Bombing Run

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  It was chilly in the damp draughts that tore through the aircraft, but he could feel sweat under his helmet and running down his arms.

  He wondered what the Wingco would say. Probably think it a huge joke; he might even go up in the Wingco’s estimation as a result of his misadventure.

  *

  The harbinger of the recently revived Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, disbanded after the Great War, was an attractive brunette with two rings of braid on her cuffs. Wheldon saw her emerge from Station H.Q. accompanied by the station commander.

  ‘What is she, a flight looie?’ Ufland asked.

  ‘Flight officer.’ Vachell answered before Wheldon could speak.

  Wheldon looked at him in surprise. ‘Been genning up on Waaf ranks, Tony?’

  Vachell turned a trifle pink. ‘Preparation, that’s all. There are bound to be some good-looking ones and willing ones, and some who are both. The girls are bound to feel a bit resented when they first show up—can you imagine the S.W.O’s reaction!—so I thought I’d show a bit of interest.’

  The Station Warrant Officer was a veteran of the Royal Flying Corps, a bachelor martinet. He would regard the arrival of W.A.A.F. in his domain much as he might look upon an epidemic ailment.

  ‘What are they going to do?’ Ufland sounded interested.

  ‘Well, the flight officer is their C.O. She’ll probably go up to squadron officer, and there’ll be section officers and assistant section officers as equivalents to F.Os and P.Os. The O.Rs will be clerks and telephone operators and parachute packers and medical orderlies, mostly; and there’ll be morse-bashers and teleprinter operators and cooks and M.T. drivers: all sorts.’

  ‘What about the blokes we’ve got now?’

  ‘Overseas,’ said Wheldon. ‘The Russians have women aircrew, as well.’

  This amused Ufland. ‘I bet the navigators burst into tears every time they give a duff course, and the morse-bashers when they can’t get a decent bearing.’

  ‘If the observers are all like you, Beaky, they’d spend most of their time crying, then.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Pete; be fair: when did I ever give you a duff course from finger trouble? Any time we’re off course it’s because of a duff wind from Met or a compass deviation.’

  ‘So far.’ It was a darkly stated admission, but Wheldon grinned faintly as he said it.

  A few days later they found three women sergeants in their mess. One was leathery and severe-looking, another shy and plain, the third fair-haired and quite pretty. They were sitting in a corner of the anteroom, mumbling, heads together.

  Vachell murmured ‘Mine’s all right, but I don’t care much for yours.’ He strolled over and introduced himself.

  Three startled faces gazed up at him. The room was half-full, but the women had been ignored. The oldest did not relax her stern expression, which now also became suspicious. The plain one smiled weakly and returned a quiet ‘Good evening.’ The quiet pretty honey-blonde looked impassive, said ‘Hello, Tony Vachell. I’m Audrey Hobson,’ and glanced towards Wheldon and Ufland, who were still standing near the door.

  ‘Hobson! May I say you’re my choice?’ Vachell grinned.

  ‘You’ve got it the wrong way round, Sergeant Vachell: it was the original Hobson who offered the choice; of take it or leave it.’

  ‘And?’ Vachell was undeterred.

  It was her turn to grin. ‘I don’t offer choices. I’ll leave it, thanks; for the time being, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, come on: my skipper and our observer are hoping you’ll all come and have a drink in the bar.’

  The baleful-looking one stood up. ‘Thank you.’

  The shy one looked uncertain and rose hesitantly.

  Audrey stayed where she was, looked again at Wheldon and Ufland, and then back at Vachell. ‘Your friends don’t look as though they’re hoping anything of the sort.’

  The leathery specimen said ‘Well, I’ll buy a round then. Come on.’

  Vachell, feeling foolish and in some way outmanoeuvred, followed them across the room and introduced Wheldon and Ufland; who gave an impression of polite resignation. As they went to the smaller room which housed the bar, Ufland gave Vachell a dirty look.

  Vachell grinned at him. He was doing a lot of grinning this evening, despite Audrey’s snub. ‘Cheer up, Beaky: the old bat will be so grateful for it, she’ll make up in enthusiasm what she lacks in looks. And you know what they say about the shy, quiet ones: she’ll have her hand in your flies before you know what’s happened.’

  There was a noticeable fall in the volume of conversation in the bar when the women’s presence was noticed. Some of the faces that scrutinised them glowered.

  ‘Right,’ said Vachell, ‘what’s it going to be?’

  ‘Whisky,’ said the old bat.

  ‘Sweet sherry, please,’ said the shy, quiet one.

  ‘Gin and tonic, please,’ said Audrey. Wheldon did not know how it had happened, but he found that she was standing next to him. ‘Well, Peter, and what have you been doing today?’

  ‘Bashing a balloon cable about, mostly.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, was that you?’

  ‘You’ve heard about it already?’

  ‘We saw you land.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘In the tower.’

  ‘Being shown over the station?’

  ‘We’d already been given the conducted tour. I was just making my number: I’m going to work there. Nice landing.’

  Wheldon scarcely noticed the compliment. ‘You’re going to work in Flying Control?’

  ‘Don’t you approve?’

  ‘It’s fine with me.’

  ‘You don’t approve.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing against Waafs in Flying Control.’

  ‘As long as they don’t actually control.’

  ‘Well, it is the Duty Pilot’s job…’

  ‘Pilots can’t be spared any longer. Other officers are being trained to do it.’ She gave him a wry brief smile. ‘It’s all right: they’re all male officers.’

  He let it go.

  Vachell handed round their drinks and said ‘Don’t take any notice of some of these hostile-looking types. We get the same thing. The old stagers in the mess resent air crew because we get made up to sergeant about a year after we join…’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Wheldon and Ufland said in chorus.

  ‘And it takes them, in any ground trade, years and years before they get their tapes. Some of them won’t speak to us at all.’

  ‘There’s another reason for some of the ropey looks now,’ Wheldon said. ‘As you know, married quarters are being cleared out to make room for you. Some of the W.Os and senior N.C.Os have had to move into lodgings and rented houses in the village, but most of them have had to send their wives and families away altogether: back to Mum, as often as not.’

  ‘I can see their point,’ Audrey said. ‘But our C.O. told us it’s not only to make room for Waaf that the M.Q. are being cleared out. There are more airmen coming as well. And the officers’ families are being turned out, too, to make room for more officers who’ll be posted here. It’s not fair to take it out on us.’

  Wheldon said jokingly ‘Victimisation.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is.’

  ‘The weaker sex.’

  ‘If you believe that,’ Audrey told him, giving him a compelling look, ‘you’ll believe anything.’

  *

  Air-to-air firing, shooting at a drogue towed by a bored pilot flying a Henley, filled one day. This was followed by a night navigation exercise. Then came a whole day of practising ditching procedure: first, repeatedly evacuating an aircraft parked at dispersals, then a hilarious afternoon in a local swimming bath, climbing into and being tipped out of rubber dinghies.

  From the glimpses the crew had of the three W.A.A.F. sergeants, the mess seemed to be thawing towards them. But Wheldon noticed that all the men whom he saw talking to Audrey at table, in the anteroom or
over a drink seemed to find it hard going and looked either glum or discomfited. If he caught her eye she gave him a nod and an inscrutable look, and this began to irritate him. Now and then they exchanged a brief impersonal greeting. As far as he could see she took little interest in anything except her work and reading all the mess newspapers and magazines. Once, when she was on night duty and he was on another night exercise, they exchanged radio-telephone messages. He was tempted to startle her out of her composure by pretending that he needed to make an emergency landing. It was a temptation easily resisted and he was surprised that the notion had even occurred to him.

  Vachell was still persisting, among several other aircrew, both sergeants and officers, in trying to persuade the attractive new barmaid at the Fox and Hounds to go out with him. One evening, when she was particularly scintillating and vivacious, and poor Vachell was enamoured to the point of despair, the reason for the general failure to penetrate her defences was revealed: in the shape of a huge craggy petty officer, on weekend leave from his destroyer; it transpired he was spending his leave at the pub, which her uncle and aunt owned. The petty officer stood at one end of the bar, occupying the amount of space usually filled by two men, frequently smiling at her, occasionally advancing a banana-like finger to chuck her under the chin, and addressing her as darlin’ in a rollicking Ulster brogue. To all of which she simpered and smiled and blushed rosily. A brand new ring glittered on her engagement finger, at which she kept casting satisfied glances.

  Wheldon tried to console his second pilot. ‘It’s just as well she didn’t let you take her out, Tony. You’d have made your routine instant pounce and she’d have complained to the gorilla. He’d have torn your arms and legs off one by one; slowly.’

  Vachell sighed. ‘I was a mug to waste all that time and money standing her port and lemonade every time I came here. I’ll stick to home-grown talent from now on: they’ll be turning up tomorrow.’

  ‘You needn’t look any further than the mess: Jane’s always flapping her lashes at you.’ Jane was the plain shy sergeant, who, despite her apparent demureness, was rumoured to be a tartar in the Equipment section.

  ‘Thanks, I can do better than that.’

  The war seemed to have very little to do with life at Brinstead, compared with daily newspaper reports of patrols on the Maginot Line and actions at sea. The two disastrous forays across the North Sea already seemed to have faded into myth.

  Detachment from the war appeared even greater the next day, when a contingent of 100 W.A.A.F. arrived. The leathery sergeant, whose name was, almost incredibly and most inappropriately, Fay, and who had acquired a doughty reputation as a consumer of whisky, was seen and heard barking at the girls on the square: where, with some giggling and a pretence of being unaware that every off-duty airman on camp, and many who ought to have been attending to duty, was watching, they were falling in. It was Fay who was in charge of the W.A.A.F. Orderly Room and the girls’ general discipline. ‘And she’d scare the shit out of the most hardened defaulter we’ve got in the barrack blocks,’ was Ufland’s expressed opinion. Then, with a look of disbelief, to Wheldon and Vachell, ‘D’you know, she’s only thirty, they tell me. Never think it, would you, with that weatherbeaten face?’

  ‘She was nanny to a family in Kenya,’ said Vachell, who knew more than was strictly necessary about all the three women sergeants and the three women officers whom the station now boasted. ‘She’ll treat those poor girls like blacks. Probably give them six of the best with a sjambok if they step out of line. It’s the African sun that’s given her that walnut colour.’

  ‘I wonder if she’ll call their billets “kraals”,’ Wheldon said. ‘I still think it’s beyond a joke, though, bringing women onto a bomber station. If the Service really needs them, to release blokes for overseas, they could at least keep them to non-operational stations.’

  His crew knew better than to argue. There was to be an all-ranks dance in the N.A.A.F.I. that evening, at which a newly formed orchestra of half a dozen professional musicians among the conscripts and Volunteer Reservists would play. Vachell and Ufland wondered how Wheldon would spend the evening and felt badly about leaving him on his own.

  There was a surprising proliferation of best blues in the sergeants’ mess after high tea; including, to his crew’s surprise, Wheldon’s.

  ‘Got a crafty date with a bint in Lincoln, Pete?’ Ufland asked.

  ‘Thought I might as well come along and keep an eye on you two.’ There was a challenge in the way Wheldon said it and they knew better than to look amused. He paused on his way to the bar and looked into the anteroom. ‘Hang on a mo.’ They watched, unbelieving, as he crossed to where the three W.A.A.F. were seated. They grimaced at each other when he returned shepherding the women. ‘I told the girls we’d better get a few decent drinks aboard before we go to the Naafi. They’re not allowed to sell spirits, or even sherry, remember.’

  ‘My round,’ said Fay after Wheldon had bought the first one. And, when their glasses had been refilled, ‘I can’t call you “Beaky”: what’s your Christian name?’

  Ufland looked confused.

  Vachell said ‘Beaky isn’t a Christian; and, anyway, he’s been in the Service so long, man and boy, he’s only got a number. Why don’t you call him by his last three “Seven four six”, if you want to be intimate?’

  Ufland blushed, Audrey grinned broadly, Jane giggled; and Fay looked disconcerted at the implications of intimacy.

  ‘Well?’ Fay prompted after an expectant pause.

  ‘Just call me “Beaky”, like everyone else.’

  ‘I certainly won’t. If you won’t tell me your… your first name, I’ll call you “Uffy”.’

  Better than the “Ezra” his Jewish parents gave him, thought Wheldon.

  ‘Well… all right. No one ever has, though.’

  Half an hour later they all walked together to the N.A.A.F.I. Audrey frowned at the knot of officers standing near the door. She muttered ‘God, a stag line. They look as though they’re buyers at a cattle market.’ One of these, a grounded flying officer pilot, detached himself when he saw her, with a smirk. She turned to Wheldon. ‘Quick, before that pimply wreck from Flying Control gets his moist hands on me.’

  Not quite sure of the exact sequence that had led him there, Wheldon found himself foxtrotting with her to ‘It’s A Lovely Day Tomorrow.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, ‘but it was a time for swift action. You can dance us to the bar, if you like, and have a beer.’

  ‘Naafi beer’s lousy.’ He wouldn’t have stopped dancing with her if they were giving away free champagne, he realised crossly. She was pliant and light, her breasts were agreeably resilient against his chest. And, if she was only rather pretty, her hair had an attractive sheen, her lips were soft now that she looked relaxed and not, as she habitually did, on her guard, and her eyes were an appealing brown that contrasted strikingly with her fair colouring. Also, she smelled of violet soap and a faint agreeable scent that he suspected she had dabbed behind her ears.

  She smiled when he said that N.A.A.F.I. beer was lousy, and for a moment he fancied that her hand tightened in his. Then the impression vanished and she seemed almost unaware of him, her eyes, when he glanced down, focussed on some point in infinity.

  When the orchestra stopped playing and they rejoined the others, she was quickly separated from him and he, also, was accosted by his deputy flight commander and some other officers on the squadron. He saw Audrey dancing with the flight lieutenant who was A Flight’s deputy commander, and then with a handsome pilot officer who had recently joined the squadron. So far, she was being successful in dodging the damp clutch of the pimply wreck; but presently, when Wheldon was whizzing a pretty redhead around while the orchestra blared ‘Beat Me Daddy, Eight To The Bar’, he saw that he had entrapped her. Later, he saw her in the arms of the Medical Officer, after which he asked her for another dance.

  This time it was ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ and
he remarked that it might have been her signature tune. She leaned away to look at him. She did not appear to be pleased. ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘Don’t see you smile much, that’s why.’

  ‘There’s a war on.’ It was an automatic response and the phrase, that had become a cliché and a music hall catch phrase, annoyed him.

  ‘You can do better than that, Audrey.’

  She tightened her lips and he thought what a pity it was that she did so so often. ‘I’m sorry if you find me unoriginal.’

  ‘Oh, hell, I didn’t mean that…’

  ‘Tedious, then.’

  ‘Not that, either. You’re too intelligent to… to be tedious.’ He had nearly said ‘to talk in mechanical jargon.’

  She made a disapproving noise. ‘You were going to say something less flattering, weren’t you? Why did you change your mind?’

  ‘Now I’ll ask you a question. Why d’you keep being so abrasive?’

  He was surprised by her light laugh. ‘Abrasive! Am I? Put it down to self-defence.’

  ‘No need: I haven’t tried to ravish you.’

  This time her laugh was longer. ‘I hope you never will.’

  ‘That’s not very flattering.’

  ‘Don’t take it amiss. I meant it well: I’m a black belt at ju-jitsu.’

  Quickly, he asked ‘Is that the only reason?’

  ‘Let’s concentrate on dancing, shall we? Some of these steps of yours are a bit tricky for a simple country girl.’

  ‘Is that what you are, Audrey?’

  ‘Let’s dance, I said.’

  They parted again and when he next was able to separate her from the officers and other sergeants who surrounded her, and took her onto the floor, he asked her to save the last waltz for him.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve already promised somebody else.’

  He found little to make conversation about after that and when he saw her, in the dimmed light, being waltzed by the handsome pilot officer, he left. He stayed half an hour in the mess bar, but neither Vachell nor Ufland joined him.

  Women! He was not alone in the bar and he was enjoying the company. He was happy in the sensation he had of comfortable rootedness, continuity and familiarity that the Service itself and flying gave him so abundantly. He was aware of all that connected him to the thousands who had gone before him and who would feel as at home here as he did, if they could be brought back to life. He thought of the men who had flown over the Western Front against an enemy better equipped, for most of their war, than they were and outnumbering them as well. He thought of those who had patrolled the lonely and dangerous places of the Empire in the years between the wars and often given their lives in doing so. And now again there was a war on and his turn had come. But why the hell did I have to think of her as soon as those hackneyed words came to mind?