Wing Commander Dean cut him short. “We’ll talk about it at Ops.”
“Yes, sir... yes... of course.”
“I’ll drive you and Devonshire over.”
“What about Jorkins, sir? He knows me best. D’you mind if I bring him? I’d better take care of him.”
“If he’ll come.”
Roger went up to Jorkins and patted him.
Pike’s fitter said “He knows there’s something wrong, sir. He’s been kind of... moaning, like. Whimpering, that’s it.”
“Come along, Jorkins, I’ll look after you.”
Jorkins eyed him dolefully, gave a brief wag of his tail and did not budge.
Roger took the lead from the fitter, attached it to Jorkins’s collar and invited him to get into the car. He tugged the lead and Jorkins reluctantly followed, but before he got into the squadron commander’s car he turned and tried to go back. Roger and Devonshire heaved him aboard. Squadron Leader Eastman sat next to the wing commander. Nobody talked on the way to the Operations Room, except that Roger asked the squadron leader how he had fared.
“We hit the blast furnaces.”
“Oh, it was you, was it?”
“Ginger did, too.”
“There was quite a decent fire going when we got there. It helped us to find the oil plant.”
Tea and sandwiches awaited them in Ops. Roger was astonished to find that he could stomach them; more so to find that he was hungry.
Daphne had gone off duty at 2000 hrs and returned at midnight. She stared at Roger with such a shocked expression that it made him wonder how much of a wreck he looked. He could not even manage a smile. He looked at her blankly, then turned away.
Perhaps the controller would tell him what had been going on. He sat heavily on a chair, a cup of tea in one hand, a bully beef sandwich in the other, and looked at him.
“What’s the score, sir?”
The controller on duty was a youngish squadron leader who had been burned when his Wellington was shot down in daylight a year before. His right hand was shrivelled and the thumb missing. Skin that had been grafted onto his face distorted the shape of his eyes and mouth. On his cheeks it shone with a raw redness as though glazed. This was not the place in which to speak words of sympathy or understanding, but his look contradicted the lack of feeling in his voice.
“Squadron Leader Eastman, Ginger Pike and Sergeant Young found the target before you and bombed the blast furnaces and the marshalling yard. Carson was shot down near the target... flak. Sergeant Young was shot up by a night fighter and forced-landed at Leeming... in Yorkshire. Ginger was shot down... flak again... over Holland. They all baled out.”
“What are the chances of them avoiding being put in the bag?”
The controller’s eyes were more honest than his reassuring reply. “Pretty good. The Dutch are always helpful.”
Roger and Devonshire stayed up for another two hours, long after the time at which the last aircraft was due back. Of the remaining four, one had not been heard of since take-off and was presumed lost on the way to the target: ditched, landed in occupied territory, in Germany itself, or been shot down. Two others failed altogether to find their way to Dortmund and dropped their bombs on unidentified flak sites in Germany. The fourth claimed to have bombed the oil plant, when it signalled base, but was badly damaged by flak and crashed into the cliffs near Cromer, killing the crew.
When Roger took Jorkins to the mess, the bulldog made for Pike’s room eagerly, scratched the door, then sat outside, whining.
“Come along Jorkins,” Roger said kindly. “The door’s locked.” Rooms were shut as soon as the occupant was reported killed or missing.
He had to haul Jorkins to his room after getting the duty batman to unlock Pike’s door and let him take Jorkins’s basket and rug.
Roger’s sleep that night was a restless muddle of dreams in which a headless man, loud detonations and the heat of flames alternated with a sensation of falling through space with a tangled parachute that would not open. He woke twice, sweating and panting, with a thirst that three glasses of water could not quench. The third time he woke he felt chilled to the marrow, his limbs were quivering and he knew that he had yelled at the top of his voice in the second before he came awake with a throbbing head and pounding heart. Jorkins stood beside the bed, looking up at him and uttering sharp little yelps. Roger switched on the bedside light and reached down and fondled him.
“Go back to sleep, old boy.”
Jorkins looked at him uncertainly, then put his front paws on the bed.
“All right. Just this once. Up you get.”
Jorkins scrambled up and lay near Roger’s feet. Roger put the light out and fell asleep again, wondering which of them was deriving the greater comfort from their companionship.
There was a thunderous party in the mess that night, the traditional response to a day or night of heavy casualties. Roger had telephoned the W.A.A.F. Guard Room at lunch time, to speak to Daphne. She had been solicitous.
“Roger dear, are you all right? You looked dreadful when you came into Ops.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’d like to see for myself.”
“And I’d like to get off camp. How about a flick this afternoon and a bite afterwards?”
“You need an early night, Roger. How did you sleep last night?”
Roger did not feel bound to answer such questions. “I’ll meet you at half-past two.”
“All right. But remember, straight back to camp after dinner. No staying at the Saracen’s Head until closing time.”
When she was seated beside him in his sober Morris Eight, her level, appraising glance missed nothing. He knew he looked haggard: he had seen it in the mirror when he brushed his hair before coming out. To distract her, he told her that Jorkins was very unsettled and he had left him in his room, with instructions to his batman to go and take a look at him every two hours and take him for a stroll on the lead.
Daphne was not impressed. “Jorkins is a lot better off than you are, Roger dear. He’s got you to care about him. How can I take proper care of you from the W.A.A.F. billets?”
If you’ve got a married billet in mind, thought Roger, don’t rush me. Not with a war on, especially. She had only just turned twenty and he was not twenty-three yet. It didn’t seem to him that either was really at a marrying age; and the war imposed further constraints which Daphne did not seem to recognise.
Roger, to his surprise, found himself wondering how exactly they had got themselves into this situation and whether he really wanted to be there. He wondered if she ever shared those thoughts. He gave her a guilty sideways glance and she met it with a little smile which he thought one could describe as tremulous; and that was not a favourite word of his. It was on a par with “dewy-eyed”, which he also mistrusted because it gave him a hot flush when he read it; he had never heard it spoken. He hoped she was not going to engage him in that long talk she had mentioned the day before after church. Important issues could wait until their coming leave and her visit to Hayling Island with him.
She said presently, as they bowled along the road to Lincoln, and with some hesitation, “I liked Stan. And he was good-looking.”
He stared ahead. “Good type.” You wouldn’t have cared much for his looks when I last saw him. He wished she had refrained from mentioning Stan Price. He didn’t take her out to be reminded of all that horrid welter of blood and viscera. It was not the first time he had lost a navigator in action; navigators seemed to come and go, removed by death, wounds or illness, while he and Creamy Devonshire soldiered on forever. A steady accumulation of small irritants was making a nerve at the corner of his left eye twitch. She had never mentioned it before when his navigator was wounded or killed. Shadows surrounded him swiftly and suddenly and he wished she had not brought on this mood.
Different people had different ideas of success and Roger’s for the six hours or so confronting him was to get through them without having to
wince again from disconcerting reactions brought on by this pretty, tawny-haired, hazel-eyed girl with the firm little chin and, it seemed, a blind spot about him.
They managed very agreeably; and when, at nine-o’clock, he said goodnight to her outside the W.A.A.F. compound, the way she kissed him did not consort readily with the notion anyone might have formed who had seen her walk beside him after Matins, very straight-backed and serious: in the odour of sanctity, he had thought afterwards, giving the impression that she might at any moment decide to levitate and astonish the entire camp by surveying them from the roof of the church hut. This notion had come to him along with his fourth pint of pre-lunch beer that Sunday.
The erotic enthusiasm of her kiss had prompted him to fumble at the buttons of her overcoat and tunic.
“Good night, Roger, and thank you for a lovely evening. Now go and have a good sleep.”
His fingers were on the thin material of her shirt and he could feel her heart beating quickly through it and the soft flesh under her flimsy brassiere.
Her tone was definite and it told him that this nonsense had to stop.
When he opened the front door of the mess the noise from the bar and the ante-room hit him like the roar of a rugger crowd at Twickenham. He hurried to fetch Jorkins for a final short walk, then to join in the drinking and the ructions.
*
Eight pints of beer did not make Roger sleep soundly through the night; perhaps because the energetic mess games and the bawling of obscene songs sweated most of it out of him.
His sleep was shot through by nightmares and this time Jorkins joined in. Once, when Roger awoke, Jorkins was yowling and growling and, when Roger put the light on, he saw his short bandy legs moving galvanically. Roger had nightmares about losing his way in the darkness over the North Sea and flying into the ground because his altimeter had failed; about being tossed into a stall and spin by heavy flak; about being left alone in a Blenheim with a dead navigator after Devonshire had baled out and left him trapped in his seat while the aircraft burned. In these dreams he could feel the flames scorching him and smell the smoke, he could hear the shells bursting and the engines howling at full power.
He was walking up and down outside the crew room with Jorkins, reluctant to go back inside to the fug of coke fumes and tobacco smoke, boot leather, body heat, stale undergarments and sweat. Wing Commander Dean, Squadron Leader Eastman and the A Flight commander drove up from the wing commander’s office in the hangar.
Roger saluted.
Eastman said “Maximum effort. Briefing in half an hour.”
Another bloody daylight! None of the elements of his life was moving as it should, this winter that was nearly over: a month from now, spring would be here and he had kept reminding himself of that. Last spring had not been conspicuously healthy, with all those daylight operations and the Norwegian campaign; but he had been telling himself that this year it would be different. They were mostly flying night ops now and when spring came it would make a significant improvement in the weather, which would give the crews a better prospect of efficiency and survival. And now they were landed with a daylight; and when they least expected it. After the mauling of night before last, what the hell were Group playing at, sending them out again so soon?
He had a consciousness of being expendable material. The Staff used the energy and courage, the resilience and pride of the crews to their very limit. But there was a limit at which disillusion suddenly tainted all that fine spirit like blight infecting a strong tree, and then everything split apart; the branches cracked and fell; men’s nerves failed in the same way as those limbs of oak and elm.
Creamy Devonshire shot out of the crew room looking bewildered and incredulous.
“D’you ‘ear that, Roger? Maximum bloody...”
“Terry Eastman told me.” He had forgotten for the moment that his crew was incomplete. His tired mind absorbed the realisation sluggishly. He felt dull. “Who’s the best spare observer, d’you think?”
There were always odd men available. New arrivals who had not been crewed up, old hands whose pilot had fallen sick or gone on sudden compassionate leave; there were many reasons.
“How about Tommy Thompson?”
Roger considered this. Sergeant Thompson had been on the squadron for several months. His pilot had been badly wounded on an op ten days ago and the air gunner killed. The pilot would probably never fly again. Thompson had been sent on leave. Roger knew he was a friend of Devonshire’s.
“I didn’t know he was back from leave.”
“Last night. We ‘ad a bit of a piss-up in the mess. I was going to ask you if you’d have him.”
Thompson was a schoolmaster in peacetime, aged about twenty-six; he had an alert expression and a quietly assured manner; he always seemed a cheerful sort of chap. These were Roger’s thoughts.
“All right. I’ll ask the C.O. Look after Jorkins.”
When Roger pushed into the crew room he saw Sergeant Thompson sitting near the door, obviously watching for his entry.
“Like to fly with Creamy and me, Tommy?”
Thompson stood up. “Yes, sir. Thanks.”
Wing Commander Dean said “If it’s all right with your flight commander.”
Squadron Leader Eastman said “Good idea. He’s useful. It’ll keep up the standard you and Devonshire have always set.”
Roger beckoned Thompson to follow him outside. Devonshire came to join them.
“Did you know we set a standard, Creamy?”
Devonshire grinned. “Someone’s noticed, have they?”
“So it seems. The flight commander thinks Tommy’ll come up to it.”
“Soon open the ‘atch and shove ‘im out if he doesn’t.”
“That’s what I thought. All right with you, Tommy?”
Thompson grinned. “I’ll take the chance, sir... Skipper.”
“Roger, O.K?”
“Thank you, Roger. I’ll take care to step over the hatch instead of on it.”
“Ve haf vays of making you drop through the ‘ole,” Devonshire said, “if we find you can’t bleedin’ navigate proper.”
Thompson grinned again. “I’m sure this is the start of a long and beautiful association.”
They found that maximum effort had extracted sixteen aircraft from their sister Blenheim squadron at Baxton and a remarkable eleven from their own. Remarkable after the losses and damage of their last night’s work.
Group Captain Brand’s aggressive manner at briefing was an indication of his inward distress. He spoke as if defying anyone to doubt the validity of the operation; which meant that he disapproved of it. Most of those present perceived this. He had no difficulty in making himself heard, for there was an unusual stillness in the Operations Room.
“The Navy are going out every night, escorting convoys through the Straits of Dover and up the east coast. They are taking heavy casualties and losing ships. These coastal convoys are vital to this country. Meanwhile the enemy is running his own convoys along the coasts of northern France, Belgium, Holland and Germany without sufficient interference. The Prime Minister has called on Bomber Command to do something about it. The Hampdens go out every night and they do a damn fine job. The Coastal Command strike squadrons operate every day, but there are too few of them. That’s why the Blenheim squadrons with daylight experience are being called on. If we persistently hit enemy convoys, day as well as night, and hit them hard, it will damage his supply line and force him to divert some of his naval craft which are at present attacking our convoys to the task of escorting his own. What we have been asked to do is one of the most important operations yet carried out.”
Roger thought that “asked to” was a nice understatement.
The Blenheims were to go out in separate small formations: six fours and one of three. Two of the fours and the threesome were to take off forty minutes before the others and seek targets. If they found large enough convoys which warranted further attack, one or more of the second
wave would carry it out. Otherwise, the second wave would also seek targets of opportunity.
“I hope we’re off first,” said Roger. He was to lead a section of four.
Devonshire was biting his lip. “Me too.”
Roger glanced at Thompson. He was inscrutable.
When the captains’ names and aircraft allocations went up on the blackboard in the crew room, Roger’s section was on the second wave. He was visited again by the uncomfortable sensation of worms wriggling inside him which he had experienced two nights ago. He was not in the mood to wait today. There had been a time when his patience was conspicuous.
Jorkins had by now consented to stay to heel without having to be put on a lead. In fact he attended Roger so closely that Roger almost stumbled over him sometimes. He knew why Jorkins was behaving like this: he was only a substitute for his real master, but the shock of losing Ginger had made Jorkins suspicious. He was apprehensive lest Roger should disappear too.
All the crews who were detailed for the second wave went out to watch the first three sections take off. Although the windows in the crew room had been opened to dispel the fug, they were closed again now and Roger detested the smokey atmosphere. Devonshire and Thompson went indoors again to sit by the stove and puff away at cigarettes. He walked up and down the perimeter track outside the crew room, with Jorkins, thinking about what was coming.
In the first few months of the war, when the only targets allowed to Bomber Command were enemy warships at anchor in sea roads well away from land, he had made several low-level daylight attacks. In those days they had dropped 500 lb bombs more often than 250-pounders and the fuses had been set to an eleven-and-a-half-second delay. A lot of lives had been wasted in the course of this foolish practice. The bombs bounced or rolled off any ships they hit, before detonating.
In recent months a new technique had been evolved. Whereas before, the Blenheims tried to drop their bombs from heights of between two hundred and five hundred feet, they now made their bombing run at wave-top height; say, twenty feet. This meant launching their bombs so that the speed at which they were released carried them horizontally into a ship’s hull. For this, 250 lb bombs with a five-second fuse were used.
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 24