Empire Day

by James Philip

  “The prisoner will be taken back to his cell.”

  I was not taken back to my cell.

  Presumably, my old nemesis Matthew Harrison – in 1940 he was only just setting out on what had no doubt subsequently been a successful career in the Colonial Security Service of New England, judging by the fact he was the one calling the shots – had decided that the two stooges who had conducted my interrogation to date had served their purpose. They made themselves scarce as I was cuffed, bundled into the back of a Bedford lorry, hooded and dumped onto a hard bench for the duration of the journey to an inevitably less public place. There were far too many people to hear one’s screams in a normal police station.

  This time when my hood was removed I was in a windowless room possibly six feet square and the only bed was a concrete ledge along one wall. There was a slop bucket, otherwise the amenities were, limited. The air in the cell was on the cool side of not very warm even though it had to be around mid-day.

  The cell reeked of stale urine.

  My hosts had left my cuffs on and my hands were numb.

  I was definitely getting too old for this shit!

  I was having trouble focusing, too.

  Great!

  The bastards had put something in my tea back in Hempstead; nonetheless, I was convinced I was going to get to the slop bucket in time right up to the moment I didn’t. I would have worried about the mess I had made a lot more if I had not blacked out soon afterwards.

  Chapter 9

  Shaker Field, Albany County, New York

  “Tell me again why we’re heading up to the north-west before we fly down to Jamaica Bay?” Demanded the shorter of the two men standing before Alexander Fielding outside the hangar which accommodated the offices of the Albany Flying Club. Alex was the shortest of the Fielding brothers, by a couple of inches to Bill and three or four to Abe – Ma must have fed his ‘little brother’ better as a baby or something – but his dapper, trim frame belied a natural whipcord strength which had made him lightweight boxing champion both years during his time at the Colonial Air Force Academy at the Patuxent River Air Station in Maryland.

  Those had been among the happiest days of his life.

  In fact, he had not known how much fun he was having until his eight-year short service commission had run its course. He had tried to re-enlist, that was four years ago but the New Spain border was quiet at the time so the CAF was mostly going into mothballs and his personnel file was not exactly spotless. In another couple of years’, he would reach the top of the ‘active’ Reserve List, or if things got any hotter down south he could be back in the service any time now.

  In the meantime, it paid to keep busy.

  Barnstorming was okay; you ended up flying with a great bunch of guys. The down side was that you could get a reputation for being a wild man and the days when the CAF let ‘crazy men’ anywhere near its aircraft were long gone. So, three years on that circuit was enough. He had needed to look like he was ‘settled’, reliable when eventually the call back to the colours came.

  The job at Shaker Field was a godsend.

  Later Alex had discovered he had only got the job at the Albany Flying Club because the uncle of one of his class mates in Maryland – Pilot Officer Frank Sinclair, who had been killed in a crash down on the border six years ago – had recommended his name to the Committee.

  His predecessor had got a landing wrong in a Bulldog racer – the civilian version of the CAF’s main front line scout-fighter at the height of the Border War – and before they could cut him out of the wreckage the fuel tank had lit off.

  Bad way to go!

  Alex’s Bristol Mark V had been a CAF trainer throughout its fifteen-year service which meant it had probably had more than one bad crash in its time. The flip side was that because it had been in the service ever since it was rolled out of the factory back in England, the Air Force had lovingly repaired and cared for it. So, while it was not exactly ‘new’, it was, for an aircraft of its age, technology and vintage, a relatively well-maintained, reliable machine. Twenty to thirty miles an hour slower than a Bulldog, about as manoeuvrable, but much more forgiving with perhaps thirty or forty miles more range, it was an excellent basic trainer.

  “I’ve never flown with either of you chaps before,” he explained patiently. “Before I ask you to do any fancy flying I want to make damned sure that we are all on the same wavelength.”

  He was not about to take anybody’s word for it that a man knew what he was doing until he had seen as much for himself in the air! In the flying game the quickest way to get oneself and one’s friends killed was to take somebody’s word for something.

  “That’s fair enough, old man,” Paul Hopkins, the dark-haired, rakishly moustachioed twenty-four-year old son of a Massachusetts banker grunted with ill-disguised angst.

  Alex had been warned that the man had been thrown out of the CAF at the end of his first year at the Academy ‘despite his Boston connections’. The Hopkins were East Coast Brahmins, the nearest thing to a New England aristocracy - many of whom claimed direct ancestry, like the wastrel CAF-washout standing in front of him now - from old and great European lineages. The senior echelons of the Colonial Civil Service and the Colonial armed forces were stuffed full of ‘settler nobility’, which probably explained why the border wars in the South West had rumbled on for decades. Well, that and the unwillingness of the King’s government in England to risk a new general war with the Empire of New Spain.

  “We’re just wasting time and fuel,” his companion complained.

  Rufus McIntyre was a friend of Alex’s brother Bill. He was a strange man to find in flying circles, ‘churchy’, introverted and mistrustful of most of the people around him.

  Alex assumed this was because, like his brother, he viewed all non-adherents to his particular form of Lutheranism, or who did not physically attend his Church as a godless waster. Unfortunately, there seemed to be an awful lot of people like Rufus and Bill around these days!

  No matter what their other differences – and they had had a few of those over the years - Alex had never fallen out with his father like Bill had. Bill had turned on their mother shortly before her death; practically accusing her of ‘denying the Lord’ her eternal soul. Still, with four siblings in the family statistically speaking at least one of them was bound to be a complete shithole!

  That was Bill all right and his friend Rufus had the makings of a man cast from a similar mould.

  “Sorry, chum,” Alex declared, knowing arguing with the Rufus McIntyres of this world was God’s way of telling a man there were some folk it was just better to punch on the jaw the first time you had the chance. “You’re flying on a provisional licence issued by the Committee of the Albany Flying Club and if you want to fly over regulated territory south of Montgomery and Albany Counties, I’ve got to certify, personally, that you are ‘safe and responsible pilots’. So, what we’re going to do is take-off, fly over Indian Country, do some formation flying, a few rolls and turns, nothing very demanding and return to Shaker Field. Our aircraft will be checked out and then all being well, later this afternoon after I’ve sorted out the documentation, we’ll head down to Jamaica Bay. If you don’t like it, sorry.”

  The rules were nothing if not inflexible.

  If either of the other two men wanted to find somebody stupid enough to ‘certify’ them without seeing them in the air that was their funeral. Alex had no intention of putting his life or his job on the line for a couple of strangers.

  “Bill said you’d…”

  Alex cut off Rufus McIntyre.

  “Yeah, well you can write what Bill knows about aeroplanes on the back of a very small postage stamp and,” he was losing his temper, “if you’re thinking, for a single minute, of trying to bribe me, forget it, chum!”

  While Paul Hopkins had lost his sense of humour, McIntyre looked as if he was on the verge of physically attacking Alex.

  Not for the first time the former CAF a
ce asked himself what he was doing ‘accommodating’ these men. He had planned to take his Bristol V down to Long Island that morning; press and movie photographers were always crying out for rides when something was going on in the Upper or Lower Bays. With all the ships assembling for the great Fleet Review tomorrow it was like Christmas had come early for the ‘gentlemen of the press’ and they all wanted a personal ringside seat.

  A Bristol V was a perfect ride for a man with a camera, it was slow, steady, relatively safe in comparison to the higher performance Bulldogs and a lot cheaper to hire than the plusher, more comfortable modern aircraft, few of which had open cockpits these days. The real top-notch ‘snappers’ hated having to do their work from behind a tiny window in a pressurised cabin. The windblown splendour of a Bristol V’s front cockpit provided the best seat in the house.

  “We’re paying you well, Fielding!” Hopkins reminded him.

  “No, you’re paying me what I could have made, easily, already today flying snappers over the fleet moored in the Lower Bay. I only took your commission because my brother asked me to!”

  Life was never this complicated in the Air Force!

  All Alex wanted to do was check out that Hopkins and McIntyre were competent pilots, sign off their papers and make sure they did not get lost flying down to the field at Jamaica Bay. What they got up to after that was none of his business. As for their little detour up into the Mohawk River country he had threatened to buzz his little brother’s ‘love island’ and he meant to do it in style!

  Alex was never going to be ecstatic about Abe and Kate – even though she was a really nice girl, and apart from being a pure-bred Iroquois, Mohawk or whatever, he would have had no beef about her tying Abe around her little finger. He was no bigot. He had nothing against the Iroquois Nation, as a kid he had had Indian playmates like the others – not Bill, of course, he had always been a first-rate prig – but that was when they were children and everybody had to grow up sooner or later. Heck, it was not even legal to marry a squaw in the twin-colony!

  “If you want to fly ‘legal’ you’ve got five minutes to mount up and follow me into the air,” he decided, obviating further debate. He was doing them a favour. If they expected him to kiss their arses too, that was their problem not his!

  This said he turned on his heel and marched purposefully towards his Bristol V. His two unhappy ‘wingmen’ were flying almost identical Bristol VIs, theoretically a few miles an hour faster in level flight. However, since both Paul Hopkins and Rufus McIntyre had loaded what looked like enough luggage for a six-month stay on Long Island into the front cockpits of their aircraft they were the ones who were going to have trouble keeping up with Alex.

  The Mark V was an out and out scout, the later Mark VI was a strengthened, and therefore several hundred pounds heavier, variant designed for a bombing role. Equipped with a slightly more powerful – but again, heavier – engine the latter’s take-off and landing characteristics had never been as friendly as the earlier models.

  He had suggested that they lighten their loads; leave anything they were not going to need overnight in Albany for safekeeping in the hangar. Bristols were good, sound machines unless you overburdened them; notoriously, the CAF had only ever recruited jockey-sized men as air observer-gunners on its Bristol IV, V and VI squadrons.

  The two men had refused point blank to lighten their aircraft.

  Alex had done his duty, warning them that once they filled up their fuel tank ahead of the flight down to Jamaica Bay their aircraft would fly like beasts, especially if the wind from the south west freshened that afternoon.

  Leppe Island here we come!

  Chapter 10

  HMS Cassandra, Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn

  It was daunting to think that the great Admiralty Dockyards complex ringing the bay with its half-a-dozen broad fitting out piers jutted out very nearly into the East River, framed by a forest of derricks and the rising walls of steel that were the two new fleet carriers Ulysses and Perseus – both still over a year away from completion – was nowadays, only the third largest in New England. It was dwarfed by the great combined fleet base and shipyards of the Halifax-St Margaret’s Bay complex in Nova Scotia and back home by the yards on the River Clyde and at Rosyth in Scotland. Nonetheless, it still made for a mightily impressive vista as HMS Cassandra slowly picked her way through the flotilla of yachts and launches which had come out to greet the King that afternoon.

  Several motor gunboats bristling with heavy machine guns formed an imperfect cordon around the destroyer; their crews’ fingers never far from the triggers of their guns after this morning’s ‘incident’.

  For his part the King had refused to make anything of the assassination attempt. There was no question of altering his and his wife’s schedule; all engagements would go ahead as planned and that, was that!

  Forsaking full ceremonial dress, he had donned his Blue No. 1 uniform, hardly the best outfit for a hot summer day in the colonies but as Eleanor was wont to remind him ‘you never look more relaxed than when you are in your Navy rig’. This evening he would have to dress up like a proper popinjay; this afternoon he could get away without the antique tail coat and tri-corn hat, if not the oceans of gold braid his subjects expected of him. The main thing was that the brow of his heavily gold-encrusted cap concealed his stitched eyebrow.

  ‘I am afraid we are going to have to use a gallon of make-up to hide that this evening, darling,’ Eleanor had warned her husband as she inspected his turn out in the moments before they went up to the Lion’s deck to transfer onto the Cassandra.

  Unlike his father and his elder siblings, the Navy life had kept King George fit and trim, and cultivated in him frugal habits, tastes and moderation in all things. People were kind enough to say he looked young for his age; he preferred to think that any man fortunate enough to be seen in public on his wife’s arm could not but be ‘given the benefit of the doubt’.

  Eleanor had stepped out of the shadows into the harsh glare of World publicity as if to the manner born. The expensive high couture she had previously shunned for modestly stylish glad rags more appropriate to the wife of a career naval officer, and the modesty with which she had insisted their children were raised – such things were relative since their offspring were princes and princesses of the greatest empire the World had ever seen – had stymied the Press and republicans at home and abroad. In retrospect she could not have cultivated the image of a normal, albeit well to do, English housewife and mother better, while quietly gaining a reputation for patronising good causes, mainly in the fields of education, child health and the affairs of the local diocese of Winchester, where the family had been based for much of the King’s time in the Navy. Suddenly thrust onto the public stage she had blossomed, bringing an approachability and a new, human face to the monarchy and carried on being…herself.

  Today she was attired in a calf-length grey dress, a single silvery broach above her heart. Regal and sensible her shoulder-length auburn hair was gathered in a bun beneath a hat with a half-veil and she wore matching, very nearly flat-heeled shoes. Her arms, and every inch of skin up to her neck were covered so as not to upset the vociferous East Coast puritanical lobby. Such things could be ignored later in the day when the schedule moved to Manhattan where the populous looked to the future not the past for its solace and inspiration.

  Both the King and his Queen were a little taken aback by the positively Biblical throng on the quayside and everywhere they looked as they awaited their disembarkation. Literally, every vantage point was crowded. There were men hanging out of the cabs of the towering cranes, waving enthusiastically from the towering heights of the carcases of the two giant half-built aircraft carriers, packing all the adjacent piers, and cheering, swaying on the shores and hillsides in the middle-distance beneath an ocean of fluttering flags.

  The royal couple had become connoisseurs of crowds, intuitive judges of their mood and to a degree, of their expectations. Their last trip to the
se shores had been over five years ago when they had spent over a month in New England visiting all bar six of the Colonies, journeying from east to west where they had boarded the old battlecruiser Redoubtable bound for the Sandwich Islands. Now they were on the first leg of a new tour of the Empire.

  In all they planned to spend over six weeks in New England this time before again catching their breath in the Sandwich Islands – so fondly remembered from their last tour – before moving on to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Ceylon, and India, where they would spend nearly two months, ahead traversing the Indian Ocean to the East African colonies, going on safari in South Africa, paying state visits to the Gold Coast and Nigeria, returning to the Americas to visit Barbados and Jamaica prior to finally, sailing for home sometime in January or February next year.

  This time around HMS Lion, the cruisers Ajax and Naiad and six fleet destroyers, including HMS Cassandra would collect the Royal Party at Vancouver in mid-July, having taken passage in the meantime all the way down to Cape Horn and steamed back up to Canada, a distance of some sixteen thousand miles.

  The Ajax and the Naiad had anchored in the Upper Bay a cable to port and starboard respectively of the flagship. Each was a scaled down version of the Lion, fifteen thousand-ton vessels armed with main batteries of eight eight-inch guns. At a distance their silhouettes were virtually indistinguishable from those of the four leviathans of the 5th Battle Squadron, in the same way that Cassandra’s profile was yet again, simply a smaller, leaner version of the layout of the Fleet’s great capital ships. That was a hangover of the days before electronic detection and ranging – ELDAR - was invented when confusing one’s enemy’s precision optical gun-laying had been the name of the game.