by John Harris
“Probably not one of the people we’re looking for.” Taudevin turned away and Howard felt oddly grateful for the crumb of information thrown in his direction. Then the Group Captain moved towards the plotting table again and the rest of his remarks were addressed to the Controller. “The fighter people are covering that area now,” he said, tapping one of the markers. “But it won’t be for long. They won’t be much good after dark and it seems they’ll be grounded tomorrow by the weather. That right, Howard?”
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
Taudevin turned away from the plotting table. At the back of his mind he had the thought of the Air Commodore, clear and sharp above the other problems of the search – his wife’s brother-in-law and his own good friend and one of the most important people in the war effort.
Group had been on the phone again to find out if anything had been heard. They were clearly beginning to get worried about all those documents Waltby was supposed to be bringing back with him and, while the affair was now beyond Taudevin’s sphere of control and in the hands of the Navy and the Air-Sea Rescue people, he still felt it his responsibility to do everything possible to locate the dinghy or at least to prove to himself there were no survivors – if only because Harding was one of his pilots and Mackay and Ponsettia belonged to Harding’s crew.
He ran his fingers through his hair, aware of a sudden depression. Then he pulled himself together, brushing aside his gloom. There was no reason to start worrying yet, he thought, as common sense took hold of him again. Anything could have happened. He was trying hard to convince himself they’d get away with it, that Harding and his crew would be saved, while all the time certain that the circumstances were banking up against them.
The door opened and the signals sergeant appeared.
“What is it, Sergeant?” His voice was more nervous and eager than Howard had expected it to be.
“Message come through from the Navy, sir,” the sergeant said. “They passed it on to us, knowing we’d be interested. It’s from a Walrus in the area of the search.”
“Go on, Sergeant.” The Group Captain made no attempt to reach for the slip of paper the sergeant held out to him.
“It washes out their last message, sir. The body one. False alarm.”
“Ah!” To the Meteorological Officer, Taudevin seemed to let out a sigh of relief as he reached at last for the message form. “Thank you, Sergeant. I’d be glad if you’d pass a message on to the Navy and to Group asking them to let us have any messages between them and the launches and the Walruses. Anything relevant. Helps us to make up the picture.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
As the sergeant withdrew Taudevin moved again to the map, staring at it as though he could see something fresh on its flat surface. A WAAF nervously reached past him and moved one of the markers, and another one chalked noisily on the blackboard on the wall with a squeaky piece of chalk.
“There’s still a chance, thank God,” Taudevin said. He glanced through the window at the lowering sky. “Here comes the first of your rain, Howard.”
Squadron Leader Scott sat in Howard’s office for a while after Howard had disappeared – until the faint patter of rain on the windows stirred him out of the slough of unease in which he was wallowing. He sat up and glanced round, aware of the room being unexpectedly darker, then the slash of rain on the glass, driven by a buffet of wind, drove him to his feet as though it were a whip across his back.
For a while he stood uncertainly, wondering if he ought to try the Station Warrant Officer’s department for that lost file of his. He was on the point of setting off for the stairs when he was finally put off by the look he knew he’d see on the old warrior’s face if he went in there admitting his own incompetence.
There’d be no words, no recriminations, not even an offer to help, but still that look. And the SWO’s looks, after twenty-five years in the Air Force, were things that could crush with ease anyone below a wing commander. The Station Warrant Officer, as Scotty well knew, was probably the most efficient man on the station and ran an office in which nothing was ever lost, either on the desk or in that filing system which clicked away inside his brain.
Scotty shrugged off the small, foolish feeling he could never fail to avoid in front of the SWO and, closing the door of Howard’s office behind him, he pranced down the stairs and into the bleak, green-painted corridor that led to the Group Captain’s room. Outwardly he gave the impression of cheerful stupid heartiness. Inwardly he was a confusion of subtle strains.
Chiefly, that lost file of his was worrying him to a sickly awareness of failure, and he felt baffled and irritated by the apparent indifference and incompetence of everyone round him.
The Group Captain’s office was empty and Scotty turned angrily and set off for the stairs again, knowing he might reasonably expect to find him in the Operations Room. As he began to trudge up the steps he remembered that Taudevin had asked him to visit the Station Sick quarters on his behalf to see the men there who had returned injured from operations, and he made a point of trying in his muddled way to fix a time in his head, a definite hour so he wouldn’t forget. After all, he thought in a burst of loyalty, Groupy had plenty on his plate at the moment with this VIP lost over the sea, to say nothing of Harding, Ponsettia and Mackay.
Mackay, Mackay. A restless little movement began again at the back of his mind at the thought of Mackay. He again considered going to the SWO and admitting the loss of the file but he found he had not the courage and he put it off a little longer. There was still plenty of time, he told himself. Obviously the Group Captain was waiting to see just how Harding and his crew had faced up to this dinghy experience before he did anything about it. After all – even Scotty had to admit it to himself in his Air Force slang – it would be jolly tough tit for Mackay to come back to the aerodrome on a stretcher injured or half-dead after a spell in a dinghy at the beginning of winter and find himself on a court martial charge. That was clearly what Taudevin was trying to avoid.
Scotty tried hard to imagine what it would be like to be in a dinghy, but all he could remember was the occasion when he’d ditched his own Bristol Fighter in a shell-hole in France in 1918 and emerged half-drowned from the stinking water it contained.
He was an unimaginative man and his contacts with the flying personnel were only slight in spite of his noisy efforts to be intimate, in spite of his attempts to join in their youthful skylarks to prove that his own fading wings made him one of them. For all his often-unwelcome friendliness, he still had no clear idea of the conditions under which they flew.
He’d often stood and watched the Lancasters take off on operations, to try to catch some of the emotions of the crews. He’d watched the great black machines taxi to the southern extremity of the airfield and, as they swung their snouts to the north, had heard the deep throbbing notes of the engines swell into a brassy blare, like the howling of ten thousand trumpets. He had seen them roll in dark outline along the runway, bouncing into the air as though in slow motion, and had listened to the echoing thunder of the heavens that threw back the clamour of the exhausts as the planes grew smaller and finally disappeared across the unwavering Suffolk fields. Then, flat and vaguely depressed at having learned nothing, he’d turned back towards the truck to the Mess.
He heaved his bulk over the last step on to the second floor and, splaying his feet, set off for the Operations Room.
As he turned the corner from the stairs he bumped into the small figure of a WAAF who had been waiting near the doorway of the Signals Section, and as she turned away with a muttered apology he realised she’d been crying.
He stopped. Scotty was a kind-hearted man, clumsy and singularly unwarlike when it came to tearful women and small children and dogs.
“What’s the trouble, m’dear?” He stared at her and she stiffened slightly to attention, her head turned away from him. Scotty felt suddenly for the first time in weeks that he was dealing with something he understood.
> “Nothing, sir,” the girl said. She was small, very young and pretty, he noticed, and her eyes were moist. He recognised her as one of the Mess clerks.
“Come, come, child,” he boomed, so that the girl’s eyes flickered from side to side, fearful of the attention he might draw to her. “You’re not crying for nothing.”
“It’s nothing, sir. Really it isn’t.”
“Come, child,” Scotty said with hearty and infuriating persistence. “You must tell me. I’ll do what I can to help you. That’s what I’m here for.”
“I was only waiting to find out something from the Signals Section, sir. That’s all.”
“Anything I can do?”
“I don’t think so, sir.” The girl steadfastly refused to look at him.
“Sure?”
“Yes, sir…” The girl paused and Scotty halted as he was about to move away. “Sir, I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything of Mr Harding’s crew, sir, have you?” She burst out with the words, as though they’d been released against her will, and turned to stare up at him, suddenly trusting and tearful.
“Well – er – ah…” Scotty stroked his moustache for a moment. “Er – I – Look,” he said, “I’m going into Ops. Room now. I’ll probably be seeing the Group Captain. I’ve one or two things to ask him. I’ll find out what’s happening and let you know when I come downstairs. Er…” Scotty couldn’t resist one item of fatherly curiosity. “Who is it you’re particularly interested in, hm?”
“Sergeant Ponsettia, sir.”
“Your boy friend, hm?”
“Yes, sir, that’s right. We’re nearly engaged.”
“Hm, well, hang about in the corridor below. I’ll let you know.”
Scotty watched her as she moved towards the stairs. He remembered now seeing her with Ponsettia at station dances and in the local pub. He knew Ponsettia chiefly by his moustache and because he belonged to the same crew as the awkward Mackay who was giving him so much trouble. New Zealander or Canadian or something.
Scotty’s heart felt a flood of compassion for the little WAAF as she turned the corner. He cleared his throat noisily, thinking of his own children, blew his nose in a trumpeting sound, and pushed open the door of Operations Room.
Taudevin was there, as he had expected, talking in low tones to the Controller and the Meteorological Officer. Howard looked tired and strained, but the Group Captain was still his normal immaculate, imperturbable self, though one ravaged finger tapped on the table.
In front of them, the markers were clustered tightly round what Scotty knew to be the representation of Harding’s dinghy.
The Controller was speaking in his high Welsh voice. “I’ve been in touch with the Navy at Dover, sir,” he was saying. “If it gets no worse, they think the dinghy might ride it out. If it gets a great deal worse, they aren’t so sure. I wish we knew where they were.”
“What’s the temperature, Howard?” Taudevin asked.
“Low, sir. It’s cold and raw. Probably frost somewhere on the way. It will be pretty grim out there.”
Taudevin thrust his hands into his pockets and began to walk slowly up and down the room. They could hear the chatter of the teleprinter next door, and the whispering of the WAAF plotters by the table in the centre. The WAAF corporal chalking a destination time on the blackboard suddenly made the chalk squeak sharply in the silence, so that the noise cut across the still room, setting Scotty’s teeth on edge.
“Could you get a new piece of chalk, Corporal?” the Controller said mildly, and the corporal blushed and moved away from the blackboard.
Outside, Scotty could see the silver finger of a searchlight moving across the damp blue-grey sky, reflecting on the underside of the low cloud, and he remembered it was time the black-outs were up.
Then Taudevin, in his silent pacing, found himself opposite Scotty and he looked up, his pipe still in his mouth. His eyes travelled down Scotty’s uniform until they rested on the papers in his hand and Scotty saw the flicker of annoyance in them.
“I’m pretty occupied, Scotty,” he pointed out.
“It’s not much, sir,” Scotty said, shaking himself to life.
“Then I’ll deal with it tomorrow.” Taudevin turned away.
Scotty opened his mouth to speak. The bus service was really worrying him and he was anxious to get the Group Captain’s view on it. He shut his mouth, opened it again, then decided not to say anything. Knowing that the eyes of the Controller and Howard were on him, he fumbled behind him for the door handle, feeling embarrassed and foolish at Taudevin’s words. He was glad to get outside.
In the corridor, he stood staring at the closed door for a moment, stroking his moustache, wondering whether he ought to try once more and chance Taudevin’s annoyance. He knew the Group Captain invariably gave way when he insisted, but somehow, at that moment, Scotty had the feeling he might burst out into one of the violent angers he sometimes roused in him.
He turned on his heel and pranced towards the stairs, suddenly noticing how much darker it appeared to be than when he had climbed up them.
As he stopped thoughtfully on the bottom step he became aware of the little WAAF who had spoken to him outside the Signals Office, looking up at him out of the shadows, white-faced and frightened.
“Oh, ah…” Scotty searched for words. He had clean forgotten to enquire about Ponsettia and the others of Harding’s crew.
“Did you find out, sir?” she asked breathlessly.
“Er…” Scotty put a plump hand on her shoulder, rather like a friendly uncle. “Yes, m’dear,” he said. “Er – they’re going to be all right.”
“Have they got them, sir? Have they found them?”
“Well, they know where they are, m’dear,” Scotty said, uneasily remembering the words of Howard and Taudevin and Jones. “They’ve not got them yet, exactly, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Are they going to, sir? They’re going to be all right, aren’t they?”
“All right?” Scotty searched for words that would not commit him and failed to find any. “Of course they’re going to be all right, child,” he said in desperation. “Just you wait and see. They’ll all be back here and in bed before you know where you are. It’s just a matter of time. That’s all.”
She smiled shyly at him, and Scotty waved a hand in a kindly dismissal. “Now run along and don’t worry any more. He’ll be on the telephone to the Waafery before you know where you are.”
“Thank you, sir.” The little WAAF, her face suddenly gay, saluted him smartly and Scotty, a little startled to be saluted without his hat, nodded and watched her as she turned and disappeared down the corridor alongside the Station Warrant Officer’s room.
Uncomfortably aware that he’d deliberately misled her, he tried to soothe his conscience by persuading himself he’d told her nothing definite. But he had told her Ponsettia was coming back, he remembered, and he knew very well that Ponsettia’s chances of coming back were slightly less than even by this time, and he wondered how he would face her in the Mess if Ponsettia didn’t come back.
As Scotty turned towards his own room he found himself hoping that the weather was growing no worse.
Two
Scotty’s uneasy foreboding about the weather was well founded.
The slate-coloured seas were higher now and greyer, and with a weighty deadness about them that was ominous. Down the valleys of the waves the foam was streaked into bars and there was a fierceness about the lurch and roll of the dinghy in the fret of the wind that flung them against each other and made them grab for handholds as they slid in sickening plunges into the steep folds where the seas towered high above them, seeming to blot out the light, sloshing water over them with a nerve-shattering suddenness that took their breath away.
And, intruding into all the other sounds – the flat splash of the water under the dinghy and the hiss of the breaking crest – came a new noise, the moan of the rising wind whipping the splintered surface from the sea in spi
ts of spray, slicing off the tips like a knife and carrying them in icy darts from one peak to the next in line. Above them, the solid immovable sky lay like a grey pall on their hopes of rescue.
“Tell me if I’m wrong,” Ponsettia said suddenly, “but is this goddam wind rising?”
Waltby and Mackay looked round them at the grey lifting water, now growing darker as evening approached. Harding was asleep, lolling against Mackay, pale and young-looking and strained.
“I’ve been staring at this damn sea ever since we ditched,” Ponsettia went on gravely, “and I’ve been noticing that the waves seem just a bit higher than they did. And I notice that the crests are whipped away just a bit smarter by the wind than they were at first.”
They stared over the relentless waves, all of them aware of the tomb-like coldness of the sea and the frostiness of the air around them.
“Where are we now?” Mackay asked, his small eyes sharp and glittering and unwearied by the cold and the motion and the lack of hope.
“Same as before. Close in to Holland, I guess,” Ponsettia said. “Just north of the Scheldt and Walcheren. Only now we’re closer in.”
“They can’t be far away,” Mackay muttered half to himself. “The bastards must be somewhere about. They must be searching.”
“‘Patient, ever patient, and joy shall be thy share’, my old grandma used to say,” Ponsettia observed solemnly. “My grandpop used to put it differently. He used to say ‘Sit up, chin up, and dry up’.”
Mackay glowered at him, nursing his cut hand, white and puffed now, the gash black with dried blood beyond the knot of the tie. His fingers were stiff and dead looking, and the raw pain in the wound put an edge on his temper. “I haven’t time to be patient,” he said bitterly, thinking of those plans of his gathering dust, fading more with every day and every hour, in danger of being lost in the tangle of so many other lost hopes. “I’m older than you, chum. When the war’s over all the blokes who’ve dodged the column will be there getting the pick of everything. I haven’t the time to go on waiting.”
