‘There’s one thing,’ Jo was saying, her tone faintly savage. ‘You could hardly be closer for your rugger, could you?’
Maybe it would be an asset for her to have Kay Hendry next door. Kay’s wing commander husband Ronald spent a good deal of his time in Germany, being temporarily involved with some arcane aspect of the nuclear weapons stored there for the RAF’s Canberra light bombers, while Kay taught in the local village primary school where their two children also went. That meant she was around most afternoons and evenings and might make a pretty good companion for Jo. Girls liked all that hobnobbing over tea and biscuits. But really it was high time Jo got herself a job, Amos thought. Half her trouble is that she doesn’t do anything. Why couldn’t she become, I don’t know, a librarian in Market Tewsbury? She’s no fool and obviously likes reading. It would surely be a lot more fulfilling than mooning about all day drinking endless cups of instant coffee and reading those brainless magazines of hers.
A mere three days later, to his astonishment and relief, Jo announced she had become a vet’s assistant in Mossop. The practice was the only one this side of Grantham and was big, dealing mainly with farm animals and only secondarily with pets. The two vets who ran it needed a new receptionist and on Kay Hendry’s recommendation Jo had applied for the post and immediately got it. That evening Amos returned to find an enormous buck rabbit loping around the kitchen in between nibbling at a carrot in one corner.
‘Isn’t he gorgeous, Amos? Just feel his ears: they’re lovely and silky and floppy. He was born in captivity but then just abandoned by some people who thought he could fend for himself in the wild. But he couldn’t and was starving to death when someone brought him in. That was a fortnight ago and just look at him now.’
Amos did, and was not reassured.
‘Is he house-trained?’
‘Perfectly. Look over there.’
In the corner beside the fridge was a naked tray of earth on a sheet of newspaper. It was surrounded by a scattering of pellets like glistening coffee beans.
‘Well, fine, why not? I bet we’re unique on the station. The only people with a live-in rabbit. It’s not called Bugs, I hope?’
‘No, I’m calling him Vulcan. Very occasionally some of his bombs get quite close to the target.’
‘Very satirical.’ The sharp little sally reminded Amos of why he had first found her attractive. She was no empty-headed dolly bird, unlike most of the others who bussed into Market Tewsbury from the surrounding countryside on Saturday evenings to dance in the hall at the back of the pub, their half-frozen white thighs defenceless beneath their mini skirts. But such reflections only depressed him further. This side of his life was increasingly an irritant, a distraction from his real centre of interest. He had joined the air force to fly, not to become mired in domestic encumbrances. Much as he had loved Jo when they were first married, he couldn’t conceal from himself that his intensest emotion these days was for his mission, his aircraft and his crew. He could more easily and agreeably imagine spending the rest of his life in the company of, well, Gavin Rickards, than he could doing so with Jo, who seemed to have no further secrets to yield up. And now this new housing, with its implied official enforcement of family status, felt like imprisonment for the crime of marriage he now realised he should never have committed.
As if to make things still worse, within days he and Jo were invited to a Saturday evening welcoming party around the corner in de Havilland Road. Their hosts were Squadron Leader Dominic Purdue and his wife Joy. It was a slightly odd experience walking into the Purdues’ house since it was identical to their own, down to the furnishings and décor. It was a bit like coming home and discovering strangers had moved in, except that the Purdues were no strangers. Like his late friend the helicopter pilot Marty O’Shea, Dominic had been in the same Entry as Amos at Cranwell and their careers had run along parallel courses except that Purdue had ended up in 599 Squadron flying Canberras. He had been based at Wearsby for the last two years while the squadron’s various flights rotated to Germany, Cyprus and further afield.
‘Welcome to Marital Mansions,’ he greeted Amos as his wife collared Jo and led her off. ‘We thought you’d never make it to these refined parts. Think of this as Wearsby’s Hampstead Garden Suburb. We’re all assuming you must have bribed somebody. No doubt you’ve got some compromising photos to hold over the barrack warden’s head. Anyway, it’s now your duty to get stinko unless you’re flying tomorrow.’
‘I may not bother to get out of bed tomorrow,’ Amos assured him. ‘Not even if Wheezing Jesus tries to haul me off to chapel.’
‘Least of all, I should think. Nasty cold place full of damn silly pronouncements.’ Dominic looked around hastily for possibly offended ladies and, finding none, thrust a tumblerful of scotch at Amos. ‘I guess you’ll have heard that my ‘B’ Flight has blotted its copybook?’
‘There were some murmurs on the grapevine this morning but to tell the truth I’ve been kept so busy I missed the full story. Something about a car crash, was it?’
‘I’ll say, but luckily no human casualties. They were playing the BABS game after a session in the Tooth. Pissed as farts, of course. They very nearly made it back, too, but at the last moment they pranged the phone box outside the main gate here, ricocheted across the road and wrote off that CND protest sign in the field opposite.’
‘Hey, that can’t be bad. High time it went,’ said Amos enthusiastically. ‘Good for them, I say.’
‘Absolutely. Everyone agrees. But whatever he may think, our CO can’t say so. He’s grounded the lot of them and is making them pay for a new phone box. They’ll probably have to do a refresher on Meteors or something humiliating before being allowed back on Canberras. The boys are having a whip-round for them. Chip in?’
‘You bet. Anyone who has managed to Cat 5 that banner gets my vote.’
The banner in question was an enormous affair that supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had erected in a sympathetic farmer’s field slap opposite Wearsby’s main gate. Its slogan read ‘WE WERE ONLY OBEYING ORDERS’ WAS NO DEFENCE AT NUREMBERG. Underneath was the CND’s motif of an upside-down Y in a circle. It had been there for months. At first the airmen had planned excursions to sabotage it but gradually a general feeling had spread that it was too pathetic a target for professional pranksters like themselves to bother with. It was just another confirmation that most civilians simply didn’t understand the real world they were living in. Still, that didn’t mean 599’s ‘B’ Flight weren’t due a vote of thanks for writing it off, and in such spectacular fashion.
The two friends smiled and shook their heads, both no doubt remembering similar escapades of their own. Nearly everyone had played the BABS game at one time or another. It was named after the old Beam Approach Beacon System on which Canberra crews had trained: a somewhat primitive aid dating from the war for lining up an aircraft correctly for landing. In fact the Canberras’ version was even more primitive in that it depended on spoken instructions given by the navigator to the pilot as he made his final approach. The navigator watched a cathode ray tube that showed how much the aircraft was deviating to the left or right of the correct path. If it strayed to the left he called out to the pilot ‘Dot’; and if to the right, ‘Dash’. The further it strayed, the more he repeated it: ‘Dot-dot,’ or maybe a more urgently shouted ‘Dash-dash-dash!’ A rare, correct line straight up the middle of the runway would evoke the call ‘Steady!’
The game, best played when returning legless in someone’s car after an evening at a pub, involved blindfolding the driver. A back-seat ‘navigator’ was nominated to guide him by calling out dots and dashes. At chucking-out time in the wilds of Lincolnshire there were few other vehicles on the roads and it was surprising how far BABS players could drive without calamity. On this occasion it seemed they had managed to cover almost the entire four miles back to Wearsby’s gate guardian, a decaying Whitley bomber, before writing off the phone box and the CND banner.
This cruel luck was now to be punished further, which was doubtless no surprise to the roisterers themselves. Such exploits, together with the more physically hazardous of the traditional mess games, had long been outlawed for crews responsible for delivering the country’s nuclear deterrent. Drunken driving in the neighbourhood of RAF stations was hardly a rarity, and the local police usually dismissed it with a caution as boys being boys. But if a bomber crewman broke a leg or a collarbone in a mess game it was counted as a self-inflicted injury and was severely punished. (Breaking them in a rugger match for the honour of the station was a different matter, of course.)
‘Still,’ said Amos sympathetically, ‘I suppose that’s what comes of playing silly buggers. I bet they got a dressing-down.’
‘A real headmaster’s scolding, I gather. Actually, they’re lucky not to be on fizzers. A court martial doesn’t look too good in the old record. Instead they got the usual homily about such larks being incompatible with the high seriousness of nuclear deterrence, blah blah, squadron honour and responsibility, more blah, and not forgetting to mention that it costs the best part of a hundred thousand quid to train each crew member. Plus of course having their pocket money docked. It’s the pilots I pity. They’re all good lads but if they’re grounded long enough they’ll lose their currency, go back to retake the tests, get the hours in, all that jazz. Mind you, we all know that could change overnight if there’s an emergency. They’d be back in their cockpits within minutes. Your glass is empty, old boy,’ Dominic suddenly pointed out. ‘Can’t have that. Nobody stays sober long in Marital Mansions.’
The house filled up with familiar faces, the men tending to congregate in the sitting room talking shop while the women migrated to the kitchen, from which emanated periodic bursts of ribald laughter and plates of bridge rolls. Three rapidly thinning crates of Worthington ale stood in the fireplace. Several of the men wanted to know the inside story on the two Vulcans nominated as the Ponsonby flight in 319 Squadron. Predictably, it had become the source of inspired gossip all over the station.
‘Secret mission, I heard,’ said Jim Ledbetter confidentially. ‘They’re going to kidnap Khrushchev from his dacha. Then they’ll bring him back to Wearsby and quarter him here under lock and key with all his meals brought in from the sergeants’ mess.’
‘Poor sod. Think of the weight he’ll lose.’ There was general laughter at this. The appalling quality of the food there was notorious and NCOs’ increasingly bitter complaints were reaching ears that were usually too senior to be troubled by such things.
‘No, no, that’s not it,’ said Andy Fyfe. ‘It’s dead obvious when you think about it. Apart from the crews and the lineys, who’s allowed aboard a Vulcan?’
‘No-one.’
‘Exactly. And you’ve got an armed MP with a dog and six spare rounds for his revolver guarding each aircraft.’
‘I’ve got it,’ said someone. ‘Customs and Excise.’
‘Go to the top of the class, Bernie. Don’t you see? Not even Customs and Excise are allowed aboard. So they detail off these two Vulcans with panniers in their bomb bays and fly them around the world topping them up with contraband goods. No-one can touch them. Pearls, opium, diamonds, booze, blue films . . . It’s the perfect racket for generating funds for the RAF. I happen to know the idea comes straight from the Air Ministry. They’re not as stupid as some people claim.’
The burst of laughter that greeted this flight of fancy brought Joy Purdue hurrying in to remind them of the children sleeping upstairs. There was a token lull. Amos heard himself say, in the careful, serious tone of the half-drunk, ‘Honest – I really don’t know what “P” Flight’s for. Some weird admin idea of Muffin’s. Who knows? We’re all a bit baffled.’
‘Oh bollocks.’ Conviviality broke out again and eventually several of the other wives began persuading their husbands that it might be time to go home.
‘Shame, really,’ said Jim Ledbetter, whose shirt bore a brown stain of Mackeson’s stout. ‘I feel in the mood for a prank. How about, how about – no, you chaps, listen – how about we put that clapped-out car of the padre’s up on the chapel roof?’
‘How? It’s a high building. Tall, you know.’
‘We can get a crane, can’t we? Bound to be one somewhere. Drive it over here and Bob’s your uncle. Dead snip.’
‘No, Jim,’ his wife said firmly. ‘You’re a big boy now and you’ve had enough. We’re going home.’
‘Terrible spoilsports, these women,’ said Jim. ‘No sense of fun. Absolutely won notever.’
‘I must say I’d have liked to see Wheezing Jesus’s face,’ admitted Andy. ‘It would have been something. A Morris ascends into heaven.’
At this point Jo thanked her hostess, Dominic being asleep near the fireplace, and led Amos eighty yards back to their house and unsteadily into the hall, where he tripped over the rabbit Vulcan. A little later he and Jo were lying side by side in their bedroom, quite naked but for one sock and a shirt that Amos had overlooked. He dimly knew that with his inhibitions subdued by alcohol this ought to be an erotic moment. Yet for the life of him he couldn’t stop completely inappropriate images from spinning through his mind like a series of slideshow pictures. First there was a close-up of a Vulcan’s tyre streaked with liquid that had sent Baldy Hodge into a tizzy thinking it was a hydraulic leak until it was identified as a leaking police dog. Then there was the padre’s car on the chapel roof, surreal and splendid in the moonlight. After that a brief flash of the BABS game, interspersed with Joy Purdue’s amazing breasts which made him think of nothing very much but pink glimpses of people’s faces. These ended mysteriously with a close-up of his own crewman, the boyish Gavin Rickards, with whom he now thought he might have been at school. He slept.
9
The flight of fancy about open-cockpit aircraft that Group Captain Mewell had had during his briefing of ‘P’ Flight suddenly took practical shape. A series of phone calls enabled him to secure the loan of an ideal machine. This was a Bücker Jungmann that had apparently been abandoned in a hangar at Martlesham Heath when the RAF had pulled out the previous year. This was the type the Luftwaffe had adopted as its basic trainer from the mid-1930s and had built by the thousand. Somehow this particular example had found its way to Suffolk. The owner, a reserve officer, was planning to fly it in club aerobatic competitions and had recently rebuilt the engine. He seemed quite content to lend it to a man who had once flown with the Dam Busters.
Mewell was overjoyed. The Jungmann sat on a patch of grass by ‘B’ hangar, a bright yellow biplane smelling sweetly of fresh Titanine dope. Smaller than a Tiger Moth, it looked like a toy or maybe a large version of the radio-controlled models the Wearsby enthusiasts flew at weekends. Mewell had dug out his old goggles and leather flying helmet but otherwise wore nothing but his uniform. A couple of erks watched with a valiant attempt at solemnity as their commanding officer folded down both access panels in the sides of the front cockpit and squeezed in. He was quite a tall man and, once wedged, found he could barely get his knees far enough up under the fuel tank in order to put his feet on the pedals. Wincingly, he levered himself out again and sat himself in the student’s cockpit behind. This was not only more spacious but better instrumented. Well, I am forty-one, he thought as he strapped himself in. Not quite the flexible twenty-year-old I once was. While familiarising himself with the layout he was glad he’d picked up a bit of German in the prison camp during the war and so was able to translate some of the inscriptions on controls and gauges. Finally he began the start-up ritual. He set the brakes and at his wave one of the helpers held a wing tip while the other laid a hand on the propeller.
‘Fuel on, switches off, throttle closed,’ called the erk.
Mewell checked that the choke was set. ‘Fuel on, switches off, throttle closed.’
‘Throttle set. Contact.’
‘Throttle set. Contact.’
The propeller swung and the engine caught with a ragged tuft of blue smoke that w
as immediately shredded by the ensuing gale. Mewell settled it back to a tickover whose gassy chatter did more even than the smell of dope to take him pleasurably back to his youth and his own wartime training as a fledgling pilot. Conflict might still have been raging and his comrades decimated but a new life had spread out ahead of him disguised as an expanse of green and springy turf capped by a limitless dome of blue sky. The promise of a great freedom welled within him like adrenaline. Seeing that both erks were standing clear he raised his hand, settled his goggles, gunned the engine and bumped towards the nearest taxiway. No need to use a runway designed for bombers: a couple of hundred yards of grass alongside the taxiway were ample. There was no radio, so he had previously worked out a system with the runway caravan. He lined himself up and set the brakes, eyeing the orange windsock at the end of the airfield to check the wind.
A window in the caravan opened, an arm appeared and a lamp flashed green. Having first remembered to lock the steerable tailwheel, Mewell pushed the throttle open and began his run. At twenty-five knots the tail came up and he could see ahead through the grey blur of the propeller. At sixty knots he was off the ground and climbing away, banking slightly to starboard to take him over the fire dump, across the woods and away from Wearsby. He headed eastwards over fenland, climbing to five thousand feet before trying a gentle first roll. Lincolnshire’s green patchwork swung up and over the cockpit followed by blue space. It was perfect. His heart sang in the wind that streamed into his face at various angles as he sent the little yellow biplane cavorting about the sky like a foal leaping and kicking its legs in an access of spring fever.
Under the Radar Page 9
