Also available by Robert Westall
Antique Dust: Ghost Stories
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral
ROBERT WESTALL
SPECTRAL SHADOWS
Three Supernatural Novellas
Blackham’s Wimpey
The Wheatstone Pond
Yaxley’s Cat
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Spectral Shadows by Robert Westall
First Valancourt Books edition 2016
‘Blackham’s Wimpey’ originally appeared in Break of Dark, published by Chatto & Windus in 1982
Yaxley’s Cat first published by Macmillan in 1991
The Wheatstone Pond first published by Viking in 1993
Copyright © Robert Westall, 1982, 1991, 1993
This compilation copyright © The Estate of Robert Westall, 2016
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Cover by Henry Petrides
BLACKHAM’S WIMPEY
Yes, I do fly in bombers. What’s it like, bombing Germany? Do you really want to know? OK, brace yourself.
Two more pints, please, George.
Well, I expect you’ve been bombed by Jerry yourself. Plenty of bomb damage around. And there’s you, sitting down in your shelter, behind your steel plate and three feet of earth, near wetting yourself and hoping the next bomb hasn’t got your number on it. Well, being in a bomber’s a bit like that, only the nasty bangs are coming up at you, instead of down.
But that’s where any similarity stops. You see, a Wimpey – a Wellington bomber to you – isn’t made of steel. It’s made of cloth, stretched over a few aluminium tubes; a bit like a tent. If you try hard enough, and sometimes even when you’re not trying, you can put your finger straight through the cloth and waggle it in the slipstream outside. So when a shell bursts near you, you can see the shell-splinters going right through your fuselage, like a horizontal shower of rain, and out the other side. I suppose I’m lucky, being the wireless operator; I’ve got two big radio sets to duck behind. Though by the time you’ve ducked, it’s too late anyway.
And suppose you, down in your shelter, were sitting on about two tons of TNT just waiting for an excuse to blow up. And about a thousand gallons of petrol, in leaky tins that stink the place out, so you never dare light up a fag, however much you need one. And your air-raid shelter’s in a bloody express lift that keeps going up and down without warning, so there’s always a smell of spew about the place, even when your skipper’s not taking violent evasive action. And you can’t breathe properly without a dirty great mask over your face; and when you’ve got a head cold it’s so bloody freezing you have to keep taking off your mask to knock an icicle off your nose.
No, it’s not much like what you see on the movies.
And I think wireless ops have the worst job – because I am one. You can’t see a thing that’s going on, being sat right in the middle of the crate. There’s bits of celluloid windows in the side, but they’re brown with oil and smoke from the engines – they’re never cleaned, not like the windscreen and gun-turrets. My oppo, the navigator, even he’s got a little astrodome over his head. It’s supposed to be for taking directions from the stars – doesn’t that sound romantic? – but if he’s ever reduced to navigating that way, we’re really in trouble. He just uses it for being nosy, so he can add his two-pennyworth on the intercom.
Because it’s the intercom that keeps us sane. You see, in a bomber, the only thing you can hear is the noise of the engines; it blots out even the racket of bursting flak. And you get so used to it, it gets to seem like silence – unless one of the engines starts to pack up, then you notice fast enough. But otherwise, when you’re over target, you can see bomb-bursts and shell-bursts and flak-trails and even another crate buy it, and it’s just like a silent movie, especially with your ears muffled up inside your helmet. But there’s always the good old intercom, and all the lads yakking down it and even cracking mad jokes and laughing till the skipper shuts them up, like a teacher with a rowdy class. And it makes you feel not alone. And a good skipper keeps asking you every few minutes if you’re OK, and that helps too.
My job’s all listening, not looking. I have my eyes shut most of the time; might as well be blind. That’s an idea, isn’t it; blind wireless ops – save the fit men for the army? Anyway, as I said, my job’s listening. I’ve got two radio sets: RT and WT. WT’s for long-distance; Morse code only. It gives us directions from the top brass, like old Butcher Harris sitting on his arse at High Wycombe. And the only thing he’ll tell you is to pack up and come home, ’cause the cloud’s too thick to see the target, or maybe Fatty Goering’s not at home that night ’cause he’s sleeping at his aunty’s. Now that’s a little signal not to miss; if you do, you’ll find yourself doing a solo raid on Berlin. Oh, I know that sounds great, like something out of the Boy’s Own Paper, but actually it’s not ’cause all over Europe there are little Jerry night-fighters sitting on their little nests of radar, just waiting for you to fly over slow as the morning milk cart. That’s why we have these thousand-bomber raids: so Jerry’ll have so many to think about, he’ll run around in circles like a kid with presents on Christmas morning. Safety in numbers: if they’re chopping some other poor sod, they’re not chopping you. So I listen carefully for that little WT signal, which is not easy when the skipper’s taking evasive action and the engines are doing their best to take thirty-six hours leave of absence from the wings, and our guns are going full blast and everyone’s talking on the intercom at once. They’re not supposed to, but try and stop them when the balloon’s going up.
That’s all about the WT, except you never use it. Jerry would get a fix on you in a flash; then you’d have company. Only time you use it is if you ditch in the sea coming home. Then you send out Mayday on five hundred kilocycles and hold the Morse-key down for thirty seconds to give them a fix on you. Trouble is, everybody’s listening on five hundred kilocycles – air-sea rescue, German air-sea rescue, U-boats . . . take your pick. I’ve heard of lads freezing to death in the sea while two lots of silly buggers were fighting over them.
The RT – intercom in all your war movies – is a worry too. You’ve got to keep the volume just right, see, so no one outside the crate hears a squeak. Turn the knob too far – easy enough done wearing icy gloves – and Himmler can hear you fart. I’m not shooting a line, honest!
So what keeps us going? Actually, we get a lot of laughs. Remember the time you and me were outside Beaky’s study waiting to be caned, and we couldn’t stop laughing? Well, it’s like that all the time, almost. And we’ve got Dadda. Dadda’s a great guy for laughs. Who’s Dadda? the child asks. Dadda’s our skipper – the big boss-man. Dadda’s like God, only cleverer. Dadda has changed my life, the way God never did. I remember the first time we saw him.
We arrived at Lower Oadby one January dusk in ’43. Flying Wimpey IIIs. Just the five of us, no Dadda then. The adjutant hadn’t time to bother with us; there was an op on that night, so he just shoved us into a barrack-room with the crew of L-Love. L-Love were a bloody good crew – done twenty-two ops, but they weren’t big-headed about it. They taught us a lot while they were getting kitted up. Things like always flying dead in the middle of the bomber stream because the Jerry fighters always nibbled
at the edges. They weren’t much older than us and made us laugh a lot, though we did wonder a bit why they looked so pale and sweaty; the barrack wasn’t all that warm. And their rear-gunner was chewing gum so hard, his muscles kept standing out in knots all along his jaw. Anyway, they barged out saying don’t do anything in Lower Oadby they wouldn’t do. If you’ve seen Lower Oadby that’s a big joke.
‘They’re OK,’ said Matt, our only pilot, and we drifted across into their half of the barrack-room, inspecting their pin-ups and the photos of their girlfriends stuck on their lockers and touching their spare lucky silk stockings and rabbits’ feet. Not being nosy; just looking and touching so that a bit of their luck would rub off on us. They’d shot down an Me 110, a twittish night-fighter that had flown slowly past them in the dark without even noticing they were there. Apparently it had blown up like the Fourth of July, and one of its prop-blades had lodged in L-Love’s main spar without hurting anybody. Battered and rusting, it now hung over their skipper’s bunk.
The hut was quiet and peaceful. We stoked up the stove till its stovepipe glowed cherry-red halfway to the ceiling, and we all snored off like babes.
The barrack-room door banged open with a gust of snow at four in the morning. Somebody shoved on all the lights.
‘Good shopping trip?’ shouted Billy the Kid, our rear-gunner, always first with a wisecrack. We all sat up.
It wasn’t them. It was three stupid-looking RAF police with snow on their greatcoats. Carrying big canvas sacks in each hand. They didn’t say a word to us, just started grabbing all L-Love’s kit and golf clubs and spare rabbits’ feet and stuffing them into the sacks. Ripping down the pin-ups off the lockers.
‘Hey!’ shouted Matt. ‘What the hell you doing?’
One of the police turned to him, his face blank as a Gestapo thug’s just before he pulls the trigger. ‘They got the chop,’ he said. ‘Tried to land at Tuddenham and overshot the runway.’ He turned away and began throwing stuff into his bags with renewed vigour. None of them looked at us again. We sat up in bed in our striped pyjamas, hating them. Until they tried to take the prop-blade off the wall. Then Matt was out of bed in a flash.
‘Leave that alone. That’s ours.’
The policeman reached for the blade.
‘It’s ours, I tell you!’ screeched Matt. ‘They gave it to us.’
‘Yeah,’ we all yelled. ‘They gave it to us.’
The policeman shrugged. He knew we were lying. But Matt’s a big lad and he was mad as hell. They finished stuffing stuff into bags and left, jamming off the lights.
‘Bastards,’ said Matt, getting back into bed.
‘They’re only doing their job,’ said Kit, the navigator. ‘I don’t expect they like doing it, over and over again.’
‘Some guys enjoy being undertakers . . .’
Nobody said anything for some time. Then, in the dark, Kit said, ‘They were a good bunch. I’m glad they all went together.’ Which was a pretty bloody stupid thing to say, but what isn’t bloody stupid on that kind of occasion?
Billy the Kid went out to the bogs and was very sick. We listened. In a way he was being sick for all of us; saved us getting out of bed.
We kept the prop-blade a week, then threw it away. It sort of filled the whole hut, like the evil eye of the little yellow god. We never tried interfering with those policemen again, except once.
Next morning, they ran us down to the dispersals to see our new crate, C-Charlie. She really was brand-new, which was funny. They normally give green crews the clapped-out old crates. Why waste a good bomber on a mob who are five times more likely to get shot down than anybody else?
It was bloody freezing, even wearing two sets of long johns and a greatcoat. We mooched around her, kicking things and grumbling; feeling totally unreal and farting and belching all over the crate and giggling every time. Does that shock you? It was partly, I suppose, to show how we felt about everything, and partly to try and get something hard and solid out of our guts which would never go away again. You probably know, that’s the way fear feels. And Billy the Kid kept bleating plaintively about who the other pilot would be.
‘Me,’ said Matt. ‘There is no other pilot. They’re trying to save pilots.’
‘If they blew this bloody crate up now, they could save a navigator as well. And a wireless op and two air-gunners and a lot of petrol.’ Kit was the real joker, even then. Life and soul of the party. Only, his big blue eyes were stary that morning, the whites showing all round like they seldom have since.
We dropped back on to the tarmac.
‘I always wanted to be a landgirl,’ said Matt. Since he was six foot two and the only one of us who had to shave every day, it was quite funny.
We stood and talked and froze. We found out that a year ago, we’d all been in the sixth form. We found out that Matt had been the top pilot of his course, and Kit top navigator. Mad Paul, the front-gunner, and Billy the Kid were top stuff, too; reaction times like greased lightning. (They played a stupid game involving slapping each other’s hands; anyone else who joined in always lost, and it really hurt.) Only I was mediocre. I had passed-out halfway down the wireless ops list.
Still we stood. Were we all there was? Was Matt’s horrible idea coming true? Did we have to take this thing to Germany on our own?
Just then a thirty-hundredweight drove up. A pair of long, thin legs emerged from the cab, stooped shoulders and a cap pushed back to display a wrinkled forehead and balding nut. He didn’t look at us; he walked across to C-Charlie with the precarious dignity of a heron hunting frogs. We gaped at the apparition. His uniform, which carried wings and a flight-lieutenant’s rings, was thin and grey as paper.
‘Look at that uniform,’ said Matt, not bothering to lower his voice. ‘He’s got some time in.’
‘Probably in the pay office,’ said Kit.
‘You can make blues look like that over a weekend,’ said Billy. ‘Bit of bleach in the water, and a razor-blade to scrape the fluff off . . .’
The apparition kicked the starboard tyre violently, stalked on and began doing a Tarzan-act on the starboard flaps. The Wimpey is a pretty whippy, flexible sort of plane. Some pilots compare flying one to lying in a hammock, others to making love to a woman. The steering-column keeps nudging your chest, the engines nod up and down in a regular rhythm and the wing tips actually flap in flight. This guy had the whole plane rocking in motion, the way he was thumping hell out of her.
‘Shall I go and tell him it’s government property?’ asked Matt. We all got those stupid giggles again. The apparition ignored us, until he had given the tail-wheel a final kick. Then he walked over to us.
He knew we’d been taking the mickey. He found us amusing.
‘Let’s get you into your bunny-suits,’ he said, ‘and see if this thing flies.’ We bundled into the back of his thirty-hundredweight, all except Matt, who he kept with him in the front. All I will say about the way he drove is that I was sick halfway back to the billet. Of course, I was sitting over the exhaust.
‘If he flies like he drives,’ said Kit, ‘we won’t make the coast.’
‘The German coast?’ I gasped, pulling my head back in over the tailboard.
‘The English coast,’ said Kit.
New flying-kit has a life of its own. It makes you feel like a giant panda, trussed up for its journey to the zoo. It trails things that wrap around any knob or lever available; it makes you a yard wide so you knock things off shelves that you think are miles away. Passing anybody else in the confines of a Wimpey is like dancing with a stuffed bear. You feel sweaty and cut off from everything.
Dadda’s gear wasn’t like that. He had battered all the life out of it; it fitted him like a second skin. In places it was creased and wrinkled like rhinoceros hide; in other places it was worn smooth and shiny. There were great dirty patches near the most-used pockets. He looked more like a decrepit heron than ever.
We took of
f smoothly and easily. Piece of cake, I thought. Then he told me I had too much volume on the intercom, though I don’t know how the hell he knew. Then he told Kit he talked too much. I was still laughing silently about that when the WT set hurled itself violently into my side; lots of painful knobs too. Next second, I was dangling, helpless, in the middle of the fuselage on the end of my safety-harness. Next second, I got the distinct impression I was hanging upside down. Certainly three pencils and a map shot up in front of my face.
I was sick again, and now there was no tailboard to lean out over. Further forward, the Elsan toilet broke loose with a terrific clatter and came sailing past my head. Thank God it was empty. First I thought my last moment had come, then I hoped it had. When I got myself together a bit, Dadda told me to turn the intercom up. I was just reaching for the knob when the world turned upside down again. I heard Kit say, in a dreamy voice,
‘He can’t fly upside-down at zero feet.’ Kit had somehow strapped and braced himself so he could look out of the astrodome. ‘I can see ducks sitting in mud over my head.’ His face was lit up like a child’s at a funfair. After that, all I did was to keep my eyes shut, play with the intercom knob, and try to keep my guts inside me. And listen to Kit’s running commentary.
‘I think we’re strafing Spalding . . .
‘Two cars have just crashed . . .
‘He’s knocked three bricks off a factory chimney . . .
‘We’re flying down a canal – below the level of the banks . . .’
Mind you, I wouldn’t swear to the truth of any of it. Kit always shot a line, given the least chance. But it felt like it. And there was a lump of bracken caught in our closed bomb-doors afterwards; that even Kit couldn’t have faked.
We finally reached the ground and crawled out. Dadda began belting hell out of the crate again, this time in the company of the ground-crew sergeant, and not sounding too pleased.
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