Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  Rex led them onto the ridge and stopped in a small clearing. “Time for a stirrup-cup, chaps,” he said.

  They dismounted and took off the rifles slung about their shoulders. They stamped up and down, beating their arms and flexing their legs to relieve the stiffness. Rex passed around his silver hip-flask.

  “Funny-tasting whiskey, this, sir,” Moke Miller said. “Smells of … iodine.”

  “That’s Jeyes’ Fluid, you fool,” Cattermole said. He poured himself a tot and downed it. “Best quality Jeyes’ Fluid, too.”

  “Just the thing for a sink like you, then,” Mother Cox said. Cattermole reached out and seized Cox’s nose and twisted, hard. Cox howled, escaped, and and kicked him on the shins but Cattermole was wearing flying-boots and did not flinch. He reached out again and clipped Cox on the ear. Cox kicked again, aiming for the crotch. Cattermole caught his ankle one-handed and Cox, to save himself, grabbed the nearest body: Patterson. They both tumbled down.

  “Please sir,” Dicky Starr said, “Moggy keeps mucking about, sir. Sir, it’s not fair, sir.”

  Rex ignored him. “That’s pure malt whiskey,” he told Miller. “From the Isle of Islay. My family has a share in a small distillery to the north of Bruichladdich, you know.”

  Cattermole was unbuttoning his fly. Patterson and Cox hastily scrambled out of the way. Reilly trotted over and watched, ears erect.

  “Pure malt, eh?” Miller said. “Fancy that.”

  “The peat-stain in the burns creates the flavor,” Rex explained. “South of Bruichladdich the malts taste completely different.”

  Cattermole walked around the clearing, pissing hard, in pursuit of Patterson. The others dodged his spray. The others dodged his spray. Reilly followed, yapping excitedly. “Piss off, Moggy!” Patterson shouted.

  “People will tell you a malt is a malt,” Rex said. “Never believe it.” He spun the top back on the hip-flask. “Always look north from Bruichladdich, laddy,” he said, “You won’t regret it.”

  Cattermole was still trailing Patterson.

  “I owe you an apology, Moggy,” Dicky Starr said from a safe distance. “I always thought you were full of shit.”

  “For Chirst’s sake, Fanny,” Cox complained, as Cattermole at last exhausted his bladder, “can’t you keep this idiot under control? He’s a bloody menace.” Cox rubbed his ear. “A joke’s a joke, but …”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barton said evenly. “Everything seems all right to me. Or, to coin a phrase: Jag tycker om det.”

  He left Cox scowling and strolled over to the adjutant, who was sitting against a tree, out of the wind.

  “Fine view,” Kellaway said. The hills trailed away below in a great horseshoe, with the château near its mouth. Streaks of standing water glistened on the airfield like fresh snail-tracks.

  Barton shielded his eyes and stared hard. “What’s going on down there?” he asked. The wind made his eyes water and he turned away, blinking. “Someone’s working on the field.”

  “Good God!” Kellaway was envious. “Can you really see that far? I expect it’s Micky Marriott. He’s got his troops out digging ditches to try and drain off the floods.” Kellaway squinted in the wrong direction. “I’m not sure I can even see the bally ’drome from here,” he muttered.

  Barton squatted. He picked up a couple of pinecones and knocked them together. “Moggy chucks his weight about far too much,” he said. “The man’s a pain. Why doesn’t Rex tear him off a strip?”

  “Not his style. Anyway, you’re Moggy’s flight commander, Fanny. You sit on him if you want to.”

  Barton kept knocking the cones together until bits began to break off.

  “No, they don’t deserve it,” he said. “They fart-assed about when I was acting CO. I’m not going to do them any favors now.”

  “Ah,” Kellaway said.

  “They didn’t scratch my back. Why should I scratch theirs?”

  “I can’t fault your logic, old boy. Of course it won’t make you any more popular.”

  “I didn’t join the Royal Air Force to be popular, adj.” He threw the battered cones at a tree, and missed.

  “I’ve often wondered: why did you join?”

  Barton laughed, briefly. The honest answer was that he joined to get away from New Zealand and the stupidity of sheep; but he couldn’t reveal that. “To serve the king!” he declared. “Also the queen, jack and ten. Why did you join?”

  “Because I wanted to be a hero,” Kellaway said without hesitation. “And when I think of the real heroes I knew in the last war, marvelous men, who are all as dead as mutton, and I’m still here, it makes me wonder.” He turned his head and looked Barton full in the face. The cold wind had stiffened Kellaway’s face and tightened the skin around his eyes. “It makes me wonder, Fanny,” he said again.

  Barton was startled but he was saved from responding. Rex cried: “To horse!” They got to their feet. “Marvelous chaps, Fanny,” Kellaway said. “The most wonderful men you could wish to know, all snuffed out. But not me. Not me. Why not me?”

  Barton felt puzzled and slightly embarrassed. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, adj,” he said.

  “No, it doesn’t make much sense, does it?” Now Kellaway seemed to regret his own remarks. “The arthritis must have got into my brain. Dunno about you but I’m getting more than slightly peckish. Roll on grub-time, say I.”

  They rode for another hour, Rex map-reading, and halted in the lee of the slope where a hollow gave extra shelter. They lit a fire, and cooked and ate pork sausages (from Harrods of Knightsbridge) with French bread and bottles of very cold Whitbread’s Pale Ale, after which there was fruit cake and chocolate biscuits. They sat or lay around, drowsy with fresh air and food, looking past the shimmer of their fire. The hillside was studded with giant chestnut trees whose branches occupied the air so completely that the ground was bare and the trunks stood like columns in a cathedral. Behind, at the top of the ridge, the wind boomed and howled. It was wonderfully restful. “Bring your weapons, gentlemen,” Rex said. “We’re going for a little walk.”

  He set off at his usual brisk pace, walking parallel to the ridge.

  “Why the artillery?” Moke Miller inquired. “Isn’t it safe?”

  “Wild boar. We might get a shot. Deer too, so they tell me.”

  He led them for a mile over increasingly broken terrain, the chestnuts giving way to spruce and silver birch, and then stopped. Between a pair of young trees stood a small cairn. Carved on a large flat stone set in the middle were the words Un Aviateur Allemand Inconnu. Moss blurred the letters. “Thought you’d like to take a squint,” Rex said. “Last resting place of some poor Teutonic knight of the air.”

  “Humble yet tasteful,” Fitzgerald said.

  “More than you can say of the krauts,” said Cox.

  “One of your scalps, d’you think, uncle?” Starr asked.

  The adjutant smiled, and shook his head. “Hope not,” he said, with some feeling. Starr said: “Come off it, uncle. He’d have done it to you if he’d had half a chance, wouldn’t he?” The adjutant nodded. “Well, then,” Starr said.

  A leaf came slowly spinning past. The adjutant caught it, crushed it, and let the fragments blow out of his hand. “I don’t feel at all guilty about the Germans I had to kill,” he said. “On the other hand, it says this fellow was inconnu, which means they couldn’t identify him, so he almost certainly got burned to bits.”

  There was a gloomy pause while they considered that.

  “Look,” Rex said, “you can see where he hit the trees.” There was indeed a short downward channel where trunks had been snapped off and branches torn away. The scars were very weathered.

  “How did you know about this place?” Barton asked.

  “One of the frogs at that bomber base told me. I expect there are dozens just like it.”

  “Hundreds,” Kellaway said.

  “Bloody lonely spot to die,” Miller said.

 
“Show me somewhere that isn’t,” Cox said, which made Kellaway look at him with interest.

  “Everybody keep still,” Cattermole ordered. “I’ve just seen a fox.”

  Immediately they all turned their heads. It was a young dog-fox, fifty or sixty yards up the slope, loping along a trail that angled away from them. The animal had a perfectly balanced, wonderfully easy action: he seemed to tick along, his legs no more than clipping the ground. His tail streamed out, big and red. He looked clean and fit and utterly at home in these woods. “What a beauty,” Dicky Starr breathed.

  “Vermin,” Cattermole said. He worked the bolt-action.

  “Hey!” Starr said. Moke Miller loaded and raised his rifle too. “Come off it, for Pete’s sake,” Starr said.

  Now Patterson and Cox raised their rifles. At last the fox noticed them. He stopped and watched, head cocked, ears alert. He seemed interested and unafraid. “What’s the point?” Starr demanded, but Rex and Barton were also taking aim. “After three,” Cattermole said. “One, two—”

  “Run!” Starr shouted. The rifles crashed out an untidy volley, brutally deafening, and the fox was kicked sideways so that it rolled uphill in a spinning flurry until it whacked into a tree and bounced out and stopped.

  “Tally-ho!” Cattermole cried, and led the charge. Reilly raced alongside, barking joyfully.

  Starr turned his back on them and glared at the adjutant. Kellaway was finding a comfortable spot to sit on the cairn. “Stupid bastards,” Starr said. “Childish bloody thugs. Feckless cretins.”

  Kellaway took out his pipe and began the soothing ritual of filling it.

  “I feel bloody sick,” Starr said.

  “Breathe deeply,” Kellaway advised. “You don’t want to lose your lunch up here, old boy. It’s a long way back to the mess and we’ve eaten all the grub.”

  Only two bullets had struck the fox, but the rifles were military .303 Lee-Enfields and the damage was great. One shot had smashed through the ribs and torn a great wet scarlet hole in the guts. The other had hit the head below the eyes and ripped away much of the jaw. Nevertheless the fox was not dead. Its lungs were pumping and it was making a series of thin, choking barks. Rex reloaded, put his rifle against its ear, and blew half its skull off.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Starr muttered miserably. “They couldn’t even kill the bloody thing properly.”

  While Cattermole cut off the tail as a souvenir, the others examined the spot where the fox had been standing. Some of the bullet strikes were several yards off-target. One had stripped bark from a branch ten feet above ground. “Not too brilliant,” Barton remarked.

  “Hell of a kick, this gun has,” Cox said.

  “That’s the beauty of the Hurricane, isn’t it?” Rex said. “When you’ve got eight Brownings, each squirting twenty-odd bullets per second, you can afford to spray ’em about. It’s actually the most efficient way to attack.”

  “Really?” Cox was feeling somewhat jumpy: the fox was a bloodier mess than he had expected. “Spraying’s more efficient?”

  “Oh yes. You get target-saturation, you see. Tests have proved it, Mother. Quite conclusively.”

  “Did you spray that German Blenheim, Fanny?” Miller asked. “Or did you drill it through the middle?”

  “You get yourself up in a Blenheim,” Barton said, “and I’ll show you.”

  “Fanny’s still a bit touchy on that subject,” Patterson said to the others, out of the side of his mouth.

  “He honestly didn’t realize it was a Blenheim,” Cox said.

  “He thought it was a four-engined Sunderland flyingboat,” Miller said. “From certain angles they both—”

  “You’ll get my boot up your backside from no uncertain angle if you don’t shut up.” Barton’s face was stony.

  “See?” Patterson whispered loudly. “Touchy.”

  Rex finished wiping bits of blood and brain off the muzzle of his rifle. “Come on, chaps, let’s go,” he said. “Reilly! Heel, sir! Leave that alone, damn you.”

  Unwillingly the dog followed them, licking its chops. Kellaway too set off. Dicky Starr let them get ahead before he climbed the slope and piled the biggest stones he could lift on top of the dead fox. He ran and caught up as the others reached the horses. He was first man into the saddle, first to set off.

  The sun was now low, and the light under the trees was washed with purple and shot with gold. Mother Cox found himself riding alongside the adjutant. “That cairn,” he said. “Nice of the French to go to so much trouble.”

  “Oh well. Once a chap’s dead you might as well treat him decently.”

  Cox ducked his chin into the high sheepskin collar and nibbled on the edge. “Can’t say I go a bundle on that inconnu business, though.”

  “Fortunes of war, old boy.”

  “Yes, I know, but … You see, I don’t mind taking my chances with Jerry upstairs but it does seem a bit rough to do your stuff and maybe run out of luck—well, that’s all right, I’m not complaining about that, but supposing I come to grief somewhere, not that I’m planning to, but just suppose the elastic band snaps or a wing falls off or something, and I find myself at twenty thousand feet with no visible means of support, well, all I’m saying is, I don’t want to end up listed as ‘missing,’ thanks very much.”

  “Mmm. Point taken, old boy.” Kellaway was beginning to imagine the glow of whiskey, both in the glass and in the throat.

  “I mean, it’s such a piddling word, isn’t it? Missing. Makes you sound as if you lost your way, or got locked in the lavatory. Damn silly.”

  “Yes. Mind you, it happened to lots of chaps. In the last show, I mean. French especially, French infantry, good God yes, whole regiments went missing, whole brigades, all just blown to smithereens. Ever heard of the Ossuary?”

  “No.”

  “Up at Verdun. Ossuary, it means bone-pile or something like that. You don’t know what missing means until you’ve clapped eyes on that place, Mother. Two whacking great tombs full of all the bones they brought out of Verdun. Three hundred thousand men, all inconnu. Three hundred thousand, Mother!”

  “Well, I don’t care. The frogs can do what they like. I don’t want it to happen to me.”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “I mean, you couldn’t ask for an easier name, could you? Cox, C-O-X, that’s all I want. It’s not much to ask.”

  “True.” Kellaway exercised his right shoulder: the cold was seeping into it. “Funny word, smithereens. When I was small I used to think it was a place. I thought people got blown to smithereens the same way they got driven to market. I wonder what smithereens really are?”

  Cox found a handkerchief and blew his nose. “I mean, it’s like having dirty plugs,” he said.

  Kellaway thought it over. “Don’t quite follow, old boy,” he said.

  “You know, adj: dirty plugs. Engine’s not firing properly. It’s missing.”

  “Oh.” Kellaway nodded. “Missing. Yes.”

  “I honestly don’t care where I end up,” Cox said, “as long as it’s definite. I hate being kept in the dark.”

  Kellaway tucked his chin onto his chest. Cox’s statement suggested several remarks but the more he thought about them, the less helpful they seemed. He raised his eyes and saw Patterson, riding several lengths ahead of them. Patterson stood in his stirrups, pointed his knees outward, and waggled his behind. Evidently his crotch was feeling squashed. “Good heavens!” Kellaway said. “Baggy Bletchley!”

  Cox looked where Kellaway was staring and saw Patterson resettle himself. “Come again, adj?” he said.

  “I’ve just remembered, after all these years. Baggy Bletchley. I knew there was something familiar … My stars, what a turn-up for the book. I must tell Rex …”

  But as he checked his horse, Moggy Cattermole came cantering up, whooping and waving the fox’s brush. “Stand by to be blooded!” he shouted. “Get your gore here, while it’s fresh!”

  “Keep that filthy thing away
from me,” Cox said.

  “Look out, Moggy, I want to see Rex,” Kellaway said.

  “Got to join the club first, uncle.” Cattermole swung his horse around to block the trail. “Everyone gets blooded! Old English custom! Rules of the hunt!”

  “Rubbish,” Cox said.

  “And it’s a new squadron tradition.” Cattermole moved closer. “Lord Rex says so.”

  Cox stared suspiciously. Cattermole flourished the brush, and smiled. “For God’s sake keep that muck off my uniform, that’s all,” Cox said.

  Cattermole grabbed him by the shoulder and thrust the brush down his neck. Cox wrenched himself away. Cattermole gave Kellaway a dab on the nose, and charged off in pursuit of Patterson, hallooing loudly.

  “Hulking great oaf,” Cox said crossly. He tried to look at his shirt collar but his chin got in the way.

  Kellaway stopped and waited for Rex to arrive. He said: “I’ve just remembered something rather unusual about Air Commodore Bletchley. You might—”

  “Who’s that?” Rex pointed ahead. “Isn’t it little Dicky? This should be worth watching.”

  The trail climbed in a great left-handed curve, cutting across a slope that grew steadily steeper. Cattermole, having blooded Patterson and Miller, had ridden on and reached Starr.

  “Piss off and play with your sadistic friends,” Starr said to him.

  “Now, now. No excuses, young Richard. CO’s orders, everyone gets blooded.”

  “You sicken me, you lot.”

  “For shame! It’s a grand old English tradition, Dicky! Where’s your patriotism? Besides, this stuff’s good for the complexion.”

  Cattermole hustled his horse alongside the other. The path wasn’t wide enough for two and Starr’s mount began slipping on the outer edge. Starr said: “I won’t—”

  “You will, you little runt.” Cattermole jabbed the brush at his face. Starr ducked under it and slammed his elbow into Cattermole’s ribs. Cattermole gasped with pain, lost balance and almost fell backward. His left boot kicked up and smacked Starr’s horse in the mouth.