Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  b See Appendix 2, p. 293.

  Another door opened down the corridor outside and Dusty Springfield swept out, just not knowing what to do with herself, before the closing door cut her off. Amos thought there was something absurd about these abrupt, weird juxtapositions of two worlds: the Top Twenty accompanying things so secret they could hardly be thought about.

  ‘Now,’ Mewell was saying, ‘the second thing you’ll be testing is equally new and experimental. Despite all the bomb comps and target practice we do, everyone knows that pinpoint accuracy isn’t absolutely vital when it’s a nuclear warhead you’re delivering. A couple of hundred yards more or less isn’t going to make much difference. However, we are Bomber Command and we may still be called on at any time to drop conventional iron bombs on uppity fuzzy-wuzzies threatening Her Majesty’s territories overseas. Things are looking pretty dicey in the Yemen at the moment, not to mention points east. In which case accuracy matters very much indeed. We’ve all recently heard grim stories from Vietnam of the Yanks bombing their own troops by mistake. God knows blue-on-blue is easily done in war: I’m afraid we’ve done it ourselves. So obviously some method of precision-guiding munitions to their target would be a great advance.

  ‘Up to now we’ve been concentrating on making ever more accurate bomb sights. But at the same time we, the Americans and the Russians have been experimenting with sticking a TV camera into the nose of the bomb, which as it falls relays a picture to the bomb aimer or nav plotter so he can guide it onto the target with his little joystick. However, the latest idea is to do away with the camera and use something called a laser instead. I gather this is a beam of highly concentrated light even thinner than a pencil. Again, I certainly don’t understand the ins and outs of the physics involved, but there’ll be a boffin coming down to talk to you nav plotters, too. Questions?’

  From somewhere far away in the distance there filtered the familiar sound of four Olympus engines spooling up to full take-off power with the unmistakable honking wail their intakes made as they gulped tons of air every second. Swiftly this neared, melding into the darker noise of the jets themselves which in turn bounced low-frequency sound around the room before the speeding Vulcan passed diagonally away from the ops block along the main runway, its actual lift-off being screened by two hangars. The rumble died.

  When he could make himself heard, Amos said: ‘Obviously these two systems are going to mean some new equipment installed in our aircraft so presumably they’ll be u/s for some time. Do we get any flying in the meantime?’

  Mewell smiled. ‘Point taken. Yes, I’m afraid your two aircraft will have to go back to Woodford. You will have heard there’s a new paint scheme being phased in for all V-bombers to take account of our shift in tactics from high to low level. So your two aircraft will be the first to be repainted and this new equipment will be installed at the same time. They say a fortnight, ten days if we’re lucky. Apparently the Oilcan set-up requires a lot of extra power so they need to stuff more cooling gear into the back. As for flying, you’ve noticed we’re hosting Canberras here on rotation from Germany. We’ll see if we can’t arrange you some hours on those. Failing that, there’s always an assortment of passing traffic at Wearsby and I’m sure you’ll be able to wangle yourselves a bit of air time in some of it – as you always do in any case.’ This provoked some not very abashed smiles from the four pilots in the room. ‘Personally, I’d dearly like to import some Tiger Moths from wherever they’re still flying them – I don’t know, a university squadron perhaps? A few hours of real stick-and-rudder stuff does wonders for airmanship after all those hours tooling along on autopilot in a pressurised metal bullet like the Vulcan. Open-cockpit stuff – that’s proper flying,’ Mewell added with a touch of wistfulness. ‘Happy memories, gentlemen, happy memories.’

  Typical Muffin – Amos thought afterwards – managing to inject a little nostalgia into Cold War technology. Still, anyone with his war record was entitled to it. This was a recognition that, on the whole, the officers at Wearsby wouldn’t have swapped their station commander for any other brass hat in Bomber Command.

  7

  Chief Technician Ernest ‘Baldy’ Hodge sat on the bus and watched the hedgerows pass in an unfocused blur. He was thinking grumpily that one day soon he would no longer be dependent on this uncomfortable and laborious mode of public transport, constantly stopping in the middle of nowhere to pick up elderly shoppers. This was one of his periodic trips to Grantham, a journey that involved changing buses in Market Tewsbury as well as a good deal of patience. He would usually make the trip on his day off; but since his personal Vulcan, XM580, was away being re-equipped and repainted he had some otherwise scarce time on his hands. He was not the sort of man to be reassigned to temporary duties elsewhere. Nothing you could put your finger on, exactly; just something about him that prevented even the engineer wing commander in charge of the maintenance unit from taking advantage of the fact that for a couple of weeks one of his chief technicians was severely underemployed.

  A disgruntled, self-righteous man this Hodge, with his translucent red ears: a combative person, much given to sour rejoinders in sergeants’ mess and dispersal hut where, even among his peers and despite his gleaming scalp, he was considered the chief ‘hairy’. It was widely accepted that you didn’t tangle with Hodge. He had countersigned his cynical persona by having a blue sword tattooed inside one meaty forearm with the legend ‘Dishonour Before Death’ around the sword’s tip in Gothic script. Nobody had ever thought for a moment that this inversion of the traditional military motto had been a mistake on the part of the tattooist. Baldy was famous at Wearsby for having thrown an orderly officer into the frozen fishpond outside the sergeants’ mess one night for daring to try closing the bar at 23:00 as per standing orders. He was carpeted and fined, which only increased his perennial resentment over money, his pay being the same as that of a junior engineer officer ten years younger: some £1,218 per annum which, as a married man of thirty-four, Baldy Hodge considered wholly inadequate for an experienced aircraft servicing chief responsible for the proper functioning of one of Britain’s V-bombers. Money matters were seldom far from his calculations and conversation and, what with one thing and another, had he not been so competent and reliable in his work he would have been altogether intolerable. However, where his work was concerned C/T Hodge did things by the book; and although no-one – probably not even his wife – could honestly say they actively enjoyed his company, Amos and the rest of XM580’s crew were glad to have him aboard in a sixth seat on certain trips to foreign airfields where the ground crew’s standards might not be up to Baldy’s. If anyone could keep their aircraft going, he could.

  At last they drew into Grantham bus station. Hodge hung his burly frame menacingly over two stout women with headscarves and creaking wicker baskets easing themselves arthritically down the bus’s steps. They both paused to call a thank-you to the driver.

  ‘Take your time, missus, I would,’ said Hodge witheringly as, released at last, he set off briskly up the High Street to Swinegate. It was a sunny day and he found his mood pleasantly expectant as he came in sight of the familiar corner shop. P. & S. Finstock was a typical tobacconist and newsagent: utterly unremarkable, in fact, with its worn lino and the smell of newsprint and paraffin. There was a large tabby cat asleep in the flyblown window beneath a copious display of handwritten cards advertising accommodation, lessons in book-keeping, secondhand cots, a breeding pair of pigeons. A decrepit old man with burst slippers and a walking stick clutching a packet of Woodbines was inching his way out as Hodge entered.

  Inside, the shop was empty and silent save for a bluebottle that was probably destined to join the corpses on one or other of the yellowed scrolls of flypaper Sellotaped to the ceiling. The shelves behind the counter were lined with big, screw-topped sweet jars and stacked packets of cigarettes. Bottles of fizzy drinks stood on the floor in one corner. The counter was piled with neatly segregated newspapers. From somewh
ere in the interior came the whistle of a kettle and before long a man in a sagging cardigan appeared with a mug of tea in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. On seeing Baldy Hodge he set the mug down and parked the cigarette on the scorch-marked edge of the counter.

  ‘Morning, Mr Parsons,’ he said. ‘And not a bad one, either. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting? She’s out shopping so I have to make my own tea. Your post’s here. Arrived Thursday, it did. No, tell a lie, it was last Tuesday. Postman had to wait because the coalman was delivering and the cover was off the coal hole outside the door there. Half a ton of nutty slack, and more bloody slack than nuts, I can tell you. Had to stand over the bugger to make sure of a couple of hundredweight of lumps at least. And the price these days! Well, I told him, if that’s how you treat your customers I can always go back to Charringtons, can’t I? Thought I was doing you a favour, switching. You take your horse and cart and hop it back to the Co-op and tell them to pull their socks up. Who wants a great heap of coal dust in their cellar?’ He reached beneath the counter, squinting, before producing a large brown envelope bearing a row of the familiar blue French stamps. ‘All the way from gay Paree,’ he said, winking odiously. ‘Will there be anything else, then? Your usual mint humbugs?’

  ‘No, I’ll have a quarter of sherbet lemons today,’ said Baldy. ‘I feel like a change,’ he added with an effort at chattiness to match the shopkeeper’s while inwardly fuming with impatience.

  ‘Right you are, then.’ The man took down a jar and shook a rattling heap of yellow sweets into the brass scoop of a small pair of scales, then poured them neatly into a paper bag which he twirled expertly by the corners. ‘That’s two bob for the post and threepence for the sherbets. Half a crown? Ta.’ He rang up the till and handed Baldy his threepenny bit change. ‘Thanks very much, Mr Parsons. We’ll meet again, as Vera Lynn used to say.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Baldy, stepping out into the sunshine of Swinegate with the envelope securely tucked under his arm. He made his way back towards the High Street before ducking into the saloon bar of a pub that hadn’t yet begun to fill up with lunchtime customers. Reassured to find he had the gloomy room to himself, he carried his Double Diamond to a distant corner table. He took a large gulp of the beer before setting the mug down and opening the envelope. He noted it was addressed to plain John Parsons. Had the name appeared with an initial he would have known he needed to arrange a new accommodation address. He wondered what the envelope contained this time. It was usually some general interest magazine all in French. Once it had been knitting patterns and the last time it had been about horses, so far as he could judge from the pictures. Baldy Hodge was not a linguist. On the contrary, he prided himself on not knowing a word of Froggish, as he called it. He had no time for all that parley-voo and owf veedersayn stuff. It didn’t seem to have done them much good in two world wars.

  He drew out the magazine and immediately pushed it guiltily down beneath the table’s edge. The bastards! This time they’d sent him something typically French, all right, and it required no translation. He shot a glance at the room. There was nobody about. The barman was round the corner, dealing with customers in the public bar from which came voices and an eddy of smoke. He looked down again at his lap. Nudes on every page. And – good God! – not just women, either. This wasn’t Health & Efficiency by a long chalk: there were people actually, well, doing it. You could see everything. Baldy felt himself blush. He was, of course, a man of the world, as he often informed his subordinates at Wearsby; but really, there were limits. The dirty-minded so-and-sos! Still . . . With another furtive glance around he turned to the centre spread. At least the important thing was there. Under cover of the table he drew out a sheaf of dark blue five-pound notes – the new ones, he noted, with the Queen’s portrait. To think of sandwiching Her Majesty between pictures of that kind of filth! But what else could you expect from foreigners? He licked his fingers and surreptitiously counted the notes. Twenty, all right. That cheered things up. Another step towards the car of his dreams. He was buggered if he was going to settle for some dull runabout. He’d put that little toy Austin-Healey of young Rickards to shame. He couldn’t wait to see people’s faces at Wearsby when he burbled up in one of the new 4.2 E-Types. They’d be out in October for £2,100. Leather upholstery and that long, gleaming bonnet. One of those babies would release anybody’s inner James Bond and no mistake.

  With another glance at the room Hodge swiftly tucked the money into his inside pocket, shoved the magazine back into its envelope and downed the rest of his beer. Just like the adverts claimed, he thought as he returned the empty mug to the counter: a Double Diamond works wonders. He went out into the sunshine with something of a spring in his step. He called in at the Post Office where he deposited eighty pounds in his account. He tucked the remaining fivers into his savings book and strolled back towards the bus station. He never noticed the young man with the blue windcheater and crisp haircut who kept pace with him, but always at a careful distance.

  8

  One morning a note from the barrack warden informed Amos and Jo they were being moved from the flat into a house of their own. This turned out to be a brick semi-detached with three bedrooms in a close whose rear overlooked the sports field and the station’s chapel. The previous occupants were an American family who had just been posted back to the States. The surprise news was disquieting to them both, and for reasons neither was yet quite willing to disclose to the other.

  ‘Oh Amos, at last a house of our own!’ Jo said, satirically clasping her hands at her throat like a Hollywood housewife overjoyed with her new cooker. ‘And we’ll be right next to Ronald and Kay.’

  ‘And their children. And their dog.’

  ‘It will do wonders for my social life but I don’t suppose it’ll have any effect on yours.’

  Ignoring her sarcasm, Amos said, ‘I want to know what it means.’

  ‘It seems to mean that at last we get a proper family home of our own.’

  ‘Huh. That’s the theory, my dear. In practice this is the RAF. Nothing ever comes without strings. There are politics at work here, Jo. Think about it. Married quarters are like hen’s teeth. Yet they’re suddenly moving a childless couple into a house with three bedrooms. Why? Who authorised that? It makes no sense and it’ll undoubtedly get a lot of needier people pissed off because we’ve jumped the queue.’

  ‘Does that mean we now have to have children whether we like it or not?’

  The house was a fifties brick semi in a small estate comprising a cluster of roads named for pioneers of British flight. Tucked behind Cody Road and Rolls Drive, Brabazon Close was the one that gave its residents the most convincing impression that they were not living on an active Bomber Command station so much as on the leafy fringes of civilian suburbia. The rugger posts visible from the back windows might have been those of a school playing field; the trees beyond might have screened off a golf course instead of the grassy mounds of buried fuel tanks with their jutting black ventilation cowls; and between the intermittent roaring of aero engines the twittering of birds could be heard even with the windows closed.

  The move was accomplished in a single morning while Amos was on duty. Between them they didn’t have much in the way of possessions, and the house was already furnished as though by a boarding-house landlady who didn’t trust her tenants not to put their feet on the chairs. The plywood kitchen cupboards were lined with sheets of wrinkled green Fablon marked with the rings of other people’s pots and pans. In a battered tin ashtray on the Formica-topped kitchen table was a small gummy bladder that had once contained lighter fuel. There was also a used pipe-cleaner and an American book of matches with the slogan RE-UP NOW! inside the cover. Amos recognised this as urging US troops to re-enlist for the rapid build-up currently under way in Vietnam. The institution-green carpet in the lounge flaunted odd stains and the dents of furniture that had been moved.

  Two of the three bedrooms upstairs contained a single bed. In o
ne room there were children’s handprints on the pink distempered walls. In the bathroom the medicine cabinet above the washbasin was empty but for a strong smell of nail varnish remover and a crumpled yellow tube of Kolynos toothpaste. Hot water was supplied by a gas water heater on the wall over the bath which, once Amos had lit its pilot jet and opened a tap, ignited with an explosive thump that rattled the window panes and very slowly heated the water with industrial clamour before dying abruptly with a click. In the cupboard under the stairs he found the meter that required a rich diet of shillings. He decided that until the RAF was your landlady you had no idea of the real meaning of the word ‘skinflint’.

  Jo was gazing in horror at the double bed in what the architect had possibly thought of as the ‘master bedroom’. The stained mattress was slightly awry and visible on the inside of the wooden base was a black Ministry of Supply broad arrow. The varnished deal headboard showed twin darker patches where numberless sebaceous scalps had rubbed.

  ‘This is plain sordid, Amos,’ she said decisively. ‘I’m not sleeping on that. We might as well be in a prison.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just institution furniture,’ he said.

  ‘No doubt you got used to this sort of thing in that private school of yours, not minding that generations of disgusting adolescents had left their mark on what you slept on. It won’t do for me. You can go and get that divan base from the flat. I know it’s RAF property but we had it new and the springs are good and however grubby it may be at least it’s our own grub.’

  Her rebellion was perfectly reasonable, Amos thought as he stared out of the bedroom window. The bed was indeed a disgrace: an object more suited to commercial travellers’ lodgings or to a cheap hotel on the Continent. He was suddenly assailed by an image of himself and Jo as a couple on the Titanic complaining about the furniture in their cabin, and couldn’t help a tight little smile. Outside, flocks of starlings mustered in the late-afternoon light. On the playing field two boys were doggedly trying to get their control-line model aircraft to start, flicking its propeller over and over as darkness raced towards them over the planet’s edge. He was suddenly swept with a brief but terrifying conviction that nothing would last.