‘I won’t be sleeping. I’ll be remembering you.’
I didn’t respond immediately. I was thinking the thought that she had put into words. It was: Christ: this is fast, isn’t it?
‘I want to see you again.’ It’s what happens when I get close to a woman. My brain begins to short-circuit, and I start to repeat myself.
‘I come down on my own some weekends; you might see me then.’
‘You didn’t tell me what your boat is called . . .’
‘The Lady Grace . . . it’s a twenty-footer; white and red – you can’t miss her.’ Then she sensed my movement and asked, ‘Are you laughing?’
‘It’s nothing.’ I was speaking into her hair, and unromantically realizing that my bum was cold. ‘God just played a joke on me. I’ll tell you another time.’
I helped James, Maggs, and Jason their helper, wash and dry the glasses, and swept the fag packets out of the bar. People can be pigs. Maggs had a twinkle in her eye when she asked, ‘Enjoy your walk, did you, dearie?’
I didn’t think that anyone had noticed.
I slipped out again at about 3 a.m., without disturbing anyone, and stood on the jetty not ten yards from where The Lady Grace was moored. Its long white and red hull rocked up and down gently on the swell. Leastwise; that’s what I told myself was causing it to rock.
Over breakfast in the morning Dieter suddenly said, ‘I looked out of the window last night Papa: I wanted to see the moon.’
‘And did you see it?’
‘Yes; and I saw you talking to that lady up against the wall.’
James looked uncomfortable. He said, ‘Maybe you didn’t, old man.’
‘Yes he did,’ I said firmly. ‘That’s how grown-ups sometimes stand if they need to talk,’ I told the boy.
‘Martin doesn’t call it talking.’
‘Who’s Martin?’
‘Martin’s in my class; sometimes we go fishing on the Arun with his dad . . .’
‘What does Martin call it then?’ Why is it always me that gets to ask the stupid question?
‘Martin calls it fucking.’
Maggs laughed through a mouthful of tea, and blew it all over the table.
I couldn’t believe the progress they’d made with the prefab. I reckoned I would move in when I next came back. We fired Kate up, and drove into Chichester. Carlo and Dieter wolfed down Knickerbocker Glories and lemonade in the tea shop opposite the cathedral, and then we found a toy shop. They chose Lottie a big floppy doll with yellow pigtails. Carlo wanted a small soft grey donkey, and Dieter a Dinky Toy: he chose a little Austin Seven.
Maggs took us all to the small flint and rubble church on Sunday. It didn’t matter that we were unbelievers, she told us – it would do the kids good. Each of the children held one of my hands when we walked into church, and all the old dears turned to smile at us. A couple of children turned to look at Dieter. He grinned back at them. Evelyn Valentine sat near the back with her husband, and a group I assumed they knew – they all had that together look. She smiled at me too. He looked as if he wanted me dead.
We picnicked on the strand, and paddled in the afternoon, and before he went to bed Dieter insisted on writing a letter to accompany Lottie’s doll. I sat at the dining table with him to watch him write. He held his tongue between his teeth as he concentrated. I couldn’t help feeling that his brother would have been proud of him. I explained that I didn’t know when I’d be going back to Germany. He wrinkled up his nose in a smile. ‘That doesn’t matter, Papa, as long as they go together.’ He read Carlo and me a story before they went to bed: Carlo still didn’t say all that much – which worried me. Then I packed, and drove back to Kent in my little Singer. It was warm enough to have the lid off all the way, and the moon was high before I arrived at the Nissen hut we sometimes camped in between flights. I think that it had been a store shed during the war . . . all the proper accommodation had been in requisitioned houses. Although the blankets felt damp I was asleep before eleven, and dreaming of my old Lancaster, Tuesday. That’s often the way: she creeps up on me when I least expect it.
In the morning Scroton threw the door of the small hut open with a bang. Sunlight flooded in. He bellowed, ‘Hands on socks . . .’ as if we were still in the RAF, and doing our square-bashing.
‘Bugger off, Dave.’
‘What’s the matter with you this morning?’ ‘I’m not awake yet. Give me a couple of ticks.’ I washed in cold water under the tap outside. I’ve always loved that first brief skirmish with cold water in the morning. I don’t shave. I burned my face a bit in the war, and it no longer does beards. Part of me said that that was handy, but another part said that it would have been nice to have the choice.
Scroton kept up some semblance of conversation with me while I dressed. I asked him, ‘What’s on the board for us?’ Old Man Halton kept an ops board in our office at Lympne; just like the old days.
‘Nothing yet. I thought we’d motor over to the Parachute for breakfast.’
‘We’ll walk: it will be good for us.’ The Parachute Cafe was less than a mile away. It had been set up to service the Spitfire and Typhoon pilots who flew from Lympne in the war. It just about clung on with custom from the commercial ops at the airfield, and Sunday afternoon drivers. Its breakfast fry-ups were famous for miles. We waved to Dick Barton as we walked out of the main gate. We called him that, and sang the well-known theme tune whenever we took him drinking, because he always wore a long trench coat and dark trilby hat. He never worked out that the image was destroyed by the upright bicycle he pedalled to work. He was Halton’s manager. He’d been a squadron leader in the war, and consequently had zero organizing abilities: the office was always in a mess, and our schedules lurched from week to week. We both were still la-la-ing the radio programme theme music, and laughing, as we strolled into the Parachute.
Dick Barton’s private office bore a neatly printed cardboard label which said Squadron Leader Brunton. That was his real name: he said that it was an old Scottish clan name, but we didn’t believe him. He shot out of the door when we waddled into the General Office, waving a flimsy in the air. He grinned. ‘Orders. Your target for tonight.’
‘Going back to bomb Germany, boss?’
‘No, Coventry. You’re to drive up to Croydon. They should have finished the maintenance on Dorothy by the time you get there. File papers for Amsterdam: pick up a full load of car parts there, and fly them to Coventry for tomorrow.’
‘And after that?’
‘I’ll phone. Don’t worry, Charlie; we won’t forget you.’
Dave asked, ‘Who’ll take Whisky?’ To tell you the truth he didn’t like anyone else flying her.
‘I haven’t got anything for her today, old boy. If anything crops up Milton can have her. He’s around here somewhere.’
That made it worse. Milton had done all of his wartime flying on singles, and was a clumsy sod with anything bigger. Scroton made the upside-down smile.
‘Have they got that big runway at Amsterdam cleared for use yet?’
‘Don’t know, old boy; find out when you’re there, and let me know. I’ll update the Airfield Notes for everyone else.’
The problem was that Brunton was paid more than the rest of us, so that arguing with him was useless. Besides, he’d promised us all tickets for the London Olympics through some shady contact, and we didn’t want to bugger that up. As usual, the fire crew had pulled the tender out of her shed, parked it behind the old maintenance workshop and sloped off to the Parachute themselves. We took my car alongside her and, with a yard of rubber tube, affected the transfer of about six gallons of petrol in just a few minutes. If Halton was too broke or too mean to pay our passage up to London, I didn’t see why we should have to bear the cost ourselves.
The bastards had locked the side gate of Croydon Airport – the one on the Purley Road – so we had to trundle around to the main gate, and wait in the queue. Before he lifted the barrier for us I asked the old soldier on the gat
e why.
‘The Customs insisted. They said there was too many watches and fags going out through it. Don’t worry, they say they’re going to scrap the main gate soon, and you’ll be able to drive right up to the terminal building just like before the war.’
It was the new world we made after the war: every time you turned your back someone made up a new rule, or a new law, and there was something else you couldn’t do. And new taxes? Scroton once told me if there was a hygienic way of measuring shit, they’d tax that too.
While I was waiting for the barrier to go up I noticed the car waiting to leave on the other side. It was a big brown Austin 12 Saloon with black wings; polished so you could see your face in it. The driver was a young man with a hard face, short hair, a dark suit and a Guards tie. The woman sitting in the back was checking her lipstick in a compact mirror: then she accidentally made eye contact with me. I knew her; or rather we had known each other. Rather too well. She smiled quickly, and then looked away. As far as I was concerned the car still had War Office written all over it. If Dolly was sitting in the back instead of driving it, she must have gone up in the world. That was interesting.
I filed our papers with Flying Control and Customs, and waited for clearance. The Customs clerk had dirty fingernails, and an ink stain on the inside of the index finger of his right hand. That used to be the identifying badge of clerks and schoolboys; you never see it now.
Dorothy’s proper engineer was named Mortensen: the same as the Blackpool player who scored in the FA Cup. Because I’m small I hate big guys, and Mortensen was so tall that they’d have to raise Tower Bridge if he wanted to walk underneath: you get the picture. His hair was thinning before its time, and he sweated a lot. He also farted more frequently and pungently than any person I’ve met before or since. For Dorothy’s positioning flip to Amsterdam Scroton quarantined Mortensen in the cargo bay after he’d got her off the ground. I sat in the engineer and co-pilot’s seat alongside Dave. I asked him, ‘What’s your route?’
‘Down to the Channel and turn right; no, left: that’s it. If I turn right we’ll end up over the Atlantic. I thought I’d fly over base, and see if that sod Milton is rogering Whisky.’
None of the independent cargo carriers were allowed to use the direct corridors between London and the main European capitals, because BOAC and BEA had complained that we were getting in their way. Even so, Scroton was routing us a lot further south than we needed to be.
We roared across the outfield at Lympne at about a hundred feet. Whisky was tucked away on a hard standing down in the Dell. Her cargo door was open, but nobody seemed to be about. Brunton ran out of his office as we crossed, and shook his fist at us, although he would have forgotten all about it by the next time we met him: part of his charm. Dave put Dorothy into a hard climbing turn to port, her engines roaring like a quartet of lionesses. When she was empty she flew like an angel, and I decided that I loved her very much. I thought that, in Whisky, Dave had misplaced his affections.
Scroton asked me, ‘Get your end away over the weekend?’
‘Yes; as a matter of fact I did. You?’
‘No. Funny thing is that I wouldn’t have fancied it if it had been on offer. I want to see Magda again. I’ve asked the Old Man to send me back to Berlin.’
‘She’s a whore, Dave.’
‘I know. I can’t help it.’
I hadn’t been able to help it myself once, when I loved a girl who was a generous, but undiscriminating lover . . . but I wasn’t going to encourage him. Mortensen came back up for his seat on the let down to Amsterdam. I strapped into the seat behind them, facing my radios, and introduced us to the Tower.
The way the car-parts scam worked was this. Immediately after the war, when our light industry was changing gear from wartime to peacetime production, there was a shortage of components for products for the domestic market; especially cars – we had never needed chromed door handles during the war, for example, but we needed them now. So when we got going again we imported some items from Europe. The deal was that if the importation was from a war-ravaged country the Customs duty was low – that way we were encouraging the rebuilding of their industries. On the other hand, if the items came from a country that had managed to stay out of the war, and just profit from it, like one of the three Ses – Switzerland, Sweden or Spain – then the duty was high – not to penalize them for being the cowardly, uncommitted money-grubbing neutral bastards that they were, you understand; it was just to encourage the others. The knack for the car companies was to buy their parts from these previously neutral countries, where they were high-quality and cheap, slide them across Europe’s porous borders, and then import them from a European airport claiming the reconstruction low rate of duty. Everyone was at it.
I hated the car-parts run anyway. The boxes of metal components pushed Dorothy close to her maximum load, and she showed it – crawling around the peritrack on the ground, and wallowing like a hippo once we got her into the air: these loads scared us.
Mid-afternoon. They had cleared and extended the main runway, which wasn’t a bad thing because Dorothy needed every bleeding inch of it that day. If there had been a house close to the end of the runway we would have sailed slap through it. It took us twenty minutes to put nine thou on the clock, and that was it: Dorothy was going no higher. It was a good job that there weren’t any mountains between Amsterdam and Coventry because we wouldn’t have made it over them. We were over the North Sea – not high enough over it for my liking – when Mortensen tapped the four dials mounted slightly behind him to the right, snorted and said, ‘Bloody ridiculous, Skip, but our fuel’s marginal.’
I was actually squatting behind and between them. I asked, ‘What does marginal mean? Marginal for Coventry or marginal for England?’
He laughed. If Mortensen could summon up a laugh our situation can’t have been all that bad.
‘Marginal for Coventry, Charlie. You’ll see England before long.’
‘How the fuck did that happen?’ Scroton demanded.
‘We’re just using it up quicker than we should. Either it’s these tired old engines, or there’s a leak in one of the fuel cells.’
‘How much did we load?’
‘As much as Brunton authorized us for . . . it should have been enough for the trip and ten per cent . . . now it’s not.’
I said, ‘These bastards don’t float. Not at all.’
‘Shut up, Charlie,’ Dave replied. ‘I’m trying to think . . . and you’re not helping.’
We shut up and let him think. It seemed to be a long process. He was better at flying than thinking. Eventually he sighed, and said, ‘See if you can speak to Lympne. I don’t want to divert to there . . .’
‘We may not make it that far anyway,’ Mortensen said, and shrugged. ‘Sorry.’
‘Ask them where they want us to go.’
‘Why don’t we flop down onto the first piece of concrete we see?’ I asked him. ‘If there’s a leaky fuel cell we could have aviation spirit sloshing about anywhere.’
‘There isn’t a leak, trust me, Charlie. It’s just these bloody old engines. Now do what you’re bloody well told.’
‘Aye aye, Skip.’
‘And not so much of your bloody lip.’
If he was that cranky then he really was windy.
At least the radios worked. I discussed our disappearing fuel load with Halton’s chief engineer, another ex-services type. He agreed with Scroton: the engines needed a complete overhaul; they had too many hours on them. He reckoned that Cambridge was more or less on a straight line between Amdam and Coventry, and Mortensen agreed that we’d get that far, so that was that. Cambridge was an airfield run by an engineering company called Marshall’s: they’d spent the war rebuilding broken aircraft – maybe they’d be kind to Dorothy.
They weren’t: fifty miles out Lympne told us that Marshall’s couldn’t disrupt their flying programme for long enough to let us in. I’m sure that Brunton was lying to us: Ma
rshall’s would just be asking for a landing fee, and Halton didn’t want to pay it.
‘What do you want us to do then?’ I asked Brunton. ‘We’re running short of options.’
‘There’s an old bomber airfield on care and maintenance a few miles southwest of Cambridge, and on your track. It’s called Bawne. Put down there, and we’ll get a tanker over to you. Sorry about this.’
He bloody ought to be. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I’d flown from Bawne during the war, and had never wanted to go back. He came in again, and asked, ‘You still there Gulf Delta? Charlie?’
I took a deep breath.
‘Yes, boss. Your message received, and understood. Gulf Delta out.’ I found that I was speaking slowly; like an amateur. Worse than an amateur. I switched to talk through and told Scroton. I was going home, and didn’t bloody want to.
Chapter Four
Mortensen’s alimentary tract came back on line as soon as Dorothy’s main wheels kissed Bawne’s lumpy runway. He dropped an absolute stunner. It was as if the cabin had been filled with chlorine gas. We opened the side screens to vent it. The fuel situation had been more critical than he’d told us, because the starboard outer shut down of its own accord before they closed the throttles. When Scroton stopped coughing he advised, ‘You know, Engineer, that someone wrote a book about you once?’
I came in on cue, and asked, ‘What was that called, Skip?’
‘The Fart of Darkness. I think some poor beggar died in it with the words The horror, the horror on his lips. I think he must have just experienced one of Morty’s farts.’
‘At least we lived to tell the tale,’ I said.
Mortensen smiled, but he didn’t laugh. I guess he didn’t find it all that funny. Maybe he’d heard them all before.
Scroton had managed to do something that my old skipper had never mastered: he kept Dorothy on the ground as we crossed the hump, an old peak in the main runway that the RAF hadn’t ironed out. Thinking about it, maybe it was only gravity. Maybe we were just too overloaded to get airborne again without power. We taxied it as close to the buildings as we could, and then sat listening to the engines tick as they cooled. I got out and walked round her: I couldn’t smell petrol. That wasn’t surprising; I think that Mortensen had temporarily destroyed my senses of smell and taste.
The Hidden War Page 5
