“You know I’ll come as soon as I can.”
The inquiry was being held in a room in Station Headquarters. The controllers who had been on duty the previous night were sleeping and could not attend until the afternoon. The log books from the D/F stations had to be fetched: they were all an hour or more’s drive from Nesborough. R/T logbooks had to be sent over from the Operations Room. The deputy controller’s diagrams following the movements of the aircraft involved had to be produced. The squadron Engineering officer had to give evidence. Officers from the anti-aircraft and searchlight units concerned would have to attend.
James was asked for his evidence first. While he was giving it a runner came in with a note for the presiding squadron leader: who read it and made no comment. When he had finished with James he said “The station commander wants to see you now.” Before James could say anything, he added “I honestly have no idea why.”
James hurried to the station adjutant’s office and was at once admitted to Wing Commander Wilson’s.
“Sit down James.” Tug Wilson’s face never betrayed what was in store. As a pilot officer, when Wilson was his squadron commander, James had received both censure and praise from him but had never, apart from his conscience, known which it was going to be. He sat down and took his cap off.
“Your father has been on the telephone, trying to reach you. Roger Hallowes was shot down last night. He ditched about fifteen miles off the coast. As soon as his people had the news his mother passed it on to your mother.”
“Thank you, sir. I’d better telephone my aunt.”
“I’ve spoken to Group Captain Brand at Baxton. I’m afraid the weather’s pretty dirty off the Wash, which is where your cousin ditched. But he’s confident that A.S.R. will pick up the crew.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“For your information, James, and yours alone, I’m afraid all three of them were wounded.”
James had the same creepy itch on his scalp as he had felt during those wild moments last night when he had thought himself about to be trapped in an inverted, flat-spinning Spitfire.
“Poor old Roger. Thank you, sir.”
“I’m sorry, James. I like Roger and I can tell you his station commander thinks very highly of him.”
“That’s something I will pass on to his people, sir.” James’s half-smile was without much humour. He stood, put on his cap, saluted and hastened off to the mess to telephone.
His mother answered.
“Tug Wilson’s given me the news, Mummy. I thought I’d have a word with you before I speak to Auntie Beryl.”
“She’s here, darling. Did Wing Commander Wilson say anything?”
“He said they’re bound to pick the crew up quite soon. Tell her not to worry: they’re not far from land. If there’s any delay it’ll be because the weather’s not too good. But they’ll be all right in the dinghy.”
“You can tell Beryl yourself, darling. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“We’re looking forward to having all you boys home in three weeks’ time.”
“So are we. You’ve told Christopher?”
“Daddy telephoned him from the office.”
“I’ll let Nicole know.”
“Oh, yes, do that. I’d forgotten about her.”
“She’s as fond of Roger as the rest of us are.”
“Of course. I know that. Now here’s your aunt.” There was a pause while Sheila Fenton handed the telephone to her sister.
“Hello, James.” Beryl Hallowes’ voice was carefully controlled.
“Auntie, you mustn’t worry. My station commander spoke to Group Captain Brand after Dad spoke to him, when he couldn’t get hold of me. Everything’s under control. Wing Commander Wilson told me that the group captain at Baxton thinks very highly of Roger and he’s confident the crew will be picked up.”
“Thank you, dear. That’s very reassuring.”
“They’re not far offshore, Auntie. The only thing is, it’s a bit foggy, which might hold them up. But they’re quite safe in the dinghy, you know.”
“Yes, dear, of course. Thank you. Everything all right with you?” Her voice was beginning to crack under her distress.
“Fine, Auntie. And don’t worry about Roger. He’ll be picked up soon.”
There was no reply. Then his mother was on the line again.
“I’ll let you know as soon as we hear Roger’s been found, dear.”
“I’ll keep in touch with his station.”
And that was that. What a night it had been for the Fenton-Hallowes clan. Thank God, Christopher was all right: they didn’t want a hat trick of calamities. What had befallen Roger made his own adversity trivial. How badly was Roger wounded? What food and medical supplies did the three-man dinghies carry? What was the weather forecast for the area and which way would tide and currents be carrying the dinghy? Was there really much hope? Any hope?
James walked all the way to dispersals. From the crew room he put a call through to Air Ministry.
“James! Is it all finished so soon?” Nicole was delighted.
“No. It won’t finish before tomorrow evening. There’s something else. Roger had to ditch last night...”
“He was shot down?”
“In effect, yes. He had almost reached home. He and his crew are adrift in a dinghy.” He spoke in French, for privacy from curious ears at his end.
“But that is a calamity.”
“Oh, they’ll be found. But the point is, after exposure for so long, in this weather, they may not be in very good shape. I think Roger will be sent on leave... he may have to go into hospital.”
“James, you are hiding something from me. Hospital, you say?”
“Well... yes, hospital. It’s usual, when anyone has been in a dinghy for several hours in cold weather. For observation.”
“You are keeping something back, James. And you are preparing me for something. Are you telling me that you will go and see Roger when he is rescued, instead of coming here?”
“When they pick him up, if the business here has been settled, I’ll certainly fly up to see him if he is bad enough to be put in hospital. Then I’ll come to London.”
“I understand that. Of course you must go and see Roger. I too shall go and see him if he stays in hospital. But you have not told me everything, James. He is wounded, isn’t he?”
“Now don’t jump to conclusions, Nicole. And if you telephone my aunt...”
“What is this ‘if’? What do you take me for? Some sort of flint-hearted Amazon, just because I have chosen to put on a uniform?” Her indignant French was coming thick and fast. Despite his worries, James started to grin. No one could be less like an Amazon than slender, pretty Nicole with her slim, long legs, dainty hands and feet and a mouth and eyes which betrayed her feminine gentleness. “Of course I shall telephone Mrs. Hallowes. And of course I shall say nothing to add to her anxiety.”
“Of course!”
He heard her chuckle. Her changes of mood had always been volatile. “Eh bien, cher James. We both have work to do. Keep me informed, won’t you?”
On impulse, he said quietly “I’d rather be keeping you warm.”
She chuckled again. “You are a reprobate. I am shocked.”
James chafed all day. He was grounded for the duration of the inquiry. Half the squadron had been on the Fighter Night and would not appear at dispersals until after lunch. There were few people in the crew room. He worried constantly about the way the inquiry was going and about Roger. In spite of his reassuring words to Big, there could be enough evidence to lay at least part of the blame on one, or both, of them. ‘Pilot error’ was a frequent - it seemed, the cynical said, the favourite - Finding of courts of inquiry into flying accidents. Especially, the most cynical added, if a pilot had been killed and could not defend himself.
As for Roger: his fate was too painful to dwell on.
At lunch time James was called to the telephone. Christopher
sounded as buoyant as ever.
“You’re going on a forty-eight this evening, aren’t you?”
“No. Bad luck about Roger, isn’t it.”
“That’s what I called about. Why aren’t you going? On account of Roger?”
That would do. There was no point in burdening Christopher with the truth. It could keep until they met on leave next month; then they could laugh about it over a pint. Christopher would laugh his head off at the verbal caricature they would together draw of Big going berserk with excitement in the dark and blundering all over the sky, shooting at anything that moved, crashing into anything that didn’t get out of his way.
“Yes, I want to keep in touch with Baxton.” He wouldn’t tell Christopher that Roger was wounded, either.
“I’ll keep in touch with you, then. We can’t both keep ringing there. Have you told Nicole?”
“I have. She’s very upset.”
“It’s bloody. Bit tough for Daphne, I suppose.” Christopher sounded grudging.
“God! I’d forgotten about Daphne.”
“I think old Roger has been getting really serious about her, don’t you?”
“Well... let’s say I think he has been weighing her up.”
Christopher laughed. “Well put. He was never one to push into things, was he? What gen have you got on the old trout?”
“Tug Wilson rang his station commander. They expect A.S.R. to pick him up at any minute. He’s not far off the Wash.”
“Weather’s duff, I suppose. It’s ‘birds walking’ here.”
“That’s the trouble. They’ve got boats out, though. And, of course, there are convoys passing all the time.”
“Yes. And minefields around.”
“I hope Auntie Beryl and Uncle Denis don’t think of that.”
“Call me if you get any gen, won’t you?”
*
James woke three times in the night and each time it happened in the same way. He was flying in pitch darkness. There was not a glimmer of light, not a sliver, not a pinprick of light in the terrifying total blackness. It was like being locked into a tomb deep underground.
But he was not underground, because he was feeling the motion of turbulent air. His aeroplane rose and fell on currents and into pockets. Strong winds buffeted it, forcing it to swing from side to side, to pitch and yaw and tilt vertically.
His feet were cold and his body felt as though he were being roasted on a spit. His senses reeled in his dream and were still reeling when he had woken.
There were loud noises, explosions and the screech of rending metal.
The blackness was suddenly banished by a blinding light.
He had the sensation of whirling and falling and at the same time doing cartwheels.
He fell towards the sea and on the sea a Blenheim wallowed with fire consuming it while three men lay inert in a yellow rubber dinghy.
He heard the voice of Tug Wilson telling him sternly that he was being grounded for a severe breach of flying discipline. That if he had not attempted a barrel roll at night there would have been no collision.
The reprimanding voice faded and again he was being whirled around in a black sky and a Blenheim was sinking among tall waves and in driving snow.
Waking, he struggled to sit up, dizzy and disoriented in the blacked-out room.
This happened to him at one-o’clock in the morning, at four and again at five.
After the third shocked awakening he slept soundly until his batman brought tea at half past seven.
He telephoned the Ops Room at Baxton. The dinghy had not been sighted. The temperature had fallen below freezing during the night. He passed the news on to his mother, so that she could tell her sister as much as might comfort her.
“Do you really think there’s any hope of finding him... them? Of finding them alive?”
“Yes, Mummy, there’s hope.” It hadn’t looked encouraging in his dream. He did not think there was any chance now of Roger or either of the others having survived. It depended how bad their wounds were and how resistant each man was to extreme cold. But he repeated “There’s every chance. Crews have been picked up after several days, out in the Atlantic. Roger’s on the doorstep.”
“I’m going to see Beryl in a minute, as soon as Dad’s left for office.”
“They’ll find Roger; alive and kicking.”
Nicole telephoned soon after. James was kicking his heels in the crew room, trying to fix his attention on Malcolm Muggeridge’s “The Thirties” while his thoughts kept straying to the court of inquiry.
“How is it going with your inquiry?”
“We won’t know until all the evidence has been taken. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
“And Roger?”
“No news yet.”
“I can find no pleasure in being alive, sometimes, cher James.”
He thought of her parents, undergoing who knew what hardships under Nazi occupation. He thought of her naval officer brother, last heard of in Algeria; Nicole did not know whether he was serving the Vichy Government or had made his escape to join the Free French. She had told James that she did not even know what his feelings about the dilemma would be, where his loyalties would lie. He wondered if she felt guilty for having left her parents in France.
“We all suffer from le cafard, ma chère.”
“It is new to me. I feel... tied down by an accumulation of anxieties which are beyond my control, yet make me feel... almost guilty... certainly responsible for allowing them to happen. It is absurd. How can I be responsible for what is happening to you... or to Roger? It is hard to explain. The only way I can describe it is this feeling of being tied down... by events which I have had no part in shaping. Do you understand me, James?”
“I’ll untie you, ma chère. In the meanwhile, look on this mood as you would on a cold or influenza: it is a kind of malady and will soon pass. Take comfort from that.”
James went outside. Big and Tad, the latter handicapped by having one arm in a sling, were cleaning their car. They spent a lot of time doing this. They had jointly bought a 1934 Morris Oxford Saloon. Its faded maroon paint was never allowed to lose its gloss. a chromium-plated vase clipped to its dashboard was filled with artificial roses. In the summer and autumn they had kept real flowers in it. To every pilot on the station it was known as The Fornicatorium. Someone had pasted a sign on it which read “Abandon all hope girls, if you get in.”
The Fornicatorium’s owners had not understood the message until James explained it to them; whereupon they had been delighted and left it in place.
Big looked round when he heard the crew room door. “Is news, James?”
“No news. Probably not until tomorrow.”
“And about Roger?”
“Still searching.”
“We go, we find.”
“I don’t think so. There’s sea fog.”
“They find. We make prayer.”
Pious Poles, he thought: perpetually praying or poking. There were usually eight or ten of them among the three squadrons. The Queen Bee quaked before them. In the past four months three of her W.A.A.F. had been made pregnant. They seemed to do everything to extremes. They certainly fought like fiends. Every Sunday all those not on the flying roster attended the Mass which a civilian priest came to celebrate in a room over the N.A.A.F.I. James wondered if he had seen the notice on the Morris Oxford.
There was a brittle atmosphere in and around the crew room. Everyone was worrying about the court of inquiry. The farce of operating day fighters by night had exasperated them all, ground crews as well as pilots. If any blame were attached to James or Big, it would be universally regarded as unjust: even by those who knew very little about what had happened. Everybody also shared James’s anxiety about his cousin. Any of the pilots might have to ditch at any time. A long search so close to shore was not reassuring. They were beginning to realise that fifteen miles was not so close after all.
James reflected that he had never before experience
d the same flatness of spirit. Last summer, in France and during the Battle of Britain, when so many friends - on other squadrons and other airfields as well as his own - had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, there had been great sorrow but always the liveliness, the youthful vivacity that one expected on a squadron, perhaps above all on a fighter squadron. Today it was missing. Try as he would, he could not force back the tension and unhappiness. Even as he sat talking to Tiny Ross it seemed to him that they were like some stiff representation of two friends and comrades in adversity, a stylised Victorian daguerreotype with a staunch and bathetic title.
After lunch the squadron was released to sixty minutes availability, which meant that the pilots could go anywhere about the camp. James and Ross spent three quarters of an hour playing squash racquets on the officers’ mess court. It diverted James’s mind. Ross was the better player. At the end of it, the bleak mood had receded a little.
Five-o’clock, with the curtains drawn, a log fire burning in the ante-room grate. James had finished his third cup of tea and was waiting for the six-o’clock news and a pint of bitter. A mess waiter came to call him to the telephone.
“It’s Group Captain Brand for you,” the station adjutant at Baxton said. James’s reviving spirits fell. The station commander in person to give him the news? It could only be the worst.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening, Fenton. Your cousin and his crew were picked up an hour ago. I’m hoping you’ll be able to make things a bit easier for his mother.”
“It’s very good of you to let me know, sir.”
“Wing Commander Wilson will have told you he was wounded. In the leg, we now know. Play it down as much as you can, will you.”
“You mean they’ll have to amputate, sir?”
“We don’t know how bad it is, but it was a bad wound and he lost quite a lot of blood. There’s also the problem of exposure, of course. They were in the dinghy for nearly thirty hours and you know how cold it was last night.”
“I see, sir. Was he conscious?”
“Yes, but... rambling, I believe.”
“Delirious, sir? Is it pneumonia?”
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 27