The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  In the distance there was the tatty old airfield control caravan painted in faded red and white squares like a 3D chessboard. I remembered it from my Bawne days, but hadn’t realized that it was still in use. Now I watched two men descend its narrow steps to the grass, and get into an equally tatty jeep that had been parked beside it. When it drew up alongside Dorothy I saw that its driver was an overweight flight lieutenant with a Groucho Marx moustache, and the other guy was a Navy two-ringer. After wondering what the Navy was doing so far from the sea I reassigned him in my head. It was the bloody Customs.

  I was leery of Customs officers, and I’ll tell you why. Because the radio operator had the least to do in a Halton aircraft, he also completed, signed and handed in the official documents. That included the Customs General Declaration – or Gen Dec – and one of the things you had to declare was what you were hauling, and where it was from. The severe penalties for making deliberately incorrect statements gave me a problem on the car-parts runs, because we were doing it all the time.

  The fat man squeezed from behind the wheel of the jeep, and said, ‘Hello, old boy. Spot of bother? I had a signal you were coming in.’

  ‘I didn’t know that there was anyone here, sir.’ I used the word by instinct. ‘I would have given you a call up.’

  ‘Forget the sir. Just me; a few stupid policemen and my mess servant.’

  ‘We ran out of gas. Stupid really. The owner didn’t tank up enough in Amsterdam.’

  ‘Pleased to get the company, old boy. Makes it feel like a proper posting again.’

  He had that look that told you he’d been in the RAF for ever. I didn’t realize it, but so must I, because he suddenly said, ‘You were in the mob too, weren’t you? It’s written all over you.’

  I grinned. ‘You mean the worry lines? Yes. Bombers. What about you?’

  ‘Explosives and Ordnance Officer. I ran the bomb dump. That was in India most of the time.’ The skin of his face was vaguely yellowed: that accounted for it.

  ‘Miss it?’

  ‘Yes; I do, oddly enough. Better than being a caretaker of a dead airfield.’

  ‘Have you any idea when our fuel will turn up?’

  ‘Tomorrow apparently. They’ve had to make some arrangement with Marshall’s. I had your gaffer on the line: Old Man Halton. Is he as fierce as everyone says?’

  ‘No. Nothing like. He’s a very good employer.’

  ‘He says for you to book in somewhere local, and fly on in the morning.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I called the local Customs johnny. I knew that Halton would want everything done by the book.’ That’s what you think, I thought, but said, ‘Fine,’ and looked at his passenger for the first time.

  I didn’t have to tell Scroton any of this, because he was hanging out of his sliding window, earwigging. Occasionally his lips moved as he related something back to Mortensen.

  The Customs guy was tall and slim, and wore his uniform so well that you’d think it tailor-made. Perhaps it was – there were some odd types in the Customs just after the war. His cap was tipped jauntily to one side, showing you a thatch of stiff, light-coloured hair. His face was long and squared off, and it smiled and smiled and smiled. He said nothing. He was the Customs man you never wanted to meet when you had an overnight case full of duty-free fags. It was as I took this in that I recognized his attitude. I said, ‘You were in the job too.’ Not a question; a statement.

  He smiled and shook his head, but it was a distant smile, and it wasn’t an emphatic shake.

  ‘No; not quite. I was in Coastal.’ Coastal Command: the bit of the RAF which flew over miles of ocean for days at a time. They used to joke that it was the boredom which killed them. It wasn’t; it was usually the sea of course. They never quite saw themselves as the same as the rest of us.

  ‘What were you on, Sunderlands?’

  Sunderlands were giant seaplanes with more domestic accommodation than a Hamburg brothel: my girl Grace delivered them in the early days. He shook his head, and smiled again. His easy smile made you realize that he thought life was a bit of a joke. ‘No. Liberators: I was at St Mawgan.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Back of bloody beyond. The locals tried to make us welcome, but there were precious few women. What about you?’

  ‘Lancasters. I flew from here, actually. I never thought I’d come back again.’

  There was one of those ten-beat gaps in the conversation. Then he asked, ‘Shall we have a wander around? See what’s left?’

  I’d known from the start that I’d have to do it, but I hadn’t wanted to. It was good of him to offer me his company. What was odd was that the sun, low in the west, was still shining. Warm on my face. In my memory Bawne had become one of those places where it always rained.

  We walked up to one of the big hangars – there were only two. They had dragged my old Lancaster Tuesday into there, when her bomb doors fell off after one particular shaky do. In my mind I could still hear my old skipper, Grease, singing out Bomb doors gone over Germany . . . as if it had been some bloody great joke. I told the Customs man the story as we walked, then I asked him, ‘Where are you based?’

  ‘Thurleigh. The Americans are still there, but not for long. Do you know it?’

  ‘I was there once.’

  ‘You wouldn’t recognize it now. There have been big changes . . .’

  ‘Didn’t you mind the CO here calling you the Customs Johnny?’

  ‘Why should I give a bugger?’

  ‘I’m Charlie . . .’

  ‘Bob Holland.’

  We shook hands as we walked.

  The door to the big T shed still slid easily aside on greased rollers. I don’t know what I expected to find inside. Not an aeroplane at any rate. It was a bleeding car park. There were about thirty RAF lorries, up on blocks with their tyres deflated. Out on the apron again, and in the sun, I could see the Grease Pit – which is what we’d named the Nissen hut I’d lived in for months when I flew from here in 1944. It nestled up against the fences and woods, closer to the administration and domestic blocks. I don’t know why I was so reluctant to go down there.

  The Customs man asked me, ‘What have you brought in this time?’

  ‘Personally, or Dorothy’s cargo? Do you want a Gen Dec?’

  ‘Yes please; I’ll stamp it up here, and you can carry it on to Coventry. I meant what cargo?’

  ‘Car parts for William Lyons. That’s Jaguar, isn’t it?’

  He nodded, and asked me, ‘Reconstruction parts, are they? Come from the Low Countries or Germany?’

  Decision time.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so; but that’s what will be on the Customs papers eventually. There was a great fat Swiss C-54 on the next stand, and I saw the boxes transferred across from it.’

  Decision time again. For him but not for me: like the bells of hell in that song. I’d just told him the parts would be misdeclared. He was good at the ten-beat pause. Then he said, ‘Thank you, Charlie. You didn’t have to tell me that.’

  ‘I don’t know why I did. What will you do now?’

  ‘Nothing for the moment. It’s nice to know though,’ and that was it. And we were standing in front of the Grease Pit: the place I knew too well.

  He left me there. There was a padlock on the door. I could have asked for the key, I suppose, but it was actually a bit of a relief. Pete, the tail gunner, and Marty the bomb aimer both were dead. I didn’t want to think about the others, in case some of them were. Sergeants all: stars. I walked around to the back of the hut where the fence stood on the Bawne Road. The gap we’d once cut for late-night expeditions to the flesh pots of St Neots had only been roughly repaired with twists of wire – in fact it looked as if someone might still be using it. Eventually I walked away, and didn’t look back. Going back to somewhere that once was important in your life is always a mistake.

  Lieutenant Swan – such was his name – had actually offered us accommodation before I got back to
them, and Scroton had already accepted. What goes around comes around: I was going to live in the Officers’ Mess of the station I had flown from as a sergeant. We ate with him, and his senior policeman, in a dining hall full of echoes of the past. If you listened carefully you could hear all the dead men sitting down for supper. There were white lawn tablecloths and the best Mess silver . . . but not quite alone in the huge space we soon found ourselves whispering. The food was fucking awful: some things never change.

  Then Swan took us on the skite to Bawne pubs I knew better than he did. Between the meal and the pubs I slipped away for another trip of my own, in the twilight. I went out through the hole in the wire, and along the metalled road to a house I remembered. It had been lived in by a WAAF I knew. She had been kind to me. The small garden was overgrown, and a window pane had been broken. No one home. I had been right the first time; it was best not to go back. Listen, I have a piece of advice for you: stay away from empty airfields – they’re full of ghosts.

  The next morning I awoke without much of a hangover, although Dave Scroton didn’t look too good. I don’t know what had been in the Brown Windsor Soup we’d been served the night before, but it tightened up Mortensen’s sphincter miraculously. There wasn’t a squeak from him until after we landed at Coventry. The refuelling bowser from Marshall’s had been standing alongside Dorothy when we trooped out to her after breakfast, and the top-up took a bare half-hour. Once Mortensen had signed for the fuel, and declared himself satisfied, it was time to go.

  Old Man Halton’s two-tone grey Rolls-Royce was sitting alongside the cargo shed at Coventry Airport. His matching grey chauffeur opened the back door of the vehicle so that he could speak to us.

  ‘Everything OK, lads?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Halton.’

  ‘Go over and lodge the papers please, Charlie; then you and Pilot Scroton will return with me. I want you to take Whisky to Germany tonight.’ He always called his pilots Pilot; almost as if it was a rank.

  In the Customs office the one officer looked like a child of about fifteen in a navy blue uniform. He said, ‘Thank you, Mr Bassett. Mr Holland called me about you.’

  ‘Mr Holland?’

  ‘Holland, the officer at Thurleigh. He asked me to give you this.’

  This was a tin of fifty Senior Service export cigarettes with an export seal. He pushed them into the small pack I always carried for my gear. Then he turned away before I had time to ask why. Now I was a paid informant. A grass. I told you: everyone was at it in ’48. It wasn’t only the airfield that was on care and maintenance.

  In the car the Old Man mostly ignored us, and concentrated on a great file of paperwork he ploughed through. I was amused to see that his mouth moved as he read. Dave and I had one of those inconsequential conversations that you have when the boss is in earshot. Now and again the Old Man joined in, with an acidic comment that would make us laugh. He was still coughing a lot. I do remember that at one point he leaned over, tapped me on the knee to fully engage my attention, and said, ‘Come and see me next week, boy. Brunton will schedule you an appointment.’

  ‘OK, sir. What have I done this time?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about. We just have to talk about your next career. I went to an exhibition of radio technology last week. The new radios are so small and so simple that even our fools of pilots will be able to operate them.’ He smiled at Scroton to take the sting out of it. ‘The radio operator’s days in commercial flying are numbered. We’ll have to find you something else to do.’

  I suppose that it was nice to feel wanted.

  I phoned the Major from Lympne. He asked, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Sussex. I’m off to the Fatherland again. Tell Dieter that his letter to Lottie is on its way.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘What’s my house looking like?’

  ‘It has a roof on it, running water and electricity. Almost there.’

  ‘Did I ever say thank you?’

  ‘All the time. Time you stopped. The Valentines were here last night. He still thinks that you work for me, and advised me to sack you. Apparently he’s a Special Constable in the City in his spare time, and they’ve been giving him lectures about Communists and freethinkers. He definitely thinks you’re a freethinker.’ He laughed. I didn’t see the joke.

  ‘He doesn’t think; that’s his problem. I wonder what Mrs Valentine thinks.’

  ‘She thinks that she’s coming back on her own soon, for a few days’ grass widowing, and asked me to remind you that you owed her a chess game. I didn’t know that you played chess.’

  ‘Schoolboy stuff.’ We both laughed.

  As I put the phone down Brunton put his head around the office door.

  ‘That’s Whisky all loaded and ready to roll, Charlie. Do you want to nip over and check your radios?’

  I didn’t particularly; but, what the hell – it’s what I was being paid for. Whisky was still on the hard standing down by the Dell. I walked down to her because I needed the exercise, and to keep the buggers waiting. Her big cargo door was open when I arrived – noticing that almost distracted my attention from the patch of new oil on the concrete under the port engine. I hated this bloody aircraft. She had about half a load in the hold.

  ‘What have we got?’ I asked Crazy Eddie.

  ‘Gold dust. Fifty-eight cases of tinned hams, and eight cases of ready-ground coffee. But for that, read fifty-nine and nine. We’ve got one of each extra. I gave the crew chief that brought them down a fiver. You can bung me your share later: OK?’

  ‘Frankfurt again?’

  ‘S’right. Then we do the odd part.’

  ‘What odd part?’

  ‘Taking the passengers on to an RAF station at Fassberg, that’s north of Celle. Then we take them on to GGW.’ GGW was one of the call signs for Gatow; that was the British airfield in Berlin. ‘. . . leave them there, and come back a couple of days later via Lübeck. The Old Man said he’d speak to you before we left.’

  Hoo-bloody-ray. I should have noticed it as I climbed aboard. I would have done if it hadn’t been for the oil leak: there were two new seats bolted in side by side on universal mounts down at the tail.

  ‘What passengers?’

  It seemed to me that Dave Scroton deliberately turned his back to us before Eddie replied, ‘Old Man Halton is doing a favour for someone. The Skipper’s gone all huffy about it, and won’t talk.’

  I could understand why; we weren’t the tossers in BOAC with long-legged canapés and free air stewardesses. You probably think that I got that back to front, but I didn’t: think about it. What would we do with the buggers for three hours’ flying time? So much for keeping my people waiting; someone was keeping me hanging about instead. I sat on the lip of the cargo door with my legs dangling, smoked my pipe, and browsed an old book of Scottish poetry I’d found in the ready room. There was an endless verse about the Battle of Flodden by an old dog named Aytoun. Halton’s Roller crawled around the peritrack to us. It seemed to take about a day. When the Old Man got out and hobbled over to me his coughing was worse than ever, and up close his voice smelt like cancer.

  ‘Charlie . . .’

  I hopped down to meet him halfway. ‘Guv’nor.’ He smiled. I guess he liked that. I asked him, ‘The engineer hinted you wanted me to do something over there this trip.’

  ‘I want you to keep your eyes open, and deliver our passengers safely. I want you to have a poke around Fassberg, which is an RAF station, and Lübeck if they let you, and tell me how much kit, or people, we’d have to ship into either if we were to contemplate regular runs to Berlin from there if we were asked to.’

  ‘Are we going to be asked to?’

  ‘You never know, do you?’

  Maybe this was my new career. Poking around places. His eyes sparkled, until he started to shudder in another paroxysm of coughing. He smothered it with a handkerchief, and then spat, ‘I want a written report when you get back. One I can use as a shopping list if I need to.’


  Halton’s chauffeur handed me up two hefty suitcases for stowing. When I turned back he was turning away to open the rear door of the big car for our passengers. The man emerged first. He still had a brown suit the colour of yesterday’s shit, and a haircut like a toilet brush. He had a messenger bag handcuffed to one wrist and one of those new Stirling sub-machine guns carried almost casually in the other. From his crewcut hair to his brown suede shoes, he looked very twitchy. The woman showed about four yards of leg, and dark stocking tops as she followed him. I’d have known those legs anywhere.

  Dolly Wayne, bless her, still carrying an old gas-mask case. If I still knew my Dolly then it contained noting more sinister than a clean change of smalls, her lipstick, handkerchief and a couple of French letters. Happy days!

  Chapter Five

  Dolly Wayne had been allocated the General’s suite in the American HQ meeting house on Rossmarkt. There had been a Rossmarkt in most German cities and towns until the ’20s. I think that it meant horse market . . . there aren’t that many left now, because we bombed most of them. You can’t de-nazify a horse; all you can do is eat it.

  It wasn’t really a house; it was a pocket palace, and relatively unscathed. Tommo once told me that we marked out the buildings we were going to occupy, and deliberately didn’t bomb them. Jerry should have noticed that, and worked out what was coming. Privately I didn’t think that our bombing was that good. If Marty Weir, our bomb aimer, had got within half a mile of what he aimed at we were satisfied.

  She lay face down, sprawled over the huge old bed wearing nothing but her dark stockings. God had achieved His design peak in creating Dolly’s behind – I’m going to tell Him that if I ever get to Heaven. Her bum had a gentle splash of freckles I never tired of kissing and counting. One stocking had slipped about three inches, and had wrinkled. I smoothed it up again, and asked her, ‘What are you doing over here?’