The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  When I wasn’t with her I was with the boys. They wanted to walk up the Roman road the other side of Chichester again, and we did so, under the trees and hiding from the drizzle. Going to church again on Sunday morning worried me a bit, but I spent the time there thinking about Fergal, and wondering how he was getting on. After that we all ran out on the shingle, and flew a kite that James said had been his when he was a boy.

  I was there on Monday morning to lift Evelyn’s case back into her car. Her hair shone in the overcast like the oiled black of a crow’s wings. Despite the hard red slash of her lipstick across her pale face you could have almost taken her for a happy woman. On Monday night I relieved James’s bartender in the small bar, and got a bit sideways from the drinks the customers bought me. On Tuesday I washed up the crocks for Jules in the restaurant, but Tuesday night turned bad.

  That was because he phoned me on Tuesday night. He must have got my number from the office. Old Man Halton. I knew that it was him when the phone coughed at me. I said, ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘Can you come down on Thursday, Charlie? We have to get things moving.’

  ‘I was going to anyway. What things?’

  ‘Haven’t you listened to the News today?’

  ‘No, what’s happened?’

  ‘The Russians have shot down a BEA Viking in one of the air corridors. It was full of passengers.’

  ‘Any survivors?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fuck it.’ Say it with feeling.

  Halton said, ‘You know that I don’t like people swearing, Charlie . . .’

  ‘Yes, boss; sorry, boss . . .’

  ‘. . . but on this occasion I happen to agree with you. Winston’s warning us that the Reds will have closed down all access to Berlin by road, rail or canal before the summer’s out. For once I agree with him too . . . So yes; fuck it . . .’ and he put the receiver down at his end. Then it happened again: my hand was shaking. One of these days I was going to wake up brave, just like everyone else.

  I decided to drive across on the Wednesday, following the coastal road, but that still left time for me and Carlo to raid the Chichester bookshop before it closed for its half-day. I always loved English towns on Wednesday afternoons after the shops had all closed: it was as if a sprinkling of fairy dust had put the population to sleep. Dieter wanted a Biggles book. I bought him two because I didn’t know when I would be back – and later told Maggs to hold one back for a week or so. Carlo wanted a picture book about a cat that flew an open-cockpit aeroplane and delivered the airmail. The aircraft was completely red, like a GPO delivery van . . . and the aircraft I would be flying for the next few months . . . and it seemed to crash a lot. I suppose that having nine lives makes a cat an over-confident pilot. They were always worse than the cautious ones.

  James and Maggs came out to see me off. It was as if we all knew that something was starting to happen again, but didn’t want to bring it up. I had the hood down because, even though the sun wasn’t showing through, it was still an unseasonably warm day. Maggs reached in, and ruffled my hair. I didn’t mind her doing it. She said, ‘I been thinking about what you said about the women you go wiv.’

  ‘What is it, Maggs?’

  ‘You get your share right enough, but what’s worrying is that none of ’em like you enough to stick around fer long . . . you gotta work harder at it, Charlie.’

  Trust a woman to put the blame back on me. I said, ‘I love you, Maggs.’

  She leant over, and gave me a peck on my cheek. James put his hand on my shoulder when he said goodbye. He didn’t usually touch people. That’s when I realized that maybe they thought they’d never see me again. I looked out along the quay, and noticed that The Lady Grace was flying a small flag quartered in white and blood red squares. I might have been wrong, but a fading signal from my memory seemed to be telling me it was the naval signal flag for the letter U. Flown alone it meant You are standing into danger.

  Chapter Seven

  Two hours, and the further I drove the colder it became. Eventually I stopped and fished my flying helmet and split-lens goggles from my pack. I must have looked quite the thing – like the racer Reg Parnell maybe.

  Someone must have told them I was coming, because the stove in the small accommodation hut was burning. I was hungry, so I roared it up, and stuck a tin of baked beans and a tin of Spam on top – after piercing them with my knife of course. They were ready in an hour, and washed down well with a couple of bottles of Worthington. I could have gone on to the pub, or found Elaine, but I just wanted a couple of hours without the pressure of people I knew around me. Do you know what I mean?

  Eventually I jumped back in the car and went down to the Odeon at Sandigate Road in Folkestone. It was showing The Brasher Doubloon with Nancy Guild. Just before I went in I remembered that she could be a bit of a shrieker; not my type at all.

  It was the Movietone News before the feature that really grabbed my attention; they ran an item on the Vickers Viking incident in Germany. They showed some grainy, shadowy images of smouldering wreckage that the Soviets had handed over, because the aircraft had fallen out of the corridor and into their sector. It was a scheduled BEA passenger flight in a nearly new aircraft. It hadn’t been shot down; it had collided with a Communist Yak fighter. The Russians were saying that it was all our fault of course. They flashed up a publicity still of the Viking’s crew. BEA was still heavily into radio officers, and this one was Charlie Mamser. I knew him because we had been on the same course. It was the moment I realized that we were at war again. Funnily enough, after seeing that I didn’t get the shakes again until 1949.

  ‘Hands off cocks; hands on socks!’

  The door bounced with his blows. Bloody Scroton again. He was getting bolder. He always stayed up in the village; I never worked out with whom. He’d brought my breakfast from the Parachute on the way: a fried egg sarnie, with lashings of salt and sauce. The warm yolk splattered and ran down my chin. Brilliant. Halton Airways was on parade on the grass in front of the little brick admin block. That was Dorothy, old before her time, Whisky, and the two new Avro Lancastrians. They were all painted red.

  ‘Christ,’ Crazy Eddie muttered. ‘Custer’s last stand!’

  The two Lancastrians had Tin Man and Scarecrow lettered neatly in black on their great red noses . . . and I do mean great red noses. A Lancastrian had a nose like Schnozzle Durante; if you can still remember who he was. The Old Man had even been able to wangle appropriate registrations for them: Tin Man was G-HATM. You could read that as Halton Airways Tin Man; she was Tommy Mother when we were on air of course; Tommy for short. I can’t say that red is my favourite colour. I think that most men who’ve been to war would tell you the same thing. Whisky looked awful; they’d painted around the naked bint on her nose: she was still perched on a trio of black Ws with an evil smile on her face. She still wore nothing but a black, pointed witch’s hat.

  ‘Where did you spring from?’ I asked Ed.

  ‘I came down on the milk train this morning; special request. I always knew that it was a mistake to give the office a telephone number.’

  ‘How long have you had a telephone?’

  Ed sniffed. I suddenly realized that he sniffed a lot. ‘Don’t. It’s my auntie’s. She has to come down the street for me.’

  ‘Eddie lives in Earlsfield,’ Scroton told me. ‘It’s the posh end of Wandsworth.’

  ‘Where are we going today then?’

  ‘You’re not, Charlie. The boss has left you a brown envelope that doesn’t look like a pay packet. We’ve got to air test Jasta 11.’ He motioned to the aircraft behind him by jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  At first I didn’t get him, and then a misspent boyhood with Biggles kicked in, and I remembered that Jasta 11 was the Red Baron’s squadron in 1918, and that they painted all their bloody aircraft bloody red. It didn’t cheer me up, because you know what happened to poor old Manfred, don’t you? The bloody colonials shot him, and they’re still argui
ng about by whom.

  I sat in the front office with Elaine, and fingered my envelope. I opened it when I saw she wasn’t in the mood for a chat. Old Man Halton had a thing about shopping lists. He’d used the phrase before. He wanted me to go to Celle, the memo said, and Lübeck and Gatow. I was to examine a small office at each airfield, give the RAF a shopping list of the furniture and fittings to put in them. He thought that if we could get in before the other airlines we could get our own accommodation . . . with his friends pulling the strings, I got the feeling that anything was possible. Very good of the RAF, wasn’t it? I was also to make a contact at each place who could arrange overnight accommodation for our crews if pinch came to shove. Mine not to reason why, although I did wonder. How many other private airlines were already asking for facilities at airfields in Germany? How many would get them? Pretty few, I’d guess. Maybe none.

  Apart from the Yak hitting the Viking passenger flight in the corridor, all of the rest of the traffic – along the autobahn, railway and canals – was getting through to the Big City OK as far as I knew. It was almost as if Halton was planning for a worst-case for Berlin . . . not that it would be worst-case for him: anyone with an aircraft to spare would be coining it in. We’d need more loaves and fishes than Jesus if we planned to feed the five thousand down there. I got the feeling that the commercial airline business was limbering up to get its snout into a trough.

  ‘How am I supposed to get there?’ I asked Elaine.

  ‘Apparently Mr Claywell’s coming down from Croydon for you.’ Then she sniffed. What had I said wrong this time?

  What a bloody relief. Randall’s Airspeed Oxford had not received the all day permanent red treatment. It was its usual horrid colour of drabby green, and bore no registration mark. I told him, ‘You’re going to have to put her Reg letters and airframe number on it. Some of these fancy civvy airfields will turn you away if you aren’t doing it from the book.’

  ‘I’ll get round to it when they make me, son.’

  ‘How did you get away without being painted all over red, like the rest of them?’

  ‘I convinced the Old Man that it would be useful to have at least one kite that was so nondescript that no one would pay any attention to it. He spent the day with me on Tuesday. Feisty old bird, isn’t he?’

  ‘I like him.’

  ‘So we got somethin’ in common, Charlie. Maybe our marriage will work out after all.’

  I grinned. You couldn’t do anything else with Randall. He carried a whole small-pack full of one-liners.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Randall.’

  ‘And you, Tiny Tim. Thanks for getting me my job back.’

  I suppose that was technically correct. The rest of Halton’s small fleet would haul the freight, whilst Randall would end up with the odd jobs. He was very good at odd jobs, and irregular work suited him.

  ‘I knew that I’d need a taxi in this job, and I didn’t trust anyone else . . .’

  ‘Ah, Charlie. Put not thy trust in princes . . .’

  ‘Are you a prince?’

  ‘I am, actually. I bought a beat-up castle in Germany from one of my compatriots a year ago. A title went with it. Prince of Thüringen and Saxony.’

  ‘I think that title actually belonged to the Kaiser.’

  ‘Not any more it don’t; it belongs to the Claywells. You ready to go?’

  I flung my pack into the back of his aircraft between the passenger seats, and followed him forward. The Oxford was the old trainer twin, and still had a radio rig for trainee wireless operators. I fired it up, and tuned it almost by instinct while he was taxiing. The old lady’s Cheetah engines purred like contented pussy cats. As soon as I strapped myself alongside him Prince Randall Claywell Jnr opened up the throttles and let her go. It was good to be back . . .

  It was also good to cross the old Reich border in daylight, and with no one shooting at us. The American girl controller sounded familiar to me, but that’s a knack all American girls have. She told us to turn right if we wanted to go to Frankfurt. Randall turned right.

  Randall rarely flew with a navigator: I don’t think that he trusted them that much. He flew with a couple of maps tucked into the top of each flying boot, and always seemed to know which one to pick without looking. Maybe he couldn’t read maps anyway, so it didn’t matter. I told him, ‘We’re not going to Frankfurt, Randall.’

  ‘We are now, Charlie.’

  ‘We’re not fuelled for Frankfurt, Randall.’

  ‘We are now.’

  There was no point in arguing with the only man up there who knew how to fly the damned thing. I thought that it was going to put another day on my trip. So what? But what was the bugger up to?

  I think that Randall made the longest, straightest, lowest approach to Frankfurt ever – he was going for the record book. Two women working in a field clearing stones paused, straightened up and waved to us. That’s new, I thought. Randall had half slid back the little Perspex side window beside him. The cabin temperature dropped by ten degrees immediately. He threw out a small, well-wrapped package, and slammed the window shut.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked him. ‘Some sort of contraband?’

  He shrugged, and didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, ‘Chocolate for their kids. Several of us are doing it.’

  ‘You’re all heart after all.’

  ‘Not all of the time, Charlie.’

  I didn’t think we’d diverted south just so he could fling some bars of chocolate to a farmer’s wife: I was correct. We were directed off Frankfurt’s runway on to the peritrack, and Randall took us around to a hard standing as far from the main airfield buildings as possible. It was already occupied by a gasoline truck and a jeep.

  The jeep was also occupied. Tommo sat alongside the US officer who drove it. She had light-coloured hair secured in a stylish French roll. They’d brought our lunch out to the aircraft. Thermoses of tomato soup and coffee, and pastrami sandwiches made with that coarse white German bread with the hard bits in.

  ‘Wotcha, Charlie,’ Tommo said, and hugged me. I wished he wouldn’t do that.

  ‘That’s an English word, mate.’

  ‘I know. I’m anglophilic. That’s another one. This is Wendy . . .’

  ‘I know,’ I told him. ‘We’ve met. She was running the caravan at an airfield called Fécamp in France, and we split a bottle of her wine . . .’

  ‘. . . and you’re Charlie,’ she said. ‘You were with that maniac David Clifford.’

  ‘I left him in Germany after the surrender, but he stole my girl. Have you seen him since?’

  She bit her lip, and looked away. ‘No . . . and he was killed a few weeks later, I think. Knifed in an argument with some Russian.’

  We sat on the grass and picnicked close to the Yanks refuelling the Oxford: they finished before we did. Tommo had greeted Randall by now. A quick handshake and, ‘Hail to the prince!’

  Randall grinned, but I beat him to it with, ‘Didn’t know you two were acquainted. Should have guessed.’

  Tommo said, ‘I know everybody. Ain’t you worked that out for yerself yet?’

  The tomato soup was very good. American tomato soup always is: they should teach us how to make it. I kept from staring at Wendy’s tits the way I first had at Fécamp in ’45. Well; most of the time. Tommo caught me at it, rolled his eyes to the sky, grinned and shook his head.

  When she drove away again she was alone, because Tommo was coming with us. He had a big pack, just like me, so he must have been expecting to be away for a few days. He told me, ‘Don’t look so downcast, Charlie. This is a properly accounted, paid-for official flight. The US army’s funding it, and it has a high degree of legality.’ The problem with that was Tommo’s understanding of the word legality.

  The officer I found myself doing business with at Celle was a competent Flight Lieutenant WAAF of about forty. They may have been calling them something like the WRAF by then, but I never could see a difference. There was just a touch
of grey in her stiff black hair. She didn’t laugh much, didn’t smile much either. She showed me an office in the office block, and a spare control caravan, and asked me to choose. I took the latter because it was roomier, and didn’t smell of damp and piss. She gave me a quick look which seemed to tell me I’d made the right choice. Then she made up a list of things that I’d need to run a small air force from there, and made me sign for it. I wasn’t sure that I liked that bit. I still don’t like putting my name to bits of paper that mean things to other people. I asked her about accommodation.

  ‘We’ve got a terrace of requisitioned cottages we don’t use – just down the road. I’ll pick you a good one. OK?’

  ‘Thank you.’ I felt awkward about what I asked next, and that probably showed in my voice. ‘Look, do you know what this is all about?’

  ‘I haven’t been told, if that’s what you mean. But I can bloody well work it out the same as you can: something bad is coming. I hope I’m back in Blighty before the fucking balloon goes up; I don’t want to be in this dump when that happens.’ Her swearing was absolutely conversational, as if it came naturally.

  I’d bombed Celle, or tried to, in 1944. We hadn’t made much of a job of it, but a Tiffie squadron came back six months later and buggered up their railway yards. I asked her, ‘Is Celle a dump? It doesn’t look too badly knocked about to me.’

  ‘It’s not Celle that’s the dump, it’s bloody Germany. I hate the damned place: it’s still full of bloody Nazis. We should have emptied it and started again.’

  We found Tommo and Randall sitting on upturned oil drums, taking in the last of the sun. Randall had a mug of cold-looking coffee, and Tommo a bottle of one of those pale beers the Jerry likes so much. The wind was whistling across the airfield the way winds do: I think they were impervious to it.

  Tommo said, ‘Finished? Good. We wondered where you’d got to.’

  ‘I had a job to do. That’s why I came here.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me it was with Vera. You be careful with her, or she’ll eat you alive. Hello, Vera.’