The Forgotten War

by David Fiddimore

  Turnaway snapped, ‘Shut up, that man. What was it, Dai?’

  ‘It’s OK, Skip. It’s turned away. On his way home.’

  I clicked. ‘Charlie. His signal’s fading.’

  ‘Well done, chaps . . . tally ho.’

  Prat.

  When I was a boy we had an ancient Airedale dog. He was named Rip, because he came from Ripon in Yorkshire. He was so bad at catching the mice in our kitchen that every time he lunged for them with his great open mouth they would jump through his jaws as if engaged in some bizarre sport. His mouth would snap shut with a clack as his teeth met on nothing, and I would look up from my book knowing that Rip had missed another one. In my opinion we were just about to try the aviation equivalent of that: a quick dash into Ivan’s territory and out again before his jaws snapped shut on us. The AVMs wouldn’t dream up such stupid bleeding stunts if they had to do them themselves.

  Morgan warned the Skipper of our course change about three minutes before it was due, and told him to turn to it ‘on my mark’. Surprisingly, it worked. Almost immediately he clicked and said, ‘We are in enemy airspace.’ Enemy? Since when? That had been a turn to fly almost due east. Four minutes later we turned south, and Morgan sang out, ‘OK, Bombs. She’s all yours.’

  Walters ran through the drill that came back to me from a couple of years ago. Fly right, left, up a bit, down, down. That didn’t upset me. What upset me was when he clicked and said, ‘Bomb doors open’ in the middle of it.

  Tim responded with ‘Bomb doors open.’

  And a minute later Walters clicked and shouted, ‘Switches on. Red light; green. Bombs gone. Close bomb doors.’

  ‘Bomb doors close,’ confirmed Tim.

  Almost immediately Morgan sang out, ‘Friendly airspace . . . now.’

  I had distinctly felt the old cow lurch upwards at ‘Bombs gone’, so whatever had been in the bay was now in Germany, and we had just attacked the Soviet Zone.

  Fuck it.

  I clicked, and heard someone breathing very deeply. I worked out that it was me. The hairs on the back of my neck would have stood up if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet.

  ‘Skipper, it’s Charlie. Permission to come forward?’

  ‘Later, Charlie. Just make sure that no one is talking about us first.’

  ‘Roger.’ I wondered what the difference was between mutiny and wresting command from a mad pilot and his bomb aimer. There was a problem: if Tim took the huff and went on strike there was no one else who could fly the damned thing.

  He let me into the office as we crossed the German border into France. Morgan clicked, ‘C’est le Nav. Ici la France!’ He sounded euphoric. I couldn’t see what about: his French was atrocious.

  I couldn’t believe that we had made it this far without someone shooting back at us. On the way up to the office I looked over Morgan’s shoulder as I asked him, ‘Where are we?’

  He laid his finger on a line drawn on his map which crossed into France north of Haguenau, in miles of open country, and grinned as if someone had told him a joke. He was taking us deep into France over Nancy, Sens and Orleans before turning north for home and brekkers.

  The office was almost a haven of peace and tranquillity. Tim was munching a Piccalilli sandwich, and had a thermos top of coffee in his hand. The engineer patted me on the back as I squeezed in. George, the automatic pilot, was flying the kite and we were up in the cold stuff at twenty-three thou. I couldn’t understand why they were all so terribly pleased with themselves. ‘Skipper, snap out of it! We just attacked the Soviets. Were we supposed to start World War Three, or was that just something you thought up on the spur of the minute?’

  ‘Nobody’s going to start anything, Charlie. Don’t be such a windy old woman.’

  ‘We just bombed a village in the Soviet Zone—’

  ‘With Bibles.’

  ‘What did they do to deserve . . .?’ My question petered out as I took in what he’d just said.

  ‘Two villages with one vicar; split in two by the new border. The vicar asked the RAF to drop a load of Bibles for the ungodly on the other side.’

  ‘And the RAF risked our lives for that?’

  ‘The RAF is always on God’s side, Charlie. Go back to your boxes now, and have your supper. Sing out if the Frogs start talking about us.’

  He seemed calm and collected, and directed a very level gaze at me.

  ‘Yes, Skip,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  I had just strapped into my seat, rubbing backs with Dai, and was unwrapping a neat package of sandwiches. I never had time to discover their filling. There was an enormous explosion somewhere up front, and the gale that was suddenly blowing through the fuselage blew my food out of my hands. I knew it; I had been in this film before. The aircraft began pitching up and down like a roller coaster. I locked down the Morse key into transmit, and struggled forward.

  We were tilted slightly down, so must have been losing height. In the office the engineer was still on his seat, but hunched forward with his hands over his eyes. The noise was tremendous, and the air rushing into the aircraft was pushing me off my feet. There was nothing in front of Tim’s feet except his pedals. Nothing at all. Just cold French air. Tim was covered in blood from head to foot, and there was a lot of it sloshing around everywhere. He shouted, ‘Not mine.’

  I shouted back, ‘Where’s Walters?’

  ‘Blown up. Flak, I think.’ Tim’s eyes were very wide and bright. ‘Give me my ’chute, clip his on –’ he nodded at the engineer ‘and fling him out. Get everyone out, and go yourself.’

  I must have frozen for a moment. Blood was blowing into the slipstream in strings of globules from where it had accumulated on the surfaces around us. There was an arm in a flying jacket behind the Skip’s seat. I’d have sworn that it was still clenching and unclenching its fist. ‘Now!’ Tim screamed.

  I did it without thinking. The front of the Lincoln, with Walters’s glasshouse and the front turret, had gone completely. English flak had taken off Tuesday’s rear turret just as neatly in 1944. Now it was the bloody Frogs. I clipped on the engineer’s ’chute, put the ring in his hand and rolled him forward. He simply disappeared. I touched Tim’s shoulder as I went back. He was still flying the kite as well as he could. Morgan had already gone, and Dai was going. I helped the mid-upper gunner down, and pushed him in front of me. I had forgotten his name. As they jumped I hammered on the rear turret door. There was no response, but I noticed that the gunner’s ’chute was missing from its stowage. Neil hadn’t hung around waiting for the order.

  That left me. I couldn’t remember clipping the ’chute on, but it was there, so I swung my legs over the sill and was pulled away by the slipstream before I knew it. I flinched as a huge dark rudder fin slashed past my face. I tumbled for a five-count, and then lost my nerve and pulled the ring. Another five-count, or so it seemed, and then there was a soft bang, and when I got my breath back and looked up there was a round silk canopy hanging above me in a starry sky. I couldn’t help myself: ‘Oh you beauty!’ I shouted to it.

  I seemed to swing up and down, going nowhere. Occasionally the canopy tipped a bit and obscured the moon. My feet were cold. I couldn’t remember how I’d lost my boots. My face was wet. That was because I was crying. I thought about pushing Miller against that office door and lifting her skirt. I know that I should have been thinking something useful, but that was what I was thinking about when I hit the deck. To each his own, I suppose.

  I landed in a grass field alongside a black slow-flowing river. The field had a ruined shed in one corner. I hobbled over to it, pulling my ’chute behind me like a bridal train, too tired to unhook myself. The shed had once contained something like fine hay, and there was still a heap of it in one corner. I wrapped my parachute around me and went to sleep there.

  24. Down by the Riverside

  When I awoke in the morning an unfriendly girl of about seven was staring down at me. She held a three-pronged pitchfork about ten sizes too big for her.<
br />
  ‘Je cede,’ I told her.

  She let me drink from the river before she turned me in.

  The seven-year-old explained that she wanted me to walk in front of her by prodding me with the bloody fork. I carried my parachute. We went across the field and onto a country road. The single-street village she took me to was only a mile away, but I was through the bottom of my socks by then – men aren’t designed to go far in bare feet. It got so that I was wincing with every step. She did an odd thing as we came onto the village street; she came up alongside me with her fork over her shoulder like a sentry’s rifle and took my hand. That was the way I arrived at the small Gendarmerie: hand in hand with an agriculturally armed child. As I began to climb the three concrete steps to the building’s blue door the girl relieved me of my parachute and walked away with it. Even when they’re seven years old girls get their priorities right, don’t they?

  Police forces all over the Continent are overly fond of dark blue uniforms: have you noticed that? It must be a kind of club they belong to. The gendarme at the small desk was a heavy-set man with thinning brown hair and a small moustache. He was not Claude Rains, and his eyes did not twinkle with suppressed humour. This was not one of his Anglophile days.

  My feet left bloody streaks on his grey linoleum. When I first spoke he waved me to silence, and concentrated on a form that he was completing. He wrote slowly and gnawed his lower lip.

  I finally lost my patience and said, ‘I’m cold, I’m hungry and I’m tired.’

  He looked up from his writing for a moment and observed, ‘You are also under arrest.’ Then he went back to the form.

  Fuck it! At least I should be used to being arrested, not like the other poor sods. For the first time I realized that I had assumed they had all made it. Now I began to wonder if they had.

  The little girl had been kinder than I thought, because the local quack walked in minutes later with his nurse, who wore her number one whites. She had something like a wimple on her head. It had a small red cross on it. Maybe she sold hot dogs on the side, like the girl in Hamburg. They sat me in a hard old chair in the corner. The doctor examined me, and tut-tutted at the old burn scars on my shoulders. The nurse washed my feet, and anointed them with a strong-smelling yellow ointment. She bandaged them. The doctor produced a pair of canvas-topped soft shoes from his bag. They were too big for me, but the bandages filled the spaces.

  Then something odd happened. When I went to stand up I found that my legs had turned to jelly. The nurse grabbed my arm. The doctor moved the chair to face the policeman and his desk, and they helped me into it. The odd, literally legless feeling persisted for a few minutes. Then the doctor went to stand behind the policeman. Apparently ‘You are also under arrest’ had all but exhausted the gendarme’s English vocabulary. The policeman spoke: the doctor translated for him. I replied, and the doctor translated for me. I probably could have managed more or less in French by then, but I wasn’t about to tell them that.

  The copper asked, ‘And you are?’ I rather liked the emphasis; it implied that one or more of the others might be around.

  ‘Charles Aidan Bassett.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Royal Air Force?’

  ‘Yes. Pilot Officer.’

  ‘Your service number?’

  ‘22602108.’

  ‘You were the pilot?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘When did you arrive in France?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that either. Name, rank and number. That’s all I can say.’

  Fatso had a sour look on his face. What he said next was fast, and sounded insulting. The doctor said, ‘The officer wishes you to cooperate. He asks me to inform you that the war finished three years ago, and that when it did we were allies.’

  ‘In that case please ask him why you shot down my aircraft.’

  I got the first glimmerings of smiles. From both of them.

  ‘He will put you in a cell now,’ the doctor said.

  I looked the copper in his piggy little eyes. ‘J’ai faim,’ I told him.

  ‘Vous parlez Français?’ The surprise in the piggy little eyes said it all. He would have been less startled if his dog had begun to sing the Marseillaise. I shook my head. I didn’t want him to get carried away.

  ‘Comme un enfant.’ I shrugged a Gallic shrug, and smiled a rueful Gallic smile. They were both put-ons. You may not believe it, but in 1945 Picasso was among those who taught me how to do that. The copper didn’t know that, so he emptied my pockets, took my ID tags, and locked me up.

  They put me in a cell with Nutty Neil. Normally he was just the sort of cell-mate you would choose, but he stank of animals, and his uniform was caked with what looked suspiciously like shit. He had removed his flying jacket and was sitting on it. He had a black eye. After we got over being pleased to see each other I asked him, ‘Did they beat you up?’

  He shook his head and looked embarrassed. ‘I fell into a pigsty. A pig kicked me; but that wasn’t the worst thing.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The fucking thing tried to mount me. If the farmer hadn’t come to see what all the commotion was about I would have been raped. How about you?’

  ‘I was captured by a little girl who stole my parachute. Have you seen anyone else?’

  ‘Tim’s here. He’s in a terrible state. He’s got a head like a football.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t said anything – I’m not sure that he can. I think he’s dying.’

  There was a plain wooden bed under the single high barred window. I could just see out of the window by standing on the bed on tiptoe. I was looking out onto a narrow side street or alleyway. There appeared to be a few people about: it was probably the rush hour. Anyway, I shouted out to them, ‘Au secours! Au secours! Je suis un aviateur anglais – Au secours!’

  ‘Is that French?’ Neil asked.

  ‘No, it’s something like French,’ I replied. ‘I just want to create a fuss. Au secours!’

  You’ll have realized by now that I’m not at all bad at creating fusses: in fact, I’m a natural. Our captors stormed back into the cell. The gendarme pushed Neil aside, dragged me down from the window, and bounced me across the cell and into a corner. I didn’t take much bouncing. He was bigger than me. The doctor said, ‘He wants to know what the matter is. Why are you shouting?’

  ‘I want to see my Skipper. Mon capitaine. I know that he’s here, ici, and I know that he’s hurt.’

  He translated that, then told me, ‘The officer says no. He also says that if you keep shouting he will beat you until you are not conscious.’

  ‘Please tell him that he will have to beat me every time I wake up. I will not stop shouting to the citizens until I see my officer.’ I remembered that ‘citizens’ is a very big word in France.

  Neil said, ‘Blimey, Charlie.’

  I quickly hushed him. ‘Shut up, Neil. This isn’t your show.’

  By now my breathing had slowed to normal; so had the gendarme’s. The doctor said, ‘He wants you to speak French.’

  ‘Tell him I would like to, but that my French is far worse than his English. We would not understand each other.’

  The doctor translated this for me, and I don’t know what was in the sentence but it worked. The copper gave his twitchy little smile again. Then he shrugged. Then he beckoned me to follow him. The doctor came too. Neil stayed in the cell. They let me see Tim through the bars of a cell down the corridor. He sat at one end of a wooden bed identical to the one on which I had been recently standing.

  Morgan sat on the other end with his feet up, hugging his knees. He perked up when he saw me. ‘Was that you, making all that noise?’

  ‘Yes. You OK?’

  ‘Not bad. Twisted my ankle a bit. How about you?’

  ‘Fine, except I cut my feet walking here. Neil’s with me. A randy pig gave him a black eye. What’s
happened to Tim?’

  Neil had been wrong. Tim’s head was bigger than a football. Most of the bulge was on his left side, and was lividly bruised. His left eye bulged too. He was staring ahead.

  ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t say anything, and I think the swelling’s getting worse. I’ve asked them to do something about him, but they just pretend they can’t understand me.’

  ‘Tim,’ I tried. ‘Speak to me, Tim.’ He didn’t even twitch. I’d swear that he could neither hear nor see me.

  I turned to the doctor. ‘This man is very badly injured. I have seen injuries like this before: if he doesn’t go to hospital he will die.’

  ‘Maybe. Where did you see a similar case?’

  ‘I was one myself. I am telling the truth.’

  The doctor spoke to the gendarme. Then he told me, ‘He has instructions from the Ministry of the Interior to hold you all here until officers arrive from Paris. You flew a heavy bomber aircraft from Germany into France without notice or permission. It is a serious and difficult matter.’

  So he knew that much already. I wondered how much else.

  ‘You shot us down,’ I shouted. ‘Also without notice or permission. A little warning would have been nice. That is also a serious and difficult matter. We are supposed to be allies. This is a diplomatic incident and eventually it will be disposed of by diplomats. There is no reason for anyone else to die. Please tell the officer that if he will permit my captain to be taken to hospital to be treated at once, I will answer all of his questions. Paris will think him a hero; an ace interrogator.’

  ‘Ace?’

  ‘Exceptionally skilful.’

  The copper was like me; he understood a lot more than he let on, because he immediately nodded, said, ‘Oui!’ and beckoned the nurse forward from where she had been standing at the end of the short corridor. Tim was walked away between her and the doctor. Morgan and I were locked in the cell with Neil – and I hoped that I’d done the right thing.

  Where the fuck were the others?

  Morgan said he didn’t like it. ‘We’re not supposed to say anything, Charlie. Not even under torture or duress.’ Bugger that for a game of soldiers.