‘Hello, Charlie. You back?’
The RAF always picks people who are quick on the uptake for command rank: have you noticed that? It works every time.
‘Yes, sir. London was a bit quiet. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I smashed my car up on the way there.’
‘So I heard. The MT section was a bit miffed after all the work they’d done on it.’
‘I managed to get them a couple of bottles of Dimple Haig . . .’ In fact, I’d nicked three that belonged to the girls. They had so many that they’d never miss them. If they did, I’d pay up, and apologize for forgetting to tell them. ‘Has anything happened while I’ve been off, sir?’ I asked Watson.
He mumbled a bit, and thought about it. ‘You know that there’s a listening station down at Southsea, don’t you?’
‘Yes. They’re supposed to triangulate the Jedburgh signals with us, to see if we can get a fix on their location. It never works.’
‘Quite so. They have another comfy little job. They relay the Navy meteorologist’s shipping forecast to any naval vessel in home waters twice a day.’ I didn’t see which way this conversation was going, so I just looked intelligent and nodded. It always fools them. ‘The problem is that their weather signal has been temporarily and deliberately blocked by one of your ruddy Jedburghs for the last few days. Tit for tat. On the one occasion Southsea were able to ask why, they received the big kiss-off, and were told, “Ask Charlie.” Want a drink?’
‘Yes please, sir. While you’re fixing it, I’ll try to work out how much I can afford to tell you if I want to keep my rank.’
‘Good man.’
I escaped an hour later. I still had my rank. Watson thought that it was a bit of a lark. So did I. I always feel uneasy when I find myself in agreement with superior officers. I like the fact that the acronym for superior officers has always been SO – just like the one for sod off. I spent great chunks of my service life just wishing that they would.
Miller hadn’t left yet. Both huts were monitoring Red trawlers. The Red trawlers were probably monitoring us. At least that made it nice and cosy. I had this picture in my head of radio-monitoring officers all over the world listening to each other’s silences through headphones, each waiting for the other to speak first, like a shy couple out on a date. When I stood alongside her I could just get a faint whiff of the perfume. Jasmine or roses – I couldn’t make up my mind.
‘I want you to come out with me. Properly. For dinner and a show up in Town. Something like that.’
She looked at her feet. ‘No, Charlie. You know I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it wouldn’t be right. I can’t explain.’
‘You can sleep with me, but not go out with me?’
‘Yes. That’s it. Do you understand?’
‘No, I don’t. But it doesn’t matter.’ I shrugged. It actually mattered an awful lot, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. I could see Ming coming up the path. ‘That’s my lift coming. See you tomorrow.’
‘Fine,’ she replied shortly.
Charlie had buggered it up again. Neither of us left happy.
I had a smaller jar for Bella. I gave it to her in front of Ming so there would be no misunderstanding.
She flushed with pleasure. ‘What’s this for, Charlie?’
‘Dabbing between your whatsits, they tell me.’
‘Don’t be daft. I mean what’s it for?’
‘It’s for being an ace landlady. Thanks.’
Ming said, ‘Nobody brings me presents, do they?’ He was just pulling my leg. I produced the third bottle of Dimple. ‘Yes, they do, Ming. There you are. Thank you for looking after me.’
‘Thanks, Charlie. I can see I’m going to have to have a proper word with Mr Watson.’
‘What about?’
‘Ask him to send you on leave more often. This is just like Christmas.’
We drank cloudy cider around the table until the world took on a rosy glow.
Of all the Lincolns I had climbed into in the last couple of months this old lady, under her blanket of drizzle, was the oldest and most careworn. She showed us what she thought of us right from the start, when her port inner refused to fire up. The huge prop turned over a couple of times in response to a few weak coughs from the exhaust stubs, but that was it. The smoke that dribbled out of them was white: she had elected a new Pope. Maybe this one wasn’t a Nazi.
We all piled out again, and stood in a huddle under her wing waiting for the bus to collect us. Turnaway Tim was still doing our driving, a quiet new Welsh bomb aimer called Walters sat in the greenhouse at the front, and there was Perce’s replacement, of course. He was another Welshman: overweight and voluble – a real Land of My Fathers type. He told us his name was David, but that everyone called him Dai – short for Dire Straits because he brought bad luck to anyone he flew with. He told me that as we were introduced, and I wished he’d kept his trap shut. He was right, though: the aircraft must have turned against him before he even threw a switch on the radar array, because it had refused the first fence.
I asked Tim, ‘They’ll have a replacement kite for us, won’t they, sir?’
‘You’d have thought so.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That I don’t know, so shut up, Charlie, and wait and see like the rest of us.’
The crew bus smelled of fresh vomit. I was beginning to get a bad feeling about flying today. We were taken back to our ready room: a small Nissen hut not too far from the dispersal. Someone had run the stove up so hot that the larger droplets of drizzle hissed and evaporated on the hut’s metal outer skin. It was wreathed in steam.
‘I’m not going in there,’ I told them in all seriousness. ‘When aircraft get that hot they bloody burn.’
‘Don’t be such an old woman, Charlie.’ That was from Morgan the Navigator. I still didn’t fancy him much, and if our aircraft needed to be abandoned in the cold night sky I didn’t fancy his chances of getting to the door in front of me. ‘We’ll leave the door open for you if you like. Just let’s get in out of the rain.’
‘Rain is good,’ I muttered. ‘Kites don’t burn so well in the rain. I love the rain. The SS ran their crematoria at lower temperatures than that room.’
‘Charlie . . .’ That was Turnaway Tim putting his oar in again.
‘OK, Skipper. I know when I’m outgunned.’ I stood just inside the door.
‘Run this past me again,’ Dai Straits asked us. ‘Explain why we are recording ground radar profiles in deepest France.’
Tim told him, ‘The French are our allies, but if Ivan decides to roll west our Gallic friends will put up just as firm a resistance as they did last time. They will surrender immediately: it’s what they’re exceptionally good at.’
‘So we’ll bomb the brown stuff out of them?’
‘No. Whether we’ll bomb them or not is something I don’t know . . .’
‘I’m all in favour of it,’ I said. ‘I met some artists in Paris who paint with their tadgers: we ought to stamp that out, for a start.’
There were muffled guffaws from the rest of the crew and a ‘Shut up, Charlie’ from the boss. ‘Even if we don’t bomb the Frogs,’ Tim explained, ‘we’ll need to overfly their country to bomb somebody else, won’t we? So we are profiling the navigation Way Points that we’ll need to plan missions against the Hun. Sorry – slip of the tongue – I mean the Russians. That’s the theory of it, anyway.’
‘If the French are just going to surrender again,’ I asked him, ‘why did they bother to accept their country back in the first place? Why don’t they let some other sods run it for them, and just live there for free?’
‘I don’t know, Charlie.’ There was impatience in his voice. ‘I’ll get Nye Bevan to ask them the next time he’s over there.’
‘And if we’re only out there navigation profiling, why do we always take a bomb aimer?’ Let’s see how he gets out of that one, I thought.
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��Charlie, why are you being such an obnoxious little shit tonight?’
‘I don’t know, Boss. I think that it’s something to do with not wanting to fly with you any more. Can I go home now?’
‘No, you bloody can’t. You’re bloody well coming to France with me.’
‘It’s because we’re doing target profiles as well, isn’t it?’
Pin-drop time.
Eventually Tim said, ‘I warned you, Charlie . . .’ But he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He shuffled his feet around, and watched them moving.
‘Warnings don’t work with me any more, Skipper,’ I told him. ‘They must have told you that. I’ve been inside worse prisons than you could ever dream of, and if you threaten to ground me I’ll kiss you for it. Do the French know that we’re coming?’
‘This is insubordination, Charlie . . .’ Tim was almost blustering now.
‘And frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn: I’m almost demobbed. I heard something like that in a film once. Do they know we’re coming, Tim?’
He whispered, ‘No.’
I didn’t whisper as I turned away. I said, ‘Fuck it.’ Then, ‘And fuck the brass, and fuck the Frogs.’ I swung back on him angrily. ‘Can you give me one good reason why I should carry on with this mad lark, sir?’
My old skipper wouldn’t even have bothered to explain that orders are orders: he would have clouted me one, and carried me onto the aircraft under his arm. Tim didn’t. He looked at me, and did something more effective. He said quietly, ‘Because you’ll be letting us down if you don’t, Charlie.’
Pin-drop time again.
‘You’re a right bastard, sir,’ I sighed.
‘Good. I’ve always wanted to be one of those.’
The crew bus splashed up to the door again, and Sergeant Ramsden stood in the door like a Labrador, shaking the rain from his cape. He spoke formally to Turnaway. ‘The reserve aircraft will be ready in about five minutes, sir. We’ve been asked to get you over there. The bomb load has been transferred over.’
I spoke to Walters for the first time. ‘What bomb load?’
He blushed. ‘We sometimes fly with a bomb load, didn’t you know? It shows the Reds that we mean business.’
‘But not this time,’ Tim butted in. ‘This time we have a load of paper, just for ballast. Is there anything else you need to know before we fly, Charlie?’
‘How about how to say “I give in”, in French?’
‘Something like je cede, I think, but duck before you say it: the French aren’t all that used to taking other folks’ surrenders yet. They’ll probably mess it up, and shoot at you first. Can we get on now?’
In the bus Dai Straits asked me, ‘Why is it important that the French do or don’t know that we’re coming?’
‘Because if they don’t know who we are they’ll assume the worst, and start shooting at us.’
‘They’ll think that we’re Russians?’
‘No. They’ll think that we’re English. That’s much worse.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘That’s because you’ve never been liberated. Don’t worry – Tim will probably get us back.’
So we were an hour or so late for Death. Death wasn’t all that amused: he must have spent far too long in the company of Queen Victoria.
This is how it happened. We were held on the strip for another half-hour waiting for the weather. In my experience that never does much good. It gave me time to light up my boxes, check them until I was bored and then move up to look over Morgan’s shoulder. He was friendlier now than the first time we’d sortied together, but ours was always going to be a marriage of convenience.
‘Isn’t it odd? You’re called Morgan, but you’re about as English as they come, and our Welsh bomb aimer is Walters . . . which is pretty English.’
‘Norman French, actually, after the Fitzwalters who came over with William the Conqueror. Walters will feel at home where we’re going.’
‘Where are we going this time?’
‘Weren’t you listening at the briefing?’
‘No, I was looking up the skirt of the WAAF who came in with the CO. I regret that now.’
‘We’re going low-level to Hamburg. We refuel there; some kind of practical exercise to see if it would be possible to do it with a squadron. Then we fly down the jolly old border we’re so familiar with already. Then turn west and fly across France at our maximum ceiling, finally turning north to dear old Blighty. Your oppo will be plotting and profiling all the way, of course. No peas for the wicked.’
‘How far down the border are we flying?’
‘To Zicherie and Bochwitz. They used to be German villages joined to each other once, but now the border cuts between the two of them, although everyone’s been pretty relaxed about that so far. They must be important to somebody, because we have to dive just across the border if no one’s looking, and approach them from the north as if we were doing a bombing run. It will probably scare the shit out of somebody.’
Yeah, me, I thought. ‘What about the bombing height?’
‘Ask Walters. ’Bout fifteen thou’, I think.’
‘I wish we wouldn’t do that sort of thing. If I was a Red, this would really piss me off.’
‘But it keeps Ivan on his toes, doesn’t it?’
I didn’t want Ivan on his toes; boxers get up on their toes just before they clobber their opponents. The problem was that I didn’t know how to put that into the simple words that Morgan would understand.
Hamburg was all right, although we opened the back door on a fine veil of drizzle. Just like England. I realized that I had no way of knowing where we actually were, because one airfield looks pretty much like another, you know. Maybe Tim had flown us cunningly to a big redundant airstrip in Wales or somewhere.
I stood under the raised canopy of the Red Cross canteen wagon that had come out to refuel the crew. A harassed-looking ground crew refuelled the aircraft. Nutty Neil stood alongside me and blew on his mug of coffee.
‘How do we know we’re in Hamburg, Neil? We could be in Iceland for all I know.’
‘No. It’s snowing in Iceland, and the girls have bigger tits.’
‘How do you know it’s snowing in Iceland?’
‘It’s always snowing in Iceland.’
‘And how do you know the girls have bigger tits? Have you been there?’
‘Nah, but I know some Yank who has. You know that it’s dangerous to shag outdoors in Iceland?’
‘Why?’
‘As soon as you withdraw your plonker it freezes solid. Then you have to be careful not to knock it off. One guy had a hard-on for eleven months.’
‘Why eleven months?’
‘That’s how long the winter lasts in Iceland. The odd month is spring, summer and autumn all rolled up into one.’
‘You’re nuts, Neil.’
‘Flying with you, Charlie? I must be.’
‘You like a hot dog, boys?’ the Red Cross girl serving us asked.
‘Iceland’s national dish,’ I told Neil.
He leered, but at the girl, not at me. She was dark, tall and a bit on the rangy side. She looked tired and hungry, and I wouldn’t have made fun of her.
Neil asked her, ‘If I buy one, can I put my hot dog in your roll?’
She had a quick grin. ‘That’s clever.’ Somehow she made one eyebrow stand to attention: that was a neat trick. ‘I haven’t heard that one before. I was only serving hot dogs for two years, and I never heard that joke before.’
‘OK, OK.’ Neil waved his free hand. ‘It’s an old joke and I’m sorry – and yes, please.’
‘Please?’
‘I’ll have a hot dog.’
I asked her, ‘How do we know this is Hamburg, and not some other city?’
‘When the rain lifts you can still smell the smoke from the buildings you burned; OK?’ OK. She was sharp enough.
‘If I come back can we have a date?’
‘No. You’re too small.’
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‘I could grow up if you waited.’
She shook her head and smiled. ‘No, you RAF boys never grow up.’ That was all we were going to get.
Twenty minutes later you could have seen a huge ball of spray belting along the runway. I was somewhere inside it.
We flew through the weather front and out the other side. A late moon cast a cold light on a damp countryside. The Lincoln droned south like a drunk in a coma. It was quite like old times, but something was not quite right. It took me half an hour to work it out: there were lights visible on the ground. Towns and cities. So, no: not quite like old times. I heard an aircraft on the other side talking to his controller; he seemed to be pacing us, so whoever he was he could fly slow and still stay up in the air.
I clicked. ‘Skipper, it’s Charlie.’
Click. ‘Yes, Charlie?’
‘There’s someone out there. I can smell him.’
‘Bears?’
‘No. Jerries.’
‘Does he bear us ill will?’
‘Don’t know, Skip. He seems to be pacing us, but over on their side.’
‘Let me know if he does anything . . . Dai, wake up. Can you see him?’
Click. ‘Yes, Skip. I have him now. Something big like us.’
‘Is he a beacon? Anything smaller homing in on him?’
‘No, Skip.’
‘Let me know if he does anything – and bloody well stay awake.’
‘Yes, Skip.’
I turned in my seat and tapped Dai on the shoulder. He lifted the side of his helmet so that he could hear me.
‘Sorry, chum. I should have asked you first,’ I told him. ‘We didn’t have people like you in my day.’
He grinned. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He put his finger against a vertical blip on one of his small screens. ‘There he is. He’ll turn away from us in a few minutes. Back towards Berlin.’
‘How do you know? Have you seen him before?’
‘No. I just know: it’s a feeling I get.’ As Dai spoke the blip started to move across the screen and away from his finger. I turned away from him and got back to work.
Click. ‘Skip, it’s Dai.’
Click. ‘Aye, Dai.’
Someone clicked, and sniggered. I think that it was the engineer.
The Forgotten War Page 33
