Authors: Derek Robinson
“I'm worth,” Langham lisped. His cut lip had swollen. Rain washed blood down his chin.
“It's a man's game,” Uncle said brusquely. His boots were a size too small; he knew all about pain. “Ossington have always been a dirty lot. Don't worry, I'll watch out for foul play.”
“It's not them. It's Black Mac,” Silk said.
“Nonsense.” Uncle walked away. But after a minute he summoned McHarg. “You really mustn't hit your own men, you know. That's foul play.”
“Not a bit of it. I read the rules last night. It's only a foul if you hit an opponent.”
“Really?” Uncle was startled. “But look here ⦠I mean, what's the point? It won't help us win.”
“It might. Those two are awful lazy. They need a wee tickle to make them run.”
In the second half, Silk and Langham ran shamelessly away from their captain. They ran as far and as fast as possible. If by bad luck someone passed the ball to them, they immediately kicked it and ran the other way. This saved them from further serious damage. Ossington beat Kindrick by forty points.
Black Mac had stamped on Langham's right foot, so Langham used the accelerator cautiously as he drove to Bardney Castle. Zoë was shocked by the sight of his split lip. It had swollen enormously, forcing him to talk out of the side of his mouth.
“Darling! You look
dreadful.
What happened? Have you been in a fight?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He winced as she helped him out of his greatcoat, and her face twisted in sympathy. He noticed this and realized he could do better than rugby injuries. “I wish I could tell you about it. Deadly secret, I'm afraid. Get shot at dawn if I say a word.” He tried to smile and his lip split again. The trickle of blood horrified her. She sent for ice.
“Have you seen a doctor? Yes, of course you have. Silly question. I knew you must be flying when you didn't phone me. You've been
on operations, haven't you? No, you mustn't tell me. You're so calm! It must have been awful.”
“Well, getting in a panic never helps.”
Ice arrived. She wrapped some in a towel and he held it against his lip. He thought she looked even lovelier when she was worried about him. “What can I do?” she asked.
“Whisky. The MO gave me some magic ointment for my various bumps and bruises, but it can wait.”
They held hands by the fire while he sipped whisky, awkwardly, through the corner of his mouth. Then she insisted that he show her all his injuries. “All right,” he said, “but it's not a pretty sight.”
He stood naked while she gently applied the MO's healing balm to his knocks and scrapes. Her open admiration, and the warmth of her touch, actually made him feel heroic. He wondered it if it was like this in days of yore, when a noble warrior returned from battle to his grateful maiden. Then what? Did she express her appreciation in the usual way?
She was thinking:
I never expected war to be like this. I suppose they fly somewhere and get involved in violent dogfights, or something
⦠What she said was: “One piece of equipment is still in good working order.”
“So it is. That's jolly lucky, isn't it?” He held her by the shoulders and they kissed.
“Are you quite sure, darling? You must be exhausted.”
“Not a bit. Never felt better.”
She put her arm around his waist and guided him to the bedroom. Because of his injuries, she made him lie on his back while she eased herself into position on top. He was impressed by her suppleness. Nobody mentioned pickled eggs.
Silk and Langham were young and healthy. Their injuries soon healed. Whenever he met them, McHarg asked if they were fit. “The Group Captain wants me to take a team to Ossington,” he said,
grinning like a shark. “He wants revenge! He's a devil for revenge, is Rafferty.”
“I'd sooner bomb Berlin in broad daylight,” Silk said.
McHarg cackled in his odd, high-pitched fashion. “That's what we like to see! Fighting spirit!” He walked away. A passing airman saluted him, and he returned the salute with such fervor that the man looked around for a cause.
“One of us has got to shoot him,” Langham said. He spun a coin and lost. “I can't. I'm a married man.”
“How's Zoë?”
“Too much on her own. Gets bored.”
“Not by one of the gardeners, I hope. That's a joke, Tony.”
“Christ, it had better be.”
McHarg was in his office, reading an Air Ministry publication on the safe storage of tracer bullets, when he got an urgent summons to the operations room. A medium-sized flap was on. Two submarines, or perhaps the same submarine twice, had been spotted about fifty miles off the east coast. Group wanted six Hampdens in the air urgently, bombed up and fueled for a long patrol. “High explosive,” the Wingco said. “Six two-hundred-and-fifty-pounders per kite. How soon?”
“Half an hour,” McHarg said, and ran from the room.
He took the first vehicle with a key in the ignition, the MO's Morris, and drove fast across half a mile of grass to the bomb dump. The huts where the armorers worked were empty except for three airmen playing brag. “Where's everyone?” he roared, and saw the clock and knew: they were eating their bloody midday meal. He telephoned the Airmen's Mess and the Sergeants' Mess, ordered every armorer back on duty double-quick.
The three airmen were starting up the tractors, hitching on the bomb-trolleys, shouting, running. McHarg headed for the dump and stopped. Outside the entrance lay row upon row of shiny olive-green two-fifties. The stenciled idents said HE. No need to winkle the damn things out of the depths of the dump, then. Stroke of luck. Should save ten, fifteen minutes.
Armorers were turning up on bicycles and in trucks. He quickly got them loading the trolleys. The flight-sergeant armorer arrived on his motorbike. “Anti-sub patrol,” McHarg told him crisply. “Six kites, six two-fifty HEs per kite. Impact pistols. Get cracking. Wait! What were those stores doing outside the dump?”
“Getting cleaned, sir. The casings were all sweaty, we've been scraping the crystals off andâ”
“Use âem! You've got twenty minutes to takeoff.”
The flight sergeant was soon back. “We'll need more time, sir. Six two-fifties is a tight squeeze on some of these kites. Getting the bastards dead central so they lock into place ⦔ He sucked his teeth.
“Nothing new. Done it before.”
“Time is what I'm talking about, sir.”
“You're wasting it, standing here.”
As if to confirm this, they heard the harsh bark of Pegasus engines being tested. Soon the noise died as the ground crews cleared off and left bombing-up to the experts.
McHarg got in the Morris and drove to the nearest Hampden and watched. He knew the flight sergeant was right. Loading a bomber couldn't be rushed. The chain of trolleys had to be backed precisely under the belly so that each bomb could be winched up until it sat nicely in its carrier. It had to be secured with clamps that gripped it and held it rigid. Provided everything was dead central the carrier could be locked into place and a light would come on to indicate this. Then the whole procedure was repeated for the next bomb. The more bombs, the less space to work in. The armorers scraped their knuckles and cursed, but they did not rush.
Thirty minutes was up. McHarg said nothing.
He moved from Hampden to Hampden. He stopped at the fourth airplane: P-Peter. The flight sergeant was kneeling under it, his head and shoulders inside the bomb bay. McHarg walked over and squatted beside him. The concrete hardstanding was wet. Oil splashes had left twisted rainbows in the puddles. The flight sergeant, without looking at him, said, “This carrier's totally fucked, sir.” He got out to let McHarg see.
The carrier was cockeyed. Something or someone had bashed it, knocked it out of shape and now it wouldn't slot into its space. That was one thing. The other was the bomb. Parts of it were lightly coated with yellow crystals. So were the other bombs in this bay.
“They're sweating,” McHarg said. “Every bleeding one's sweating.”
“Yes sir.” The flight sergeant sounded sick. “I was told they were all scraped, but obviously they weren't.”
“By Christ, I'll have someone on a charge for this. I'll have someone's guts.”
“We can change this load, sir. Get these off, put others on. Take twenty minutes if we go flat out.”
McHarg sat on his heels. He could see Rafferty and the Wingco standing near the control tower, watching. Outside the crew rooms, aircrew were sitting on the grass, watching. “Not fucking likely,” he said. “No daft bomb is going to make me look stupid. Get your head in here. If we ease off the clamps a wee bit, that'll give us some slack so we can give the carrier a dunt, straighten it out. Are you ready?”
They were standing awkwardly, legs braced, bodies twisted. Perhaps one of them slipped on the oily concrete. Perhaps one of them loosened a clamp too much, and the sudden weight of two hundred and fifty pounds of bomb was more than the other clamps would bear. Perhaps the volatile crystals made a damaging bang when the casing hit the concrete, or maybe the impact pistol triggered the Amatol, although it should have been safe. But what is safe? Nothing is ever totally safe. The bomb went off and the rest of the load exploded too, and everyone in or near the control tower saw P-Peter erupt like a small volcano. Men two hundred yards away were knocked flat. The nearest Hampden was blown over. Other aircraft were damaged by chunks falling from the sky. The blast stopped the church clock in Kindrick. A maid in an upstairs room at Bardney Castle House saw the pink glow made by six hundred gallons of burning petrol, and heard the boom, and was too frightened to tell anyone.
The Wingco managed to get four undamaged bombers into the air. They patrolled their sector of the North Sea and saw nothing but an upturned lifeboat. The sea was rough, visibility poor, it might well have looked to someone like the conning tower of a U-boat. They bombed it anyway, and came home, landing well away from the deep black hole that had once been the concrete hardstanding for P-Peter.
The court of inquiry, chaired by an air vice-marshal, adjourned in order to attend the funeral. There were seven coffins: five armorers plus an engine fitter and a bowser driver who had been standing too near. Most of the coffins were supplemented with sandbags to make a respectable weight. Those of McHarg and his flight sergeant contained nothing but sandbags: synthetic funeral, in aircrew jargon. Still, it was an impressive ceremony. The skies were steel-gray and frost coated every blade of grass. The church clock showed seven minutes past one. “Shades of Rupert Brooke,” Bins murmured to Uncle as they waited for the pallbearers. “Stands the church clock at thirteen oh seven? And is there haggis served in heaven?”
“Poor taste, old boy.”
“Yes. But irresistible.”
The air vice-marshal departed next day. There had been little evidence to examine and no close witnesses to question, so his report was bound to be pretty brief. The hole got filled in and within a week the scorched grass was decently covered by light snow.
This was not enough to stop flying, and late one afternoon Silk was making his approach to Kindrick, sinking gently to seven hundred feet, when he saw a farmhouse whose chimney was smoking and nearby a cottage whose chimney was not.
He told Langham, who called there on his way home. A farm laborer had been conscripted by the army and his wife had gone to live with her mother, so the cottage was empty. When she saw it, Zoë was surprisingly enthusiastic. “It's a sweet little cottage. The furniture's quite impossible, and we'll need someone in to clean, but I'll take care of that. Extraordinary wallpaper, darling.”
“I think that's Mickey Mouse. The pictures don't quite join up, do they?”
“We'll have it painted eau de nil. Burgundy curtains, don't you think, darling? And an oatmeal carpet. Let's blend in with the countryside. I shall buy jodhpurs, lots of jodhpurs.”
Furniture vans and decorators came and went for a week. Then the couple moved in, none too soon. Winter began dumping snow. It took the ground crews all day to clear a landing strip, but the wind had all night to bury it in drifts. 409 did little flying until February 1940.
Christmas was a happy time. Zoë gave a string of parties; all the officers of 409 visited the cottage at least once. Away from the pomp of Bardney Castle she was a different person, bright, lively; everyone envied Tony; some tried to replace him. No luck. “You're awfully sweet,” she would say, “and I'm terribly old-fashioned.” Sometimes, when the party ended, she told him of these approaches. Later, he told Silk.
“Boot the bastard in the balls,” Silk suggested.
“Why? He didn't do any harm. Anyway ⦠I never thought I'd say this, but to tell the truth, there are times when I wouldn't mind having an understudy. I mean to say: twice a night, every night. What happens when the well runs dry?”
“Lay off, then. Don't be so damn greedy.”
“It's not me. It's her.”
“Oh.” For Silk, this was an entirely new concept. “So she wears the trousers.”
“Half the time she wears bugger all. And I'm only flesh and blood.”
In mid-January, Langham drove home to find the cottage empty. He sat around, waited, got slightly drunk. The farm had a phone; there were people he could call who might know something. He went to bed, telling himself that if she had fallen in the snow and frozen to death, it was already too late, there was nothing he could do. Was that callous? Blame the war. He slept badly, told nobody she was missing, and next night she was there, waiting, with a box
of oysters and a dozen lemons. “For you,” she said.
“I hate oysters. They taste like death.”
“You must eat them, darling. I've been to see this brilliant specialist in Harley Street, Guy Chard-Cox. He swears by oysters. I'm having two dozen a day sent here. Guy says it's what you need to do the trick.” She gave him Guy's business card.