The Professionals

by Max Hennessy

  ‘Yes. Rode over. Thought I might as well.’ He looked at Jane. ‘Didn’t expect him to be here, of course,’ he said to her. ‘Badly brought up, shouldn’t wonder. Gets in the way a lot. Specially in the air.’ He glanced at Jane’s mother and his smile died. ‘Came over with some bad news, actually.’

  I knew what it was without asking. ‘You’re going back to France?’

  Sykes nodded and I saw Jane’s face fall. ‘Given me a squadron,’ he went on. ‘Rather a good show, really. Didn’t expect one.’

  I felt the bottom fall out of my world. Sykes had become everything to me. Father-confessor, co-conspirator in the forming of plans for aerial combat against the edicts of the authorities at headquarters, the superior officer who was always ready to try out the half-baked new ideas I thought of, the one man who’d never treated me – as some of the older men were in the habit of doing – as a schoolboy who had to be favoured. I couldn’t imagine the squadron without him.

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘Immediately. Telegram came.’

  ‘Ask for me,’ I said impulsively, almost begging. ‘I’d like to be in the same mob.’

  Sykes gave me that brilliant smile of his, that smile that was always sufficient reward for the effort to the man who picked up his coat when he dropped it, the mechanic who laboured all night over his engine so he could be in the air at first light, the tender driver who conveyed him to the station. It was a gift of charming people such as I’d never have if I lived a million years because it came from generations of Sykes males getting people to do things for them. There had probably been Sykeses and Bartelotts smiling at serfs at the courts of King Harold before William of Normandy even began to cast covetous eyes across the Channel.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ I went on. ‘Ask for me.’

  ‘Thought of it already,’ Sykes said.

  I was so overwhelmed that he wanted me in his squadron I had quite failed to notice that Jane’s eyes were big and moist. They were suddenly so full of sadness I became aware at once that I’d stayed too long.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Bill.’ For a moment I wondered if I ought to call him ‘Sir Bill’ or ‘Lord Bill’ because I knew there was a title around somewhere at Hathersett, but it didn’t seem to fit him and I settled for the normal.

  ‘I’ll be getting home,’ I said.

  ‘Aren’t you staying for tea?’ I noticed it wasn’t Jane who asked but her mother.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be off. I haven’t seen my parents yet.’

  Somehow I got out of the door without falling over the step, and as I mounted the bicycle and pedalled home through the dusk I felt myself surrounded by black treachery. Somehow, I felt, Jane should have told me, her parents should have told me, my parents should have written. Then gradually commonsense took over and I realized that a gauche boy not nineteen and never noted for saying the right thing at the right time was no match for a wealthy young man of the world like Sykes, and I felt better enough even to marvel that it had been Jane – Jane whom I’d thought I was in love with myself – who’d captured his affection. It made me feel almost related to him and I was delighted, and my resentment vanished because it was clear Jane had forgotten me in the first moment she’d seen Sykes.

  Because I, too, thought there was no one in the world like him, I could hardly blame her for thinking the same.

  * * *

  When I got back on the Sunday night, Sykes was with the Major, organizing his departure. The klaxon that sounded the Zeppelin alarm had gone so that there were machines in the air. It was too late for me to join them so I wandered down to the field to see what was happening. It was cold so I’d slipped on a jersey and I stood by the flarepath staring at the sky and catching the acrid smell of burning paraffin in my nostrils as the smoke wafted down the line of lights.

  ‘Anything been seen?’ I asked the flight-sergeant in charge.

  ‘Not a thing, sir. The Hun’s probably doing a practice trip over Cuxhaven and someone tipped the wink to London. You know what they’re like there.’

  I knew.

  ‘There’s a bunch of new chaps arrived, sir,’ the flight-sergeant went on. ‘Just came in. To take the place of Mr McSpadden, Mr Graves and Mr Williamson.’

  I nodded, not really listening. Even now, even back on the field, I was still a little bewildered that Jane could have changed her mind so fast. I couldn’t find it in me to blame her, however, and I decided I was more mature than I’d realized. I’d been able to face the fact that she thought more of someone else than she did of me – without missing a meal, I’d noticed – and I decided it was simply old age and cynicism catching up.

  While I was staring down the line of flares, I heard voices behind me and one of them sounded vaguely familiar. I’d heard hundreds, thousands, of voices in the last eighteen months but this one seemed to dig back into the past, and as I turned round I knew why. A burly second-lieutenant was staring at me, grinning.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t young Falconer,’ he said. ‘Thought I recognized you. You look a bit different now from when I first met you at school.’ He turned to the other young men with him, also second-lieutenants with brand new overcoats and pips.

  ‘At school with this chap,’ he said, indicating me arrogantly with a cock of his thumb. ‘He was one of the little toads in the second form when I left. Used to object when I knocked him about a bit.’ He grinned at me. ‘I bet you don’t remember me, do you, young Falconer?’

  Not half I don’t, I thought. A lot of other things hung together suddenly, too – a familiar face and a bullying manner in Fynling and the memory of misery at school. His name was Catlow and, with his fashionable toothbrush moustache and the cap with the wire removed to give him a dashing ‘Gorblimey’ air, he looked as slimy now as he did then. He had often made my life miserable with his overbearing bumptiousness and big fists.

  ‘Had to give you a thick ear more than once, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘What are you doing here? Just arrived?’

  I looked up at him and said nothing and he went on loudly.

  ‘Have to be a bit more careful here, y’know. This isn’t school and we’re not playing cricket.’

  ‘No,’ I said gravely, trying to look like Sykes did when someone irritated him. ‘So they tell me. How about you?’

  ‘Pilot,’ he said with heavy self-importance. ‘This is Peckett and this is Bull. Off the same course.’

  I nodded at the other two and he went on cheerfully. ‘How about you? Airfield security?’

  I don’t know what he thought I was because I was without a cap and wore slacks instead of breeches and, wearing the jersey instead of a tunic, there was no insignia of rank showing.

  ‘I suppose you’d call it that,’ I said. ‘Been flying long?’

  ‘Yes. Gave up a good job in the city to do my bit.’

  ‘And now you’ve come to show the Germans a thing or two?’

  ‘Not half. Those old Huns’ll have to watch their step now, eh, Peckett?’

  Peckett, who was a tall pale-eyed young man, didn’t seem half so confident as Catlow and only managed a wan smile in the glow of the flares. But Catlow was never lacking in confidence or bounce. At school, he had always been in the habit of announcing his successes before they’d arrived, and despite previous failures, had always seemed surprised when they failed to materialize. How he’d become a pilot I had no idea but I suspected he was a rotten one.

  While he was telling the uninterested Peckett just how he proposed to win the war, I learned from Bull, a thick-shouldered man who seemed quite unimpressed by him, that they had joined up six months before and had about six and a half hours’ flying to their credit. I felt I was going to enjoy meeting Catlow officially when the time came.

  Nothing was seen of the Zeppelins, of course, and when I returned to the mess, Sykes was there making his farewells. As I entered, Catlow, Peckett and Bull were standing alongside him, stiff and ill-at-ease as became newcomers in front of a man with two
medal ribbons, a wound stripe and three pips on his shoulders. Sykes called me across.

  ‘Hello, Ludo,’ I said with great deliberation.

  He gave me a funny look at the name but, to my delight, he put his arm round my shoulder. I could see Catlow’s eyes almost popping out of his head at the inch of ribbon under my wings.

  ‘This is the chap who’ll be taking over the flight,’ Sykes said, and it was news to me because it was the first I’d heard of it. But I was pleased all the same, if only for the look on Catlow’s face.

  Sykes went on briskly. ‘Take no notice of the youthful innocence,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn a lot from him. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about flying. He’s been in it from the very beginning and he’s full of ideas.’ He turned to me. ‘I’m off tomorrow, Brat,’ he went on. ‘Thing’s are waking up a bit in France. I’ll ask for you as soon as I get there. For the moment though, you’d better take these chaps up in the morning and see what they can do.’

  * * *

  He left early the next day and I got up at dawn especially to see him off. Despite the hour, he looked as though he’d stepped out of a fashion magazine or one of those advertisements tailors were always putting in the newspapers with tailor’s-dummy officers waving a swagger stick and wearing puttees that never managed to look like the ones I wore. The mess waiters were hovering near, looking as though they’d been orphaned or something, because they all thought the world of Sykes.

  He was just shaking hands all round as I arrived and he beamed as he saw me. ‘Nice of you to get up,’ he said.

  ‘No trouble. Couldn’t sleep.’

  He seemed a little thoughtful. ‘Think I owe you a sort of apology,’ he went on.

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘Jane.’

  ‘Oh! That!’

  ‘Well’ – he shrugged – ‘from what she tells me now, it seems you’d always imagined she was your girl.’

  ‘Yes, I did, I suppose.’ There was no point in not being honest.

  ‘No hard feelings, I hope?’

  It wouldn’t have made much difference what I thought. There was nothing about me that could compare with Sykes’ attributes.

  ‘’Course not.’

  ‘Cracking girl,’ he said. He shook hands. ‘Must be off. Take care of yourself, Brat.’

  ‘Yes, Mummy! I’ll be careful.’

  I watched the tender take him off to the station. I’d not really got to know him properly in France, but in England we’d become surprisingly close friends, considering the difference in background and age. I felt bereft and decided that while I was feeling so down in the dumps I’d make a meal of it and take Catlow up and find out how bad he was.

  He was awful.

  ‘How many hours’ flying have you had?’ I asked him.

  ‘Thirty-odd,’ he said.

  I didn’t believe him for a minute.

  ‘Let’s have a look at your log book.’

  He changed his tune sharply. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bit mixed up. Thought you said – er – it’s seven.’

  ‘The way you fly it could well be seven minutes.’ I was unnecessarily cruel with him but he’d never hesitated to be cruel to me at school and I was still low in spirits. ‘You need practice. You’ll have to get more hours in.’

  He obviously hated me telling him what to do. ‘It’ll be enough,’ he said.

  ‘Why? Expecting to get on the staff?’

  I could tell from the look on his face that I was right.

  ‘Suppose you don’t,’ I said. ‘Suppose something goes wrong. It’ll do no harm to know what to do, will it?’

  * * *

  Inevitably, because I wanted to be with Sykes and because Sykes wanted it, too, the powers that existed at the War Office decided otherwise. He was taking over the squadron of a man who’d been killed and he had to take it over just as it was. And because I’d been in England the appropriate length of time after a tour of duty in France they deemed it wiser to keep me there. You can ask for him, they told Sykes, when you need a replacement; but at the same time they told me, you can join him when you’ve done your tour of duty as an instructor and not before. The chances of the two coinciding seemed pretty slender.

  But the war in the air in France was changing subtly. The superiority that the British held at the beginning of the Somme had been lost again as the Germans had produced their first Albatros, a shark-like machine with blunt square wings which was said to be faster than and could outclimb anything we possessed. It was strong and sturdy, they said, and could dive like a bomb, and in the hands of a good pilot could be incredibly dangerous.

  And they had some good men, too.

  Immelman, who’d more than once put the fear of God into me over Douai on my first tour, was dead, killed in the early days of the Somme in a fight with a lumbering FE2b. The Fee crew had claimed to have shot him down but the story had got round that the interrupter gear which enabled him to fire his gun forward had run away and he had shot off his propeller and the machine had fallen to pieces with the vibration. Boelcke, who had wrought so much damage with him among British planes, was dead, too, killed in a mid-air collision, but no one had any doubts that there would be someone new along soon to take their places, and already it was being said that the Germans were organizing their best pilots into one or two elite squadrons which could do untold damage working together, instead of spreading them in penny numbers along the whole front. It seemed a good idea to me.

  Not that it had all gone the way of the Germans, though. There was a Nottingham man called Albert Ball who was not much older than I was but seemed to be getting himself talked about a lot in the messes, and a few others I’d heard of and envied, and there were said to be new machines on the way that would make the Germans sit up and watch what they were doing. I only hoped I’d be in France when they arrived.

  Christmas came round again, the third Christmas of the war, when in August 1914 they’d been saying it would be all over by the first, and I grew bored to tears flying round the countryside with advanced pupils. Catlow was still with us and we all felt sure he was just waiting a posting to some prearranged staff job. He was no better than when he’d first arrived. He was ham-fisted and clearly hadn’t that fine instinctive sense that made a good pilot. Peckett and Bull were better but they’d all been poorly trained. Perhaps it wasn’t their fault because training methods and conditions were chaotic and every instructor had different methods, and every pupil learned to fly a different way so that it was almost impossible for one man to take over another’s pupils. The need for setting up some standards seemed so great, in fact, I submitted a report on the subject which seemed to impress the Major.

  ‘You know what you’ve probably done?’ he said gaily. ‘You’ve probably worked youself a senior instructor’s job for the rest of the war.’

  I was horrified. I still only wanted to join Sykes.

  ‘A man who can write a report like that isn’t likely to pass unnoticed,’ the Major went on. ‘They’ll probably ask you to set up a new system here.’

  I gulped. ‘Then I’d like to withdraw the paper, sir,’ I said. ‘I want to go back to France.’

  He grinned. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to keep the identity of the writer dark.’

  I was growing very frustrated by now with instructing and slipped home whenever I could. But it was no longer quite the same. Jane was as friendly as ever but she’d changed inevitably. We’d been good friends long before I’d imagined I’d fallen in love with her, however, and we still managed to take long walks along the wide Norfolk beaches, sometimes when the North Sea mists came rolling in and you had to know the place well to prevent yourself getting lost. There was rime on the grass in the fields behind and it was so cold we had to walk fast, talking invariably about Sykes. I’d had a few letters from him hastily scrawled on the backs of message sheets and a few from Jane who was clearly in much closer touch with him than I was, and it appeared he’d got himself another medal �
� from the Belgians this time. It wasn’t hard to talk, because we were both fond of Sykes for entirely different reasons.

  The winter dragged on, endless grey skies and rain that reduced flying to nothing. It was a drab period, sad and full of gloom. The offensive on the Somme had failed to break the German line and the disappointment had spread to every corner of the country and everyone seemed to be waking up to the fact that the war was different from what they’d ever expected. The bands that had still been playing in the streets the previous year had disappeared, broken up for the most part so that their members could fill the appalling gaps caused by the casualties, and there was a sort of sullen obstinacy about that early spring of 1917 because suddenly no one could see the end of the war, and disillusionment had set in.

  Once I went over to Hathersett Hall with Jane. It was an imposing Georgian mansion situated in a park of several hundred acres, its architectural style a little frigid for my taste but impressive by any standard. The interior contained portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, and landscapes by Hobbema and the Dutch masters and, though I knew nothing about them, they were good enough to take my breath away.

  Sykes’ people were just like Sykes himself. His father was a retired cavalry colonel recalled to service and running a training camp in the north of England, and his mother was a vague regal kindly woman who made me feel completely at home. They shortened Sykes’ name, Ludovic, to ‘Lulu’ among the family and they obviously adored Jane and clearly approved of her. To my surprise, I found Sykes had talked to them about me, and I was strangely flattered that he should, and felt that I was moving among the mighty. There was a young cousin there about Jane’s age I fell heavily for. Her name was Charlotte but everyone called her Charley and she completely charmed me, as in a strange sort of way, they all did – as though they were acting the role of French aristocrats on the way to the guillotine, brave and full of dignity and humour in the face of danger. The family had already been decimated by the war because so many of them were in the services, and in the little room where Sykes’ mother did her sewing, the mantelpiece was covered with photographs of men in uniform whom I learned were all cousins and nephews and uncles who had given their lives. Then I realized that they weren’t acting a role at all but had behaved throughout their history as they were behaving now. They were a privileged group, and they paid for their privilege by offering their lives when their country was in danger.