by Peter Albano
With the port wing drooping five degrees, the Merlin squirting oil from its stub exhaust ports, the oil pressure gauge showing under fifteen pounds and dropping, the tough, doughty fighter still climbed. Nodding with disbelief, Randolph eyed his altimeter that was slowly passing twenty-five hundred feet. If he was forced to bail out, he had the altitude. He turned his frequency selector to Sector Control and spoke into his microphone, “Cricket Control, this is Wolf Red Leader. Mayday! Mayday! I’ve caught one and I’m in a bit of a jam. Inbound five miles off the coast of Kent on course two-seven-five, angel two. Sector one-five-two.”
The familiar silken voice filled his earphones, “Wolf Red Leader, this is Cricket Control. Have alerted air-sea rescue. Keep the cork in and good luck, old boy. Hope you make it.”
“I say, thanks awfully. That’s white of you, old man.” Randolph’s laugh was wild and funneled into an open microphone. He quieted himself and then shouted a response that shocked half of England, “I’ve had a jug full of you. Stuff the cork twice up your arse, you bloody, icy-calm chambermaid. Come up and scramble with these bastards and then see how calm you are.” He switched off the radio and continued to chuckle to himself. Hansen’s dead body stretched in the water was burned on his retinas and kept flashing pictures to his numb brain. He shook his head, blinked his eyes to no avail.
The coast of Kent passed below and the downs were ahead. Fenwyck Manor. His childhood home at Fenwyck was only a few miles ahead. Mercifully, Hansen faded. But his mind, still boiling with the frenzy and horror of combat, raced with crazy thoughts. Maybe he could drop in. Bail out, work his shrouds, and land on the vast lawn. Surprise his sister-in-law, Bernice, the servants. His brother Lloyd was in North Africa. He was due for a leave but maybe he was dead. Perhaps, his nephew Trevor was home. His niece Bonnie might even be there with her new army officer beau. Lieutenant Blake Boggs—a pimply-faced, weak idiot if he had ever seen one. He had seen his nephew Rodney Higgins there two months earlier when the young lieutenant stayed a weekend. Fine lad. He had the good looks of his mother Brenda. God, Brenda. Dear, beautiful sister-in-law Brenda Higgins Hargreaves. The most magnificent woman he had ever known. He loved her still and always would.
A backfire and flash of flame from his ports jarred him back. His oil pressure was almost zero and the coolant temperature was in the red. The Merlin was burning up. He stared down, looking for the emergency field at Kelvedon. Saw nothing but woods and here and there a plowed field. He banked carefully to the south and his home airdrome. Then it happened.
The engine began to vibrate as if it were trying to shake itself from its mounts. There was a muffled explosion and the right side of the hood flew up and bright orange flames spewed over the right side. He could smell burning petrol and oil and the cockpit filled with smoke. Heat came up through the floorboards and he could feel it through his boots. In seconds, the fire would break through the firewall. He felt horror course through his veins like ice water. He had burned once in a S.E.5A. Crashed in no-man’s-land. Was he to repeat that, too? But he had no parachute then. He had a parachute now and he was at three thousand feet. The thought calmed him. “Might be time to quit you, old girl,” he said out loud.
He was answered by a ripping, wrenching sound of metal strained beyond its limits and the left wing bent up at the fillet and then flopped back down again. He felt the port main wheel drop and bang loosely on its pivot. More skin ripped loose. Then the entire wing broke off just inboard of the cannon and carried off most of the tail as it tumbled into the slipstream. Immediately the fighter plunged to the right into an incredibly tight spin like a maddened dervish.
Randolph felt himself flung against the side of the cockpit and there was a sharp pain in his shoulder. With speed born of panic, he groped for his harness pin and pulled it free. Then in quick motions he tore off his mask and helmet and yanked the rubber ball hanging over his head. The canopy ripped away and wind like demons unleashed by the devil swirled and shrieked around him. Then, hooking his elbows on the cockpit rim, he pushed with his feet and elbowed himself up. But the centrifugal force of the impossibly tight spin battered him against the side of the cockpit, tangling his jacket in the aluminum quadrant of the throttle and mixture control. He was trapped. It was his pocket, hooked like an anchor.
Screaming in a frenzy of fear, the major pushed with all the power of his muscular arms and his good left leg. His head was above the windscreen and a hurricane of wind tried to suck him out. He worked himself up but the jacket was caught in a vise, pulling down over his shoulder but refusing to break free. Around and around he whirled, the doomed fighter beating him against the sides of the cockpit. A solid maelstrom, the wind clawed at his flesh, rippled the skin of his cheeks, tore spittle from his mouth and blinded him. Down, down he plunged into the nightmare, timeless, witless, and helpless. But a sliver of brain still functioned, still fought for survival in the eye of the hurricane.
Screaming, cursing, he pushed and kicked. There was a ripping of leather and a quick release and he fairly shot out of the cockpit, barely clearing the remnants of the tail. He grabbed the D-ring, pulled hard. There was a sharp report like a pistol and the parachute opened. Then, impossibly, all was quiet. He was floating in a paradise of silence.
Above, the peaceful sky was a calm blue. Below, his fighter was twisting and disintegrating. It corkscrewed into a pasture with violence rarely seen on this earth, the explosion scattering pieces of debris in a quarter-mile radius. A black, ugly plume surged into the sky and orange flames roiled fiercely. Randolph shuddered.
He was low, perhaps five hundred feet. He worked his shrouds, drifting away from the smoke. Below he could see green fields, orchards, quaint thatched houses, horses, cows, and people. Standing alone or in groups on roads or in front of houses, they stared upward with the usual white faces and pointed. He drifted toward a tiny hamlet with a church spire topped by a cross with a finial like a dagger. “That cross can kill,” he said to himself. Fumbling with the shrouds, he spilled air and drifted away from the threatening cross and the half-dozen houses of the village. Now he was very close to the ground and the earth that had seemed so remote and faceless was rising fiercely to meet him.
A young woman carrying a pail was staring up. She was standing next to a rock wall on the edge of a meadow and was very close. Randolph felt himself drifting toward the wall. More frantic pulling of the shrouds and suddenly he dropped straight down. When he hit, he buckled his knees and rolled forward, arms covering his face. He tumbled, tangled in the shrouds, and then felt himself dragged across the ground toward the rock wall. Cursing, he dug in his heels and strained hard. The parachute tangled in the rocks and some small elm. He was down and alive. He unhooked the harness.
He ran his hands over his body, legs, arms, head. His left shoulder was sore and there was blood on his cheek, but nothing was broken. Like all men who survive combat, the thought, It’s over and I’m still alive, ran through his mind over and over.
He pulled up his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and stared straight ahead, trying to comprehend what had just happened to him. His mind was numb as if his brain had been severed at the base. Shock. Nature’s way of protecting man from the horrors he could visit upon himself had deadened not only his brain but also his senses. It took him a full thirty seconds to realize he was sitting in a small potato patch and someone was standing beside him.
A slender, beautiful blond young woman of about twenty was by his side. She was holding a pail of milk. Although she was slender, her plain cotton dress could not conceal the lovely curve of her hips, the small peaked breasts. Her blue eyes held the compassion of a mother who had just discovered her baby had stumbled over a rock and required her attention to soothe his hurt. There was a quiescent glow in their depths—a tranquillity that wiped away the horror of killing and brought back a feeling for peace and life. To Randolph, he was staring at an angel.
After placing he
r pail of milk carefully on the ground, she leaned over the pilot and touched him gently on the forehead. Her palm was cool. “Are you all right?” she asked in a soft, high voice filled with concern.
Randolph smiled. “Quite fit, thank you,” He tried to rise but found his legs were rubber.
Carefully, she placed an arm under his elbow and helped him to his feet. The world turned but immediately began to slow. She clung to his arm tightly. He could hear shouts and the pounding of boots as a group of farmers rushed across the meadow. She gestured to an opening in the wall and Randolph could see the thatched roof of a house nestled in a group of trees. “Would you like a spot of tea?” she asked casually. Randolph chuckled. “Why do you think I dropped in?”
IV
Return to Fenwyck
Number 54 Squadron was based on a farm just to the east of Detling. A huge wheat field had been cleared and two crisscrossing asphalt runways laid. At the end of each runway were a dispersal hut for ready pilots and a concrete tarmac large enough to park four fighters. Each hut was connected to the small control tower with telephone lines. The RAF had learned the bloody lesson of dispersal early in 1940 when several squadrons had been caught on the ground with their aircraft bunched and wiped out.
There were four wooden-framed, canvas-covered hangars that were near duplicates of the flimsy Besson-neau hangars of the Great War. A machine shop had been assembled in the barn; two long barracks buildings built for the enlisted men, and a row of small huts for the pilots’ quarters. A kitchen had been built between two mess halls; a small room for the officers and a larger hall for the men. A compact but complete surgery was tucked behind the mess halls.
Randolph’s headquarters was in the farmhouse. A former stagecoach station, the large two-story building, was nearly four hundred years old. Built of enormous beams—some were a foot wide and two feet thick—the walls were plastered with a mixture of sand, gravel, mortar, and horse hair, which was used as a bonding material. In the early years it was known as the Santa Marta Inn because the huge ceiling beams had been salvaged from the wreck of the Spanish galleon, Santa Marta, which grounded on the rocks off Dymchurch after losing her masts in a battle with Sir Francis Drake. In the early nineteenth century the railroads put the stagecoach company out of business and a prosperous farmer named Donald Barrington bought the station. Here four generations of Barringtons cooked, ate, slept, fornicated, were born and died. In 1939 the RAP took possession and the airdrome was built.
Tourists would have called the old house “charming.” To Randolph, it was “a filthy old rattrap.” His bedroom was at the head of the stairs and he worked in the large main room that had been the public room of the old inn. At this moment, for the first time, he was receiving medical attention in his own headquarters.
Stripped to the waist and seated at his desk, a battered, old oak piece contributed by Detling’s constable, Randolph was at the far end of the room next to a huge fireplace. Randolph grunted as the old squadron surgeon, Captain Wayne Chatfield, examined his bare left shoulder with a delicate but firm touch. The flyer’s right leg ached from calf to thigh where his old, layered burn scars had been stretched when he had parachuted to the ground. The impact had been severe, like jumping off a barn, and both knees reminded him of the impact with dull, persistent aches. These things he kept from Chatfield, but the ripped cheek and bruised shoulder could not be concealed.
There were seven other men in the room watching the proceedings with keen interest. Randolph’s batman, Sergeant Forrest Woodhouse, was watching intently over the doctor’s shoulder. A twenty-five-year veteran and a survivor of the battles on the Somme, he had been blown sky-high by a forty-two-centimeter Wipers Express in 1917. With a broken shoulder, six broken ribs, and a fractured hip, he had been offered a medical discharge. He refused, accepting limited service, instead. faithful and diligent, he had a knack for anticipating his officer’s needs. He had already handed Randolph his second Haig and Haig and water. He had been crestfallen when the pain in the major’s shoulder had forced him to cut the blue tunic off of Randolph with scissors. But coagulated blood on the right collar and sleeve would have probably ruined it anyway.
Seated at his desk, which was nothing more than a battered old sideboard with a typewriter, was the squadron clerk, Lance Corporal Timothy Evans. A towheaded youngster from Acle in Norfolk, he was eager, energetic, and was a fast learner. His large gray-green eyes were misty with concern as he watched the proceedings.
Randolph’s adjutant. Captain Edwin Smith, hovered nearby nervously. In his early fifties, he was a veteran of the old Royal Flying Corps and had seven kills over the Middle East where he had flown Sopwith Camels ‘against General von Falkenhayn’s best flyers. In 1917 he was the first Englishman into Jerusalem and never let anyone forget it. Brazenly, he had landed his Camel inside the city just after the Turks evacuated and before General Sir Edmund “Bull” Allenby made his storied triumphal entry. Allenby never forgave him. Now with crippling rheumatism, which he vehemently denied, he was relegated to administrative duties that he despised. However, he executed his responsibilities with panache and a high level of efficiency.
Still in their flying kit. Pilot Officer Ian McBride, Flight Lieutenant Cedric Hart, and Flight Sergeant Michael Sturgis sat against a sidewall, smoking and drinking. All stared at Randolph with deep, penetrating looks as if they could not believe the major was actually there. All had been convinced the major had been killed.
Chatfield, an old RAF doctor who had come out of retirement “for the new bash,” was at least sixty-five years old. With a bare stubble of white bristles, his pate gleamed as if it had been stropped with Kiwi. His sagging face was deeply creviced like a relief map and his rheumy blue eyes were strangely striated with uneven green lines. But there was confidence there—the confidence that came to eyes that had seen everything. Steely resolve gleamed there, too. Regardless of rank, his decisions, his authority, prevailed.
Chatfield had a brilliant, incisive mind and loved chess. Often, in the evenings, he and Randolph spent hours at the board. Usually these matches were futile, because more often than not, their efforts ended in drawn games instead of checkmate. Randolph had immense respect for the physician and considered him one of his best friends.
Everyone leaned forward as Chatfield raised the flyer’s left hand shoulder high. Randolph winced and was unable to suppress a groan.
“Severe contusions, abrasions, and some subcutaneous bleeding,” the doctor said to himself. Then the old surgeon reared back and used the lower magnifying lenses of his bifocals. ‘The X rays show no broken bones, but, upon my word, Major, such a lot of lovely colors—purple, yellow, black, a dash of green.” He lowered the flyer’s arm gently and stepped back.
“How bad, Doctor? How bad?” Randolph asked impatiently. He emptied his glass and held it up. Immediately Sergeant Woodhouse recharged the glass from a makeshift bar on a battered sideboard next to the clerk’s desk.
“Why did you refuse attention from the army doctors at Bethersden?”
“They’re butchers.”
Chatfield smiled at the oblique compliment. “Then who cleaned the head wound? The temple?” He gestured at the long red laceration that began just forward of Randolph’s right ear and extended down to his cheek.
“A civilian—a girl. I landed on her potato patch.”
Chatfield narrowed his eyes and mused, “And you injured it when you bailed out?”
“Quite right. I already told you that. Why do you ask again?”
The old doctor tugged on his chin with a thumb and forefinger. “Because it looks like it has been professionally cleaned and dressed.” He leaned forward. “And it looks as if it’s been healing for a week.”
Randolph sat quietly for a moment, mind filled with thoughts of the fascinating girl—Elisa Blue, she had told him as he left—and her beautiful cottage. His voice softened. “No, Doctor, just tw
o hours—two hours ago.”
Chatfield said, “I’ll dust it with sulfa and bandage it. But it doesn’t look as if it needs either.”
Evans spoke up, bringing the war back and blotting out the warm memories, “You scrubbed two Jerries, Major?”
“Quite, I know,” Randolph acknowledged, feeling sudden, inexplicable irritation.
“Confirmed?” the adjutant, Edwin Smith, asked.
“I don’t give two bloody stuffs for the whole lot,” Randolph growled and then fell silent. Everyone looked at one another uneasily.
“Yes. Confirmed,” Hart offered. Misreading Randolph’s silence, the flight lieutenant pressed on enthusiastically, “I saw them both and so did most of the eastern seaboard. I boffed a Dornier and a ME, McBride got one of each, Coop Hansen got a ME. Two Dorniers and two one-oh-nines got away.”
Randolph slammed his fist on the desk so hard a bottle of alcohol leapt off and shattered on the floor. Hart recoiled like a man encountering a cobra in a dark forest. The major’s face was flushed like sunset and the veins in his neck swelled like a tenor reaching for a high note. “Blast it! Kochling got away and Preston Donovan bought it and Coop was butchered by Kochling.” Silence like a heavy, viscous liquid poured on the room, coating everyone and everything. Eyes were averted, seeking the floor, the ceiling, anything but another man’s eyes.
The major drained his glass and Woodhouse made another trip to the sideboard, returning with a full glass. Shifting his gaze from man to man, the squadron leader showed a mercurial change in mood, suddenly speaking softly and sarcastically, “Think of the glory—the honor Coop and Donovan bought. Their heroism will be reported in The Times, The Guardian, Gazette. They’ll be mentioned in dispatches, be awarded the DSO, and their families can display them on their mantels. Marvelous trade.” He grabbed a maintenance report with his good hand and held it before his eyes as if he were reading a citation. He mimicked the clipped, singsong voice of a bored staff officer, “His Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to approve the award of the Distinguished. . .” He threw the document into the air and it drifted like a pendulum to the floor.
