Authors: Derek Robinson
“Few people do.”
“They don't know what courage and strength it takes to go on hammering the Hun, night after night. Brave men in Bomber Command. None braver than 409. Give 'em the chance, and they'll make Hitler look silly.”
Skull watched the countryside go by. “All the same,” he said, “S-Sugar missed the bombing range by ⦠well, by rather a long way.” Rafferty looked at his watch. “And how did they end up in Yorkshire?” Skull asked.
“Won't this damn car go any faster?” Rafferty growled. The driver put his foot down.
“You did jolly well with his Greenwell's Glories,” Skull murmured.
“It's about time you called me âsir' again,” Rafferty told him. “Straighten your tie. Do up your tunic. You look a complete shambles.”
While Rafferty and Skull were heading westward, two civilians were driving roughly north, aiming for Coney Garth. Rollo Blazer was a film cameraman; Kate Kelly was his sound recordist. Their route was rough because after they left London they got lost. All the signposts in England had been removed a year ago, during the invasion scare. Kate had a map but until they knew where they were, it was useless. Every road they took twisted and wandered. And the rain blotted out any landmarks.
Rollo Blazer stopped the car at a T-junction. The wipers cleared the windscreen and revealed a high barbed-wire fence, a wet field and a sky loaded with cloud. Then a gust rocked the car on its springs and lashed it with rain and the wipers had their work to do all over again. The car was misting up. Kate used a headscarf to wipe the windscreen. “We must be in Suffolk by now,” she said.
“Why? What does Suffolk look like?”
She wiped the windscreen again. “Looks wet.”
“Left or right?”
“Damn good question.” A truck arrived behind them and gave a rasping blast. “Right,” she said.
The truck followed them. Rollo saw an entrance to a field and swerved into it. The truck charged past. He killed the engine. “Say what you like about the Blitz,” he said, “it filmed well.” Ahead stretched soggy grass and sky: dark green and gray. “You know what that's going to look like on the screen. Cold porridge.” He took a Leica from a bag and focused on a passing bird. “Look, a fly in the porridge,” he said.
The wind was still gusting. It battered the grass and made the barbed wire shriek.
“My mike is ready to hate this place,” Kate said. “It's all screaming and howling.”
“That's the fly. It's drowning in the porridge.” Someone knocked on his window. He wound it down. Four RAF policemen looked at him. All wore revolver holsters, and one had the holster open and his hand on the gun. “Identify yourselves,” he demanded.
“I'm Alfred Hitchcock and she's Vivien Leigh,” Rollo said.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the policeman said. “You're both under arrest.”
“And about time too,” Rollo said. “I'm bloody starving.”
It was the wrong thing to say but he delivered it well. Long ago, Rollo Blazer had been a promising young actor, talented and handsome, until he threw it all away.
His curse was his restless imagination. The off-stage life of a character intrigued him. At rehearsals he kept asking: “What's the story behind the story?” It irritated the cast. “For fuck's sake, Rollo,” an old actor told him, “the audience don't give a damn what happens offstage. You can exit and convert to Satanism and strangle your grandmother, for all they care.” Next night, in Act Two, Rollo entered on cue and said, “I've converted to Satanism and strangled my grandmother, does anybody care?” Then he spoke his usual lines. For the rest of the performance, whenever he came on stage the audience was unusually alert. Rollo met the old actor in the wings. “You know,” he murmured, “I think they do care.” The man gave a wintry smile. “Any fool can chuck a brick through a stained-glass window,” he said. The curtain fell and Rollo was sacked.
He was glad. The prospect of a long run bored him. What next? He'd had bit-parts in a few short movies. It was fun but the money was pitiful. He borrowed twenty-five pounds from an aunt who thought he was twice as handsome as Leslie Howard, and gave ten to a cameraman to teach him how to shoot movies. This was 1930, when many a worker got a pound a week. Rollo learned a lot for his tenner. With the other fifteen he bought a slightly damaged Sunbeam Talbot and had it painted red. Red for Blazer.
The car became familiar at low-budget shoots on locations around London. Rollo said he was freelancing for movie magazines. He helped carry equipment, he watched and learned. One day a
cameraman fell sick. Rollo volunteered. He wasn't expert but he was cheap, and the film was already over budget. The director kept him on.
By 1939 he was a veteran of the British film industry. All the easy charm of the slim young actor had gone: he was stocky, even stubby, and his right shoulder sagged from carrying cameras. Rust-red hair was graying about the ears; freckles dotted his nose and cheekbones. At the corners of his eyes, years of squinting into a thousand viewfinders had left arrowhead tracks. He was thirty-four and divorced. He came across many attractive women and some who were beautiful, but if he thought too much about any of them the scar on his scalp itched.
Rollo had married an actress called Miriam. It was meant to be a union of minds and souls as well as bodies, but from the first they fought. While he was an actor they fought about the difference between good and bad theater. When he became a cameraman he despised the theater and they fought over that. No blood got shed until their final fight. She threw plates. Most women cannot throw straight, or far. He dodged a couple and then realized that he was safer standing still. She missed and missed. He leaned against a wall and laughed because he genuinely found the scene funny. “You've seen too many B-movies,” he said. “People only do this in the movies.” That made her furious, and her fury made her miss him by an even wider margin. He was laughing so much that his ribs hurt. She rushed at him with the last plate and smashed it on his head. When she saw blood trickle down his face, she ran from the room and from his life. He needed six stitches. Ever afterward, if he laughed too much or if the sudden sight of a delightful woman flustered his loins, the scar itched. Rollo Blazer took this as a warning. He had no intention of remarrying. Too old.
In the summer of 1939, Paramount wanted him as second cameraman on a production of
Robin Hood
to be shot at various British castles. On the day that Britain declared war, an assistant producer phoned him. “Head office just pulled the plug,” he said. “It's canceled.”
“Splendid. Peace in our time, after all,” Blazer said. “Chamberlain will be pleased. Have you told Hitler?”
“Glad you can see the funny side of it. You're not on contract, Rollo, so we don't owe you a bean. Just calling to say goodbye.”
“This is not the Robin Hood spirit.”
“And Hitler isn't the Sheriff of Nottingham. What d'you reckon you'll do now?”
“God knows.”
Thirty-four was the wrong age in 1939. Not old enough to have fought in the first war and not young enough to fight in this one. Men ten years younger than Rollo were being sent home by recruiting officers and told to wait. In any case, uniforms didn't excite him. Sailors got drowned, soldiers got blisters, and airmen had to fly. Rollo disliked heights and distrusted airplanes. When a friend in the Ministry of Information told him that its Crown Film Unit needed a cameraman, he knew at once that this was the way to serve his country.
He did his best. He filmed the British Expeditionary Force going cheerily off to France. He shot patriotic filmlets about what to do in an air raid, the correct way to wear a gas mask, how to use a stirrup pump on an incendiary bomb. It was hard to make the Phoney War exciting when it produced nothing but the blackout. How could you shoot the damn blackout? Then the war became real and he filmed what was left of the British Expeditionary Force, grimy and weary, many without weapons, a few without clothes, as they got off the ships from Dunkirk. He knew his footage would never get past the censors. They wanted shots of grinning Tommies, giving the thumbs-up. He filmed the dazed anger of a beaten army because it was history; it deserved to be filmed.
For a few weeks he shot training films for the Home Guard. How to make a Molotov cocktail. How to stop a German tank by stuffing a potato up its exhaust pipe. How to garrote a stormtrooper with a rabbit-snare. Then Crown sent him to cover what Churchill was calling the Battle of Britain.
The battle was unfilmable. For one thing it was two or three miles high, virtually invisible; for another, it was spread all over the south and east of England. If Rollo gambled and went to Essex, the battle that day was over Kent. If he went to Kent, the cloudbase was down to a thousand feet. Once he was lucky: the fighting was right above him and the sky was clear. Sometimes the sunlight flashed on a speck of metal. It was like watching very tiny minnows in a very clear stream. Machine-gun fire was like a stick rattled along a railing in another street. He shot what he could. Spitfires landing, Hurricanes
taking off. A high mesh of contrails, as pretty as Chinese writing on blue paper. Nothing an audience would look at for more than fifteen seconds. Everyone was talking about invasion. Rollo abandoned the air war and explored the South Coast.
Wherever he found the army doing anything interesting, he got ordered away. He showed documents to prove he worked for Crown Films, but they did not satisfy lieutenants and captains fresh from France where much sabotage had been done by Nazi parachutists dressed as nuns. Nobody had actually met a nun-parachutist, which showed how lethal they were: they killed on sight and left no witnesses. The best shot that Rollo could get was a profile of a sentry on a clifftop, from which he pulled back to reveal that the soldier was overlooking the empty Channel.
In 1940, a lot of newsreels used that clip as shorthand for the invasion that never came. Rollo came to despise it. “Cliché,” he said. “Bad cinema. Movies should move. That's just a lousy piece of celluloid.”
In place of the invasion came the Blitz.
The raiders came by night in wave after wave. London was so near the Luftwaffe airfields in Belgium and northern France that sometimes the Heinkels and Dorniers and Junkers made two trips, returning to stoke up the fires they had started. Next morning, cameramen roamed the smoking streets. Rollo was in bed, asleep. He had been up all night, catching the action.
Nobody at Crown asked him to do it. He went out because he couldn't resist it, and because he reckoned someone should record the death of a great city, even if nobody survived to see his film. All the experts had calculated that the bombers must kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been flattened like sandcastles; why not London? Each evening, as he left his Chelsea flat, Rollo was reconciled to the thought that, if and when he came back, there might be no flat and no Chelsea.
It didn't happen. London was not obliterated. It was thoroughly
spattered with high explosive, and sometimes the spatterings merged to destroy whole streets, but more often the bomb-strikes were as thoughtless as raindrops. It was no safer to stand in Hyde Park than it was to sit in the Café de Paris. There were stray craters in the park, and one night the Café de Paris got blown to blazes, along with the band, the singer and the customers.
Random havoc.
The phrase come to Rollo Blazer at the end of a long night of wandering devastation, when he realized that this military operation had no plan, no system, no shape. The bombers might skip one street and strike the next: kill here, spare there. Or neither. Or both. Or some other witless combination. All these shuddering blasts and blazes added up to an idiot tantrum: random havoc. He was on his way home when he turned a corner and saw a doubledecker bus standing on its nose in a hole, quite upright. He filmed it and thought:
You could bomb every bus route in London every night for a year and this wouldn't happen again. Two years. Ten.
A church clock began to chime and it could not stop. The bell was cracked. It sounded old and weary and touched with despair, and it made a perfect soundtrack. In fact it was beyond perfection, the sort of cinema you wouldn't dare put in a script in case it looked corny. This wasn't corny, it was heartbreaking, it was the world turned upside down and tolling its own death. What made it utterly heartbreaking was the knowledge that it wasn't even cinema, because Rollo wasn't shooting with sound.
His boss at Crown was an ex-advertising man called Harry Frobisher. Frobisher hadn't slept much, he'd had to walk most of the way to the office, and when he arrived Rollo Blazer was waiting, asking for a sound recordist to work with him.
“I don't need your sound,” Harry said. “Shoot mute, I'll dub in my own sound. Fire bells, bombs exploding, anything.”
Rollo told him about the bus and the church. “You can't dub that,” he said. “You haven't got a cracked bell on record.”
“If I need it, I'll send someone to record it.”
“Too late,” Rollo lied. “Delayed-action bomb in the crypt. Whole place is a heap of rubble now.”
Frobisher was a bulky, untidy man with a lumpy, warty face, the kind that no barber would want to shave. His mouth was permanently set in a slight twist that made him look as if he had just made
an unwise decision. He was stuck with his face. He didn't care what people thought of it. If it made them nervous, too bad; he got on with running his section of Crown Films. He ran it well.
Rollo wasn't nervous but he knew when to say nothing.
“I'm short of good soundmen,” Harry said. “Also short of lunatics. Only a maniac would work with you. You should be dead by now.”
“I'm very careful,” Rollo said. “I always wear a tin hat.”