The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘I don’t see why not. But you should really ask a pilot.’

  He turned away, said, ‘Mr Claywell . . . ?’

  Randall looked up, but I butted in before he had a chance.

  ‘No, boss. Not Randall. Randall would try to land a B-17 in a tennis court. You’ll have to ask a normal pilot.’

  The old man went into a prolonged bout of coughing again; then he went into a prolonged bout of laughing again. They didn’t sound all that different.

  He kicked us out so that he could have another meeting with his pal, Air Commodore Reginald Waite to you and me. They were up to something, and I didn’t know what. That always got to me. I hate it when the bosses start plotting. Randall and I wandered out among the beautiful old girls who were soon to end up as cubes of aluminium and bundles of electrical cable. It was all so bloody sad.

  There was a young businessman over near half a dozen late-mark Spits – probably mark fourteens – he had a smart black suit, a regimental tie, and was chatting up the RAF engineering lieutenant charged with selling them off. They shook hands, and the man turned away. Done deal, I thought. There was something familiar about the way he moved. He joined someone identically attired, who was obviously closing a purchase on three tired Marauder light bombers. Click. They were my two Joes. Maybe they’d changed their minds: instead of bumming their way to Israel they’d decided to buy a small air force. Mazeltov.

  Even although the words which passed between Elaine and me were nothing but professional and cool, I received a tremendous sexual shock from the conversation, and I knew immediately that the same thing was happening to her. It was as if the telephone had come alive in my hand. I couldn’t wait to have her again – sorry to put it as bluntly as that, but it was interesting.

  The Old Man was saying goodbye to a senior RAF officer as I made my way back to the Rolls. He introduced me. If I had been his gardener he still would have introduced me: I think that they call that ‘old-fashioned charm’. Then he said, ‘This is Air Commodore Waite, Charlie. The Air Commodore has had a heretical idea.’ I grinned, and shook his hand. What else was I supposed to do? Halton’s eyes twinkled. He went on, ‘The city of Glasgow has two airfields, Charlie – Glasgow Renfrew, and Glasgow Abbotsinch. The Air Commodore believes that if, for some reason, the road, railway and sea routes into Glasgow were completely closed down, we could easily supply the entire needs of the civilian population indefinitely by air. Using those two airfields.’

  I went cold. I clasped my hands behind my back, because I didn’t want anyone to see that they were trembling. I can read the newspapers the same as anyone else, and what’s more I could take the hints that Russian Greg dropped from time to time. The bastards weren’t talking about Glasgow; they were talking about somewhere a lot bigger and further away. They were talking about Berlin.

  Milton had curly brown hair that stuck up from his scalp like a hedge. It was almost red. He was younger than me, I think, and his face was smothered with freckles. He looked as if he had stepped from the pages of the Beano or the Dandy. We sat outside the ops block on deckchairs. Behind and above us, the office window was open, and we could hear Elaine singing along with an American called Dean Martin. Once in Love with Amy. The way he sang it, I could have fallen in love with Amy myself. I had changed back into my work clothes, and felt very comfortable in the sun . . . it shouldn’t have been that warm at the start of April.

  In for a penny; in for a pound: I said, ‘I gave the Old Man the opportunity to sack you this morning, and he wouldn’t do it. I thought that was interesting.’

  ‘He wouldn’t. He once knew my mother rather well.’ Milton had one of those irritating Surrey nasal drawls.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Twenny-three, twenny-four years ago.’

  ‘How old are you, Colin?’

  ‘Twenny-two or three. You?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  We had a bottle of beer each. No flying. Whisky was still away with Scroton and Crazy Eddie. God knows where Dorothy was. A big column of black smoke was drifting back from a burning car down in the Dip, at the lowest end of the field. The Fire and Maintenance Gang had put a match to an old Austin in order to practise extinguishing fires. They weren’t having much luck. The car had burned like a torch for half an hour so far. I made a mental note not to be inside a burning aircraft around here.

  Milton was nothing if not direct. ‘Why did you try to get rid of me?’

  ‘. . . because you’re such a goddamned awful pilot. Everyone says so. Everyone says a little prayer when you take a kite up, because they don’t think they’ll see it again.’

  Elaine was singing with Jo Stafford now: The Best Things in Life Are Free.

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like a company man, you know,’ Milton yawned. ‘Anyway it’s not wholly true; I’m very good with singles. It’s just that I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake with twins and multis.’ He meant twin-engined and multi-engined aircraft.

  ‘But all of our aircraft are twins or multis.’

  He yawned again. ‘You have a point, old son, but fear not . . . you’ll find I’m very good in a crisis. All my flying skills come to the fore then.’ Then he added, ‘When I next get you fired I’ll tell you, as well.’

  ‘Why should you want to do that?’

  ‘’Cos you’ve made away with the fair Elaine, whom I rather fancied myself.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Dunno. Everyone’s talking about it. The Squadron Leader’s going to be pretty teed off when he finds out.’

  Above our heads the window slammed shut, and I said, ‘Shit.’

  ‘Any good, was she?’

  I said, ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,’ but it sounded unconvincing, even to me; I probably blushed.

  Later I learned that one of the fitters had found a pair of smalls in the back of Whisky, and the others quickly worked out that Elaine and I were the last off station. Two and two: in the original sense probably. How the hell can a girl go home without her knickers, and not know it?

  ‘Just how good were you flying fighters?’

  ‘Very, old man – particularly Hurricanes: the good old Hurrie. T P F F.’

  Same day, same people, same sun, but later. We were on a seat outside Lympne’s only pub.

  ‘What’s that? T P F F?’

  ‘Take-off check list for the Hurrie. Trim; prop; fuel and flaps. I can still remember them.’

  ‘I should bloody well hope so; we’re not that drunk.’

  He held up his beer, and squinted down the road through it. It was slightly cloudy.

  ‘Lo. The fair Elaine cometh.’

  She was walking, pushing her bicycle and smiling. The sun sparkled in her hair. Before she was in earshot he asked me, ‘So you didn’t couple with the fair lady?’

  ‘Wouldn’t tell you if I had. Flattering of you to think of me, though.’

  He sighed, then admitted, ‘I’d better uncirculate the rumour I started then.’

  ‘. . . and apologize to the fair lady,’ I said as Elaine flopped onto the seat alongside him, and smiled.

  ‘Don’t bother. I’ve already taken my revenge.’ When we didn’t ask, she informed Milton, ‘I’ve told everyone the knickers are probably yours – that you wear girl’s knicks under your flying clothes. No one will want to fly with you after that. Get me drink: a Pink Lady if they’ve the makings.’

  Milton looked suitably hangdog. ‘No one wants to fly with me as it is.’

  ‘There you are then. That’s fixed you properly.’

  ‘I’ll fly with you, Colin,’ I said.

  He said, ‘Good God!’ before he left to fetch her some alcohol.

  Elaine told me, ‘I think you’re madder than he is.’ She slipped over and gave my arm a quick squeeze.

  ‘Why aren’t you angry any longer? You were pretty mad when you slammed the window on us.’

  ‘I’m used to it, I suppose. If you believed all you heard I’v
e slept with every man at the airfield. There’s a different one every week.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Something to do with being the only presentable female in the middle of a herd of unpresentable men. Wishful thinking. It’s something girls have to put up with.’

  ‘I thought that maybe you were Brunton’s girl.’

  ‘I once thought that maybe I was going to be.’ She looked out towards the war memorial at the road junction. There were new names on it. There was regret in her face, I thought. Then she said, ‘This arrangement’s much better. I say; you are single, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. No one would have me.’

  ‘I would.’ Maybe she’d already said too much.

  ‘You’d change your mind,’ I told her. ‘Before long you’d find me too much of a good thing.’ That seemed to take the heat out of the conversation. I started to wonder where Milton had got to.

  ‘Are you staying on tonight?’ Elaine asked me.

  ‘Yes. I’m in the accommodation hut. On my own I think.’

  ‘Good. They weren’t my knickers, by the way. That’s not a mistake I’d make so easily.’

  So who, for God’s sake, had lost them?

  Milton appeared just in time. He had two pints and two pink ladies; he obviously expected Elaine to catch up with us. Everyone knew that her husband Terry was a long-distance lorry-driver flogging big Fodens up and down the Great North Road. He was home at weekends. After the first time I never asked again about her being married and she didn’t quiz me about being single. It seemed to work.

  That night, squeezed into the narrow bed alongside me, she told me, ‘You can go home tomorrow if you like. Don’t come back until next Thursday. Every aircraft will be in and out of the workshops for days . . . just like yo-yos. Halton’s having them all painted in a company livery.’

  ‘What will that be?’

  ‘All Day Permanent Red.’ That was an advertisement for Max Factor lipstick I think. It came back years later.

  ‘Seriously?’ I could feel her breasts rubbery against my chest, and knew that if we were still awake in twenty minutes I would want her again.

  ‘Seriously. Like half the newspaper joke.’

  ‘I’m sorry love, I haven’t heard that one.’

  She laughed quietly, and kissed my chest a couple of times before she responded. Like a dog gnawing on a nice old bone.

  ‘What’s black and white and red all over?’

  ‘Ah, that one: a newspaper.’

  ‘Your aeroplanes are going to be red all over. Like Dorothy.’

  ‘Whisky will look like a run-down butcher’s shop.’

  ‘Only on the outside, Charlie.’

  She humped up about six inches, and kissed me on the mouth until we stopped talking.

  Carlo sat on my lap, and read a very simple book to me. I hadn’t realized that three-year-olds could read. Maggs looked as pleased as punch, and told me, ‘Dieter’s been learnin’ him. He’s very forward for his age: a proper little Albert.’ It was a phrase that everyone was using; she meant Einstein. Dieter looked properly gratified as well. He was reading a Penguin aircraft recognition book, and grinned at me over his new specs.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked Maggs. ‘Which one is forward for his age?’

  ‘Boaf of ’em,’ she pronounced triumphantly.

  ‘You’re doing very well,’ I told her.

  ‘A potter’s only as good as ’is clay,’ she explained.

  If you said kind things about the boys you didn’t need to bring her presents. I did anyway. It was a lace shawl from Alsace. She turned away when she took it from me: tears in her eyes.

  ‘If I didn’t have my Major,’ she told me, ‘there’s no way any other woman’d get anywhere near you, Charlie Bassett.’ Whenever she felt particularly fond of me she used both my names, which was a little bit odd. My present to James was $3600. It had been $2800 when I had set out from England ten days earlier.

  ‘Doesn’t the bank ever say anything?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, Charlie. Usually it says thank you.’

  I told you before: everybody was at it in 1948.

  Friday afternoon. James’s place had a new pub sign. He took me outside to admire it. It showed three raggedy-looking soldiers clustered around an equally raggedy-looking khaki staff car, and the words Happy Returns.

  ‘You’re a sentimental old twerp,’ I told him.

  ‘You like it then?’

  ‘Of course I do. Les will love it as well. It may put off any German sailing types though.’

  ‘Haven’t seen any of those yet.’

  ‘No, I think we stole all their yachts. I saw one sailing through Belgium on the back of a three-tonner.’

  ‘Can’t help thinking it served them right. The Jerry was a frightful beggar when it came down to it, wasn’t he?’

  I thought about Marthe and Lottie. ‘Not all of them.’

  James picked me up wrongly. ‘I didn’t mean Dieter. He’s one of us now.’

  I had driven down in my old Singer, and abandoned it in James’s car park. It had a few dents and scrapes, and one small cut in the canvas hood, but still looked like a class act. James had a gravel car park which took about eight cars. He could always expand it if he needed to, but most of his customers at the weekends walked up the quay from their boats anyway, so why would he bother?

  Evelyn Valentine swept in in a new Sunbeam Talbot sports car. It was powder blue, and had a long sweeping tail for sweeping in to places with. She was wearing about a hundred pounds’ worth of clothes; a pair of slinky sea-green silk trousers, and a natural wool sweater three sizes too large for most of her. Dark glasses and a headscarf which matched her trews. Make that a thousand pounds. It was the first time it occurred to me that Mr and Mrs V weren’t short of a bob or two.

  ‘Hello, Charlie; hello, James.’ She removed the sun specs, and frowned. ‘Do you prefer Charlie or Charles?’

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘I forgot; I’m sorry. I’m always forgetting things.’

  Was that a warning off, or just a warning?

  ‘So do I. I think I owe your husband an apology, don’t I? I don’t know why I wanted to thump him.’

  ‘I do: happens all the time. You’ll have to wait anyway: he’s gone to Birmingham for the weekend to play a golf competition against some tiresome man with no legs. I’m a grass widow for a few days.’

  No, it hadn’t been a warning off. She dropped her eyes, and then looked up again in exactly the right places in the speech. Dieter had been watching her, a finger in his mouth and spellbound, from the restaurant door on the side of the building. The thought occurred to me again: maybe he and I had more in common than we knew. I lifted her bag from the boot of her car – it was the first time I’d seen a sports car with a boot large enough to climb into. I also carried the bag down the quay for her, to where The Lady Grace was now lashed alongside. She removed her shoes to climb down to the yacht, and moved competently around on its decks. Her feet were very white, her lipstick, finger- and toenails very red. Probably that All Day Permanent Red Elaine had told me about. The grin she gave me when I handed her case down to her was very cheeky.

  ‘See you tonight in the bar, maybe.’

  Now, God doesn’t often drop life’s little prizes straight into your lap. When he does my advice to you is to accept them with gratitude. And immediately. What was that phrase again? Grabbing it while you can becomes a habit: something like that.

  I sat with the boys in the evening, watching them scoff their teas. Maggs had put a fry-up in front of them. Both came back for more fried white bread. My function was to provide the entertainment; the stuff that Charlie Chester was doing on the radio was a bit too sophisticated for them. I drank a pint of beer and started a round of I-Spy, and Maggs cautioned them for speaking with their mouths full. After they had readied themselves for bed I read Carlo a story – the same book he’d read to me on the day I arrived – and Dieter surprised me by sitting on the
arm of my chair to share it. They chanted The Grand Old Duke of York as they stumped up the steep, narrow staircase to their bedroom. Maggs was making a rather splendid job of them. I still wasn’t a proper parent, but maybe I was moving closer to it.

  I ate supper with James and Maggs in the bar before it opened. James’s new chef Jules served us a beef stew topped off with baked slices of potato. I wondered why nobody ever called James Jim. Jules and Jim sounded all right to me. He was originally French, ex-Catering Corps, a bit of a bruiser and a bit of a find. He didn’t particularly want to return to France. Anyone could understand that. He sat in the bar, and smoked a French cigarette while we ate: the scent took me back a couple of years. James told me he was living in a caravan until they could make a more permanent arrangement. That was when I realized he was waiting for my room upstairs when I took the prefab.

  As far as women were concerned I had never hidden much from James, and couldn’t from Maggs anyway.

  ‘My love life,’ I told them, ‘can be really bloody confusing. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m on my head or my heels.’

  Maggs had run a small brothel in Paris during the war. She sniffed and said, ‘My girls knew some o’ them tricks too.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean, Maggs. What happens is that I have no girlfriends for weeks and weeks, and then two or three come along at the same time . . .’

  ‘Just like buses,’ James said. ‘Yes, I know what you mean, although I don’t know why you’re complaining.’

  ‘It’s inefficient,’ I told them. ‘I always hated inefficiency . . .’

  ‘If I was you I’d grab it while you can, Charlie love.’ That was Maggs of course.

  Then someone rattled the bar door from the outside. The Frenchman sighed, stubbed out his cigarette, looked at his wristwatch then moved to unlock it. Through the glass panes I could see Evelyn’s face. She looked hungry.

  By the time Evelyn drove away on Monday morning my balls ached. She worked me like a navvy. The forepart of The Lady Grace’s accommodation was one large bed, and I got to know it from most angles. Its ornate decoration and hangings told me that the vessel didn’t go to sea all that often.