Second Violin

by John Lawton

  Port Erin

  Isle of Man

  Dear Sir,

  We hereby confirm clearance of a cheque for £750, drawn on the account of Dr. Manfred Massmann, The District Bank, Amersham. The money has now been credited to your deposit account.

  Yrs Faithfully

  J.B. Morton

  Manager

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Oskar an’ me turned over his office night before last. Idiot kept it in his desk drawer. Didn’t know enough to burn the bleedin’ evidence.’

  ‘You burgled Trench’s office!’

  ‘No,’ Siebert said. ‘Not burgled. I had a key made. Young Jenkins gave me an impression of the original in a bar of soap.’

  Rod waved the letter at them.

  ‘And where’s the original of this?’

  ‘We sent it out by the patisserie run yesterday. My missis should get it in a day or two now. Trench don’t play ball one copy goes to my MP, and another copy goes to Scotland Yard. My missis’ll hang on to the original.’

  ‘And that’s what you told Trench?’

  ‘Straight up.’

  Rod did not know what he felt. Elated, deflated, victorious, defeated.

  ‘You shouldn’t be bothered,’Jacks said. ‘You’d done wonders waving the old school tie. You got us fed back in Manchester, you got the sick and the old uns taken in at Douglas, you got this lot up an runnin’. You done good, you really have. But what you did today . . . OK it was moving . . . it was stirrin’ . . . an’ we are all Stinkin Jews now . . . you was dead right . . . but it was never gonna work with a total tosser like Trench. All a sit-down was gonna get you was a row of cold arses.’

  Rod folded the letter and passed it back to Jacks.

  ‘Of course,’ he said softly.

  ‘He’s right, Troy,’ Siebert said. ‘Gandhi-style civil disobedience was never going to work. As your English phrase has it, it was time to fight fire with fire.’

  Rod looked at them. He could not see what they had in common. They were the same height and the same complexion – short, dark men – and that was about it. In peacetime, one would surely have been having his collar felt by the other?

  He said, ‘And to fight crime with crime? Do you know what an unholy team you two make? You should see yourselves, the East End wide boy and the career copper on the same side.’

  ‘War,’ Siebert said, ‘makes strange bedfellows of us all.’

  § 149

  Trench sent for Rod again the following day.

  He too unfolded a letter and passed it across the desk to Rod.

  ‘Came from the War Office this morning.’

  Rod took it in at a glance and then re-read it slowly word for word.

  Trench said, ‘It’s an order for your release.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘You should be delighted.’

  ‘And so should you.’

  Trench declined the bait.

  ‘You want me gone. Supposing I won’t go?’

  ‘Your charges will be safe with me. You’ve played Snow White among the Seven Dwarfs too long even for your own amusement. You’ll go. Of course you’ll bloody well go. It isn’t a request . . .’

  Trench’s finger tapped down on the paper.

  ‘. . . It’s an order. RAF Cockfosters. Seventy-two hours from now. You’re in the forces now. Like it or lump it, Mr Troy just bugger off!’

  § 150

  Rod arrived at Cockfosters wearing an ill-fitting off-the-peg uniform. There had been just enough time to get issued with the uniform, to drop in on his wife, children and parents and to ring his tailor and order a uniform tailored to his bulk. His father’s obsession with, as he still insisted on calling it nearly forty years after the Wright Brothers, ‘powered flight’, had led Rod at an early age to indulge his father’s hobby for him. The old man had bought an aeroplane in 1922 . . . Rod had flown it for him and with him. He was a good amateur pilot, qualified longer than most professionals now in service and he had rarely lost a chance to fly. He’d kept up the hours in England, Ireland, France and, until the Nazis had grown suspicious of him, Germany too. Hence, it was with no small pride that he pinned his wings to the baggy RAF blue blouse before reporting to Wing Commander Perkins.

  ‘I say, old man, you do realise wings are strictly for pilots?’

  ‘I’ve been flying since I was sixteen. More than fifteen years.’

  If Rod had wanted to stay in Intelligence it was the wrong remark to have made. Forty-eight hours later he found himself reporting to 56 Fighter Squadron, Fighter Group 10, in Boscombe Down, Wiltshire.

  § 151

  It seemed to Rod that it had been a glorious summer. He’d seen it in London, he’d seen it on the Isle of Man, he’d glimpsed it one day at Cockfosters and now in rural Hampshire only twenty-five miles from the English Channel. He drove his HRG 1100 Sports two-seater down from London, his suitcase strapped to the back. Either side of the road out of Winchester the farmers were taking in the harvest. Heavy horses plodding in front of the whirling blades of reapers. Steam engines bellowing, fly wheels flying, leather belts spinning, threshing the corn. It was an odd combination of scents in the air. Steam and soot and the indescribable smell of mown wheat. He had no word to capture it in its ambiguity. It was the smell of summer – but it presaged autumn. The heat of the day always held that first cool breath of autumn, ‘rotten before ’tis ripe’ as some fool in Shakespeare said of the medlar – but for the life of him Rod couldn’t remember who.

  At the gate they told him to report to the Squadron Leader. The skies above were clear and empty. Somewhere across the airfield he could hear the sound of Forces Radio, the jaunty burble of the BBC Variety Orchestra. The Squadron Leader – Alec Bremner, a Scotsman as tall as Rod was himself, which went some way towards reassuring him that he might actually fit in a Hawker Hurricane – was sprawled in a lacquered Lloyd Loom chair, hands locked behind his head, staring into the blue yonder.

  ‘That’s a good sign.’

  ‘What is?’ Rod asked.

  ‘I was watching you. When you’d parked the car the first thing you did was look up. You didn’t look around or look for me, which was pretty much what you’d been told to do, you looked up. First sign of a pilot. You know who make the best pilots? Not rugby players, not football players or any other sporty type. It’s musicians.’

  Rod looked up again.

  ‘Beautiful flying conditions. Not a plane in sight. And I play second violin.’

  Bremner eased himself out of the chair. Returned Rod’s belated salute with a handshake.

  ‘And I bang away at the joanna when no one’s around. Let’s be grateful for small mercies, shall we? Now, how many hours?’

  ‘Honestly couldn’t say. More than a thousand, that I do know.’

  ‘Good bloody grief, where have they been hiding you?’

  Rod did not think this quite the moment to answer.

  ‘OK, then, how many hours on Hurricanes?’

  ‘None. Not a sausage.’

  ‘OK . . . have you ever flown a monoplane?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything with retractable wheels?’

  ‘No . . . nor anything with machine guns. I’ve put in the hours, but I am an amateur.’

  ‘Amateur? Bollocks. We’ve been taking anyone we can get since June. Ferry pilots. Green kids in their teens. Poles and Czechs who can’t speak a bloody word of English. Canadians . . . even the odd Yank, and more Aussies and Kiwis than you could count. Amateur is no longer an applicable term. The only people we haven’t taken are women . . . and I wonder how long it will be before we do.’

  Bremner left no time to unpack, and got him up in a Harvard trainer right away. Less than forty-eight hours later, during a lull in the fighting, he was flying solo at the helm of a Hurricane, the squadron leader flying rings around him to teach him the tricks of aerial combat; the constant weaving to avoid enemy fire, sudden sweeps from behind, blinding attacks from out o
f the sun, the voice crackling through the headset ‘Takka takka takka takka! You’re dead, old son.’

  Two days later it was real.

  § 152

  High over Ventnor, Isle of Wight, a fleet of Heinkel 111s is in search of a target. The radar station, one of a chain dotted along the southern and eastern coasts, feeding into Fighter Command HQ at Stanmore, which gave the RAF advance notice of raiders from across the channel, had been taken out by Stukas less than a fortnight before. It was possible the Luftwaffe didn’t grasp the extent of their success, but the Heinkel 111s ignored the remains of the radar station, lumbered on in the direction of Portsmouth. The 111s were slow planes – if a plane could ever be deemed slow by those on the ground below, harvesting by horse and reaper as they had done for two hundred years and more. Flying at no more than 225mph, a Heinkel 111 packed a bomb payload in the region of 3,000 lbs. Without the Messerschmitts they were vulnerable. Bremner had split the squadron into two wings – he would lead the more experienced pilots to tackle the escort, the ‘new’ boys, and there were two others as green as Rod, would try to take out the bombers, although the word ‘try’ had only been used once by Bremner, as in ‘try not to get yourself killed’. A Heinkel was not only well-armoured, it was structurally all but impossible to break it up with bullets alone. Bremner had told him of bombers taking thousands of rounds with no significant damage to their capability in the air.

  The tactic worked. It seemed to Rod almost too easy. To defend the bombers the fighters had to defend themselves – at cross-purpose when squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes closed in. The Messerschmitts peeled away from the Heinkels in swirling dogfights.

  Flight Sergeant Milner led Rod and four other Hurricanes in a wide circle away from the action to come at the Heinkels side on, from the West, sun behind them. A Heinkel had no tail gunner – the firepower was all forward. Two gunners in the nose, two in the belly and one on top.

  The top gunner in the nearest Heinkel opened up at once. Milner’s voice came over the RT uttering the last words Rod had wanted to hear after staying within fifty feet of him since they left Boscombe, ‘Break, break, you’re on your own!’

  A Messerschmitt 109 came down upon them. The German and Milner exchanged fire, and Rod took his Hurricane up into cloud out of harm’s way. It was an instinctive move, and he knew, quite the wrong one. ‘You’re here to fight, laddie.’ But he had not known how to engage the German without getting in the way of Milner. He put the plane into a tight circle, feeling the pull of G-force, and dropped sharply, too sharply, back down with no clear idea of where he was, out of cloud, and realised he had come down right in front of a Heinkel – facing its two forward gunners. A burst of fire from the Brownings in his wings, his first at a living target, a sound like ripping calico, fear fighting relief when he realised he had missed both gunners. Relief fighting fear as he realised they had both missed him. A second, almost unbidden burst of fire and then the shock as he saw the glass bubble in front of the two German pilots shatter and splatter with blood – and then the Heinkel dipped sharply, just as he rose. An unnerving bump as his tail wheel clipped the top gun turret and then flying free and fast, turning tightly once more to see the Heinkel spiralling out of control, down to earth.

  Bremner had told him from the start that they all wanted ‘a kill’. And he’d heard for himself the raucous claims in the mess afterwards, but Bremner had also said waiting for the proof was a dangerous vanity. ‘The enemy is not the bloke you’ve just shot up, he’s the bloke you can’t yet see.’

  Rod turned the plane northward just in time to see the 109 he had eluded minutes before send Milner’s Hurricane plummeting – a trail of black smoke, then a billowing white cloud as Milner bailed out. But the Messerschmitt pilot hadn’t heard Bremner’s rule. He watched long enough for Rod to line up behind him, behind his armour, and open fire.

  The blast as the Messerschmitt exploded sent Rod reeling westward. Down, down, down. When he levelled out of the dive, he was far below the battle. For a moment he seemed not even to be able to hear the sound of his own engine. As though he had slipped through a hole in time and space. Cocooned in a bubble of silence. Blasted into memory. He was in a bar in Berlin. Any bar would do. Nameless. He and Greene drinking German beer. And the voice in his head was asking if any of the young Luftwaffe officers he rubbed shoulders with night after night were amongst those he had just killed. Nameless.

  Then Bremner’s voice sounded, clear and present, loud and real and now, in his RT, ‘Pancake! It’s all over, you hooligans. Back to base. Repeat, pancake.’

  § 153

  Bremner had unzipped his flying boots and came flapping up beside Rod.

  ‘Milner?’ he said simply.

  ‘I saw him bail out. Saw the ’chute open.’

  ‘Then we’ll get him back soggy and sorry in an hour or two. And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You’ve made a spectacular start. Don’t let it go to your head, but you have. I expected you to have a crack at a Heinkel. Fat lot of use if you can’t. But to take the bugger down, and then the 109, that was something. How do you feel?’

  Rod had been feeling rather a lot. If there was a gamut, it ran from elation, through surprise to a sad regret at the loss of life . . . to some rough-hewn sentiment he recognised might be patriotism.

  ‘I feel . . . I feel . . .’

  He stopped. Bremner and he face to face.

  ‘What was it the PM said in May? . . . he quoted General Weygand’s phrase about the Battle of France, said the Battle of France is over . . . blahdey-blah-de-blah . . . the battle about to begin will be the Battle of Britain. That’s us, right? Battle of Britain?’

  ‘Catchy, trips off the tongue,’ said Bremner. ‘But then I’ve always felt Winston had one eye on the history books.’

  ‘So, if this is the Battle of Britain, I feel . . . well . . . British.’

  It had taken a long time for Rod to arrive at this point. He had been aware for some time that it was a journey he had embarked upon long ago – quite possibly on the day almost twenty years ago when he had told his father that he would not be naturalised (‘Well, Dad, not just yet anyway’). He had never expected to reach this moment thousands of feet up in the skies over England, or in combat, but reach it he had. Would Bremner get it? He’d have had this conversation with whoever had asked him the question. He dearly wished he could have had it with his brother. But it had been Bremner, and only Bremner was listening . . . and he didn’t know Bremner. He liked him – hard not to, he thought, but he didn’t really know him. Would Bremner get it?

  Bremner roared with laughter, slapped Rod so hard on the back he lurched forward.

  ‘British? British, you Viennese Russki Sassenach bastard? Bugger British, I’m staying Scots!’

  They scrambled again less than two hours later.

  Bremner peeled them off by numbers to left and right. Rod heard Bremner on the headset to him, ‘OK, Red Seven?’ And then he heard him singing ‘Wi’ a hundred pipers, an’a an’a . . . we’ll up and we’ll gie ’em a blaw a blaw’. Then he heard him laughing like a maniac.

  § 154

  Drax pulled a face, not for the first time, and set down his spoon.

  ‘No disrespect to your mother – but I’ll never get used to the taste of nettle soup.’

  Billy said, ‘Get it down yer. It pulled me through in 1921.’

  Drax succumbed to a fit of coughing and asked for water. Billy went into the bathroom and came back with a tumbler. Drax drained it at one gulp, eased his head back on the pillows.

  ‘Y’OK now?’

  ‘I have been worse.’

  ‘Bet you’ve eaten worse too.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Like in that camp.’

  Billy was pacing gently up and down the room, hands stuffed in the pockets of baggy trousers.

  Drax said, ‘Whatever it is you want to know – ask.’

  Billy stopped in front of the window, stared at t
he cloudless September sky.

  ‘When was you inside?’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-three.’

  ‘As soon as old Adolf got his knees under the table?’

  ‘If I understand your idiom aright, yes.’

  ‘And just ’cos yer Jewish?’

  ‘There were many more than Jews in the camp.’

  ‘Oranienburg, right?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Rosen was there too. Bleedin’ miracle you didn’t bump into one another.’

  ‘I was there because I was . . . am . . . a Communist. I was a member of the Austrian party during my time in Vienna just after the last war. When I moved back to Berlin I did not join the German Party. All the same, after the burning of the Reichstag, when they needed scapegoats, the Nazis seemed to know who was a Communist and who was not. There was even talk that the membership lists had been supplied by Moscow. They knew. They needed the merest excuse to arrest me. I gave it to them.’

  ‘Things you said, like you do here?’

  ‘Less . . . much less. I asked students not to wear party uniforms in my lectures. The same day I was arrested. Two SA men came to my door at midnight. They gave no reason for my arrest, gave no time to pack or prepare. I was bundled into the back of a truck. They did not tell me the destination, although it was obvious. Everyone in Berlin knew about Oranienberg, although many pretended they didn’t. Ironically, I remained on the payroll of the university for the next ten days until the Nazis passed an act forbidding Jews to join the civil service or teach in the universities. So I would have been fired anyway. The following month, having nothing else to do, they burnt books all across Germany, and no doubt some of mine were among them. Ironically – and this war is full of ironies – I would be offended if they weren’t. I was released in the December. The camp closed soon after. But there are others now, bigger camps – Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück.’