Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  They gave him a second helping of apple crumble and cream. He said they looked awfully smart.

  “We’re all volunteers, in F.A.N.Y.,” Chlöe Legge-Barrington said, “so we buy our own uniforms. A bit like the Red Cross.”

  “Only much, much more swanky,” Lucy Knight said. The others hear-heared. “We don’t wait for orders from the army. We knew the troops wanted a cinema, so we bought our own, but Edith drove it into a snowdrift.”

  “All the same,” said Nancy Hicks-Potter, “you mustn’t think we’re not nurses. We could remove your appendix right here and now, on the kitchen table.”

  “Bet you sixpence you can’t.”

  She opened a drawer and took out a carving knife.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “Two years ago. Just when I was about to become captain of boats. C’est la vie.”

  She cocked her head. “Show us the scar.”

  “Please,” Chlöe said. “No shop during meals. Anyway, Charles here is exhausted.” He opened his mouth to protest and was overtaken by a yawn.

  She took him to his bedroom. It was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor. “Sorry about the mattress,” she said. “You know what nuns are like.”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Well, you soon will. Here’s a nightgown. Best we can do, I’m afraid. Goodnight.”

  The nightgown carried a faint scent of roses. The mattress was hard, but he scarcely noticed. He was asleep before her footsteps had faded.

  He had never learned to swim, and now waking up was like swimming to the surface of a very deep pool: quite impossible, so he stopped trying and just let it happen. He had no idea where he was, or when it was, and there was no point in looking, because everything was black. Only one thing was certain: a very naked mermaid was lifting him, he could feel her breasts on his chest and her legs entwined with his. Sweetly and easily he became fully awake, and his brain informed him that mermaids had no legs, and he told his brain that he didn’t care. He hadn’t the faintest idea which of the six girls was doing these exciting, inviting, rhythmic things to his body. At first he had nothing to say. Later he had little breath to spare for talk. Eventually he was speechless with delight.

  The last thing he remembered was his nightgown being tucked around his legs and the blankets being pulled over him. While he was trying to think of suitable words he fell asleep.

  The whole splendid experience happened again, complete with a climactic firework display on the inside of his eyelids. Or did he dream the second event? He woke up in broad daylight to find a mug of tea steaming on the bedside locker. As he sipped it, he wondered: once? Twice? The same person? Two different visitors? And how best to behave when he met them all again?

  As it happened, only Chlöe Legge-Barrington was in the kitchen when he went down. The others were all out on duty. He ate porridge and two lots of bacon and eggs, while they chatted about holidays in Cornwall.

  There was nothing he could do about the cinema truck: it had a broken rear axle. He saddled Daisy.

  “Come again, won’t you?” Chlöe said.

  He took a risk, and said: “Certainly – if I’ve got the strength,” and smiled as he looked her in the eye. She didn’t even blink. Which could mean everything, or nothing.

  * * *

  The snowstorm slackened and gave way to blue skies. The Chinese squad dug and dug and when two good runways were open, Wing H.Q. ordered a D.O.P. for the following day, at dawn.

  Munday hated these early patrols.

  He came from a large family, mainly girls, who lived in a Cotswold manor house with no lack of servants. His father had inherited a small coal mine in Nottinghamshire, and so money came naturally out of the ground, not that the boy ever saw it happen. He drifted through school. At home, his sisters ran and fetched for him, laughed at all his jokes and treated him like a young god. In uniform, they said, he was quite stunning. He was eager to win a few medals. Marching came as a nasty shock. His feet ached abominably. The more he saw of the infantry – especially bayonets, which actually had a channel for the blood to run out – the more he liked the R.F.C.

  But he could never get used to being shaken awake at 4.30 a.m.

  He dressed mechanically, shivering as he dragged uniform over pyjamas, and stumbled through icy blackness, a scarf around his mouth. The mess was chilly. He chewed on boiled eggs and bread. Always the same awful food for the early patrol. Why? Nobody knew. Tradition. Hot tea, too, but Munday knew how his bladder would feel about that in an hour, at fifteen thousand feet. He would have to take off his gauntlets and his gloves and unbutton two or three outer layers and fumble his way through the flies of his underwear, and by the time his thing had done its stuff it would be dead of frostbite.

  There was just enough light to read the instrument panel when C-Flight took off. Spud Ogilvy led the first three aircraft, with the Russians flanking him. Munday led the others, angled to the right so as to avoid Ogilvy’s wash. They settled down to a hard climb, and this soon pumped the sun over the horizon. It began as a sliver of deep red. With every thousand feet it swelled and burned brighter until it was a white-hot disc that made the eyes water. An armada of aircraft could be hiding there; and if they were, they would have seen the Pups by now. There was nothing Ogilvy could do about that except keep on climbing.

  They crossed the Lines at about nine thousand feet. Normally the German batteries would be spattering the sky with Archie. Today a silver-grey mist was enough to keep the German gunners indoors. Munday looked down and envied them, especially their warm feet. Cold was seeping up his legs. Already his toes had lost all feeling.

  A freezing gale swept past his cockpit, and it was impossible to search the sky without getting hit in the face. Munday searched the sky. There was something colder than the gale, and that was terror.

  On his second patrol – weeks ago by now – he had watched from high above as Ogilvy stalked a Hun two-seater, crept closer, and killed it with a five-second burst. Whenever Munday felt himself getting weary, or cocky, or bored, he terrified himself with the memory of that burst of flame, lemon-yellow with a core of red, that jumped out of the two-seater and exploded it in a flurry of wings and body and tail.

  Ogilvy took them up to seventeen thousand feet. There they floated, and froze, for an hour.

  One of Munday’s wingmen was a Canadian called Barnard, very keen, not very bright, too tall for his weight but filling out month by month. Barnard didn’t mind the cold but the height bothered him. His ribs were thin. Running made him dizzy. Now, at this height, his Pup wobbled as his lungs laboured to drag in enough thin air, and there was never enough. He knew he was getting sleepy, he knew that was bad. Munday was waving to him, pointing up. Barnard’s eyes were watering long before he found a tiny cluster of Albatros scouts, almost transparent against the bleached blue of the sky. Jesus, Barnard thought. How can they breathe up there?

  For twenty minutes, nothing changed.

  Barnard was no longer sleepy. From somewhere his body had found a reserve of energy and pumped it into his brain, with the message: Stay awake, godammit, that’s death floating up there. A muscle in his left thigh was jumping, which was a waste of energy, so he told it to stop, and it ignored him, so he hit it with his fist, and something went bang! in the engine. The Pup shuddered violently. Oil sprayed on the windscreen until it overflowed and ragged black gobbets blew into the cockpit. Barnard stuck his head out to see what was wrong. Oil slammed into his face, oil covered his goggles. He was blind and the Pup was shaking like a wet dog. It shook Barnard too. His hands lost the controls and blundered about, found the switch and killed the engine.

  Instant, total peace. No racket, no shuddering, just black blindness. He dragged off his goggles and saw the rest of the flight, many hundreds of feet above and ahead, droning away from him. He eased the Pup through a gentle turn and began the long glide home.

  You could glide a mile for every thousand feet of height you lost. Seventeen thousand feet should be e
nough to see him across the Lines, provided nobody interfered, provided the headwind wasn’t too bad, and provided all the Hun gunners were blind drunk. Barnard forgot all that nonsense and concentrated on nursing his Pup so that it neither stalled nor dived but simply slid down a slope between the two.

  He had fifteen hundred feet in hand as he crossed the Lines. The wind whistled softly in the wires, and everything was so quiet that he could hear men shouting orders, the hoot of a distant locomotive, the whack of someone pounding in stakes. Nobody fired on him. The mist was still too thick. Now that was a fat slice of luck.

  Mist, of course, was a two-sided coin. It hid Barnard from the ground and then it hid the ground from Barnard. It hid a company of pioneers who were marching back to their billets after a weary night of digging new reserve trenches. Their boots, and the blanketing fog, dampened the soft whistle of the approaching Pup. When they saw its silhouette charging at them, head-high, they scattered. Barnard saw none of this but he felt the jolt when the right lower wing clipped a running man.

  The Pup’s speed was about fifty miles an hour, more than enough to break the man’s back. Barnard was luckier. His machine left its undercarriage in a stone wall and racketed across a sea of ancient shell-holes.

  The pioneers pulled him out of the wreckage, carried him back to the roadway and laid him beside the dead soldier. Barnard’s forehead had whacked the gunsight and he was out cold. Of the two men, Barnard – blackened and bloodied – looked far the worse.

  * * *

  The mist that saved Barnard was the prelude to a week of rain. It dissolved the snow and saturated the Western Front and settled down to a persistent drizzle.

  “Not like English rain, is it?” the padre said. “English rain generally has the decency to turn up when needed, do its stuff, maybe with a spot of thunder and lightning to add to the merriment, and then buzz off and rain on somebody else, like the Norwegians. But this French rain ... I mean, look at it. Day after day. You can’t tell me that’s proper weather. That’s just ...”

  “Incontinence,” said Lynch.

  “Exactly.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Cleve-Cutler said. They were sitting in the mess. At the distant edge of the airfield, a row of Chinese labourers could be dimly seen, digging a drainage trench. He knew it would do no good. Fifty trenches might get rid of the surface water, but one alone was useless. Still, he let them dig on. “Total piffle,” he said. “Utter tosh.”

  “Well, if you’re going to baffle us with science,” Dando said.

  “I grew up in Cornwall. It rained like this all year round. My cousins have got webbed feet.”

  “Not uncommon in Britain, actually. We are nearer the primeval swamp than we like to think.”

  “About ten yards away,” Lynch said. “At a guess.”

  Plug Gerrish, dozing in an armchair, yawned hugely and said: “O’Neill sent us another postcard. He wants us to send him cheese. Says you can’t get a decent Rocquefort in London now. Scandalous, he says.” Gerrish yawned again.

  The C.O. watched a soldier on a bicycle raise waves as he cut across a large puddle. “I bet it’s pouring in London right now,” he said.

  “If I were you, sir,” Dando said, “I’d go there and see for myself. After all, nothing much is likely to happen here, is it?”

  Cleve-Cutler hadn’t been to England for a year. He telephoned Wing and got ten days’ leave. Within an hour he was in a car, heading for Boulogne.

  Charles Dash was given permission to have another stab at rescuing the cinema truck, which was now assumed to be stuck in mud. He took Daisy. As the horse splashed unhurriedly to Beauquesne, there was plenty for Dash to brood over.

  It was assumed by both their families that he would marry his cousin Jessica. She looked a little like him: lots of freckles, good strong legs. They had been warm friends for years, taken holidays together (Jessica with Charles’ family to Cornwall; Charles with Jessica’s family to Norfolk), and they shared an interest in horses and dogs. They knew all about breeding, so Charles’ father saw no need to explain the whys and hows of sex to him. You couldn’t live in rural Herefordshire without seeing it all around you, bulls and stallions and rams going at it like steam-hammers. Ample time to discuss all that with the boy when marriage loomed; and when suddenly the boy went off and joined the Yeomanry his father merely told him to remember always that he was a gentleman but that not all ladies were, well, ladies. “Aren’t they?” Charles said. His father winked and tapped one side of his nose and walked away, duty done. Charles was baffled. He felt sorry for his father, who was forty-four and losing his wits. Well, he’d had a good innings.

  Then, when some nameless nymph – well, all right, one of six names, but which? – slid out of the blackness and into his bed and stole his virginity, twice in one night, it was not only a delicious experience, it was a severe shock. This wasn’t how it was done in Herefordshire. In Herefordshire a chap took a girl to lots of dances and proposed marriage and after much fuss and expense they went off somewhere and had a honeymoon. It all took time, and announcements, and organisation. It didn’t happen like a thunderclap in the night. Two thunderclaps. For days afterwards he could think of nothing else.

  For his second visit, Dash took his razor kit, toothbrush and pyjamas. Also a bottle of Madeira. This time each of the F.A.N.Y. nurses welcomed him with a kiss on the cheek. Lucy Knight (small, curly black hair, face like a cherub) was the last to kiss him and she saw how flattered and flustered he was. “Life’s too short,” she told him. “Men are so slow.”

  “Only because bullets are faster.” Did that make sense? It sounded rather clever.

  “All the more reason!” she said, cheerfully. “And you can’t tell me anything about bullets. I’ve been up to the elbows in gore all afternoon.”

  During supper he wondered whether it was Lucy.

  He had few clues. One was the memory of the startling sensation of breasts brushing his skin. Lucy certainly had initiative, and a chest that drew his glance like a magnet. To take his mind off it he talked to Chlöe Legge-Barrington. She had an athlete’s figure and a restless energy that he found exciting. Nothing wrong with her chest, either. Could it be Chlöe? She urged him to take more cabbage. “Fortifies the blood,” she said. A secret signal? He took more cabbage.

  After supper they all played whist. When he tried to shuffle the pack, the cards sprayed from his fingers. “I’m not much good at this, I’m afraid,” he said. Edith Reynolds said, “Men are only good at two things,” which provoked a flurry of comic suggestions. Edith said no more; simply smiled. Wonderful lips. Chest okay, too. Might well be Edith ... The Madeira went around. Jane Brackenden proposed a toast to women’s suffrage. “Equality now!” she cried.

  “Onwards!” said Nancy Hicks-Potter.

  “And upwards!” said Laura da Silva.

  Dash stopped trying to guess. They were all topping girls, all. They all had crystal-clear, expensively educated voices. They all had spiffing chests.

  The whist ended. He said goodnight, took his candle, hurried upstairs, got into his pyjamas, then had a better idea and took them off. The bed was so cold that he jumped out and put them on again. He lay awake, occasionally squirming as lust visited his loins. Eventually Madeira overtook lust and he slept.

  He awoke smoothly and swiftly when the bed was invaded by a silky tangle of limbs. By now he was a veteran of this business of nocturnal seduction; he knew exactly how to handle it. He did a lot of handling and a steady amount of kissing and he did his level best to prolong the thrill, until his body leapfrogged his good intentions and exploded like a firecracker and left him as limp as yesterday’s salad. That was the time to speak. The room was so black that he could make out nothing, not even the shape of her head. What to say? In his mind he rehearsed phrases. May I know your name? Awfully formal. What about: I don’t think we’ve been introduced ... Not in good taste. He cleared his throat. As he did, she slid out of the sheets. “I say ...” he whispered.
The door clicked shut. Too late.

  Twice more, that night.

  He awoke feeling fuzzy in the head and stiff in the thighs and bruised about the balls. Everyone was at breakfast, full of chat and bustle. He ate an enormous meal and realised how impossible it was now to ask anyone anything. He should have spoken up at the time, in bed. But if he had done so, she might never have returned. No secret, no sex. He was caught in a wonderful trap.

  Nothing he had been taught at Monmouth School had prepared him for this. At Monmouth he had dissected a frog and got the impression that reproduction was all a matter of tubes. Well, clearly that was not an adequate explanation.

  It was time to leave. He kissed everyone and said goodbye. Everything was delightfully bewildering.

  When Daisy carried him into Pepriac, he was ravenously hungry and so pale that his freckles seemed to float on his skin. He ate, and immediately went to bed. “Give it up,” Simms advised. “It’s only Charlie Chaplin, after all.” But Dash shook his head. “I can’t disappoint everyone now. Isn’t this what we’re fighting for?” Simms stared. “No, it isn’t,” he said. Dash blinked three times and then his eyes closed.