Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

by Derek Robinson

  “Of course not. That’s ridiculous.” He ate some toast. “Maybe a little bit. It’s all I’ve ever done.” He put marmalade on the toast. “I suppose I miss the flying. Ops were a hell of a kick, can’t deny that.” He licked marmalade off his finger. “Provided you survived.”

  “And you’d do it again,” she said. “In a flash.”

  “Funny you should say that. Barney Knox wants me to join him.” He got up and strolled around the lawn. “He reckons there’s a big future in the airline business.”

  “Then go, Silko. I’ll miss you. What I shan’t miss is you standing about, pretending to be a civilian. I didn’t marry a civilian.”

  Silk was inspecting a rose bush. “Busy bees,” he said. “California has the most amazing hummingbirds. They hover and poke and –”

  “I know. Seen them. Now let’s go back to bed and you can demonstrate your hummingbird technique.”

  “Wizard prang,” he said. “Whatever that means.” It turned out to mean a lot of steamy, squeaky sex. So that was all right. In the afternoon he cabled Barney and took the job.

  3

  The end of the world war released tensions that set off small wars. There was already civil war in Greece. The Dutch were losing a colonial war in what would soon be Indonesia. There were uprisings in Poland, Palestine, Algeria and the Philippines. The French were determined to keep their possessions everywhere, and soon they were fighting in Syria, Lebanon, North Africa, and in what was then known as Indo-China. France bombarded Haiphong in 1946 and the Vietnam war began. Korea had civil war. India divided itself in a frenzy of killing. Malaya had civil war. China’s internal battles went on and bloody on. Latin America wasn’t at war, but nobody could say it was at peace. In the past fifteen years, governments had been overthrown by military coups in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba and a few more. The world war had ceased, but local violence kept breaking out like forest fires. Barney Knox had considerable experience of war and of flying, and he told Silk that he saw a large business opportunity in servicing impromptu and irregular military requirements by air, in an informal global context.

  “Gunrunning to civil wars,” Silk said.

  “That’s about it, yes.”

  “Why the bullshit?”

  Knox massaged his eyes. “I’ve been up too late, talking to my backers, the guys putting money into the outfit. They like bullshit, it makes them feel smarter. More corporate.”

  “But it still boils down to gunrunning.”

  “Guns or medicine or radios or whatever’s in demand.”

  “What happened to the airline business? Coast to coast in seven hours?”

  “Couldn’t raise the big bucks. Couldn’t compete with Pan Am, TWA, the rest. Besides ... who wants to fly scheduled routes? Might as well drive a Greyhound bus.”

  Knox’s outfit was called The Outfit, Inc. That was only in the United States. The company had different names in different regions. In the Orient it operated as Total Transit Ltd., in the Middle East as Complete Couriers Ltd., in South America as Rapid Action Consolidated. Knox bought some surplus transports from the Air Force and hired veteran crews. He ran The Outfit, made the deals, planned the flights. Silk did what he was told: flew here and picked up the goods, flew there and delivered them, usually at an isolated airstrip left over from World War Two. He had an Australian navigator and an American radio op. They never got excited if the aircraft got shot at from the ground or buzzed by fighters. Silk enjoyed the work. He travelled the world and earned ten times his RAF pay. Occasionally he flew home for a spell of leave.

  The first time he returned, he met Zoë at the House of Commons.

  “I can’t tell you how proud I am,” he said, as they embraced. “I honestly thought you were completely useless, and now look! I’m married to the next Prime Minister but three.”

  “You’re very jolly, Silko.” She took his arm and steered him towards the bar. “I haven’t seen you so happy since you bombed Mozart’s grave. What have you been up to?”

  “Oh... stooging around, making myself useful. Tell me about you. How did you get in here?”

  She ordered drinks, and told him. First, the Tory MP had revealed that the Labour candidate spent the war in the Pay Corps, far from the fighting line, until invalided out with piles. Useful, yes. Gallant, no. Retaliation was fast. A Labour supporter who was a printer rushed out five hundred posters showing the familiar face of a Tory peer who had recently been found at night in Hyde Park, behind some bushes, with a corporal of the Coldstream Guards, both naked. The caption was: I’m buggered if I’ll vote Tory! The Tory MP was white with fury. The posters got ripped down, too late: the joke was all over Lincoln (South). The Labour-Tory fight turned ugly. At a Labour rally, a farmer asked a simple question about subsidies. The candidate stumbled, blustered and thoroughly cocked-up his answer. The farmer said, “You can’t fertilize a field by farting through a hole in the fence.” The candidate’s name was Carter. Now he was Farter Carter throughout Lincoln (South). Thereafter, Labour and Tory were so hellbent on savaging each other that they ignored Zoë. She went about her independent campaign, talking sense, entertaining the crowd, looking lovely, and winning with a majority of over four thousand votes. “Piece of cake,” she said.

  The division bell rang. MPs hurried out of the bar. “Shouldn’t you be doing something?” Silk asked.

  “No. It’s a debate about oil. Why bother? Shell and BP and Esso have got Iran and Iraq and Persia all sewn up, anyway.”

  “Iran is Persia, darling.”

  “Well, that’s their problem. Isn’t it lucky that I kept the apartment at Albany? So handy for the Commons. Shall we go there now?”

  “Tempt me,” he said. “Has it got hot and cold running sex?”

  As they left the building, the policemen saluted her. Years of habit made his saluting arm twitch. Peace still felt odd.

  HOLY DEADLOCK

  1

  That was the shape of their lives for the next twelve years.

  Zoë kept getting re-elected. One of her constituents suffered at the hands of an arrogant civil servant. She led a vigorous campaign which forced the government to hold a public inquiry. Her constituent got justice, and she had found her place in politics: she defended lost causes. She won more than she lost.

  Silk too did what he was good at, but quietly. In ’48 and ’49, The Outfit sent crews to help the Berlin Airlift. Russia was trying to starve the Western Powers out of the city. Silk flew Lancasters converted to carry cargoes of fuel. Berlin was easy meat for him; he just looked for the same old landmarks and made the same old turning points. After a year Moscow gave up, and Silk rejoined The Outfit, which was soon absorbed by something called Air America.

  “You might not like it,” Barney Knox told him. “It has absolutely no connection with any department of the US government.”

  “I see. Which particular department is it absolutely not connected with?”

  “The CIA. No link whatsoever. The pay’s good.”

  “Will I have to kill anyone?”

  “Only if they insult the queen. Hell, what do I know? They’re paying top dollar, so it’s not going to be a milk run. You want out, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  Silk wanted in. Air America suited him. It had a large stable of aircraft, from single-engined air taxis to four-engined airliners. Every task was different. He flew sacks of rice (or something labelled rice) into Burma, and he flew body bags (or bags of something) out of Nicaragua. The years passed; when he flicked through his logbook he was surprised how quickly they had passed, and how many types he had flown: Constellations, Globemasters, a Ford Trimotor, a Catalina, various Piper Cubs, Mustangs, freighters converted from Marylands, Baltimores and Bostons. And many more. Occasionally his flight plan sent him to a US Air Force base. He was always made welcome: Barney Knox’s influence. Sometimes they offered him a flight in a military aircraft, just for the experience. He flew as co-pilot in a Lockhead Herc
ules, a gentle giant of a plane. He flew in the two-seat trainer type of some astonishing jets: the Sabre fighter, the twin-engined Canberra bomber, the US Navy’s Phantom. He even flew an Air Force version of the Boeing 707. Once he got accustomed to their kick-in-the-back acceleration, he liked jets better than anything. After a jet, Air America’s freighters felt like wheelbarrows.

  2

  Silk always took his leave during the Parliamentary summer recess, when Zoë would be free. That arrangement failed in 1957.

  She wasn’t at the apartment or the cottage. Her office said she was part of a Unesco team investigating illiteracy in the Third World. Where, exactly? Right now, in Singapore. “I’ve just come from bloody Singapore,” Silk said. The office was sympathetic. It had tried to contact him via Air America but apparently the airline’s number was unlisted. Very unusual.

  1958 was worse. Zoë’s diary was so full that he gave up any hope of a normal reunion. Instead he found out where she was going and he tagged along. Big mistake.

  He was sitting in a lecture theatre at Birmingham University, not listening to her speech about secondary education, when he knew they were in trouble. She wasn’t the woman he had married, she wasn’t skittish, slightly crackers, lithe as a kitten, totally unpredictable, huge fun. She was Zoë Silk, MP, in a tailored navy blue suit, the skirt two inches longer than he liked, and wearing the permanently interested expression of the politician. She’d changed in twelve years – well, of course she’d changed, everybody changes. That meant he’d changed too, and not for the better. Laura – growing up fast and usually away at boarding school – seemed to treat him like an uncle. A distant uncle.

  He left the lecture theatre, went to the lavatory and stared in the mirror. He looked like his father. Especially the eyes. He was looking at his father looking back at him, a bit critical, a bit dissatisfied. The old man had been a pain in the ass. Christ Almighty. He washed his face. Made no difference. Same eyes.

  On the train back to London, Zoë said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Silko darling, but would you mind awfully having the guest bedroom tonight? It’s just that I’ve got an early start tomorrow, and you can be so enormously restless when you sleep.”

  “Can I?” he said. “Bloody hell.”

  “And I suppose I’m accustomed to sleeping alone.”

  He was glad when he could go back to Air America, but not for long. After a week or two he began resenting the work because it kept him away from Zoë. Yet he knew that if he went back to London he would be bored and boring, and she would be as remote when she was in the House of Commons as she was when he was flying to Chile or to Portuguese Angola.

  He got to know Angola quite well. Portugal had clung onto its empire in Africa by never changing the simple formula of total white supremacy and brutal black repression. Then Lisbon had declared that its African colonies were now in fact overseas provinces of Portugal, so any prospect of freedom for the black population was stone dead. Action and reaction were equal and opposite: the first attacks came from the MPLA, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola. The Soviet Union sent aid and advisers to the MPLA. The Pentagon couldn’t be seen to support colonialism, but something had to be done, and Air America supplied much of it.

  In the spring of 1961, Silk flew a Douglas DC-3 to Angola and landed at a military air base near Nova Lisboa. He was wearing what he always wore: leather flying jacket, cavalry twill slacks, calf-length boots: all stained and battered. He went up into the control tower and watched men unloading crates marked Refrigerator – Handle With Care. Heavy mortar shells began marching their explosions along the runway until they hit the aircraft. It blew up with a ferocity that no refrigerator could provide. That took care of his return trip. The next problem was how to get out of Angola.

  It took him five days, travelling by taxi, bus and train all across Africa, to reach Tanganyika. He flew first class to London, a scruff surrounded by suits. At least he managed to shave on the plane. He used up the little bottle of aftershave by splashing it on the grimier, grubbier parts of his body. At Heathrow he phoned Zoë’s office. They said she was at her house in Scotland.

  “You mean in Lincoln,” Silk said.

  “No, in Scotland. She has a small hunting lodge, in the Trossachs.”

  “Where, exactly? What’s the phone number?”

  Short pause. “I’m afraid we can’t give out those details.”

  “I’m her bloody husband, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I see. Well, we could telephone Mrs Silk, and she could telephone you, if you’d like to give us your number.”

  It was a public callbox. He was still staring at its number, arguing with himself whether he should do what they said, wait here for Zoë’s call and maybe fly to Scotland, or should he find a hotel, or go to the apartment, or buy a gun and shoot himself, when his call ran out of time and the line went dead. He had no more small change.

  He came out of the callbox. A man was waiting to use it. He had a face like a rabbit with a tired, shaggy moustache. “Cheer up, chum,” the man said. “It might never happen.” Silk’s fist made the decision, not Silk, his fist tightened and it was very ready to smash the man’s teeth, when somebody gripped Silk’s arm. “You don’t want to do that, sir,” a policeman said.

  They kept him in an interrogation room for half an hour. They looked at his passport, checked the dollars in his wallet, gave him cups of tea and listened to his weary account of his travels and his faraway wife. Then they let him go.

  “Bloody lucky for me you were there,” he said to the policeman.

  “We get all sorts arriving at Heathrow, sir. I could tell that you weren’t having a very happy day.”

  Silk found a bar where they were willing to take his dollars and he got to work on a double Scotch.

  “Just the chap I want to see,” said a confident, Home Counties voice. Silk looked up. Bowler hat, club tie, pigskin gloves, walking cane. Total stranger. Oh, fuck my old boots, he thought in despair. Then the stranger took the bowler off, and grinned, and it was Freddy Redman, his navigator, his partner in the Lanc on so many dicey ops. “You look like shit, Silko,” Freddy said, “but apart from that you haven’t changed. I expect you’d like another.”

  “First intelligent thing I’ve heard all week,” Silk said.

  The barman did his stuff, and they moved to a booth. “Have you got a problem, Silko?” Freddy asked. “Apart from needing a bath, that is.”

  “Bath.” Silk pulled open his shirt and took a sniff. “Bit ripe. That’s Africa for you. Took a DC-3 to Angola, the buggers blew it up. Hell of a bang.”

  “So I heard. Occupational hazard in Air America, isn’t it? They won’t dock your pay.”

  “You know about...” Silk did more damage to his Scotch. “How do you...”

  Freddy waved it away. “Not important. So what’s your big problem?”

  “Zoë. Marriage is on the blink, Freddy. We never meet. I’m always...” He gestured, feebly, with his left hand. “And when I get here, she’s always..” An equally weak gesture with his right hand. “See? We’re income...” He yawned, hugely. “We’re income...” He thought hard. “Patible. That’s the problem.”

  “I may have a solution, Silko.”

  “No, no, no. Can’t be done. I’m no good unless I fly, and if I fly we never meet. It’s holy deadlock.”

  “No such thing,” Freddy said. “I have the answer.” Silk stared. As Freddy watched, he saw Silk’s eyes go out of focus. “Drink up, old chap. I’ll drive you home. We’ll sort it all out tomorrow.”

  KICK LIKE AN EARTHQUAKE

  1

  They met again at the Reform Club.

  Silk had slept at the Albany apartment. He’d taken a long bath and had a haircut, and now for the first time in years he was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt with a cutaway collar and a dull tie, polished black shoes. He’d never been to the Reform Club and he was taking no chances. “I feel like a Harley Street pox doctor,” he said
.

  “Wrong club.” Freddy looked at the crowd of members near the bar. “Try the RAC. Now then: we haven’t much time, I should have been in Bonn half an hour ago...” He checked his watch. “They’ll just have to start without me. Here’s my idea. You rejoin Bomber Command.” Freddy had a confident smile. “Solves all your problems.”

  Silk scratched the back of his neck; barbers never got rid of all the bits. “Rejoin,” he said. “You’re the one with the problem. Your bowler must be five sizes too small. I’m thirty-eight, Freddy. Bomber Command doesn’t want me. Never did. They tolerated my funny ways, that’s all. Rejoin now? I wouldn’t get past the commissionaire. He’d chuck me in the gutter along with the rest of the garbage.”

  “So you say. But I think I’m in a better position to judge.”

  Silk stared at him. Freddy had put on a few pounds and his hair was silvering gently at the temples, but there was something more than that. He had a calm and steady gaze that Silk always associated with ranks of group captain and above. “Better position? What’s your racket?”

  “Air Ministry. I’m the tenth assistant deputy director as you enter on the right. Bomber Command’s changed, Silko. Even you must have heard –”

  “Yeah. Big jets. Doesn’t change me. I’m still thirty-eight.”

  “So what? We’ve got bomber captains who are over forty.”

  It took a few seconds for Silk to take in that information. “Thank God for a navy, is all I can say.”

  Freddy took a photograph from an inside pocket and gave it to Silk. It was a close-up of a four-engined jet bomber taking off. “Vulcan,” he said. “I don’t know how many Lancasters we made for the price of one of these, forty or fifty, certainly. This is a very valuable aeroplane. Air Ministry isn’t going to give it to some slap-happy twenty-two-year-old so he can hedge-hop across the Cotswolds and fly under the Clifton Suspension Bridge.”

  “Nobody’s that crazy.”