“Getting cleaned, sir. The casings were all sweaty, we’ve been scraping the crystals off and—”
“Use ‘em! You’ve got twenty minutes to takeoff.”
The flight sergeant was soon back. “We’ll need more time, sir. Six two-fifties is a tight squeeze on some of these kites. Getting the bastards dead central so they lock into place …” He sucked his teeth.
“Nothing new. Done it before.”
“Time is what I’m talking about, sir.”
“You’re wasting it, standing here.”
As if to confirm this, they heard the harsh bark of Pegasus engines being tested. Soon the noise died as the ground crews cleared off and left bombing-up to the experts.
McHarg got in the Morris and drove to the nearest Hampden and watched. He knew the flight sergeant was right. Loading a bomber couldn’t be rushed. The chain of trolleys had to be backed precisely under the belly so that each bomb could be winched up until it sat nicely in its carrier. It had to be secured with clamps that gripped it and held it rigid. Provided everything was dead central the carrier could be locked into place and a light would come on to indicate this. Then the whole procedure was repeated for the next bomb. The more bombs, the less space to work in. The armorers scraped their knuckles and cursed, but they did not rush.
Thirty minutes was up. McHarg said nothing.
He moved from Hampden to Hampden. He stopped at the fourth airplane: P-Peter. The flight sergeant was kneeling under it, his head and shoulders inside the bomb bay. McHarg walked over and squatted beside him. The concrete hardstanding was wet. Oil splashes had left twisted rainbows in the puddles. The flight sergeant, without looking at him, said, “This carrier’s totally fucked, sir.” He got out to let McHarg see.
The carrier was cockeyed. Something or someone had bashed it, knocked it out of shape and now it wouldn’t slot into its space. That was one thing. The other was the bomb. Parts of it were lightly coated with yellow crystals. So were the other bombs in this bay.
“They’re sweating,” McHarg said. “Every bleeding one’s sweating.”
“Yes sir.” The flight sergeant sounded sick. “I was told they were all scraped, but obviously they weren’t.”
“By Christ, I’ll have someone on a charge for this. I’ll have someone’s guts.”
“We can change this load, sir. Get these off, put others on. Take twenty minutes if we go flat out.”
McHarg sat on his heels. He could see Rafferty and the Wingco standing near the control tower, watching. Outside the crew rooms, aircrew were sitting on the grass, watching. “Not fucking likely,” he said. “No daft bomb is going to make me look stupid. Get your head in here. If we ease off the clamps a wee bit, that’ll give us some slack so we can give the carrier a dunt, straighten it out. Are you ready?”
They were standing awkwardly, legs braced, bodies twisted. Perhaps one of them slipped on the oily concrete. Perhaps one of them loosened a clamp too much, and the sudden weight of two hundred and fifty pounds of bomb was more than the other clamps would bear. Perhaps the volatile crystals made a damaging bang when the casing hit the concrete, or maybe the impact pistol triggered the Amatol, although it should have been safe. But what is safe? Nothing is ever totally safe. The bomb went off and the rest of the load exploded too, and everyone in or near the control tower saw P-Peter erupt like a small volcano. Men two hundred yards away were knocked flat. The nearest Hampden was blown over. Other aircraft were damaged by chunks falling from the sky. The blast stopped the church clock in Kindrick. A maid in an upstairs room at Bardney Castle House saw the pink glow made by six hundred gallons of burning petrol, and heard the boom, and was too frightened to tell anyone.
The Wingco managed to get four undamaged bombers into the air. They patrolled their sector of the North Sea and saw nothing but an upturned lifeboat. The sea was rough, visibility poor, it might well have looked to someone like the conning tower of a U-boat. They bombed it anyway, and came home, landing well away from the deep black hole that had once been the concrete hardstanding for P-Peter.
ONE CIVILIAN, NOW DEAD
1
The court of inquiry, chaired by an air vice-marshal, adjourned in order to attend the funeral. There were seven coffins: five armorers plus an engine fitter and a bowser driver who had been standing too near. Most of the coffins were supplemented with sandbags to make a respectable weight. Those of McHarg and his flight sergeant contained nothing but sandbags: synthetic funeral, in aircrew jargon. Still, it was an impressive ceremony. The skies were steel-gray and frost coated every blade of grass. The church clock showed seven minutes past one. “Shades of Rupert Brooke,” Bins murmured to Uncle as they waited for the pallbearers. “Stands the church clock at thirteen oh seven? And is there haggis served in heaven?”
“Poor taste, old boy.”
“Yes. But irresistible.”
The air vice-marshal departed next day. There had been little evidence to examine and no close witnesses to question, so his report was bound to be pretty brief. The hole got filled in and within a week the scorched grass was decently covered by light snow.
This was not enough to stop flying, and late one afternoon Silk was making his approach to Kindrick, sinking gently to seven hundred feet, when he saw a farmhouse whose chimney was smoking and nearby a cottage whose chimney was not.
He told Langham, who called there on his way home. A farm laborer had been conscripted by the army and his wife had gone to live with her mother, so the cottage was empty. When she saw it, Zoë was surprisingly enthusiastic. “It’s a sweet little cottage. The furniture’s quite impossible, and we’ll need someone in to clean, but I’ll take care of that. Extraordinary wallpaper, darling.”
“I think that’s Mickey Mouse. The pictures don’t quite join up, do they?”
“We’ll have it painted eau de nil. Burgundy curtains, don’t you think, darling? And an oatmeal carpet. Let’s blend in with the countryside. I shall buy jodhpurs, lots of jodhpurs.”
Furniture vans and decorators came and went for a week. Then the couple moved in, none too soon. Winter began dumping snow. It took the ground crews all day to clear a landing strip, but the wind had all night to bury it in drifts. 409 did little flying until February 1940.
2
Christmas was a happy time. Zoë gave a string of parties; all the officers of 409 visited the cottage at least once. Away from the pomp of Bardney Castle she was a different person, bright, lively; everyone envied Tony; some tried to replace him. No luck. “You’re awfully sweet,” she would say, “and I’m terribly old-fashioned.” Sometimes, when the party ended, she told him of these approaches. Later, he told Silk.
“Boot the bastard in the balls,” Silk suggested.
“Why? He didn’t do any harm. Anyway … I never thought I’d say this, but to tell the truth, there are times when I wouldn’t mind having an understudy. I mean to say: twice a night, every night. What happens when the well runs dry?”
“Lay off, then. Don’t be so damn greedy.”
“It’s not me. It’s her.”
“Oh.” For Silk, this was an entirely new concept. “So she wears the trousers.”
“Half the time she wears bugger all. And I’m only flesh and blood.”
In mid-January, Langham drove home to find the cottage empty. He sat around, waited, got slightly drunk. The farm had a phone; there were people he could call who might know something. He went to bed, telling himself that if she had fallen in the snow and frozen to death, it was already too late, there was nothing he could do. Was that callous? Blame the war. He slept badly, told nobody she was missing, and next night she was there, waiting, with a box of oysters and a dozen lemons. “For you,” she said.
“I hate oysters. They taste like death.”
“You must eat them, darling. I’ve been to see this brilliant specialist in Harley Street, Guy Chard-Cox. He swears by oysters. I’m having two dozen a day sent here. Guy says it’s what you need to do the trick.” She
gave him Guy’s business card.
“Chard-Cox,” he said. “That’s a joke, surely.”
“Guy can’t help his name. He doesn’t mind if people laugh, as long as he helps make babies.”
“You didn’t tell me you were going to London.”
“I didn’t expect to stay overnight, only I met some chums and anyway what does it matter? The important thing is to get me preggers. I know you’re trying, but…”
“This is your bloody mother’s idea, isn’t it?”
“My bloody mother’s in New bloody York. Now listen, darling. Guy’s had a look at me, nothing wrong he says, might be a good idea to cut down on the gin, but when I told him you were a Spitfire pilot he said stress is a funny thing, like shell-shock in the last war, once a man gets anxious then his octane rating goes down and he stops firing on all cylinders. That’s how Guy explained it.”
By now he was pale with anger. He went outside and got logs and came in and hurled them on the fire. Sparks exploded.
“I am not under stress,” he said, too quietly.
She poured a very small gin with a huge amount of tonic, and looked at him over the rim. “You sound under stress,” she said.
“I’m monumentally pissed off with your Harley Street quack. There’s a difference. And I’m not a Spitfire pilot.”
“Darling, I couldn’t tell Guy I was married to a man who flies Hampden bombers. He’d think you were a bus-driver.”
It was a joke. He thumped the table so hard that the gin bottle bounced. “I need that drink more than you do,” he growled, and tried to grab it, which led to a friendly fight with inevitable physical contact, so they forgot the drink and went to bed. Later he ate six oysters. Couldn’t do any harm, he thought.
3
Silk was a frequent visitor, and that helped. He sometimes brought along one of the Waafs from the station, but rarely the same girl twice. They had all been lectured by the senior Waaf Officer on the folly of falling in love with aircrew. “You will be pregnant and he will be dead,” she said. They were not stupid. They noted the crashes, and they kept their distance. Zoë liked Silk because he made her laugh and if he offended anyone, hard cheese. One night, at supper, he boasted that he had designed Waaf’s knickers for the Air Ministry. “We called it Operation Passion-killer,” he said. “My design won because it had triple-strength elastic and extra gussets. You don’t know what gussets are,” he told Langham, “but we tested my knickers on one hundred randy Canadian aircrew and they couldn’t make a hole in them even when they worked in shifts.”
“Canadians in shifts,” Zoë said. “Pure cotton, I hope. Perhaps a little appliqué around the neckline. One bare shoulder. No jewelry, of course.”
“Gusset …” Langham had a dictionary. “Interesting. It comes between ‘gush’ and ‘gusto.’”
“Don’t we all?” she said.
Silk had brought a Waaf sergeant, very pretty, very tough. “Men are just jealous,” she told Zoë. “Half the squadron wear silk stockings when they fly.”
“What do the other half wear?”
“A look of grim determination,” Langham said. He clenched his teeth and thrust his jaw.
“That looks like constipation, darling.”
“Quite impossible,” Silk said. “At Clifton, constipaggers was a worse crime than buggery. We got dosed with syrup of figs quite ruthlessly.”
“I grew to quite like the taste,” Langham said.
“You just split an infinitive, darling.”
“Did I? The stuff’s still working, then.”
When their guests had gone, Zoë said: “Silk’s awfully funny, isn’t he? And sexy, too. I find bad taste very provocative, don’t you? I wish you were less respectable, my love. Why can’t you talk dirty and galvanize me into dancing naked in the snow?”
“Do my best.” He frowned and thought hard. “All right. Here goes. Um … Nipples. Wet bathing-suits. Contraceptive devices.” She shook her head. “More nipples. Blue-assed baboons.” Still no success. “Reinforced gussets?” he suggested. “Rumpty-tumpty?”
“You’re hopeless.”
“Personally, I find the phrase ‘rumpty-tumpty’ very stimulating,” he said. “Also hanky-panky and tutti-frutti.” He wasn’t going to galvanize his wife. She galvanized herself without help, twice nightly.
4
The snow stopped in January, thawed, and fell again more heavily than ever. By mid-February it had vanished for good. The Wingco was eager to get 409 back in action, and Tom Stuart wanted to make it clear to everyone that married men got no special treatment. For days, Langham was too busy to go home. Zoë hated being left alone in boring Lincolnshire and when he turned up she nagged him to get a posting nearer London. “No can do, old girl,” he said. “Haven’t you heard? There’s a Phoney War on.”
“That’s not funny. I’m going to cancel the oysters. You’re never here.”
However, the war was becoming slightly less phony. Experts at Bomber Command had analyzed the heavy losses suffered in those attempts to attack enemy shipping near Wilhelmshaven, long ago in September, and they had decided that flak did all the damage. Obviously the aircraft went in too low. So, one week before Christmas 1939, on a fine, cloudless day, twenty-two Wellington bombers flew to Wilhelmshaven. They kept close formation, still supposedly the best defense against fighters. They attacked at thirteen thousand feet, supposedly too high for German flak to reach. Both beliefs were wrong. Flak split the formations, and Messerschmitt fighters ripped into their flanks. Twelve Wellingtons were shot down, most of them in the flames of their own petrol. Three limped home and made crash-landings. Of twenty-two bombers, only seven landed safely.
A loss of 68 percent: that was the bad news. The good news, for 409 Squadron, was that daylight ops by Hampdens near the enemy coast were now definitely out; and self-sealing fuel tanks could be expected soon. Meanwhile, there were raids by night to drop leaflets. These ops were codenamed Nickels. For the first time, Hampden crews flew over Germany, sometimes as far as Hanover, Osnabrück, Cologne, even the industrial thickets of the Ruhr. Everyone in 409 flew Nickels. The leaflets were a farce, they all knew that, but the trips were real enough: four hundred miles or more over a total blackout to a dot on the map, dump the bumf, turn round and fly back to the dot you left seven or eight hours ago: no picnic. Especially when people you couldn’t see were trying hard to kill you. It wasn’t like a cross-country navigation test around England, where every aerodrome had a beacon flashing its code letter, and you could ask for a fix if you got lost, and land at a friendly field if you got hopelessly lost. Silk’s navigator was a new boy called Trevor Nimble, not yet twenty, a mathematician who had gone up to Oxford and quit after a year in order to join the RAF. He’d done a dozen cross-countries by night and never got even slightly lost. He could take star shots from the astrodome faster than any man Silk knew. The crew liked him because he played jazz on the violin and because his father was Sir Stamford Nimble, governor of Fiji. Trevor brought a touch of class to their kite, S-Sugar.
Their first Nickel was to Bremen.
This was an easy introduction to enemy territory. The River Weser flowed through Bremen, turned right and broadened into a long estuary. Find the estuary and you had a signpost to the city.
Silk took off at one a.m. and began the grind across the North Sea.
He climbed to eight thousand feet and ice began to form on the wings. Soon it was on the propellers and they were flinging splinters of ice at the cockpit. He went lower, found warm air at two thousand and stayed there. The hours passed peacefully. A half-moon shone through scattered cloud and showed a sea that looked like wrinkled black leather, as usual. His navigator gave him course corrections from time to time, nothing major, just the odd degree, until eventually Nimble navigated S-Sugar to within a mile of Heligoland, a rocky island fifty miles from the German coast, stuffed with flak batteries and heavy machine guns.
The barrage was so violent, like being caught in a firework disp
lay, that Silk took a couple of seconds to react. Then he banked steeply, dived to sea level and opened the throttles wide. Red and yellow tracer chased him.
Well, at least Nimble now knew exactly where they were. He gave Silk the wrong course for Bremen. They never found the Weser, never found Bremen. Silk flew in circles, got hounded by searchlights and harassed by flak, and finally he dropped the leaflets on Rotenburg or Lüneburg or maybe Cloppenburg, who could tell, and turned for home. Nimble sent him across the north of Holland. The Dutch shelled S-Sugar all the way to the coast. It was dawn, and Nimble identified another definite landmark. The course he gave Silk was so wrong that Silk ignored it and steered himself back to England, to Lincoln, to RAF Kindrick.
Later, Tom Stuart interviewed Nimble, and sent him to the Wingco.
“If it’s any consolation,” Hunt said, “you’re not the first, nor the last.”
“I was all right until Heligoland, until the flak, sir.” Nimble was still too bewildered to be miserable. “After the flak I couldn’t make my brain work. Each time I asked it to do something, it backed away. It was like …” The comparison was foolish, but it was all he had. “Like trying to see something through frosted glass.”
Hunt looked at the navigator’s maps and records and calculations: shambles. “You should have told your skipper.”
Nimble just shook his head, totally defeated. “Nothing worked, sir.”
His bags were packed and he was off the camp by noon. Silk said goodbye for the crew. “Not your fault,” he told him. “Just one of those things.” Nimble nodded. It was all he could do to nod. Not yet twenty, and an utter failure. Thank God father was in Fiji.
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