The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  But suddenly, Sitzkreig became Blitzkrieg – Lightning War. German Panzers and aircraft overran the allies with a speed that no one believed possible. A large part of the British army escaped, ferried back from the beaches of Dunkirk.

  As the fortunes of war changed, so did those of Old Man Murphy. France surrendered and Hitler, now master of Europe, began to plan the invasion of Britain. Pilots were desperately needed. Escaped Polish airmen were taught to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes in a matter of days. And, to the Old Man’s delight, the Eagle Squadron was formed for Americans wanting to fly with the RAF.

  Britain was running perilously short of everything needed to fight a prolonged war. Winston Churchill was now Prime Minister and one of his highest priorities was to mobilise American support that was vital to national survival. It was no easy task. Joseph Kennedy, father of the future President, was US Ambassador in London. He expected a swift Nazi victory, told Washington so and was widely believed. It was in those desperate days that Old Man Murphy became famous. Though his first name was Sean, inevitably he became known as ‘Paddy’ Murphy. He fought not so much out of idealistic fervour but with a sense of adventure and a passion to fly Spitfires, the best fighter aircraft in the world.

  He revelled in the notoriety, flying by day and at night being feted by the rich, the powerful and the fashionable.

  At a party in Belgravia, he met Caroline, the shy, slightly clumsy daughter of a wealthy family. The bombing of London had begun. It was the first time that a city had ever lived with a nightly ritual of destruction. No one knew who would be dead by morning. Such uncertainty drove them together and they were married within a month. A ‘Whirlwind Romance’, the gossip column of Vogue called it. Caroline kept the cutting of the official announcement in a tattered scrapbook:

  The Times. London, 28th November 1940.

  Married. Miss Caroline Kilrea, daughter of

  The Honourable Arthur Kilrea and the late Lady Kilrea,

  to Flt Lieutenant Sean ‘Paddy’ Murphy,

  son of Mr and Mrs Gerald Murphy of New York,

  at St George’s Church, Hanover Square, London.

  Caroline worked in a dismal office at the Ministry of Information, in the soot-laden streets behind Waterloo Station, dealing with the ever-increasing number of foreign journalists reporting the war from London.

  *

  For almost a year, while the air war raged over southern England, the couple met only fleetingly; a day here and there, and sometimes the luxury of a whole weekend. They planned for a future when they would get to know each other.

  Both talked of long holidays in the sun. He recalled the Big Sur coast of California, and she the South of France. And so it almost was.

  When the Nazis surrendered, Caroline believed that for both of them the war was ended. But Murphy volunteered for the continuing conflict against Japan. For Caroline, it was a terrible blow. Yet it was not in her nature to complain and once more she quietly endured the pain of parting and the anxiety of waiting.

  Then suddenly, there were the atomic bombs. The Japanese surrendered and it was all over. Murphy was back in London six weeks later.

  On an impulse, he resigned his commission and the couple took over the top floor of the Jacobean manor house in the Cotswold Hills of Oxfordshire that was the Kilrea family home. For eight glorious weeks they had the honeymoon that had been delayed by half a decade of war. Then came peacetime reality. For three years Murphy unsuccessfully tried his hand at all manner of jobs.

  Restlessness and despair pressed in on him. A future without flying seemed unthinkable. But opportunities for ex-aircrew were few. On a visit to the nearby airfield at Benson he heard of the sudden need for pilots to fly in the Berlin Airlift. West Berlin was an island of the Western allies almost two hundred miles inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation. The Russians had blockaded the city with the aim of starving it into the Communist sphere of influence. In response, the Americans and British organised a massive airlift to supply the city with the essentials of life. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before. Round the clock there were continuous flights carrying everything from coal to chocolate. Murphy was back in his element. Aircraft landed nose to tail at Tempelhof, the crowded city airport, which was one of the most fog-bound in Europe.

  Caroline found she was pregnant. Then three weeks later, on 28th October 1949, a glorious late-autumn morning, the telegram came.

  I regret to inform you … aircraft … collision … fog…

  It was a strange grief. At first she could not contain her sense of outrage. It seemed so brutally unjust that someone who had survived so many years of aerial combat should die in such a mundane, inglorious way. As time passed, she struggled to hold the whole man in her memory, but found she possessed only part of him.

  There were so many gaps; so much she did not know. Young Murphy was born the following July. In the warmth of high summer, the hurt very slowly began to fade. As the boy grew, his mother began to rediscover her husband. The infectious laugh, the quick temper, the generous spirit; all stirred memories that were painful yet which built an understanding of the person she had loved but never fully known.

  Young Murphy’s upbringing was the cause of an unlikely friendship. Caroline’s father, the Honourable Arthur Kilrea, was from a family who traced their ancestry back to the Protestant ruling class in Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I in the 16th century. The Scotch–Irish as the Americans called them.

  The Murphy family had altogether different roots. During the Great Hunger, the potato famine of the 1840s, when Ireland lost more than half its population to starvation and emigration, their forebears had escaped to America on board a stinking disease-ridden ship. Many died, but the Murphys survived. Amid the wheeling and dealing of Tammany Hall politics, their keen business sense built them a modest fortune and immodest political ambitions. Though he never sought office for himself, Gerald very effectively wielded power through others. ‘America’s answer to Warwick the Kingmaker’, The Washington Post once called him.

  Gerald arrived to see his grandson just two weeks after he was born and his friendship with Arthur began almost at once. ‘The Grandfather’s Club’ they called themselves.

  After Gerald returned to New York, the two men corresponded at length about young Murphy’s future, and especially about his education. Gerald returned every summer and, with Arthur and the boy, walked for hours over the Cotswold Hills and the Wiltshire Downs. It was a landscape with a story to tell, and in the evenings the child would repeat to his mother vivid tales of Bronze Age hill forts and mediaeval knights, and how, above the village of Uffington, they had stood at the very place where St George slew the dragon. The boy did not understand much of the men’s conversation, but he sensed they both had a deep affection for Ireland. They spoke of ‘The Old Country’ much as he had heard countrymen talk about a well-loved hound, a creature with great charm, delinquent habits and an uncertain temper. Only years later did Murphy see how unusual this friendship between a member of the landed gentry and a third-generation Irish Republican was. It flowered in the eye of a storm, the lull between two eras of violence. A generation earlier, or later, the talk would have been about bombs and terrorism, not music, horses and whisky.

  *

  Caroline loved these summer interludes. She watched with pleasure as the boy grew into a teenager. ‘Young Murphy’, everyone called him. Even close friends used just the one name. It fitted so accurately that a first name seemed unnecessary.

  Arthur used his well-polished network of personal relationships to set young Murphy on the privileged path of an English aristocratic education: the Dragon School at Oxford, then on to Winchester. By the end of the l960s Murphy arrived at Oxford to read Economics.

  ‘The Swinging Sixties’ were over and protest was receding from its high water mark of Grosvenor Square and Berkeley. Disdain and lassitude were high fashion and there was the stale taste of aimlessness in the air. As Dean Acheson, the Mandarin of Ameri
can foreign policy, put it: ‘Britain had lost an Empire and not yet found a role.’

  As a birthday gift, Gerald paid for a course of lessons at the flying school at Kidlington, an airfield on the edge of the city. While his fellows marched occasionally and drank continuously, Murphy found his escape in flying. Though the Chipmunk trainer was no Spitfire, it touched his emotions like nothing else. Navigating between the towering nimbus clouds that populated the uncertain spring climate of southern England, he discovered an understanding of his father that he could never put into words.

  Between grandfather and grandson the bond grew stronger. Murphy’s long and thoughtful letters to Gerald never made direct mention of his father but they both knew that this was what they were about. When Gerald invited Murphy to New York for the summer, he leapt at the chance.

  Manhattan had a strange effect on him. Though he had never been there before, it was like coming home. The accents, the street talk, the body language, all were oddly familiar.

  As he wandered the high-ceilinged, tall-windowed rooms of the family Brownstone, it seemed strange that he could not recall what had taken place in each of them. The absence of memory in a place that felt so familiar was oddly disturbing.

  He spent days walking the streets: Midtown, the Lower East Side, Little Italy and the Financial District. He would sit for hours over a succession of cups of coffee in the 7th Avenue Deli, observing New Yorkers of every kind. Occasionally he had the curious notion that he might catch a glimpse of himself as a stranger on some busy sidewalk, or come face to face with himself on a park bench or in a crowded subway train. He never knew whether it was this strange game that he had invented or some deeper impulse that made him decide to acquire a New York identity.

  Whatever the motivation, he quickly discovered that language was a surprisingly effective disguise. Soon he was testing himself by replaying accents and mannerisms; trying the patience of an assistant in Brentano’s by searching out an obscure book, swapping stories with students in a Greenwich Village bar or cheering amid a sea of Yankee fans. Very quickly he had assembled a Manhattan personality that those he encountered took for real.

  By the time he embarked on the Queen Elizabeth for his final term at Oxford, the game had become a secret obsession.

  Gerald had noticed none of it, and the New York episode wilted in the hothouse of undergraduate life and might have been forgotten completely, but for a chance meeting with a friend of Arthur’s during a weekend visit to the manor house.

  Chapter 4 - Thornhill

  In the rose garden, the elderly Arthur Kilrea sat under a huge apple tree, like a tribal chieftain holding court.

  Jack Thornhill arrived as the housekeeper was serving tea and delicate salmon sandwiches.

  “Excellent sense of timing, you young villain,” Arthur said to him as the tea was poured. “The tea is Darjeeling, but the salmon’s canned I’m afraid. Come and meet my grandson, young Murphy; he’s a student of Oxford and the streets of Manhattan.”

  “An interesting combination,” Thornhill replied.

  “Thornhill was two years ahead of you at Oxford,” Arthur said by way of introduction. “Then he went on to Cambridge; languages wasn’t it?”

  “Just one language actually,” Thornhill replied.

  “Which one?” Murphy asked clumsily.

  “Russian. He works in Whitehall now,” Arthur said as if to take charge of the conversation. “He’s a rising star. A keen mind and good Russian will take a man far in his profession.” Arthur’s brisk manner constrained Murphy from asking what profession that might be.

  Thornhill was dressed for the weekend in well-worn corduroy trousers and a wool shirt in need of darning. Yet despite his casual appearance, or perhaps because of it, Murphy sensed an inner edge, a tension that prevented relaxation.

  They shook hands and exchanged the ritual “How do you do?” of the English middle class. ‘Prickly’, Thornhill’s fellow students called him. Though his sharp temper made the nickname inevitable, few were bold enough to use it in his hearing.

  Thornhill wandered away in a haze of small talk with other guests. It was a blissful day, warm and heavy with the scents of summer. Murphy laid full length on the grass. The sun shone through the fine Wedgwood china as the housekeeper set a plate of thinly cut crustless sandwiches and a cup of fragrant tea on the grass beside him.

  “America?” Thornhill asked as he sat down next to Murphy. “Perhaps our paths have crossed. I spent some time at Harvard after I came down from Cambridge and I was in New York from time to time.”

  Murphy sat up; there was something about Thornhill that commanded respect and he had to make a conscious effort to avoid calling him ‘Sir’. For the first time, he found himself talking about his American game. Thornhill listened quietly, his silence drawing Murphy on. His interest was more than polite curiosity.

  He had come upon an ability which his professional training told him was rare. Murphy was flattered by Thornhill’s interest and the afternoon passed quickly as he revelled in the game; recreating characters from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the New York Athletic Club. As Thornhill left, he suggested that they stay in touch. Murphy took the suggestion to be no more than a formal courtesy. As Thornhill crossed the garden and drove away in a well-polished MG TD, Arthur, who had listened a lot and spoken little, stood beside Murphy.

  “Like St George,” he said. Murphy was puzzled. “Jack Thornhill,” Arthur repeated, “he’s like St George. A slayer of dragons.”

  *

  On the eve of Murphy’s graduation, Thornhill was true to his word. A postcard in a flowing copperplate hand arrived at his rooms. It proposed that they meet for lunch at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Murphy’s career with The Service had begun.

  Chapter 5 - Westminster

  Westminster chimes. It amused Thornhill to keep the clock on the window sill in exact synchrony with Big Ben across the Thames. It was one of several exacting eccentricities; small defences against a violently unpredictable world. Decades in a high-stress profession had turned his wavy hair grey and kept him thin. For a man devoid of vanity, he took an uncharacteristic pride in his ability to get into the bespoke tailored suit in which he was married more than thirty years previously. People who said he looked like an Edwardian cabinet minister would have been reinforced in their view had they seen him stood with his hand resting on the clock feeling the minutes tick away. It was eight a.m., three a.m. in New York, and still there was no news. Another half-hour and he would be sure that something had gone wrong. From the outset, he had decided not to use the satellite link. It would have provided continuous communication but this operation was too sensitive for that. Doing a snatch from under the nose of an enemy was one thing, from an ally entirely another. The call was to come from a pay phone, while the switch of vehicles was being made in an underground parking garage in Battery Park City at the tip of Manhattan. Still standing sentry beside the mantelpiece, he watched the grey winter sky lighten over the Houses of Parliament. At eight twenty-six the phone rang. It was Murphy.

  “Kloptik,” he said.

  “You have the wrong number,” Thornhill replied testily and put the phone down. The relief was immense. For the first time since the operation began, Thornhill allowed himself to think of something else.

  His eye travelled across Westminster Bridge to the riverside skyline and the great dome of St Paul’s. He could not count how many times in the last decade, by this same window, he had weighed heavy problems in his mind. Like the comforting presence of an old friend, the cityscape seemed to help.

  Earth hath not anything to show more fair, Wordsworth had written of the view from the bridge a century and a half before. In a rare act of self-indulgence, Thornhill allowed his thoughts to wander for a few minutes longer. Of the same perspective, Shelley had written, Hell is a city, much like London, and there, thought Thornhill, was the heart of the problem. Who to believe? What picture do you construct from the evidence before you?

 
; Sounding an alarm would be severely unwelcome; all political, military and strategic eyes were on terrorism based in the Islamic world. Nobody wanted distractions. Moreover, as the spectre of retirement drew nearer, his own influence was waning. Already he had wangled one extension, but was far from confident of securing another.

  For Thornhill, the prospect of retirement was like a terminal illness. It could have only one outcome. He took a grip on himself and snapped out of his lapse into the gloom. Like other luxuries, pessimism was strictly rationed. He crossed the room and sat at his neatly ordered desk. It gave him a sense of being in control. With great care he began to measure what was soon to become the most important decision of his professional life.

  From the perspective of a working lifetime, it seemed no more than yesterday that everyone had been euphoric at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the tyrannies that went with it. In the semi-darkened satellite viewing room, Thornhill had watched the death of a political system, poisoned by the malignity it had itself devised. Tanks in the streets of capital after capital across Eastern Europe proved no match for people fired with a longing to be free. But for Thornhill, it had been a period of supreme unease. ‘Fear of redundancy’, friends had joked, and to a few he admitted that they might be right. But privately his reading of the events was at a radical variance from conventional political wisdom. ‘A triumph for democracy’, the politicians had called it. But he believed he saw something else.