Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  “It’s so ugly. It’s vicious.”

  “I suppose so. That’s its job, to be vicious.” He took it back and held it against the sun, between finger and thumb, like a gem. “Missed me, though.”

  She saw the sharp, twisted metal so near his face. “It’s hateful,” she said. “Get rid of it.” He threw it, hard, out of the garden, into a bramble patch. “Best place for it,” he said.

  They went to bed, as they always did when he came back from a night op, and he was asleep while she was still closing the curtains. He awoke alone. She heard him moving about, and came upstairs. They went back to bed and held each other, skin against skin. She could feel his heart beating. Nothing aroused him; nothing. “Never mind,” she said.

  “I must have left it in Denmark. It’s a tragedy. Like Hamlet.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s nothing like that.”

  He put his head deep under the bedclothes. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Doesn’t look a bit like Hamlet. In fact it bears rather a close resemblance to Polonius. Wrinkled and bent.”

  “Be patient, my love. Next time will be twice the fun.”

  They lay side by side. She stroked his leg with the sole of her foot. “Happy Hall got the chop,” he said.

  “Oh. Did I meet him?”

  “He was at the wedding. He was a good type.”

  There was nothing more to be said about that. She listened to the frightful silence of Lincolnshire and wished it was London. He realized that his left arm had stopped twitching, and was glad.

  NO IMPROVEMENT

  April ended. Langham’s problem did not. He blamed the strain of nightly Gardening ops. Zoë gave him iron tablets to suck.

  The fight for Norway was obviously lost. Many of 409’s crews were not sorry to see it end. The Danish Narrows had become too hot. The North Sea was a long haul for a Hampden trudging home with flak-damage and casualties on board; and sometimes the casualties, wrapped in parachutes against the freezing air howling down the fuselage, died before the Hampden landed.

  409 got stood down. Langham took Silk in the Frazer-Nash to a country pub, the Black Swan. They sat beside a canal and drank beer and read newspapers. “What a monumental cock-up,” Silk said.

  “Censored, too. The truth must be worse. If possible.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s worse. I’ve been given a different navigator. Gilchrist. The matinée idol.”

  “He can’t be as bad as that bloke you sacked. Name like a fairy.”

  “Nimble. He wasn’t stupid, he was duff. Flak made him freeze. This Gilchrist’s a Brylcreem boy. He should be flying Spits.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “He hasn’t got the balls for bombers.”

  “He stood up to Rafferty, though. That took balls.”

  “No, it took galloping stupidity. He hadn’t been here ten minutes and he put up a black! Who needs a comedian for a nav? Gilchrist’s been kicked from kite to kite. He’s a bloody jinx. Now the Wingco’s dumped him on me. The Wingco hates me.”

  “Christ Almighty,” Langham said. “You’re in a foul stinking temper today, Silko.”

  Silk grunted. He was leaning forward, elbows on knees. He watched a pair of wild ducks fly along the canal, lower their flaps and undercarriage, and make a perfectly greased landing. “Wish I could do that,” he said. “Yesterday I bounced like a bloody kangaroo.”

  “Everybody has bad days.”

  “Yeah. What worries me is, I didn’t care. Shitty landing, and I didn’t give a tiny toss.” He took out a coin. “And here is the tiny toss I didn’t give. Remember this?”

  “That’s your lucky penny.”

  “It’s been on every op I’ve done.” He spun it and caught it. “Heads or tails? What are the odds?”

  “Evens, of course. Fifty-fifty.”

  “Yeah. But suppose you call heads nine times in a row and you win all nine. Now …” He tossed again, and covered the penny with his hand. He looked Langham in the eyes. “Still fifty-fifty?”

  “Logic says yes, but …”

  “But you’re not convinced.” Silk threw the penny in the canal. “Fuck luck. The chop is the chop is the chop. End of story.”

  They finished their beer and walked along the towpath. “You need some leave,” Langham said.

  “Leave book’s closed. I asked Uncle for a week’s compassionate to go and see Gone With The Wind, and he said the squadron’s awfully short of compassion right now, try again next year.”

  Silk was jaunty again. Langham relaxed a little. Still, the loss of the lucky penny bothered him, and he tried to persuade Silk to do something about Gilchrist, encourage the man, teach him some tricks of the trade.

  “I don’t leave anything to luck,” Langham said. “I check everything in advance. I go over the flight plan with Jonty, and he gives me a copy of all the course bearings. He writes the numbers big, too, in case I can’t see very well. Suppose Jonty gets knocked out? Over the target, say. I want the course for base in my hand, not down the other end of the observer’s tunnel. And I do an intercom check every seven minutes. A gunner’s no damn good if his oxygen tube’s come unplugged. I always have short gunners, five-seven, five-eight, because they can handle the guns in their little cupolas better than a big chap whose knees and elbows get in the way. And everybody in my crew can find his way anywhere in the kite by feel, in total darkness …”

  He had a dozen other precautions. At the end, Silk just shrugged and said, “Well, bully for you, Tony. Now tell me what you do when the unknown happens. Stabilized yaw, for instance.”

  “Refer to Pilot’s Notes.”

  They turned back. “How’s your sex life?” Silk asked. “Can you find time for a cup of cocoa between orgies?”

  “Awfully decent of you to ask. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. My half of the bargain has gone absent without leave. It’s been acting with what drill sergeants call dumb insolence.”

  “No lead in the pencil?”

  “Scarcely a pencil, sometimes.”

  “Better see the MO.”

  The more Langham thought about it, the less he liked the idea. The MO was good at fractures and frostbite but he was a bachelor, and he had a strange and cynical sense of humor. He might attempt Freudian therapy. He had a couch in his office. Not bloody likely. Langham went to his flight commander and said he had urgent business affairs to sort out in London, and Tom gave him twenty-four hours’ leave. He caught an express from Lincoln and was in Harley Street by late afternoon. He told the receptionist he was Zoë Herrick Herrick’s husband. Twenty minutes later he was shaking hands with Guy Chard-Cox. He had prepared a sober, intelligent statement on the train; now it vanished like steam. “No sex,” he said. “My plonker won’t rise to the occasion any more.”

  “That must be quite infuriating.” Chard-Cox was forty-odd, slim, bright-eyed, square-jawed, the opposite of the pompous consultant Langham had expected to meet. “So many things can sabotage our reproductive system that it’s a miracle we are here today. Take spermatorrhoea, which is a discharge of seminal fluid that occurs independently of voluntary sexual excitement.”

  “I think I would have noticed that, don’t you?”

  “Of course. How about circumcision?”

  “I noticed that long ago.”

  “So we can rule out phimosis. Splendid. Let’s see … Constipation sometimes causes pressure on veins, thus irritating the sexual organs … No constipation, good, good. You must tell me your secret. So many of my patients are bound solid.”

  “Terror helps.”

  Chard-Cox smiled. “I’m sure it does. There’s an unhelpful condition called intertrigo, or chafing. No chafing? Excellent. Congenital syphilis I’m sure the RAF would have detected. How about dropsy? A hydrocele, which is just a bag of liquid, forms in the scrotum and may result in varicose veins on the spermatic cord.”

  “Would I be aware of it?”

  “You would. Furthermore you’d be extremely unlucky. The conditio
n is usually confined to elderly men in the tropics.”

  “God help us. Not exactly Rudyard Kipling, is it?”

  “No. I wonder … There’s a problem called pressure palsy, sometimes known as crutch paralysis. Can we consider the flying suit you wear? Is it strapped very tightly around the groin? Enough to produce a loss of sensation? No? Forget crutch paralysis, then. Perhaps Raynaud’s Disease might apply. It concerns prolonged chill or frostbite leading to gangrene of the extremities. The question arises: do you fly your Spitfire in icy conditions for long periods?”

  “Yes and no. It’s not a Spitfire, it’s a Hampden bomber. And I often fly for hours when the outside temperature is down to thirty or forty below and my extremities, as you call them, are colder than a witch’s tit and even smaller. But all that was happening long before I got married, so …” He spread his hands.

  “Delete Raynaud. I was sure your wife said Spitfires.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Yes, of course. Sherry?”

  There was a pause while they went through the ritual of pouring and sipping. “Your wife told me a lot about her mother. Lady Shapland has quite a powerful personality, hasn’t she? Seems always to get what she wants.” Langham couldn’t argue with that. “What do you really want? Do you really want to be a father?”

  Langham hid his face behind his hands.

  “Perhaps you were never given much choice,” Chard-Cox said.

  Langham made a muffled grunt.

  “So when you made love to your wife …”

  “I was a stud.” Langham dropped his hands. He felt very tired. “I was doing it to satisfy the old bitch.” That wasn’t the whole truth but it was near enough.

  “Almost as if she were there beside you.”

  “Urging me on.” Langham swigged his sherry. “Like one of her bloody silly racehorses.”

  They talked for a further ten minutes, but really everything had been said. Langham picked up his hat. “What you might call blindingly obvious,” he said sadly.

  “It happens all the time,” Chard-Cox told him. “Not that it’s any consolation. But it’s a start.”

  He took the train back to Lincoln, dozing, waking to rehearse in his mind what he was going to say to Zoë, dozing again. He drove to the cottage, arrived refreshed by the night air, and found his wife finishing supper with Flemming Vansittart and Silk. They all seemed very happy. “Hell’s teeth! You again,” he said to the Dutchman. “Believe me, you won’t get anywhere with him.” He pointed at Silk. “He only sleeps with red-headed twins. Anyway, I’m still going to break your neck.”

  “Surely not,” Flemming said. “I’m just about to make the crêpes Suzette.”

  “Sit down, darling. If you break Flemming’s neck I’ll break yours. Have some cassoulet, it’s delicious.”

  “Flem made it, didn’t you, Flem?” Silk said. He was more than slightly drunk. “Bloody good cook. Have a drink, don’t be so bloody miserable.” He poured a glass of red wine.

  “Did Flem make this too?”

  Upstairs, the lavatory flushed. “He certainly made that,” Zoë said. They laughed. Langham didn’t understand. Silk’s new popsy came down the stairs and got introduced. Langham tasted the cassoulet. Superb. Zoë asked him where he’d been. “Nowhere near Holland, thank Christ,” he growled. They found that hilarious. He gave up.

  Later, lying in bed, he said: “I can’t see what you see in that pansy.”

  “Simple, darling. If he hadn’t mended the hole in the roof, you’d have rain dripping in your face. If he hadn’t done something to the WC, we’d be squatting in the bushes. You haven’t been here to help, have you? And I like Flemming. It’s nice to have someone to talk to. Just talk. I don’t have sex with my friends. And you seem to have lost your boyish charm lately, haven’t you?”

  He was too tired to argue. He thought: Tomorrow morning we’ll sort it all out. But next day he couldn’t find the words; and in any case his leave was over.

  He told Silk about going to Harley Street. “The quack thinks that Zoë’s mum is the nigger in the woodpile,” he said. “The more she leans on me, the more I back off.” Silk nodded. “Interesting,” he said. That was all. What more was there?

  WE SHAN’T SEE HIM IN A HURRY

  1

  When the Luftwaffe bombed the heart of Rotterdam for no good military reason and killed nine hundred Dutch civilians, then at last, finally, irrevocably, the Roosevelt Rules were scrapped and 409 flew to German cities and dropped, not leaflets, but bombs.

  Actually some Hampdens carried bombs and leaflets. With Hitler conquering more of Europe than Napoleon or Charlemagne or Genghis Khan had managed, and far faster, this was an odd time to urge the German people to change their ways. Soon the Luftwaffe would be dropping leaflets on England, showing Churchill with a Tommy-gun and denouncing him as a gangster. Churchill was quite flattered, and the British liked the picture. Either way, bumf was bumf. It changed nothing.

  But the air war, which had started so sluggishly, took off in a rush. Bombers of all types attacked railways, bridges and road junctions: vital links between Germany and the battlefront. By the time the bombers arrived, the battlefront had usually moved on. So the attack was switched to German industry. 409 Squadron learned new names in the Ruhr area: Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund, Castrop-Rauxel, Bochum, Mülheim, Krefeld, Wuppertal, many more. They were also sent to bomb Hamburg, Bremen and Cologne, familiar from Nickel trips. Bins briefed them on the oil installations to be hit, and Rafferty encouraged them to make every bomb count because the enemy must, by now, be running out of fuel. Bomber Command redoubled its attacks as the fighting threatened Dunkirk. The German army did not run out of fuel. Dunkirk fell. Maybe someone in the Ministry of Economic Warfare had got his sums wrong.

  So ended May 1940, and June was just as hectic. Germany now had Holland, so the RAF no longer needed to make a great dog-leg to avoid neutral territory. That knocked a couple of hundred miles off a trip to the Ruhr and places like Cologne and Aachen, and it saved a further two hundred on the homeward journey. This was important in June and July. The nights were at their shortest. The northern sky was never completely dark. An incoming bomber was silhouetted for the benefit of German night fighters.

  There was no such thing as safety in numbers. Each Hampden from 409 flew as an individual. Its crews decided when to take off, which route to follow, whether to bomb from high or low, sometimes what bombs to carry. Even when Group ordered 409 to send a whole Flight to hit a single target, the trip was a long and solitary experience for each crew. They might see another bomber caught by searchlights, or the flash and flicker of its bombs; but when they dumped their own load and made the long journey home, they rarely saw another machine until perhaps they had crossed the English coast and somebody else might be glimpsed in the moonlight, heading for the same base.

  Ops were like that: long hauls when usually nothing went very wrong. Occasionally everything failed. It happened to Tubby Heckter and his crew, over Bremen. Flak smashed his compass and ruined his altimeter. Fog blanked the English coast. He was lost, and much lower than he thought, which was why he flew into the balloon barrage at Harwich. A cable sawed a wing off. The wreck burned so brightly that the fire brigade easily found it, even in the fog. And a week later, “B” Flight’s commander, Micky Byrd, failed to return. Just vanished. Next day, Pug Duff was an acting squadron leader, commanding the Flight. “Who better?” Hunt said; and Rafferty agreed.

  2

  “Tell your batman to press your best uniform,” the Wingco said. “You’re going to be presented with your own personal airplane.”

  “Yes, sir,” Langham said. “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “Your rich mother-in-law has donated a Hampden to the nation. It’s to be called the Lady Shapland. The ceremony’s tomorrow, in front of the control tower. The bishop will bless the kite. The Press will take pictures. You will smile.”

  “I like D-Dog, sir. I don’t want another kite.”<
br />
  “What you want is totally irrelevant. Remember that journalists twist everything, so tell them that Lady Shapland is a wonderful woman. Otherwise keep your mouth shut.”

  Langham found Silk having a shower after playing squash, and told him the news. Silk was impressed. “How much does a Hampden cost?”

  “God knows. She probably sold Worcestershire to raise the cash. It’s easy for her.”

  “Ah.” Silk watched as Langham thrashed the air with the racket. Air whistled past the strings. “Do I detect a note of bitterness?”

  “Well, it’s pure bloody blackmail, Silko. She won’t let me rest until she’s a blasted grandmother, will she? First she bullied me, now she’s trying to bribe me. I didn’t get married, I got bought and sold in a cattlemarket. Why doesn’t the old bitch get into bed with us? Then she can kick me in the balls until I do the dirty deed.”

  “Kicking you in the balls won’t help. Biology was never your top subject at Clifton, was it?”

  They strolled back to their rooms.

  “Funny thing,” Langham said sombrely. “Father used to worry that I might run amok and get some girl pregnant. Now I’ve got the opposite problem.”

  “It makes no sense,” Silk said. “I’ve only seen Zoë fully dressed, and even so she makes my flybuttons pop. You get her in bed, stark naked, and nothing happens? You’ve got a knot in your dong.”

  Suddenly Langham was angry. “You think you can do better?” he snapped. “Okay, go ahead, she’s yours.”

  Silk gave a snort of amusement, but he saw it was no joke. “Thanks awfully. I’ve got my hands full with that new Waaf, Brenda.”

  “Not a hope in hell. Come on, Zoë likes you, she’s said so. Five minutes is all it takes. Be a pal.”

  Silk thought about it. Part of him was shocked and dismayed. A larger part wanted to jump at the chance. Unlike many pilots, Silk had lost his virginity, but it had been a rushed and disappointing business in a railway carriage between stops, and he wanted more. He wanted fireworks. Sex with Zoë would blow his socks off. “What does she say about it?” he asked cautiously.