“If they are adequate pilots, I will want the sergeants to be commissioned, sir. Better far that the men should all mess together. Last thing I want is ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the air.”
“They won’t be gentlemen, Stark.”
“Neither am I, sir. I’m Australian.”
“But…”
“If they can fly and die with me, they can eat at the same table as me, sir.”
“It’s not a good precedent to set, Stark. I shall grant your wish – in recognition of your service so far.”
“Thank you, sir. Are the adjutant and intelligence officer appointed, sir?”
“Adjutant is, and your man Jan will need your existing, experienced fellow at his side. You can have the intelligence chap. I see that he has an MC and two Mentions from the campaign.”
“Well deserved, sir. He was almost useless when nothing was happening. As soon as the pressure came on, he turned into a valuable officer and one I have a lot of use for.”
“He’s yours. Pilot Officer, I see… promote him?”
“He deserves it, sir.”
“Two steps to flight lieutenant, in recognition of his medals?”
“Well thought, sir. His family would approve - and be surprised.”
“Consider it done. Go on leave, Stark. Report to the new field outside Holt in Norfolk one week today.”
“At Holt, did you say, sir?”
“I did. It was as convenient as any other field in the Midlands or North – and I was told you would like to be there.”
“I would, sir. Very much. My fiancée, Noah Arkwright’s daughter, is a Holt girl, when she is on leave.”
“So Noah informed me. I wish you both joy. If you want my opinion, Stark – marry her as soon as possible. We have a long war ahead of us and little gain to waiting.”
“Perhaps, sir. We shall see.”
The trains out of Liverpool Street were even worse than they had been earlier in the year. Thomas found space in a first-class compartment and endured hours sat while the countryside passed slowly by. Had he been in third, he would have been standing – there were seats there for women and children and the elderly but almost none for young men.
He reached Holt six hours after boarding his first train. The pony and trap was still at the station, acting as a taxi.
“To the Lodge, Squadron Leader?”
The girl driver was silent for a minute or two, then ventured to ask after the war.
“They say it’s not going well in France, sir.”
“It may improve… It probably won’t, though. The BEF will almost certainly have to evacuate. The French army is collapsing. There’s no telling how long it will take – everything is going at headlong pace.”
“My brother is in Belgium, sir.”
“With any luck, he will come back again. I’m sorry.”
She was bright enough to recognise what he was saying. She began to cry, as nearly silently as she could.
“Thomas! Back and in one piece! Lucky you!”
“Just that, Lucy. Where is Grace these days?”
“Ferrying still, based on the site at Brooklands. I expect her back for the weekend tomorrow.”
“Good. I shall be glad to see her. More than glad.”
“She will be pleased. We have all been worried these last days. She managed to find an hour here on Tuesday – she was taking a Defiant, of all things, up to its field near Newcastle and had to bring a Gladiator south again. They are shipping a squadron of Gladiators out to East Africa and are assembling them at Tilbury Docks, outside of London. She had heard how things are actually going in France and Belgium. Losses of more than fifty per cent in the squadrons, she said.”
“We have taken a hammering, Lucy. The squadron knocked down at least sixty of the Hun. Came back eight strong yesterday, and two of them hospitalised on return. Just two serviceable Hurricanes.”
“And a DFC and bar, I see.”
“Giving them away to good boys, instead of extra guns and trained pilots.”
She was not convinced.
“Where next, Thomas?”
“Seven days here, if I may? Then I have a squadron to form at the new field at Holt. Flying what, I don’t know, though it is certainly Fighter Command. Mark II Hurricanes, I presume.”
“Noah hoped you would be posted here – he didn’t know if Dowding would arrange it.”
Rationing was starting to bite, but not too severely for those living in the country. Sugar was strictly limited but there was jam for tea and honey was available from local hives. There was also Spam, a unique canned meat which had appeared in place of ham at the cold afternoon tea table.
“It has one great virtue, Thomas – it is available. I don’t think it is poisonous and it is slightly better than no meat at all, even if soft and textureless. What was the food like in France?”
He told her of the days of boiled potato and bully beef, followed by the gluttony at the chateau where they had eaten up the food stocks squirrelled away against disaster.
“I gave the butler there – who is an Englishman – your name and my father’s, so there may be a refined gentleman’s gentleman knocking on the door one day, seeking a temporary roof over his head. He had every intention of looting the Comte’s hidden wealth - I expect him to be able to establish himself.”
He explained at length, finally starting to relax. Then he staggered off to his room and slept for sixteen hours unbroken. He was considerably more human when he reappeared for breakfast.
“Are we losing this war, Thomas?”
“We have lost already. The question is whether we intend to fight the next instalment – Britain and the Empire against the rest.”
“Harsh.”
“Realistic. We may be faced with the loss of the whole BEF and all of its equipment. Starting again will not be easy.”
“Invasion?”
“Still impossible. More so than before the Norwegian campaign. Hitler lost too much of his surface fleet there. The logistics are still the same – barges to land across the beaches face a journey of eighteen to twenty-four hours at sea – the Channel and the southern North Sea, which, I am told, are not the easiest of waters. There are minefields and sandbanks galore. The Luftwaffe cannot provide cover at night. There are at least a dozen cruisers in East Coast and Channel ports that could sail in the dark hours and reach the barge convoys, which have inadequate naval escort. Add to that a score and more of destroyers and a hundred of torpedo and gunboats and armed trawlers at sea and twice that number of inshore drifters and crabbers and pleasure boats armed with machine guns and pompoms and other light artillery. Hitler might send a hundred thousand men to sea in his first wave, but he would lose ninety per cent of them, and their barges, in that one night.”
“We need not fear invasion then?”
“We should pray for it, Lucy. The best of Hitler’s infantry would be dead inside a day, together with their support artillery and stores. He can bomb us and hurt us – no doubt he will. He cannot conceivably invade us except he builds a fleet of escorts for his barges.”
She sat back and thought for a few silent minutes, while Thomas ate a belated breakfast.
“Stalemate for a year or two, Thomas. Unless he can break our will to fight. Have you heard of what happened to Rotterdam?”
He had not, listened in horror to her description of the bombing that had ripped the heart out of the city and, it was believed, killed untold thousands of its civilian population.
“The Dutch had no air force to stop the bomber fleet. We have a sufficiency to make it costly to them this year. If we last two years, we will be able to take command of the skies – as Boom Trenchard would say.”
“He still does say, Thomas. He is busy giving morale-boosting visits and lectures all over the country.”
“Lectures? Trenchard?”
“Well… He doesn’t say very much, but he puts that little forcefully!”
“I wonder if he will visit my new mob
? I gather it may be in need of having its morale stiffened.”
“What’s wrong with it, Thomas?”
He gave her Dowding’s words, almost verbatim.
“Ah! That could be interesting – in the Chinese sense.”
“Sorry?”
“According to the story, when the Chinese ill-wish a man they say, ‘may you live in interesting times’.”
He still looked blank.
“History books never record the years when nothing happens and people enjoy quiet, peaceful, prosperous lives. They write about the interesting bits. We all know what happened to London in 1665 and 1666, after all. But what about 1663 and 1664, for example?”
She kindly explained the Great Plague and the Fire of London.
“Ah! I’ve heard of them. Rats, wasn’t it?”
“So we are told, Thomas. The rats brought the Plague and then the Fire wiped out the rats, and their fleas.”
He finally appreciated her comment – ‘interesting times’ were inevitably unpleasant for ordinary people.
“Did you go to school, Thomas?”
“Quite frequently, Lucy. The Old Man insisted that I should learn to read and write, and do my sums. He has little more education than that, though he always downplays what he has, tries to seem a complete illiterate. He says that if people think you are less educated than them, they tend to treat you as if you are insignificant and, as an example, talk openly in front of you because you won’t understand them. Useful in business and handy for dealing with the brass.”
She nodded, aware that her own husband used the same trick, often making a play of his years in an industrial school. They called them ‘approved schools’ now, she thought.
Grace came off the afternoon train, tired by the journey, immediately delighted to discover Thomas, both alive and waiting for her on the platform.
“We heard down the grapevine that your squadron had been almost destroyed, Thomas! They said fewer than a dozen of you took on sixty bombers and an equal escort!”
“More or less true, little lady. Trouble was, we met them head-on, couldn’t pretend to be looking the other way and not see them.”
“And who do you think you’re fooling? You dived in headlong and hoped they might miss!”
“What choice was there? I don’t think running was an option, and we managed to break the raid up. Wherever they were going was important to them – you don’t send out more than a hundred planes on a casual whim – and they didn’t get there.”
She had to admit that was unanswerable.
“Duty first? It must be so, Thomas. For all of us in this war. Where are you posted next?”
“Holt. The new field just down the road. From next Thursday.”
“Good. We can get married in three weeks from tomorrow. If you are going to kill yourself, we can have a married life first. We can see the vicar in the morning – if that’s what you want as well.”
The last few words were forlorn, as if she realised that she might be forcing him to a course he did not want, or not as much as she did.
He took the only practical course. The train pulled out with a company of soldiers in the last carriage whistling and cheering their embrace.
“I don’t know where the Old Man is at the moment. Last time I saw him he was playing silly buggers in France, running up to the fields at ground level in a Dominie, dropping off new pilots and picking up wounded. If he’s in England, he will turn up, I don’t doubt. Noah should know where to find him. What of Tom? Do you know where he is?”
She shook her head. She suspected he was not in England because he had not sent a letter in weeks.
They took the pony and trap and stepped down at the Lodge in rapt discussion of their next few weeks. They had quickly decided not to open the house at East Runton – they did not know where they might be in two months.
“What about the ferrying?”
“Several of the girls are married. That will be no problem.”
Lucy dug out a bottle of wine to celebrate the decision, said it saved her having to persuade them towards the course.
Tom at that moment - which he would have much disapproved of – was enduring a flight in a horribly small aeroplane with only one wing, a Lysander he thought he had heard it called. He was on his way from Dover to Belgium where he was to find General Gort’s HQ, assuming it still existed, and then join its staff and make accurate unbiased notes on what was actually happening, as opposed to what Gort thought was going on. He was wearing the uniform of a captain in the Pay Corps, which would suggest to those who noticed that he was Army Intelligence, they generally hiding in the unthreatening ranks of the least martial of the Army. He reminded himself that his name was Hanson and that he had been posted at Catterick, in Yorkshire; he knew nothing of Yorkshire but none of Gort’s staff would have been near so unfashionable a locality.
The Lysander landed at a small strip outside the minor port of Dunkirk, which was distinguished only by a refinery and oil storage tanks. The pilot turned and smiled.
“Right, Captain! Climb down and bugger off and remember not to tread on the guns in the wheel spats. I’m off.”
He revved the engine to make his point.
Tom grabbed a small kitbag and clambered clumsily out and walked across to a small hut which was the sole building on the strip. The Lysander was off the ground before he had opened the door.
The hut contained a corporal and a telephone.
“Can you get me transport, Corporal?”
“No, sir. Line’s dead, sir. Has been for three days. Ain’t seen nobody in that time, sir. Got grub for today and if nobody don’t come, I’m walking off to my unit at the docks, sir.”
“Have they got transport?”
“They had a big rowing boat, sir, for checking any ships what came into harbour, sir.”
“Do you know where HQ is?”
“No, sir. Not here, sir.”
“Why are you here?”
“The lieutenant said I got to be, sir. Guarding the airfield.”
“In case the Germans run away with it?”
“Dunno, sir. Lieutenant didn’t tell me what to guard it from.”
There was a teapot and mugs on a table at the side.
“Is the tea hot?”
“No, sir. Got tea and water but there ain’t no stove to hot it on.”
Tom gave up and swung his bag onto his shoulder. There was a minor road and he would walk it east in the hope of finding something.
An hour brought him to a military police checkpoint, controlling traffic, which was non-existent in daylight hours. There was a thirty-hundredweight lorry at the side of the road and a single MP stood in the carriageway.
“Would you show me your papers, sir?”
“Certainly. Do you know where General Gort’s HQ is?”
The MP frowned.
“Why, sir?”
“I have just been dropped off at the airstrip down the road. From England. I am to join the General’s staff.”
The MP produced a large revolver from the holster at his side.
“Just stand there. Don’t move. Sergeant!”
The lorry doors opened and an NCO trotted round from the passenger side.
“What have you got, Kelly?”
“Officer to join General Gort’s staff, Sarge. He doesn’t know where the HQ is and says he was dropped off by plane at the field down the road.”
“Was he indeed, Kelly? McManus! Bring the cuffs across.”
Another MP came from under the canvas tilt and shackled Tom’s hands behind him.
“Stick the clever sod in the back and keep an eye on him, McManus. Kelly, get in with them and keep your pistol on him. We’ll take him to HQ ourselves. Get in the back Fritz and shut up if you know what’s good for you!”
It was better than walking, Tom thought, as he tried to make himself comfortable in the back of the bouncing lorry. Considering the matter dispassionately, his story did sound unlikely. He sat back and t
ried to occupy his mind profitably.
His entertainment in recent weeks had been to read the works of the mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Only in the evenings, Russell being a pacifist and his works frowned upon, though not banned. He was almost sure there was a logical flaw in his arguments against self-defence; he ran through the propositions again.
The lorry pulled up and he was dragged out and bundled into a gatehouse, the lodge of a smallish chateau. He presumed it was Gort’s HQ.
“I am to report to Colonel Patterson-Smythe. Can you contact him, Sergeant?”
The sergeant did not know the name, but there was no reason why he should. If the officer was expected, then he must treat him with some courtesy, while still making sure that he was valid.
“Yes, sir. I shall do so immediately. Just sit down, sir.”
“Could you take these cuffs off?”
“When the colonel has confirmed your identity, yes, sir.”
It took half an hour to locate the colonel and bring him away from the business occupying his morning. The smell of Scotch suggested that he had been taking a lunch break.
“Hanson, from Catterick? Why are you in chains, Hanson?”
“A transport problem, sir. I was dropped off at the field outside Dunkirk where it was thought I could be picked up. No telephone.”
“None in the whole of bloody France at the moment, Hanson. Bloody stupid way of doing things. Thought it might be quicker, did they?”
The sergeant unlocked the cuffs and saluted. Tom managed to smile and accompanied the colonel from the guardroom.
They walked round to the front of the chateau. There was a view across the countryside to the east, marred by smoke clouds in five separate locations, the nearest and blackest only a few miles distant.
“We shall be pulling back to the west this evening, Hanson. The front is collapsing. Can’t find the Belgians and the French are proving elusive. General Gort has driven out to speak to the French high command – they might be at Amiens, or Arras, but we ain’t certain. It might be Abbeville – had an ‘A’ in it, so they think. Make a note of that, will you, my boy? Not sure that I shall get back to England – got to hang around waiting for my people to report in. You are to go back with the General when he’s ordered to pull out. I’ll pass my own appreciation to you, I’ve written everything out so it will get back to England. Useful lecturing material for the Staff College – how not to run a war, or a piss-up in a brewery!”
The Breaking Storm (Innocent No More Series, Book 2) Page 17
