Trial By Fire

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “You have the advantage, then.”

  “Daphne Palmer.”

  “Are you off duty tomorrow evening, Daphne Palmer?”

  “From one-o’clock...should say thirteen hundred.”

  “I’ll probably have to hang around the flight till five or six. Could you meet me at seven and come into Lincoln for dinner?”

  “Yes, I could. If you finish sooner, call me at the W.A.A.F. Guard Room and we can meet earlier.”

  When he rejoined the other two, Pike gave him a bland look.

  “Organised?”

  “So far so good, anyway.”

  “I shall have to get some tips from you and Creamy.”

  They went back to the hangars to see who else had returned. Only one more Blenheim had come in.

  Of the nine that had taken off, three had been shot down. One crashed on landing. One captain, one second pilot and two wireless operator-air gunners had been killed in the six which had survived the battle.

  The mental arithmetic Roger did to calculate his chances of surviving another half-dozen operations gave him no comfort.

  FOUR

  While James Fenton was flying his second convoy patrol over the English Channel on Monday 4th September 1939, the second day of the war, and Roger Hallowes was flying over the North Sea to bomb enemy ships, Christopher Fenton was driving with his father from Oxford home to Hayling Island.

  His mother, Sheila, with her sister, Roger’s mother, to keep her company, was sitting in the drawing-room, sewing. She gave only part of her attention to a desultory conversation with her sister. Her ears were alert for the sound of her husband’s car turning in at the gate.

  She thought of her urbane and confident husband, his pride in his two sons, and what it would do to him if harm befell either of them. She chided herself for sheltering behind a euphemism. What she meant was, if either of them were killed or lost a limb. She remembered the danger which the last war’s airmen hated above all: being burned. It sent a shudder through her. Her sister had just made some remark and was awaiting a response. She was aware of it, but she felt shaken by what she had been thinking and now she felt clumsy when it came to picking up the thread of their talk and guilty for being insensitive to the fact that her sister was every whit as worried about her only son as she was about her two.

  Sheila Fenton found herself wishing, for a moment, that she had been born an Italian or a Spaniard, or even a certain kind of Frenchwoman: so that she could have enjoyed the luxury of an uninhibited outburst of sentiment, of tears and loud expressions of pride, of an open display of mother love. Not really, she told herself: she would feel such a fool. And she had had two years’ practice at bottling up her feelings while Stephen was away at the Western Front, so she should be used to it by now.

  Her sister had to go home to be there when her husband returned from the bank in Havant of which he was manager. Sheila turned on the wireless. The six-o’clock news was just about to start when she heard the car arrive and hurried out to the porch.

  Christopher’s broad smile answered her question before she asked it.

  “I can see you were successful.”

  Christopher boisterously put his arms about her and whirled her around.

  “They couldn’t have been more helpful. I hope I’m as lucky tomorrow with the R.A.F.”

  She looked past her tall, hefty son to her husband. He gave her a smile in which she saw as much gravity as encouragement. For a moment his look was direct and penetrating, examining her for signs of the worry that he knew would never leave her now until there was peace again. But she was a good dissembler. She had learned, more than twenty years ago, to hide her deepest feelings. She put out a hand to clasp his and walk into the house with him, while Christopher followed.

  Christopher was restless. He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, then at his wristwatch.

  “I wonder when James will be off duty?”

  His father, at the drinks tray in a corner of the room, turned and carried a glass of sherry to Sheila, sat down with his whisky and soda, and opened the newspaper which he had not had time to read yet.

  “Pour yourself a beer, then go and telephone him. If he’s not in the mess, they’ll be able to tell you what time he will be.”

  When Christopher had gone out of the room, she asked “Was it really all right, as easy as Christopher said?”

  “Absolutely. Half the undergraduates who are already up won’t be going back next term, and half the freshmen won’t either. At least, I should hope not.” There was the note of scepticism and weariness in his voice with which he had been accustomed to speak about the privileged younger generation since the Oxford Union had voted in favour of the motion that “This house would not fight for King and country.”

  Undergraduate sense of humour and cynicism were all very well, he had said at the time, but dangerous lunatics like Hitler and Mussolini took that sort of public statement literally and seriously and based their attitude to the country on such affectations.

  It was the small, monotonous, familiar showing-off of young men on the brink of maturity who did not realise how puerile they still were, Stephen had said; but whereas the British understood their own, other nations misapprehended: and that was the kind of foolishness that got the country involved in other peoples’ troubles. The Nazis thought British youth, of the class which provided the nation’s leaders, was degenerate. Hence Hitler’s defiance and, now, this damned war. But Hitler had got it wrong, and there were hundreds of thousands of young men like his two sons to prove it to him: just as he and his generation had proved it to the Kaiser a quarter of a century ago. Christopher came back.

  “He’d just got in. He’s going to telephone later when he’s bathed and changed, to talk to you.”

  “Did he sound all right?” Sheila asked.

  “He sounded browned off. But he was bucked about my fixing things up with the college.”

  “He’d better get used to being browned off,” Stephen said, “Fighting a war is about the most boring occupation there is.”

  * * *

  Christopher went into Southampton with his father the next morning and Stephen dropped him outside a recruiting centre before going on to his office at the yacht-builder’s where he was a director. They would not be building any more yachts until the war was over. Arrangements had already been made for the firm to begin constructing motor torpedo boats for the Royal Navy and they would be doing repairs to small naval vessels; they would . have to enlarge their machine shop to take on the production of parts for ships’ light armament. Stephen would happily have gone back to the R.A.F. and at forty-six he was no older than some reservists who would be recalled. But his war wound precluded that, and, anyway, when he had sounded the matter out at Munich time, he had been told that Government would not release him from the boat yard. His job there was essential to the national interest. He had resigned himself ruefully to being forced to make a financial profit from the war; but he was determined that the company’s board would keep that profit as low as possible. “Profiteer” was the ugliest epithet that the last war had generated.

  There was a throng of young men pressing against the counter that divided the reception area of the recruiting centre in half. Behind the counter, an R.A.F. sergeant, two corporals and three or four aircraftmen kept going and coming through a door at the back, or shuffled sheaves of files about or sat at one of the tables and wrote diligently on various forms. There was a strong smell of floor polish and boot leather.

  Christopher experienced a momentary deflation of the high spirits in which he had arrived here. He had left Oxford the previous afternoon with a twinge of regret. He had been looking forward to the next three years, despite his vacillation about whether to abandon university and follow James into the peacetime Service. He had enjoyed his glimpse of Oxford life when he went there to sit his examination. Yesterday’s briefly renewed acquaintance had whetted his appetite for what he was sacrificing.

 
He had been anticipating with pleasure the tranquillity of the ancient buildings and grassy quadrangles, the rituals of college life, the escapades, the sport; entertaining friends over long hours of lively talk, working cosily behind his sported oak while firelight glowed on the spines of leather volumes ranged along his shelves and rain or snow assaulted the windows; summer boating parties with pretty girls, sophisticated clandestine romances with barmaids, new friendships with wise dons and witty fellow students.

  All those delights he had readily put aside and whatever regrets he had, had been expunged by the reflection that despite their attractions they belonged to an existence which was essentially dull and careful, hedged about with timid precautions against some excess which would result in disrepute, even in being sent down. An undergraduate’s merriment had to be constrained with prudence, sobriety was the real keynote of university life.

  Instead, he was about to launch himself into a life of danger and perpetual excitement. No doubt he would relish the dullness of an ordered, studious three years all the more for that.

  But when he contemplated the motley crowd among whom he found himself that morning, his enthusiasm somewhat evaporated. He was enough of a romanticist to have based his expectations on what he had seen of James’s R.A.F. friends, when they had come to stay at the house on Hayling Island or he and his parents had visited James at one of his training schools or at Stanswick. There was a standard kind of young pilot. Despite disparities of appearance and intelligence, ability and character, they shared many common factors. Either the Service had put its stamp on them all or they were all naturally formed in a certain mould and the Service was their proper habitat. Those young men shared a light-hearted, healthy, clear-eyed, clean-cut appearance and personality that was instantly indentifiable.

  Looking around at the other volunteer recruits, he was dismayed to see so many slouching, pasty, acned, dull-eyed, greasy-haired, scruffy, pinchbeck fellows among them. War memorials to the Great War, throughout the land, depicted young soldiers, sailors and airmen in stone or bronze. They were invariably handsome, stalwart and dashing, giving the impression of boundless health and vigour: a sort of warrior saints. But the real men whom they represented and who had given their lives in Flanders and Gallipoli, on the seven seas and in the air, had come from factories and offices and farms, from slums and insanitary country cottages, from mines and prisons and unemployment. And thousands of them slouched and shuffled and had boils on the their necks, they had bad teeth and worse breath, they lied and stole and got girls into trouble with false promises. They were ordinary people and so were those among whom Christopher found himself offering his services to his country. He looked for nobility and some reflection of what he had seen in his brother’s comrades and found few signs of either.

  The Royal Air Force, it seemed, was in no hurry to accept him. He spent much of the morning waiting and the rest being interviewed. He was told to return two days later for a medical examination and aptitude tests. He was given a rail warrant and told to report on the following day to an R.A.F. station on the outskirts of London which had never seen an aircraft and consisted mainly of a huge parade ground surrounded by barrack blocks. There he was kept overnight in company with forty-nine other candidates, undergoing more interviews and tests. Finally, he was one of eight who were provisionally accepted and given yet another medical going-over. This process yielded just three who were accepted as embryo pilots.

  When he returned home he had a form in his pocket which confirmed his selection as “ACH/GD Pilot U/T.”

  He telephoned James that evening to give him the news. James said “You know what ‘ACH/GD’ means, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “I doubt it. It’s about the same as being an untouchable under the Hindu caste system. It’s not a trade, like fitter or rigger. It stands for ‘Aircrafthand, General Duties’. They do all the so-called unskilled jobs: running errands, working on the sanitary squad, manning the ground defence guns, washing up in the cookhouse, scrubbing hangar floors, batmen...”

  “Thank you, that’s enough.”

  “I suppose you know that if you get scrubbed from the pilot’s course you can remuster to observer or air gunner?”

  “Thanks again! “

  “I’m not being discouraging, trying to be helpful.”

  A week later Christopher reported to a cheerless hutted camp in East Anglia, where he spent four weeks doing what he had already learned to do well in the Officers Training Corps at school: foot drill, marching and arms drill.

  From there he went to an elementary flying training school and made his first flight in a Tiger Moth. By then it was mid-October.

  Leaflet raids and reconnaissance continued. Eleven Hampdens had been to bomb two enemy destroyers in the Heligoland Bight on 29th September and five of them were shot down by enemy fighters. In return, the Hampdens destroyed two Messerschmitt 109s.

  On Monday 16th October, the date on which Christopher began his flying training, twelve Heinkel 111s bombed British warships near the Forth Bridge. They sank a pinnace and the admiral’s barge. They killed three officers and wounded two, killed thirteen ratings and wounded forty-two, aboard two cruisers and a destroyer.

  Ship and shore batteries and two Auxiliary Air Force squadrons went into action. The fighters shot down three enemy bombers and the guns one.

  In November, Christopher moved on to a Service flying training School in Lincolnshire to learn to fly the Miles Master and the Hawker Hurricane.

  The squadrons which had been sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force had no more opportunity to attack Germany or engage the Luftwaffe than the home-based squadrons. The Fairey Battle bombers were confined to training flights and a practice bombing range. The Lysanders did Army co-operation exercises. The Mk.1 Blenheims carried out reconnaissance over Germany. The Hurricanes flew patrols over France and the English Channel. The war stagnated. The newspapers dubbed it the “phoney war”. Some wit coined the term “Sitzkrieg” to point the contrast between the apparent reluctance of either side to strike hard, and the Blitzkrieg with which Hitler had crushed Poland in a few weeks.

  FIVE

  For nearly twenty years the Fentons and Halloweses had spent Christmas together, alternating between each other’s homes. In 1939 it was Stephen and Sheila Fenton’s turn to be host and hostess. Neither couple could raise much enthusiasm for the occasion, with their sons absent.

  In the second week of December, Christopher telephoned his mother to say that the flying school was standing down for four days over Christmas.

  “To give the instructors a chance to recover their nerve, I should think,” he said. “They’re having a tougher war, so far, than any of the operational squadrons.”

  He made a joke of it, but the fact was that during his two months at Service flying training school there had been five fatal accidents. In two, instructors had been involved by their pupils. One pupil, practising formation flying in Hurricanes, had collided with his instructor. Another, flying dual in a Master, had stalled on the approach to a landing, frozen on the controls so that the instructor could not extricate them from the stall, and the Master had plunged into the ground nose-first from five hundred feet.

  A few days later Beryl Hallowes came bustling over in a high state of excitement.

  “Roger’s coming home for Christmas too. He says they’ve had a draw on the squadron and his captain’s name came out of the hat. So the whole crew is getting a week’s leave. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Sheila said to Stephen “If all the boys can’t come home for Christmas, I’d almost rather none of them did. I know it sounds mean, but there’s going to be an awfully big gap with James missing.”

  “I know how you feel. But we must make the most of our luck. Perhaps James will be able to get home for the day, even if he can’t get three or four days’ leave.”

  “It can’t be such a phoney war after all, if they can’t let the pilots go for a few da
ys.”

  “I never did think it was a phoney war. The people who write that sort of tosh don’t know anything about flying. We may not be having to fend off heavy enemy raids, or bombing Germany, but there’s plenty of flying going on, you can be sure.”

  Stephen did not elaborate. He did not wish to give his wife any more to worry about than she already had. But he knew from experience that enemy shells and bullets were not an airman’s only hazard. The weather was almost as great a menace, and even routine flying held considerable dangers of which groundlings were totally ignorant. Cold, oxygen starvation and fatigue, compass inaccuracy, radio, engine or altimeter failures were all killers: in peacetime as well as at war.

  One evening, a week before Christmas, he answered the telephone and heard James’s voice.

  “I’ll be home on the evening of the twenty-third until the morning of the twenty-seventh.”

  * * *

  James, the only professional aviator of the three, looked for changes in his brother and cousin. He did not expect to see much difference in Christopher. Indeed, he thought that perhaps his young brother’s impact on the Service might have been more noticeable than any impression the R.A.F. had made on this particular pupil pilot. Christopher, with his energy, impetuosity and dash, was the epitome of the bold young flyer who fitted naturally into the Service and showed himself instantly to be either an excellent pilot or a careless and dangerous one. James did not doubt that his brother’s basic good sense and innate skill at games would put him high in his instructors’ favour.

  Roger, quiet and reserved, often enigmatic, unexpectedly shy sometimes, was the one who must have had to adapt himself the more radically to his new terms of reference. Above all, life in a sergeants’ mess would provide a social environment very different from his accustomed one. He had said that it was the only distasteful facet of his previous two weeks with the squadron and he had spent as little time in mess as possible. “They have high tea instead of dinner,” he had complained. “And they play a card game called brag.”