I did: a mysterious explosion had destroyed a part of that Indian city. The attack had eventually been blamed on Islamic separatists, but there was no certainty about that and many of the details about what really happened were still obscure.
‘When adjacency is used as a weapon it creates a tetrahedron of quantum annihilation: a three-sided pyramid of equilateral triangles, with a fourth triangle as its base. Anything beneath it, anything within that triangle, is vulnerable.’ He was speaking breathlessly, and he was resting his hand on my arm for support. ‘That is all, Mrs Flockhart. The technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and if it is ever used it will become a most terrible threat to peace. I am largely responsible for it.’
3
That night, when I was at home with my family, the children in bed, my husband working in his study on the top floor of the house, the news of Thijs Rietveld’s death was announced on television news. At first there was no information about the cause of his death, and in the shock of my sudden grief I assumed that the life of the man with whom I had spent much of the day had simply come to a natural end. He had certainly looked tired at the end of my interview. The old man I said farewell to as I left his house barely resembled the sprightly and energetic octogenarian who had greeted me on arrival.
When I went into the newspaper office the next morning the truth was coming in from the police in East Sussex. Professor Rietveld had injected himself with a huge overdose of a prescribed painkiller, then drunk at least one glass of scotch whisky. His body had been found in his garden, lying in the centre of the lawn.
The house and garden were cordoned off, apparently by the police, although confidential sources in the newspaper office suggested that security forces had actually ordered the closure of his house.
In the afternoon, Tibor Tarent, the young American photographer, came into the office as planned. He had of course heard the news. He brought with him several large prints of the photographs he had taken the day before.
All my plans to write a profile of the professor were put on hold, permanently as it turned out. The paper ran a long obituary written by one of his former colleagues, published several private tributes from friends and other colleagues, and within a few days the death of one of the greatest physicists of our era had passed into history.
But on that awful day of grief, Tibor Tarent gave me a large photographic print, based on shots he had taken during the last afternoon of Thijs Rietveld’s life. It consisted of four separate frames, placed in a rectangle together.
He said, ‘You were there, Jane. You saw me taking these photographs. You could see what he and I were doing from where you were standing, couldn’t you?’
‘I could.’
‘And you saw him take that conch, hold it out in his right hand, and stand calmly there on the lawn while I took these shots?’
‘That’s right.’
We were both staring at the print as it lay on my desk.
‘He never put down the conch? You agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see him pass it from hand to hand?’
‘No.’
‘I took these frames one after the other, just a few seconds apart. What the hell happened?’
I said I didn’t know. We talked about it for a while, but afterwards Tarent and I went downstairs to a local bar and split a bottle of red wine between us. We drank to the memory of the intriguing old man we had met so briefly. We did not stay long – Tibor had another assignment to go to, and I had work to do back in the office.
I still have the print of the photographs he took that day, of Professor Rietveld standing in the centre of his lawn, holding the beautiful conch. I have the print framed behind glass, and it hangs on the wall above my desk. I am dimly visible in all four of the separate photographs: slightly out of focus beyond the clump of bee-heavy buddleia, but clearly standing inside the house, watching from the window that overlooked the lawn.
The four shots form a rectangle. In the frame at the top left, he is holding the pink-and-amber shell in his right hand. In the picture next to it, he is standing in an almost identical pose, but now the conch has moved to his left hand. Below the first frame, Professor Rietveld is shown holding two identical conch shells, one in each outstretched hand. In the fourth picture, both his hands are empty.
Only in the fourth picture is the old man smiling at the camera.
PART 5
Tealby Moor
1
THE INSTRUMENT BASHER
For Mike Torrance, Aircraftman First Class, known to the others in his crew as ‘Floody’ Torrance, the sight of a Lancaster flying low in daylight was always a moment of beauty. He and the other members of the ground crew had little time for looking around, but whenever a Lanc landed they almost always raised their heads from what they were doing. The engines would be heard before the plane itself came into sight, which would then pass low in the near distance across the Lincolnshire farmland. When it turned in for its approach to the airfield, the dark green and brown upper camouflage was briefly visible as it banked. As it headed down towards the runway, nose raised slightly for the landing, the aircraft appeared all black, painted to blend with the night sky in which it flew. At night over Germany it would become invisible, or at least difficult to see, from below.
The beauty of the machine lay in its rough, purposeful and utilitarian shape. Every part of a heavy bomber was there to function as it should, without streamlining or any other flourishes of style. The gun turrets, in the nose and between the tail fins and in the upper part of the main fuselage, were made of bulbous perspex, there were observation bubbles at the sides of the cockpit and long bombing doors in the base, the engines were huge Merlins, their cowlings painted as black as the rest of the aircraft, the wings, with a span of more than a hundred feet were thick and round-tipped, holding tanks that would carry enough fuel for up to twelve hours at cruising speed.
Inside there were no comforts for the aircrew, nor for Mike Torrance and the others when they went aboard to service the plane. The seats were barely padded, the interior was only intermittently heated, the long fuselage was narrow and jammed with equipment. Jagged edges and unshielded metal corners protruded from several places. The aircrew in their bulky flying suits, worn over layer after layer of woollen clothing, could barely move about inside. Things were much worse if they had to put on their parachutes. The mental image of the desperate scramble for the escape hatch inside a stricken Lanc tumbling towards the ground, perhaps engulfed in flames, was something on which none of the ground crew could dwell.
There was no sound insulation, so the roar of the unsilenced Merlins was constant and deafening. In flight, thin cold air jetted in through a dozen cracks and apertures. The airframe itself was barbed on the outside with sensors, aerials, ports, access hatches. There was nothing about a Lancaster that did not have to be there, and there was no attempt to conceal what did.
It was nonetheless a thing of beauty for Torrance, because he considered it the best plane in the world to make the long flight across the North Sea, and then to bomb the German cities to hell. It was winter in early 1943. That was what they had to do, then.
2
148 Squadron, Bomber Command No. 5 Group, based at RAF Tealby Moor, was still new to Lancs, having been operational with the two-engined, obsolescent Wellingtons until just before Christmas. Mike Torrance had joined the squadron at about the same time, after training on the Lancaster instrumentation. A few operations had already been launched: they were known as ‘gardening’, mine-laying in the Danish narrows against the movements of the German U-boats into and out of the Baltic. It was hazardous work – 148 Squadron had already lost two of their Lancasters and their aircrews.
The new and replacement Lancasters came in from the factories, ferried by the pilots of the ATA, the Air Transport Auxiliary. They arrived one by one, two or three aircraft a week. Few of the ground crews had ever been close to a Lancaster before the first ones were delive
red, although all were trained in their particular area of speciality.
Mike Torrance was an instrument mechanic, invariably known to the other aircraftmen as an instrument basher. His domain was the Lancasters’ oxygen supply, bomb sight, gun sights, the DR compass, altimeter, artificial horizon – the instruments that were used to operate any part of the machine that was not the main airframe, engines or undercarriage. There were other teams for those. They were called the airframe bods, the engine wallahs. And the armourers who loaded the bombs and ammunition. The bowser operators, the refuellers. Maintenance was constant as soon as the aircraft arrived – repairs were necessary almost from the moment the planes started ops.
Before he was posted to Bomber Command, Torrance had been attached to Coastal Command, servicing the instruments on seaplanes. Seasickness, and tools dropped irrecoverably into the sea, were the daily hazards of his life. After retraining for the Lanc he was relieved to be transferred to a land-based squadron.
In charge of the Instrument Section of the squadron was Flight-Sergeant Jack Winslow, an RAF regular who had joined up in 1935, and who seemed to the new recruits almost omniscient about the aircraft they serviced. Two corporals, ‘Steve’ Stevenson and Al Harrison, worked under him. They knew what they were doing but the rest of the erks were a motley crowd, doing their bit in the air war, secretly never as confident of their skills as they tried to make out.
Mike Torrance, who felt himself typical of the young crewmen around him, had joined the RAF because he wanted to fly. He was a gangly six foot three, so he discovered he was too tall to fit usefully into any operational aircraft. He never proceeded beyond the first medical for the aircrew volunteers, for that reason. In civilian life he had been training as an architect after leaving school, but at eighteen he was already restless. He was good at drawing, but he loved books and music, had tried writing stories and poems. When the architecture firm moved over to war work he was out of a job, and he went immediately to join up. Months later he was a trained mechanic.
The first Lanc that arrived at Tealby Moor was for one of the squadron’s most experienced pilots, Squadron Leader ‘JL’ Sawyer and his crew. The captain was already the veteran of one completed tour of operations and was a third of the way through a second. He and his crew took the new plane up for a flight test the day it arrived, and afterwards Torrance and many of the others watched with ill-concealed envy as the ground crew assigned to that flight went to work, checking it out after it landed.
3
Within two weeks of the first Lancaster delivery, 148 Squadron was fully equipped and after a few days of gunnery testing, familiarization flights and general preparations it became operational. The war was showing no sign of coming to an end. Most of the ground fighting was in Russia, following the end of the siege of Stalingrad. Stalin was demanding that Britain and the USA should open a second front to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, but few people thought that was possible. The best the Allies could come up with was an unrelenting bombing campaign against the German homeland. The American Eighth Air Force was now based in Britain and had started daylight raids, but the Yanks were suffering terrible losses of aircraft and men.
The night campaign was what 148 Squadron was drawn into. In the annals of the RAF the period is known as the Battle of the Ruhr: a series of heavy raids on the complex of industrial cities in the north-west of Germany. Two or three times a week, from the middle of March of that year, the squadron’s Lancasters flew off into the ever-shortening nights to join the bomber stream heading out across the North Sea. Naturally, the squadron began to sustain serious damage to the aircraft and many actual losses.
The Lancaster captained by Flight Lieutenant Andy Everett was lost at the end of March. This was ‘E Easy’, the aircraft Torrance worked on every day. Everett and his crew disappeared over Duisburg, presumed shot down. It was only several weeks later that the people at Tealby Moor learnt that of the crew of seven aboard Everett’s plane, all but one had survived: the dorsal gunner, a Canadian called Ken Accent, was trapped inside the burning plane as it crashed. The rest of the crew managed to parachute to the ground and were taken prisoner. This welcome news was still unknown to Torrance and the others three days later, when in a grim mood they took delivery of the replacement Lanc. The call sign on this was ‘D Digger’.
D Digger was delivered in the late afternoon, so it was taxied to dispersal and the ground crew did not start checking it over until the following morning. It was a grey, rainy day, the few trees on the perimeter of the airfield bending under a stiff wind from the North Sea, not far away to the east. Mike Torrance’s D.I. – Daily Inspection – was the first he had carried out without supervision. There were already several other erks at work. Because the aircraft were delivered by civilian pilots none of the gun turrets was armed, so one of the first jobs for the armourers was to fit and install the machine guns. It was noisy work, and with the perspex cowls thrown open the interior of the plane was especially cold and draughty.
Torrance made his way to the cockpit, because the delivery pilot had reported that the altimeter was not working properly. Warned in advance of this, he had obtained a replacement altimeter from the stores. Removing the faulty instrument and fitting and connecting the replacement was a relatively straightforward job. The only difficulty was the usual one: the cramped space behind the instrument panel, which meant he had to lie down and reach awkwardly upwards behind the panel. Torrance’s fingers and knuckles permanently bore grazes from these tricky jobs.
With this completed, he looked again at the pilot’s sign-off to check nothing else had been reported. He stayed where he was on the floor, the rudder pedals pressing against his back. Getting in and out of this position was clumsy and sometimes painful, and he did not want to do it more often than necessary. However, there was just the one line: ‘Altmeter u/s.’
The handwriting was stiff and rounded, rather like a child’s, but the spelling mistake was not unusual. These reports were often filled in hastily by the pilots, or while still taxiing.
Torrance was levering himself up from the prone position, so that he could move on to the rest of the D.I., when he noticed something colourful and flat had become wedged between the base of the pilot’s seat and the floor. He reached over, jiggled it free, and stood up.
It was a wallet of some kind, but it was made of stiff fabric rather than leather. He could tell it contained papers that crackled when he pressed the sides. There were also a few coins somewhere inside. The wallet was sealed in a way he had never seen before: two leather strings or cords were wrapped several times around the wallet and tied together in a slip-knot. It was obviously a personal possession, probably highly valued by whoever owned it – standing there in the cold cockpit with it in his hand, Torrance felt as guilty as if he had stolen it.
Torrance well knew the regulations: any personal possession found in an aircraft had to be reported immediately. He looked around for the duty sergeant, but he was nowhere to be seen. Everyone else in and around the aircraft was working hard, preoccupied with what they were doing.
Intending to hand it in as soon as he came off duty he slipped it into his breast pocket, buttoned it down, then continued with the D.I.
He had soon forgotten about it and it remained hidden in his pocket until the evening. He was about to walk over to the canteen block for supper, but as soon as he made the discovery he let the other lads go on ahead. When he was alone in the hut he took it from his pocket and looked at it properly for the first time.
The wallet, or purse, or whatever it was he had found, shone with colours: bright yellow and orange circles, green stripes woven through and round them, a brilliant red piping stitched along the sides. There was something about the colours that induced in him a heavy nostalgic pang for his past life, not so long ago but feeling unreachably distant: long days of childhood, toys he had once had, memories of a garden full of flowers, living at home with his parents and his little sister. He was now
in a world where colours were drab or virtually non-existent. Wartime Britain was a country of unlit streets, blacked-out windows, unilluminated signs. On the base he and the other crew wore faded blue fatigues and jackets, beige or grey shirts, grey pullovers, navy forage caps. The planes were black or dark brown. The airfield was grassy but also covered in muddy patches and streaks. The concrete runways were long dull strips of concrete. The skies seemed permanently full of heavy clouds. The place where he lived and slept was a Nissen hut of unpainted metal, the hangars were darkly camouflaged, the main squadron buildings were plain brick and also painted with green-and-brown camouflage.
A sense of sharp and unexpected melancholy swept over him as he sat on the side of his bunk, staring at the coloured purse. It was a realization of the unrecoverable loss of something abstract and barely remembered, a feeling of how bad things had become for him, for everyone in the country, and an unwelcome reminder that the grim daily drabness of war was something he would have to bear and try to survive.
For a few moments Mike Torrance was stalled by these feelings. He was still only twenty-one years old – the life he had been hoping to find was slipping away somewhere. He turned the firm, slightly cushioned object around in his fingers, feeling once again the stiffness of the paper that was inside and the round weight of the coins. He drew on one of the laces, unwound them both and the wallet gaped open. A part of him was appalled by what he was doing: intruding, interfering with something private, but he thought that if he could find out who the thing belonged to then he could hand it back without going through the bull of RAF regulations.
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