Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

by Derek Robinson

  The gynaecologist had brought champagne and glasses. “Now,” he said. “Before the gloss goes off the union.” He thumbed the cork off a bottle and it hit a passing major in the Polish army on the left ear. The major got the first glass. He kissed Zoë, and then kissed Silk. He proposed a long Polish toast, and stayed to the last of the champagne. “We could do with you in the rear turret,” Freddy told the gynaecologist.

  * * *

  No honeymoon. Wartime Britain was not the place for that. All the hideaway hotels had been requisitioned by the War Office as headquarters for infantry training exercises. Silk and Zoë went to the same cottage, midway between RAF Kindrick and Lincoln, where she had lived with Langham. It smelt of mould.

  “You’d think the landlord would have lit a fire, or something,” Silk said.

  “I’m the landlord,” Zoë said. “Didn’t I tell you? After I lost Tony, I didn’t want any squalid strangers living here, so I bought it.”

  Silk stared. “Tony bought it. And then you bought it.”

  She breathed on a mirror and wiped it with her sleeve. “I hope that was a joke.”

  “Sorry. It just slipped out.”

  He took their bags upstairs. In the bedroom, on a windowsill, lay the dried remains of a pigeon. Got in somehow, down the chimney perhaps, couldn’t get out. He picked it up by a tiny claw and carried it downstairs. “Dead bird,” he said. “Sort of symbolic, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” He went out and tossed the pigeon into some nettles and came back. She was reading a newspaper that was brown with age. “He’s dead, you know,” Silk said. “They don’t come any deader than old Tony. I hope you’re not turning this place into a shrine. I can’t live in a shrine.”

  “We must have a party. Tomorrow. A sodding great pisser of a party. Open house for a week.”

  “I can’t live in a pub, either.”

  “I can. An alcoholic shrine. Like Lourdes, only with gin galore. You’ll love it, darling. Which reminds me: it’s nine hours since we made whoopee.”

  “Scandalous. Just when the government keeps nagging us not to waste anything.”

  He followed her upstairs, taking off his tie, undoing his collar stud, his shirt buttons, his cuffs. Already his pulse was beginning to race. “You think sex solves everything, don’t you?” he said. He tugged at his laces. One got knotted. He used both hands and dragged the shoe off and threw it into a corner. “Sex doesn’t make the world go round,” he said. “It makes it go slightly elliptical.” She laughed. That was reward enough. And there was so much more to come.

  * * *

  Marriage was a new and delightful experience. Ops were not. Ops continued to be the hard labour of dumping loads of high explosive on German cities, night after night, while flak and nightfighters tried to blow the bombers to bits, preferably before they dropped their loads. Sometimes a nightfighter went down in flames, hit by an air gunner or occasionally by friendly flak. Sometimes a crippled bomber exploded and took another bomber with it. Highflying German aircraft dropped pyrotechnic displays called ‘Scarecrows’ that resembled burning bombers, or so it was said. Other pilots rejected the idea: the night sky over Germany had victims enough without playing the fool with stupid bloody fireworks. That was true. Ops hurt Germany, but the pain had to be paid for.

  In 1943, when he was well into his second tour, Silk knew that a few of the men on their first tour had mixed feelings about him. They were amazed that he and his crew had survived so long, but they suspected that this might be at the cost of crews who had failed to return. There was only so much good luck to go around. Silk was getting an unfair share. What was his trick?

  He had no trick. He was a good pilot and he kept learning from experience. This was something you couldn’t teach the newcomers. After an op, if there was an empty table in the mess, chances were the missing crew was inexperienced. Silk didn’t let it worry him. Nobody said the chop was fair. Equally, nobody said dodging the chop was fair. You made the most of life while it lasted. Silk’s new life was flying.

  He liked the Lancaster. It was his workplace, his office. Every time he opened all four throttles and turned the Merlins’ roar into a thundering bellow and felt the controls become alive and the undercarriage hammer the tarmac until finally the bomber came unstuck and the engines stopped shouting and began singing: every time that happened, he felt privileged.

  He knew the price of that privilege. From the outside the Lancaster looked formidable. From the inside it was a long alloy tube stuffed with explosives and aviation fuel. Silk had seen too many Lancasters falling out of the night sky over Germany, burning like beacons. All aircrew believed that some other poor bastard would get the chop, not them. All aircrew except Silk; until one night they flew to Stuttgart, and even Silk began to wonder.

  4

  He’d been there before. About five hundred miles from base to target. The flight plan would include plenty of twists and turns, all with the aim of keeping the German fighter controllers off-balance, hoping to con them into scrambling their night fighters over the wrong city. These detours would add a hundred miles to the op. A fully loaded Lancaster could cruise at 180 or 190 miles an hour, depending on wind strength and direction. So Silk’s crew expected to spend four hours or so over Europe, mostly over Germany.

  It was a biggish raid: 343 Lancasters. The bomber stream began to cross the North Sea at 10 p.m. Silk was at fifteen thousand feet, still climbing, eating a corned-beef sandwich. Things began to go wrong. The port outer engine was losing revs. With unequal power, the Lanc was edging to the left.

  Silk dropped his sandwich and applied a little rudder to straighten the bomber. He throttled back the starboard outer to equalise the action, and he looked at Cooper, the flight engineer. “Your rotten engine is mucking me about, Coop,” he said.

  “Temperature’s okay, oil pressure’s normal. Electrics are working. Could be we lost a cylinder but I don’t think so.”

  The port outer got no worse but five minutes later the starboard outer lost some power and from then on, at one time or another, each of the four engines gave trouble, and the Lancaster couldn’t keep its place in the stream.

  Silk concentrated on flying the aeroplane. He trusted Cooper to nurse the Merlins and keep the airscrews churning. The Lanc was a frighteningly complex machine. Sometimes – not often – Silk had watched his ground crew at work, exposing the criss-cross networks of tubes and cables and rods: hydraulic, pneumatic, electric, oxygen supply, flying controls, fuel system, ammunition ducts, de-icing system, fire extinguisher system, intercom, engine controls, bomb fusing system, cockpit heating, and a whole lot more. It didn’t pay to think of the things that might go wrong. He left the ground crew to it.

  The Lanc was over Holland when Cooper said: “Dirty fuel, skip.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty certain. Explains why the engines go sick and get well and go sick again, well again.”

  “How can petrol be dirty? They filter it when they fuel the kite, don’t they?”

  “Maybe the tanks got dirty.”

  “Come off it, Coop.”

  “They clean the tanks every time a Lanc has a major overhaul, skip. Why clean them if they’re not dirty?”

  The port inner coughed and backfired and made a stream of sparks, and went back to business.

  “I hate to get this far and quit,” Silk said.

  “Nav to pilot,” Freddy said. “New course in one minute.”

  “Thank you, Freddy. Deeply appreciated.”

  “You could have had it ten minutes ago, skip, but you’re so damn slow.”

  Silk didn’t quit. If he turned back now he would be cutting across the bomber stream and then flying against it. Not a pleasant thought. His present situation was bad enough, drifting back through the passing stream. The rear gunner was searching the blackness for any oncoming bomber. Silk’s machine was trailing a long slipstream of broken air. A following pilot should feel the warning tremble at
600 yards’ range and be rocked by turbulence at 400 yards. But what if the other Lanc was not behind but alongside? Changing direction, changing height. Cruising at 180 mph, a Lanc covered 88 yards a second. Even a gentle nudge would be enough to weld two aircraft into a blazing memorial to dirty fuel. Once already, Silk had been forced to bank steeply to escape the shape of a wandering Lanc that had lurched out of black nowhere and vanished into the same nowhere just as quickly.

  All the same, he decided it was safer to stay in the stream. There was the added protection against enemy fighters. The risk of collision was acceptable because a stream was not a close formation. Bomber Command did not attempt that kind of insanity at night. From head to tail, the stream of 343 Lancasters made a column about sixty miles long and three miles wide. Each navigator knew the route and the turning points. He’d been told to be on time so that the whole force would bomb the target as a mass, saturating its defences, in and out in twenty minutes. If any crew straggled or strayed, that was their funeral.

  Silk’s dirty fuel kept him drifting back. He could never rest. His eyes felt strained and weary from the labour of always searching the night, with nothing to focus on. Finally, Freddy told him they were thirty minutes late, which meant they must be clear of the stream. Later, Silk saw the target ahead. When he reached it, his was the only Lanc over Stuttgart. The city was burning hard. He bombed it and stayed on a straight and level course for the camera, although he knew his bomb-bursts would be lost in all that flame and fury.

  Freddy stood beside him and looked down at Stuttgart. Normally he never left his navigator’s position behind the cockpit; this was a brief reward. “Crikey,” he said. “Someone’s been playing with matches.”

  The rear gunner shouted: “Corkscrew port!”

  Freddy reaching out to grab something, anything, but his fist closed on air, the floor slanted, his boots skidded sideways and his head whacked metal. Sparks chased across his eyes. The Lanc was banking steeply and plunging so hard that he feared it must be damaged, out of control, crashing. Through a haze of dust he saw Silk’s boots on the rudder pedals, his hands on the control column. Hands and feet moved, violently. The Lanc got slung from a hard left-hand bank to a hard right-hand bank, from a steep dive to a steep climb. Freddy felt as if he’d left his guts behind. The sparks drained away. He saw tracer pulsing in the night. Then the Lanc corkscrewed left and plunged again. The wings must fall off. Freddy counted his last seconds, got to five and Silk threw the Lanc from left bank to right bank and it went up like a lift. It’s not a bloody Spitfire, Freddy thought. Still, the engines must be okay. The Lanc plunged. No bloody night fighter can catch us like this, Freddy thought. Silk corkscrewed again.

  * * *

  They were the last aircraft to land at Kindrick.

  Every Intelligence Officer had a nickname. At 409 he was called Skull because his head looked a bit like one and it was full of brains. After he had asked his usual questions, he said: “Anything unusual happen?”

  “Silko corkscrewed us halfway across Germany,” Freddy said. “Is that a new world record?”

  “It was only over Stuttgart,” Silk said. “Routine evasion. Shook off the Jerry.”

  “Nearly shook off the tail unit,” Freddy said. “I only mention it because the operating manual forbids aerobatics. Should we tell the manufacturers?”

  The I.O. screwed the cap on his fountain pen. “Let’s not,” he said. “It’ll be our little secret.”

  As they went out, Group Captain Rafferty, the station commander, said, “Damned good show.” Every night of ops, Rafferty stayed up until the last crew had landed at Kindrick or until there was no point in waiting; and he always said the same thing. He was right. Just to bomb the target and fly home again was a damned good show.

  The aircrew meal was always bacon and egg. Freddy slid his egg onto Silk’s plate. “That’s for getting us home,” he said.

  Silk was too tired to argue.

  “I nearly shot down the night fighter,” the rear gunner told Cooper. “Give me your egg.”

  “Tell you what: I’ll eat it for you first,” Cooper said. “Then you can have it tomorrow.”

  “That’s in very poor taste,” the rear gunner said.

  “Not if you put lots of Worcester Sauce on it,” Cooper said. “Brings out the flavour a real treat.”

  “Rotten shots,” Silk said. They looked at him. “Stuttgart,” he said. “Just us, and all their flak and fighters. Pitiful. If that’s the best they can do, they don’t deserve to win the damn war.”

  Nobody argued.

  5

  The flight engineer and the rear gunner didn’t finish their tours. On a day when Silk’s crew were off duty, not required, the engineer in another Lanc walked into a glass door, split his scalp and got double vision. Cooper volunteered to take his place and the bomber went down over Kassel. And of course the tail was always the most dangerous position in the aeroplane. Silk was bringing them back from a raid on Bremen when his rear gunner caught a glimpse of a Messerschmitt-110 a fraction of a second too late and a burst from the night fighter killed him. Silk saw tracers going past and he corkscrewed. Already both rudders were a mess, but the corkscrew was so violent that the fighter overshot the Lanc and, in the ocean of night, never found it again.

  So, against all the odds and against his expectations, Silk completed his second tour.

  * * *

  He was the first pilot on 409 Squadron to accomplish this. There had to be a party.

  The Group Commander came, made a speech, congratulated Silk on his second DFC. Nobody was surprised, everyone cheered.

  Rafferty made a speech. He denied the foul slander that the only reason Silk had achieved his double tour was because the Huns knew he would make a bigger bloody nuisance of himself back here than over there. Laughter and prolonged applause.

  By now, the beer was at work. Wisely, the Squadron Commander said only a few words. “Sixty ops is a lot,” he began. “Silko did it in units of ten. This was because he can’t add up to more than ten without being arrested for indecent exposure.” A wave of laughter, then a second wave from those who had been slow to get the joke. “But he deserves all our admiration. And we deserve to know the secret of his success, so we can bottle it for the Mess!”

  Warm applause. Silk stood on a chair. “I remember the first time I met Bomber Harris,” he said. That silenced them. Most had never seen the head of Bomber Command, a burly, unsmiling air chief marshal whose goal was to win the war by flattening every German town and city. This would make invasion unnecessary. His determination was respected. His power was feared. Presumably his wife loved him. Nobody else did, which suited him fine. He didn’t want love, he wanted the steady tramp of high explosives down every German street, followed by the patter of a million incendiaries.

  Silk continued: “I said to him, ‘Who are you?’, and he said, ‘AC2 Harris,’ and I said, ‘That’s amazing. Why are you only an AC2?’ and he said, ‘Because there’s no such rank as AC3.’ Very witty, Bert was...”

  More laughter, cut short. Nobody wanted to miss a word.

  “Bert Harris and I were friends from the start,” Silk said. “He was sweeping the hangar floor, using the intelligence officer’s silk knickers for the purpose, nothing’s too good for Bomber Command, and I knew at once this man was going places. In fact I said, ‘You’ve got the stuff of greatness in you, Bert’, and he said, ‘What a relief, I thought I was six months pregnant.’”

  That went down well. Even a visiting air vice-marshal smiled.

  “I wasn’t flying that day. I was dressed as usual, just a tweed skirt, tight sweater, rather daring, I suppose, and a gypsy headscarf. So I asked Bert, ‘D’you know who I am?’ and quick as a flash he said, ‘Juicy Lucy from Lincoln, and have you got change for a shilling?’”

  That went down very well, except with the air vice-marshal.

  “None of that’s true, I made it all up,” Silk said. Groans of disapproval. “Even the silk
knickers. Intelligence is tight, you know that, they never give anything away. Actually, I borrowed them from a chap in the Provost-Marshall’s office. Awfully sweet fellow.”

  A storm of derision. The Provost-Marshal’s office investigated crime, such as using aviation fuel in a private car. By now, the air vice-marshal had stopped smiling. He was talking to Rafferty.

  “Where was I?” Silk said. “Oh, yes. You all know Bert Harris, full of merry quips and banter. So I said to him, ‘Come on, Bert, tell me a witty joke, something I can use to make my crew laugh on a really filthy night over Bremen when the flak’s as thick as pigshit. Bomber Harris turned to me, and quick as a flash – and witty with it – he said, ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’” The roar of laughter made the air vice-marshal flinch. “Bloody good advice,” Silk said. “And that’s exactly what I’ve been

  doing for two tours: fucking off as fast as I could.” The CO was tugging his tunic. “For my next trick...” Silk began. The CO tugged harder and Silk fell off the chair. Everyone cheered.

  The CO helped him up. “Christ, Silko, I shall be bloody glad to see the back of you.” Elsewhere, For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow was being sung lustily. “Now get yourself good and plastered and stay as far away from that air vice-marshal as possible.” He gave Silk a beer and moved off.

  Rafferty came over with a bundle of congratulatory telegrams. “Very amusing speech, flight lieutenant,” he said. “It rather explains why you never made squadron leader. And never will.”

  “Thank you, sir. I never trusted squadron leaders. Ambitious buggers.” Rafferty grunted. “Of course, group captains like yourself are scholars and gentlemen and a boon to the Service.”

  They were silent for a moment, looking at the crowd.

  “That bloody fool of an AVM wanted you placed under close arrest,” Rafferty said. “I talked him out of it, this being your big night and the boys getting tanked-up.”

  “I couldn’t make a proper speech,” Silk said. “Not my style.”

  “Well, you’ve had the last laugh. From tomorrow, you’re off 409 Squadron. Where next, I don’t know.”