Roger followed Daphne (more stunning than ever, in a black silk frock) around like a St. Bernard padding along behind a mountaineer, ready to offer aid and comfort or protection. She flirted demurely with James and Christopher, with Tiny Ross, Walter Addison and Tug Wilson: smiling sweetly at the wives of these last two when she allowed one or the other to lead her to the dance floor. Roger claimed her as often as he could; and watched her with a look of glum pride whenever they were separated.
Nicole teased Tad and Big and came back from two dances with each of them looking flushed with something more than exertion, and giggling. She confided in James and Christopher “Ils ont fait des propositions monstrueuses, ces deux rapaces.”
James put a hand on her arm and smiled. “At least they showed good taste.”
She gave him a brief, startled glance and he wondered why she had turned pink again.
In the early hours of the morning she strolled to her quarters between them, her arms linked with theirs.
“I am almost as fond of dear Roger as I am of you both. After all, I have known him nearly as long. I wonder if he realises that minx of a girl has him just where she wants him: wrapped around her little finger.”
James said “I like her well enough; but she has all the makings of a shrew: and the old buffer’s so besotted he can’t see it.”
At her door, Nicole gave them each a polite French handshake and a cool kiss on both cheeks.
Walking back to the mess, Christopher muttered “D’you suppose old Roger’s poking her?”
“I’d feel happier about her if he were. He’s obviously not, or he’d have stayed in the same pub.”
In the morning, before James saw Christopher off and Roger went to fetch Daphne, the three of them stood on the mess steps looking at the sky. The Stanswick Wing was on stand-down until 1000 hrs.
“Not even a con trail in sight,” said James. “I don’t think we’ll see Jerry over here in large numbers by daylight any more.” The B.B.C. that morning had reported another raid on London during the night. “Hurricanes and Spitfires are no good at night. It’s up to the fighter Blenheims: I believe they’ve got some new radio equipment that helps them find the bombers. We’ll have to go across to France during daylight, to get Jerry to come up and fight so that we can knock him down again.”
Roger cleared his throat. “Oh, Jerry’ll come up and fight, all right! Pity you haven’t the range to escort us. Of course, they might give us targets a lot closer to base now; and then maybe you could.” He laughed. “That would be better than nipping in in the nick of time.”
James knew he was alluding to the morning over Furnes when they had been shot down almost side by side, but he let it go.
Christopher looked from one to the other and wondered what he would have to say about the war a year from now. “Well, we’ve got this far. Or, rather, you two have. I’m only just starting. Let’s see if we can get together again at home at Christmas or New Year. I’d better get cracking now.”
When James said goodbye to Nicole at the railway station she ignored the hand offered her. She held his eyes with a long, speculative look, and when he bent to kiss her cheek she turned her head, took his face between her hands and kissed him unhurriedly on the lips.
He stood waving to her as the train bore her away, and he remembered his brother’s words.
Christopher had said that he was only just starting.
James had a feeling that he was also on the brink of a new experience. Already he was wondering how soon he could see Nicole again.
Their relationship on their recent meetings had had a half-formal, half-intimate diffidence. He had a feeling that as their intimacy grew, so a shared hesitancy and restraint had grown with it. He would like to explore their relationship further; while there was still time. He was no pessimist; but he was not sanguine, either, that he, Christopher or James could look forward to Christmas or the New Year with any real confidence.
Still, as Christopher had said, they had got this far. Only a month ago it had looked as though by now they would be fighting an invading enemy on British soil. Matters could surely be no worse than they had been. Not for Roger and him, at least. Christopher, poor chap, had still to find out how bad things could be.
He drove back to camp and out to dispersals to put on his sheepskin lined Irvine jacket — it was getting chilly now aloft — and mae west, and wait at readiness for the scramble that must inevitably come sooner or later.
A Time for Haste
Richard Townshend Bickers
ONE
Solid overcast covered East Anglia and the North Sea at a height of a thousand feet. Unusually, on this February morning in 1941, there was no sound of aero engines. At most times the roar of at least one Rolls Royce Merlin could be heard where a Spitfire Mk II was being run up in one of the three hangars or a dispersal pen on the airfield perimeter, taking off, landing, or flying in the vicinity.
There was snow on the ground and the light diffused through the dense clouds was grey, the visibility poor. A snowplough and scores of airmen in squads from all three of the squadrons had cleared a runway from east to west across the grass airfield three days ago. There were no concrete runways at R.A.F. Nesborough. The prevailing wind blew from the east but it was not consistent and while the snow lay on the ground the Spitfires often had to take off in a crosswind. The troops who had to dig and brush away each fresh fall hoped the station commander would not decide to order a north-south runway to be hacked out if the snow persisted.
Shovelling and sweeping snow was their most hated task. The wind whistled across the Suffolk flats, burning their faces. It made their noses run and eyes water. Snow caked on their woollen gloves and made them soggy, then froze, chilling their hands. It crept over the tops of their gumboots. If they wore balaclavas the wool near their mouths became wet with breath and saliva and chafed when it hardened. If they did not wear them their ears stung and often developed chilblains.
Also the whole chore offended them if they were tradesmen. This was work for the humble aircraft hands (two shillings a day if they were Aircraftmen Second Class, A/C2s), not skilled fitters, riggers, flight mechanics, armourers, wireless mechanics, electricians, instrument makers. But there were not enough ACHs to combat the snow, so everyone had to turn out.
Outside one of the creosoted wooden huts which stood at the end of eight pairs of blast pens in which his squadron’s Spitfires were parked, James Fenton looked at the sky. He wore a Service Dress cap from the crown of which he had removed the stiffener, a polka-dotted blue silk square around his neck, a fleece-lined Irvine jacket and flying boots. He had his hands in his pockets. His legs were cold in barathea through which the east wind thrust icy needles. His trousers were old, faded and rubbed, but well ironed, his boots shone with polish although three years and more of wear had made them wrinkled at the ankles. His cap looked floppy but it was unstained. You knew at once that if this neat, competent-looking, tallish young man took his cap off, the rough dark hair beneath would lie well brushed and trimmed.
The door of the crew room immediately behind him opened and closed, allowing a waft of warm air to touch his ears and the back of his neck above the scarf.
Tiny Ross appeared beside him, his voice came from several inches above James’s eviscerated S.D. head-dress. Even with his stance, what used to be called a cavalryman’s slouch, he instinctively ducked when he went through a door.
“Think he’ll make it, through this clag?”
“Yes, I do: that’s what worries me. If it gets any worse he’ll have a dicey do going back.”
“Operationally, he must love this weather. They fly in it all the time, I suppose.”
“I imagine so.”
James had not seen his young brother, Christopher, for three months; since he had flown up to visit him at his station on the north-east coast when the squadron had just converted from Hurricanes to Spitfires. They did not say much to each other on the telephone or in their occasional
short letters about what they were doing. As Ross had said, the shipping strike squadrons must welcome weather which enabled them to approach their targets unseen and prevented enemy fighters from patrolling effectively. But their airfields were on the coast and they could get in fairly easily because they always flew only a few feet above the water. It was a different matter to come across country between cloud layers or above the top, and have to descend through it over unfamiliar ground. The excuse for this visit to lunch was a navigation exercise, so Christopher would not be flying his Beaufort directly to Nesborough.
Although Christopher had volunteered immediately war was declared, and finished his training six months ago, James could still not get used to the idea of him being in the R.A.F. He had a discomfiting feeling that his younger brother, with only seventeen months flying experience, shouldn’t be allowed out in weather like this: especially with three other lives in his hands. He knew that was absurd. Even if Christopher wasn’t making a career of the Service, he was competent to torpedo German ships under heavy fire and fighter attack. What was he worrying about?
He knew the answer to that. He was anxious because he was two years the elder: the harum-scarum Christopher had been getting himself into scrapes since the day he first started to walk; and celebrated it by dragging the tablecloth off a laid tea-table in the drawing-room, to the detriment of a silver teapot and several plates, cucumber sandwiches and a chocolate cake.
There had been something eerie about those few moments when he had first come out of the crew room into the unexpected silence. It had sent a shiver through him that had nothing to do with the bitter weather. Now things were back to normal and he felt better about young Christopher. A Merlin engine was running on the opposite side of the airfield, another had just started on the tarmac apron in front of the squadron hanger. Vera Lynn was singing on the wireless set in the workshop hut next to the crew room and one of the erks had immediately turned up the volume. Several voices were raised to accompany The Forces’ Sweetheart as she declared herself “Yours till the stars lose their glo-o-ory, Yours till the sun starts to fa-a-ade, Yours till the end of life’s sto-o-oree...” A three-ton lorry was changing gear as it started along the perimeter track.
Who could worry about anything so routine as a cross-country flight by a twin-engined torpedo-bomber in the hands of an operationally experienced crew, with such a healthy workaday din around him?
He led the way back into the crew room and warmed his hands at the coke stove, then returned to his canvas chair. He had been reading Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” for the second time, wondering if post-war life would really resemble this fantasy in any way. The cynical organisation of humanity into immutable categories did not offer an attractive prospect; but the easy availability and universal complaisance of the women did. He picked up the book but his attention wandered from it.
James was aware of an expectancy and tension which led his thoughts astray. After the brief feeling of misgiving in the cold grey silence before Tiny’s breezy appearance had come an elation which, in its way, and paradoxically, was equally disturbing. Was this what the Scots called fey? He hoped not. He thought he could account for the elation: Christopher would be here soon; and he was going to London in a few days to see Nicole. But that did not account for the underlying sensation of a preternaturally sharp impression of everything and everyone around him: for they were so familiar that he habitually took them for granted.
Reaction, he told himself. It’s a cycle, a psychological cycle. The first nine months of the war had dragged by so dully that he had begun actually to feel ashamed of how little the home-based fighter squadrons were able to do. All those boring convoy patrols over the Channel and the North sea. One flare-up of excitement off the Kent coast when he had shot down an enemy bomber. That time of expectancy and constant disappointment, frustration, had produced a stress which was as severe, in a different manner, as the burden of battle. For him, it had been made worse by the knowledge that his cousin Roger’s Blenheim squadron had been in the thick of what fighting there was, making daylight sorties to bomb German roadsteads, airfields on the East Frisian islands and enemy-occupied ports and airfields in Norway.
Then had come the sudden, hectic, chaotic air battles in May and June when the squadron was sent to France at a few hours’ notice. The humiliation of covering the retreat to Dunkirk and all those other Channel ports from which the bewildered and battered British Expeditionary Force, and almost as many Frenchmen determined to carry on fighting, had been embarked for England. The excitement of being in action day after day, seeing his score of victories mount. The growing fear that sheer paucity of numbers against the big Luftwaffe formations would presently bring about his own death or maiming, as it had to other members of the squadron.
Immediately on top of that, followed the four months of the Battle of Britain. More almost daily fighting against enemy formations which grew larger week by week. Inadequate sleep. A kind of warped pleasure which came from knowing that one was doing the work for which one had been trained. That now one was part of the last bastion of freedom, not only for Britain but also for the whole of Europe. Mental and physical exhaustion but no respite. The pride with which, before the end of September, he and his comrades had known that by endurance, determination, obstinacy and bravery they had beaten the Luftwaffe: which was not short of those qualities itself. But that had not been the end of the battle. The fighting and the strain had continued. The official dates for the Battle of Britain had been set from the 10th July 1940 to 31st October. The reality had not been so neat and precise: the fear for one’s life, the fatigue, had begun long before and continued beyond that tidily defined period.
It had taken two months for taut nerves to relax. Without Nicole’s affection and understanding it would have taken longer. There had also been a contradictory undercurrent of disappointment that those blazing days were over.
And now? The squadron had, in early November, moved from its peacetime base in Kent to Lincolnshire and entered another phase of irritation compounded of a different frustration and a new element of anxiety. He looked forward to having a good grouse about it to his brother presently.
With the tapering off had come reflection. There had been time, in the last three months, to think about the friends who had been killed, wounded, burned, blinded. To try to remember the others, their faces blurred by the swift sequence of events and passage of time, who had come and gone within a few days: those who had, for a brief while, been comrades but not friends; their passage too swift for the formation of more than superficial acquaintanceship. James was shocked and sad to find now that there were many whose names or features he could not recall. One eighteen-year-old had arrived on a morning in August, come straight out to dispersals without even going to find his room in the mess, flown within the hour as James’s Number Three, and been killed fifteen minutes after take-off. His luggage was still unpacked when another new arrival took over his room that evening: and he need hardly have bothered to unlock his suitcase, for he was dead forty-eight hours later.
James looked up from his book at the others around the room. Besides Ross and himself, who were the flight commanders, and Walter Addison, who commanded the squadron, there were only two pre-war members still with the squadron; both of them flight sergeants.
Squadron Leader Addison interrupted the fresh train of thought he had been about to follow, bringing a gust of cold air with him when he opened the door. Heads turned. Nobody stood up: Addison had told them to dispense with the courtesy unless a visiting senior officer or the station commander came in. He made straight for the stove and stood with his back to it. His black moustache seemed to bristle with the cold, his swarthy cheeks were flushed.
“Weather recce.”
There was some laughter.
He looked at James. “Over to you, James. A pair.”
“Why can’t B Flight lose two aircraft... and two pilots,” James deliberately made it sound like
an afterthought as though pilots were expendable, “sir?” He grinned at Ross.
“Because I flipped a mental coin and it came down ‘A Flight’.”
Two or three faces showed some apprehension.
“Is it really just a weather recce, or have Ups got something up their sleeve?”
“Even the birds are walking today in France and Germany, according to Met.”
James turned his attention to two figures in a corner, who had been poring over illustrated magazines whose contents consisted mostly of photographs showing young actresses in undress. They were the squadron Poles, who had come to the squadron at the height of the Battle of Britain and soon frightened everyone, in some ways, more than the enemy ever did. Pilot Officers Zbigniew Uwodzicielski and Tadeusz Brzk flew with such zest and abandon in their enthusiasm for killing Germans by whatever means was possible, that nobody had expected them to survive a week after they had first been seen in action. The fear they inspired in their comrades was entirely on their behalf: no one wanted to see such engaging characters die; but here they still were.
“Think you can get down again if I let you loose, Big? Tad?”
They both leaped to their feet, smiling.
Big Uwodzicielski, thus called as an abbreviation of his Christian name and not because he was short and stocky, was as usual the spokesman: he had marginally more English than Tad; which still left him short of several hundred words which others found essential.
“Is no trouble. In Poland we fly most time in this weathers. By bum of pant.”
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 19