Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “Then don’t drink the bloody stuff.”

  “Thanks very much.” Barton chucked it away. “You’re a great help, Flip. I don’t need to piss all over myself. You’re always ready to do it for me.” That was supposed to be a light remark, humorous even, something to ease the tension; but when Barton heard the words they sounded more like a complaint. Moran said nothing. “What I mean is, we’ve got to work together,” Barton explained, or tried to explain. “If I’m doing something wrong, for God’s sake tell me.”

  “Waste of time.”

  “Try.”

  Moran heaved a deep breath. “Very well. I didn’t ask for this sprog sergeant you’ve dumped on me. I don’t want him. He’s bloody useless.”

  Barton was taken aback. “Wait a minute. Verrier’s no worse than Brook.” Moran looked away. “I don’t get it, Flip,” Barton said. “What d’you want me to do?”

  “Get him out of my flight. I’ll take Mother Cox, and your hotshot senior flight commander can have Verrier to play with.”

  “But CH3’s already got Brook.”

  “Look,” Moran said, “I didn’t ask you to ground Zab. Zab’s a bloody good pilot.” His voice rasped like a file. “I don’t see why I should pay the penalty for your fun and games. It’s—”

  “Come on, come on! Be sensible. Zab and Haddy were fucking up the whole squadron. If I—”

  “You fucked up this squadron. Not them.”

  Barton walked ten paces, turned, walked back again. “I can’t switch Verrier with Cox,” he said. “It’s not on.”

  “See? Waste of time,” Moran said. “I told you so.”

  “Oh, Christ, Flip,” Barton said. “You’re never happy unless you’re bloody losing, are you?”

  “That’s what makes Hornet such a joyous squadron,” Moran said gloomily.

  Barton found CH3 again and told him what Moran wanted.

  “No,” CH3 said. “That’s not it either. He’s using the Cox-and-Verrier business to needle you some more.”

  “He’s asking for trouble, then. What on earth’s wrong with the man?”

  “Maybe he’s got twitch.”

  “Flip Moran? Twitch? Don’t be ridiculous. He’s strong as a bull.”

  An hour later, Sector Ops called and put them on five-minute standby, almost immediately shortened to two-minute standby, which meant being fully dressed, including Mae West and parachute. It was baking hot. For ten minutes everyone dripped sweat and complained. The scramble was almost a relief.

  Barton led the squadron. CH3 moved to Yellow Section with Cattermole as his wingman, which meant that Sergeant Brook stayed behind. The flights were staggered, with “B” flight to the rear and slightly up-sun, and the sections were widespread, like a search party. Within ten minutes they were at fifteen thousand feet over Ashford, twenty miles north of Bodkin Hazel, and the controller was warning them that the raid was approaching from the southeast, twenty-plus bandits, heading northwest. Fanny Barton acknowledged. He wriggled his shoulders to loosen his shirt, now sticky with cold sweat, and his glance flickered across the cockpit, taking in the bank of dials and gauges, checking the gunsight was on and the gun-safety was off. He looked up and changed focus.

  “Hello, Mango Leader, this is Snowball. Bandits now twenty-five plus.” He sounded a little impatient.

  “Okay, Snowball.” Barton wondered what happened to all these phantom plots. Did some other squadron shoot them down, or did they never exist? They couldn’t all be Blenheims or Defiants. It seemed amazingly easy to lose a gaggle of German bombers over England. Half the scrambles failed to lead to an interception. “Yellow Two to Leader,” said Cattermole in the curious light-tenor that VHF produced, and as he spoke, Barton saw them for himself: “Bandits at five o’clock.”

  Barton gave Snowball the tally-ho. Snowball wished him luck.

  There was absolutely nothing to do except wait. If both formations held their course and speed, the German aircraft would pass the Hurricanes quite soon, thus allowing Fanny to swing his squadron behind them and chop away with a series of stern attacks.

  The sprinkle of dots grew thin wings. The crosses made a delicate pattern that grew and put on weight. “Heinkels and Dorniers,” Barton said. “A dozen of each.” He twisted his head and searched the sky on the other side: stupid to watch the right and get jumped from the left. Nothing there. “Black One to Leader, the escort’s arrived, one-one-oh’s, high.” That was Fitz. He sounded matter-of-fact but Barton knew better. Fitz’s heart would be banging away like a boy-scout drum. “Okay,” Barton said.

  The bombers were bustling along at a brisk pace. Soon they developed filigree gun barrels and radio masts, insignia, numbers, letters, the shining discs of propellers, yellow spinners, wisps of exhaust smoke fleeing the outthrust engines. For the new pilots it was their first close sight of a German bomber formation and they found it impressively disciplined: neat, tight vics of three, the Dorniers stepped up behind the Heinkels, and all storming across Kent as if they didn’t give a damn who owned it. The older pilots—CH3, Moggy, Flip, Mother, Flash, Pip, Fitz—saw things differently. Most of them were watching the bombers with one eye and the escort with the other. At least twenty Me-110’s, coming on fast.

  Barton let the bombers charge past. They were over half a mile to the right of the nearest Hurricane. The top-gunner in a Heinkel fired a few rounds, probably testing his gun. “Buster, buster,” Barton ordered, and opened the throttle wide. “Turning right, turning right, go.” The squadron banked and slid behind the bombers, hit their turbulence and began to bounce. “Going up,” Barton said. “Throttle back.” They eased above the lumpy air and he saw, far away, beyond the leading Heinkels, a solitary Hurricane. Strange. “‘B’ flight hits the right side, ‘A’ flight hits the left,” he said. “Go!”

  The German stepped-up formation was intelligent. It offered almost every plane a degree of covering fire from the top-gunners of the rank below and the belly gunners of the rank above. Barton couldn’t avoid them so he gave them a difficult deflection shot. He dived through the slipstream and turned sharply away from the bombers so that when he climbed back at them he was coming at their flank, slanting hard across the German gunsights, forcing them to rush their aim. Red and yellow tracer pulsed out of the Dorniers in fits and starts, like cartoon Morse-code. Barton touched his gun-button four times in five seconds. Each time, he saw a bomber shake, but the vibration was all in his head, trembling from the force of the maneuver and the judder of the guns, and he half-rolled clear and raced a way without knowing if he had scored.

  To his surprise, Steele-Stebbing was hard behind him.

  Pairs of Hurricanes were bouncing off the raid high and low. Smoke dribbled from a tail-end Dornier. The wheels of another Dornier suddenly swung down. It dropped out of formation and hung fifty feet below the others, nose up, straining for height, failing. Stray shouts and whoops came over the R/T, but the only voice that Barton recognized was Flip Moran’s, cursing his wingman, Verrier. He searched for the Me-110’s and found them still so far away that he called Steele-Stebbing: “Leader to Red Two, stick tight, we’ll make another pass.” But as he began his approach he saw an extraordinary thing.

  The lone Hurricane, last seen far ahead of the raid, now charged it head-on. Fire flickered from the nose-guns of the leading Heinkels: too little, too late. At the last instant the Hurricane dropped its right wing and sliced vertically between the bombers. Barton caught flashing glimpses of it as first Heinkels and then Dorniers veered and dodged and swerved. The Hurricane spat itself out of the rear of the shattered formation like a backfire. It was all over before Barton could draw breath. It was the most astonishing thing he had ever seen. A Heinkel came wallowing toward him. He sprayed it and went switchbacking through the disintegrating remains of the raid, stabbing his thumb on the button, until the sky was empty again and he dragged the nose hard toward the south, the sun, the oncoming 110’s.

  They came streaming down like skiers off a mountain.<
br />
  Moran was still swearing at Verrier. It was a waste of breath. Verrier’s radio had stopped several bullets. The same burst had taken out his port aileron and made a mess of his left shoulder. This was not the result of brilliant German shooting: Verrier had bungled his controls—got his revs wrong, put his prop in the wrong pitch, skidded and sidled and nearly stalled the bloody plane—until it was an almost unmissable target. He wasn’t incompetent, just very jumpy. When the attack began, his muscles went rigid and his hands and feet trembled. Everything started coming at him too fast: Moran’s curses and commands, the surging bombers, the belting tracer. He did one thing wrong and that made another thing worse and then the bullets ripped home and everything was agonizingly bad. The wind came raging through his smashed side-windows, caught the blood that was pumping out of his shoulder and gushing down his arm and sprayed it around; and when he looked up he saw a whole new squadron of Me-110’s falling on him. Even Moran had stopped speaking. “Oh, Christ,” he prayed, “please help, please help, please …”

  Moran kept trying to chase him, this nineteen-year-old idiot swanning about as if he wanted to get killed; but there were gunners trying to kill Moran, too, and when the 110’s joined in the battle he gave up the chase. Then the bombers started to regroup, counting on their fighters to keep the Hurricanes busy, and the next time Moran saw Verrier he was getting hammered by a pair of 110’s that were crisscrossing behind him and knocking hell out of the Hurricane. Moran fired at long range and one of them sheered away; he closed on the other and hit it as it blasted yet more chunks off Verrier. They were three in a row now, hunter on hunter on victim, and Moran was hunched forward, body strained against his straps, swearing in a harsh scream, obsessed with his kill, so obsessed that he failed to see the 110 that made it four in a row.

  He was shot in the legs: maiming, bone-smashing wounds. A cannonshell exploded in front of his face and blinded him. More cannonshells walloped great holes in the instrument panel, the bulkhead, the petrol tank. Fuel gushed over his broken legs. All this in less than a second. One moment Flip Moran was intact, vengeful, furious; the next he was crippled, blinded, awash in petrol. And the next moment he was burning.

  The last piece of equipment to fail was his radio. Moran had left his channel open to curse Verrier. Now, everyone in Hornet squadron heard him scream. The Hurricane flew itself, more or less level, for quite a long time, and the flames worked their way quite slowly up his legs. He screamed as he felt for the cockpit release that his eyes could not see, and he screamed as he tried to make his broken legs escape the fire that was eating them. Eventually the Hurricane performed a slow roll, the whole cockpit was soaked in petrol, and Moran’s screaming came to an end when there was no air to breathe and the furnace roasted his face.

  Debriefing.

  Skull spent his days at Bodkin Hazel now. He took their reports, one at time.

  Two definite kills were claimed. Cattermole said he destroyed a Heinkel 111 and CH3 said he shot down a Messerschmitt 110. Macfarlane claimed a probable Dornier and Fitzgerald a probable 110: both planes had last been seen going down with much smoke coming out and large bits falling off. Everyone else bar Steele-Stebbing claimed to have damaged at least one enemy aircraft.

  Too bad about Flip. That was a damn bad show. Most of them had seen a burning Hurricane tip over and fall, and they all reckoned then that somebody had bought it. It really was a damn shame. He must have caught a hell of a packet. Someone saw him just before he blew up, and he was fighting like a maniac, an absolute maniac. Then, suddenly, bingo.

  Skull, however, had news of Verrier. Miraculously, he had baled out and fallen in the middle of a small aerodrome, a training field. They telephoned Brambledown and Brambledown told Skull. Actually, he hadn’t so much baled out as discovered himself in mid-air when his Hurricane broke in half. He’d landed badly and snapped both ankles and a collarbone, on top of which his left shoulder was a terrible mess. So that’s Verrier, that was.

  Bloody good scrap.

  Too bad about Flip.

  And it was still only three o’clock.

  They got scrambled again at ten to five and chased half a dozen Junkers 88’s from Maidstone to Dover without catching them. Patterson got hit in the tail by Dover ack-ack and had to put down at Hawkinge airfield.

  Stand-down at eight; return to Brambledown, eight-twenty. Almost the end of a rich, full day.

  Kellaway banged on Barton’s bedroom door. “Fanny?” he called. He knew he was in there: he could hear the radio. Somebody’s band was playing Oh, Johnny, very loudly. He banged again and went in. The music blasted at him, so loud that half the notes distorted. The volume must have been turned up full. Barton sat astride a reversed chair, his back to the door. He was reading Picture Post, or at least he was turning the pages. He didn’t look up until Kellaway touched his shoulder, and then he started so sharply that he tore a page.

  “Daddy’s asking for you,” Kellaway shouted. Barton looked blankly. Kellaway switched the radio off. “How can you stand that din?” he asked.

  “What?” Barton said.

  Kellaway tapped his ears.

  “Oh,” Barton said. “I’m still a bit deaf, uncle. Altitude, I s’pose. Up and down all day. Engine noise. Ears get a bit fed-up with it.”

  “Blow,” Kellaway advised. He pinched his nose and puffed his cheeks. Barton did the same. “Ow!” he exclaimed. He stuck his little finger in his ears and waggled them about. “Bit better … Can you hear a sort of buzz? No? Must be me, then.”

  “Aren’t you going to have something to eat, old boy?”

  Barton picked up the Picture Post and tried to straighten the torn page. The torn bit kept falling out, so he pulled it off, screwed it up, threw it away. “Who’s going to be ‘B’ flight commander?” he asked.

  “You ought to get changed, Fanny.” Barton was still in flying kit. “Have a bit of a wash. Freshen up.”

  “Moggy’s the best pilot.”

  The adjutant sat on the bed and took out his pipe. “Well,” he said.

  “He’s also the biggest shit.”

  “No argument there.”

  “That leaves Pip, Mother, Fitz and Flash.”

  “Pip won’t do. He’s got no oomph, has he? You want a chap with a bit of oomph.”

  “Christ, uncle, my ears hurt.” Barton took off his Irvine jacket and sat on the bed. The adjutant began filling his pipe. He was wondering whether to suggest a hot shower, or a quick drink and then a hot shower. Alternatively … The bed started to rock. It was shaking so much that he couldn’t get the tobacco in the bowl. “Listen, I know it’s your bed,” he said, and realized that Barton was crying.

  His head was down and his body was bent like a question mark, with his arms hugging his ribs, and the sobs were coming almost faster than his lungs could deliver them. His face had collapsed into the ugliness of misery. Tears did not improve its appearance. Kellaway carefully put his pipe on the bedside table. In all his time in the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force he had seen plenty of men cry. He had never found the sight anything but repugnant. Just when a chap most needed help and sympathy, God made him look like a baboon. “Come on, Fanny, you can’t blame yourself,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. These things happen in war. Always have, always will. It’s the luck of the draw.” Kellaway didn’t hurry, didn’t put any great stress on the words. He’d been through it before so often. You had to say something, you had to make reassuring noises, but the poor blighter never really took any of it in at first. “Anyway,” Kellaway said, “it could have been worse, couldn’t it? By all reports it was all over pretty quickly. I mean, look at it this way: he went the way he’d have wanted to go. Slam-bang-wallop, over and out. Right?”

  Barton raised his contorted, shiny face and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Flip. Poor old Flip.”

  “Oh, balls! Bloody Moran went and bought it. So what?”

  “Well, exactly. You mustn’t bla
me—”

  “Shut up about Moran! Who cares? I mean, who gives a tiny damn? Look at that, uncle!”

  The adjutant looked at Barton’s Irvine jacket. A short, brown furrow ran across the left side, just below the armpit. “Bullet streak,” he said. Barton had stopped crying. His breathing was getting under control. “Did you just notice this?” Kellaway asked. “When you took it off?” Barton got up and walked to a corner of the room. “Came as a bit of a shock, I expect,” Kellaway said. “I mean, you don’t need a lot of imagination, do you?” Barton bent down and picked up the torn piece of Picture Post. “Same thing happened to me once,” Kellaway said, “only it was the helmet that suffered … Still, a miss is as good as a mile, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk such fucking rubbish.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Kellaway said. “A miss like this one is in a class of its own.” He tossed the jacket to Barton. “In fact it’s worth a drink. Want a drink?”

  “D’you know what Flash Gordon did, uncle?” Barton found a towel and scrubbed his face. “Flash went off on his own and charged straight through a whole gang of Jerry bombers. Head-on. In one end, out the other. Scared them shitless.”

  “Goodness me. Sounds very effective.”

  “Yes. Trouble is, he disobeyed orders. He should’ve stayed with Fitz, not gone blasting off on his own. What if Fitz got jumped? Flash is a maniac He’s crazy.”

  “Well, the specialist is coming to look at him in the morning. By the way, Daddy Dalgleish is very keen to have a word with you.”

  “Piss on him. Ask CH3 to sort it out. Say I’m writing letters to next-of-kin.”

  “Are you?”

  “No fear. I’m off on the spree. It’s time we had a squadron thrash. Go and round up the blokes, uncle. Tell ’em I’ll buy the first round.”

  The adjutant gave him a long and thoughtful look. “Now? I mean, you’re feeling okay again?”

  “Why the hell shouldn’t I?” Barton asked cheerfully. “It wasn’t my fault he bought it, was it? Come on, get cracking, adj. You’re like frozen treacle.”