Authors: Alan Judd
‘He went to Wiltshire to convert, too. It’ll be good for you to have a break, won’t it? Concentrate on flying, not just
fighting.’
They talked for another half an hour or so. He felt they were making conversation for his benefit, keeping the ball in the air like a
volleyball team at home, with no one saying what needed saying. It was another example of this English disease. Yet he wasn’t sure what
it was that needed saying. He wanted to continue confessing but there was nothing else to confess. It was plain, anyway, that they
wouldn’t let him, that they’d brush it aside. He now felt he should never have mentioned Patrick, let alone
Johnny. By doing so he had imposed an obligation on them, the obligation of sympathy, that they – she, anyway – had very
deliberately not imposed upon him.
‘I guess I’d better be getting back.’ He stood.
The colonel put down his pipe. ‘Come and see us when you’re back from Wiltshire.’
‘The cake was delicious, really good, thank you.’
She walked into the hall with him. ‘Mind what you do with your new toy. Be careful.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you talk about Johnny.’
‘Don’t be. And don’t punish yourself over Patrick. We’re all human, we just have to manage as best we can.’
‘I’ll let you know when I’m back.’
‘Do.’
He couldn’t deal with it, this English politeness. You were never sure quite what was meant, nor how much they meant
it. He wanted to kiss her but she was keeping her distance. Yet her gaze was warm, almost affectionate.
‘Please do,’ she added, as if perceiving his difficulty.
He took her hand and squeezed it. There was a brief answering pressure before she turned
away, again leaving him to let himself out. She said something – it might have been, ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ or,
‘Be sure you do,’ or both. He never discovered which.
In some ways they were easy meat: they flew straight and level, did not turn to avoid attack, did not fire back. In other
ways they were difficult, even dangerous: their pulse-jet engines sped them through the skies at 340–370 mph, which meant
that – apart from a few up-rated Spitfires and American Mustangs – most fighters could catch them only by diving, which entailed tricky adjustments. Only the Tempests, capable of 460
mph in level flight, could overhaul the V1 Doodlebugs with ease, choosing their range and moment to fire.
Even now, however, in the new squadron’s second week of action against Doodlebugs and Frank’s twenty-fifth sortie as a Tempest pilot, it could
still be a difficult and sometimes dangerous task. The difficulty was that the prey was not only fast-moving but small, with a wingspan of only sixteen feet and a
fuselage only three feet wide. The danger – initially, at least – was that the Tempest’s cannon were adjusted for spread-harmonisation, like the pellets of a shotgun, in order to
catch a turning fighter or moving train. This meant that to be sure of downing one of these rapid cigar-tubes you had to be close; and
sometimes the blast from a ton of high explosive resulted in burned and blackened planes and pilots. When the Tempest wing
commander, Bee Beaumont, sought permission to point-harmonise the Tempest cannon so that they focused at three hundred yards, he
was refused. He did it anyway.
Now, as Frank closed on another quarry crossing the coast between Eastbourne and Hastings, he knew he could take his time and be sure of a hit, his second that
morning. He approached level and from behind until he was about a thousand yards away, then gently descended a hundred feet and closed to three hundred yards. Looking up at the rocket through
the Tempest’s transparent canopy, he eased up until level again. Once he could feel its wake, he centred his gun-sight on the
pulse-jet’s exhaust flame and gave it a long burst. The explosion lifted his plane as he turned up and away but with
nothing like the force it would have had if he’d been a hundred yards closer.
It was a clear day and the Channel was dotted with ships supporting the invading armies in Normandy. Far off
to his left he could make out a flight of Typhoons heading south. As often recently, he was struck by the contrast between the peace of the Downs and the undulating Weald
below and what he was doing in his new seven-ton killing machine, which handled – now that he was used to it – with such
misleading sweetness.
A red flare shot up from the coast to his right, curving gracefully at the top of its
trajectory. He dipped his wing to look inland of it and, sure enough, at about 2000 feet and two miles distant, a small black-bronze
cross sped across the green towards London. He wasn’t surprised; they were coming over at about a hundred a day now. Flares were another initiative of Bee Beaumont’s,
signal rockets fired from Royal Observer Corps positions around the coast to indicate V1s to any patrolling Tempests. Frank eased into a long
shallow dive, aiming to intersect south of Tonbridge.
He was low on ammunition and, not wanting to risk returning to base unarmed, decided to try what several in the
squadron said they’d done. He approached from behind but to one side, out of the rocket’s slipstream.
He pulled carefully alongside it, close enough to see every detail of its construction but keeping clear of the
unwavering flame of the pulse-jet. According to those who’d done it, the trick was to get your wingtip beneath one
wing of the flying bomb, then raise it slowly until it disturbed the boundary layer of air around the bomb, causing it to topple away and downwards. You had to do it without any dangerous touching of wings.
Frank descended slightly, increased throttle and edged closer to the Doodlebug until the tip of his
right wing was about ten feet beneath the bomb’s left. Then, with silent gratitude to the German engineers
for making a rocket that flew so straight and true, he began a gentle roll to the left. He knew he was a perfect
target for any of the few marauding German fighters still crossing the Channel, but daren’t take his eyes off the two closing wings. At first nothing happened
but when his wing was a mere two or three feet beneath the other, the Doodlebug lifted its wing and turned almost lazily, but irrevocably, downwards and to its
right, flashing its pale blue underside as they parted company. Thereafter it curved in a steepening dive eastwards into the fields and
orchards of Kent. With luck, it would make a hole in the ground somewhere, but that was all. Frank pulled up to look around before setting course for
home.
It had been a hectic two weeks since his return and it was a few days more before Frank was free to call on the colonel and Vanessa. As well as flying several sorties a
day, they had to take on night cover and he hadn’t even had time to look up his old squadron, those that remained, anyway. The routine
of briefing, standby, flying, debriefing, eating, sleeping and more briefing permitted nothing else, not even writing to his mother. He had managed to get off a
letter to her while in Wiltshire and sent the colonel and Vanessa a postcard, after struggling with how to address them. The colonel – Colonel
Ovenden – was easy enough, but Vanessa? He realised he didn’t even know her surname. He had never asked in what relation she
stood to the colonel, assuming at first she was his daughter, then that she was perhaps a niece or something, then latterly that she could be his widowed daughter-in-law. Yet
there had been no mention of the colonel having a son, and her referring to him as ‘the colonel’ surely made it unlikely that she was family. A hired help, maybe, to look after
him. But she was more familiar than that. Several times he had been on the point of asking but it made him feel clumsy and
gauche, particularly as they acted as if it didn’t need explaining, as if it was as obvious to him as to them. He couldn’t decide
whether this was English reticence or English nonchalance, this manner of dealing that was at once inclusive and distancing, making you one of them by
assuming nothing needed explaining but at the same time making you feel hopelessly different because you didn’t understand.
Eventually, he sent a postcard of a church addressed simply to the manor, saying that he was enjoying his new toy, hoping they were well and that
he would see them soon. He included his RAF box number but there was no reply.
One day he had an afternoon free, granted because he was on standby to fly that night between 2330 and 0300. He went over to his old
squadron in search of Roddy’s bike but couldn’t find it and the two pilots he met were new boys who knew nothing of it. He would walk, he decided. There
wouldn’t be time to fish but it should be walkable provided he didn’t linger too long over tea.
The weather continued fine though with some cumulus. Spitfires and Tempests took off and landed throughout his walk, some passing so low that it felt they were buzzing him
personally. But these reminders of the world he would shortly return to did not trouble him. The unaccustomed
pleasure of walking more than a few yards to the plane, the leafy bounteousness of hedgerows and elms, the ripened cornfields and the
anticipation of welcome focused him on the pleasure of this hour, this day, with no thought for the next. Even the thought of Patrick
did not, for once, undermine it all. Everything – leaves, colours, shapes of clouds – struck him with heightened particularity.
He smelt it before he saw it, a heavy acrid smell of burnt materials, smoke and dust that lingered on the lane
before he stepped into the drive. He noticed brick dust on the hedge and on some holly leaves just before he turned the corner and saw the end wall of the manor, standing alone and intact all the way up to the ridge point where it met the roof, fireplaces and
wallpaper looking as if painted on. The rest was rubble, no stairs, no roof, no other walls but a heap of blackened timbers, smashed slates and strewn bricks. The
stone steps to the front door were still there, one end of an upturned bath jutted out from a pile of bricks, an undamaged dining
chair lay on its side in the drive and the burnt carcass of the Bentley could just be made out beneath the collapsed garage roof. The
garden beyond, visible now, was littered with detritus. The greenhouse and potting shed were intact, but with no glass.
‘One of them Doodlebugs,’ said the woman in the shop. ‘Dawn, who lives next door, she was out with her dog and saw
it come down, just tipping out of the sky straight onto its nose, not going straight and lower and lower like they
usually do. Another five minutes and she’d have been just by the manor and wouldn’t be here now. Nor would
her dog. Looks like we’re out of Senior Service. Just Weights or Woodbines.’
‘Woodbines, please. Were they both killed, the colonel and—’
‘He was, the old colonel, yes. Wouldn’t have known anything about it. And his dog. But Mrs Ovenden was away for the
day, thank goodness. She got the early train to London. She was in here the day before, said she was trying to find a job up there. Speaks French, she does, you
should hear her, so fast. Fives or tens? We’ve got twenties in Weights.’
‘Tens, please.’ They’d be cheaper in the mess but he wanted to keep her talking. ‘Mrs
Ovenden? I thought she was dead?’
‘Old Mrs Ovenden, yes, bless her soul. But I mean young Mrs Ovenden, what lived with him. Vanessa, her name is, was married to his son. Widowed
now. Such a lovely boy, he was.’
‘Colonel Ovenden had a son, then?’
‘Oh yes.’ She looked at him, as if he should have known. ‘John, his name was. Shot down in France about a
year ago. They hadn’t been married long. Lovely wedding, it was, the church looked so lovely even in wartime. They
invited all the village.’
‘When was it, the Doodlebug?’
‘This week, a couple of days ago. No – the day before that, Tuesday, when we got some margarine
and cheese in. All gone now, needless to say.’
It was the day he had tipped the V1. So had two others, he consoled himself. There was no knowing which. But he couldn’t stop.
‘What time?’
‘In the morning, it was, before we shut for lunch. If it had gone a bit farther it would have been us and
the church.’
The time fitted. But one of the others was roughly then, too. He couldn’t remember where, exactly. ‘But Vanessa – Mrs Ovenden – is OK? She’s still alive?’
‘Yes, such a lucky thing. Mind you, a terrible shock to her, coming home to that with nothing but the clothes she stood in. Spent the
night at Mary Dobbs’s, what used to clean for them. And her losing her husband only last year, that’s
the family gone now: first old Mrs Ovenden in the Blitz doing voluntary nursing in London, then young John in his plane and now the
colonel and I don’t think she’s much family of her own, to speak of. Didn’t even have time to have a baby. Will
that be all? Any matches?’
‘No, thanks, I use a lighter. Where is she now, still with Mary Dobbs?’
The woman took his money and rang the till, counting out his change slowly. ‘Went back to London the next day – no, day after, it must have
been. The day the bread should have come and didn’t. She said she had a friend in London she could stay with, the one what’s helping her find a
job. Don’t suppose we’ll be seeing much more of her down here, no reason for her to come any more, not
even a roof over her head. Poor thing. She was a nice lady, always so polite.’
‘Did she leave a forwarding address?’
‘Her friend’s, yes, Mary or me will send anything on. And some solicitors in Tonbridge, the colonel’s solicitors, she said. She left
their address too, in case anything happens to her.’
‘May I have it?’ The woman looked at him. ‘Hers, I mean. I knew them both, you see, I used to call on them pretty regular. I’d like to
write to her.’
The woman’s grey-green eyes, enlarged by her glasses, remained on his. ‘Not a friend
of John’s though, were you? Didn’t serve with him?’
He nodded. ‘Different squadrons.’
She paused long enough for him to fear she was going to refuse but then she bent and sorted through some papers beneath the counter.
‘Here it is but you can’t keep it; you’ll have to copy it out.’
It was an address in Pimlico, a part of London he hadn’t heard of. ‘Is there a telephone number?’