Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

by Derek Robinson

  “I’d snipe at CND with an elephant gun, if I could,” Renouf muttered.

  “I can think of six wives of aircrew in 409 who belong to underground Nazi organisations,” Skull declared. “They all want pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Soviet cities now.”

  “Good God. How did you discover that?” Pulvertaft asked.

  “I didn’t. I made it up, in the interests of balance. But suppose we discover an AEO whose wife is a Quaker. Maybe she’s brainwashing him. Quakers will stoop to anything in order to thwart the nuclear holocaust: honesty, decency, even prayer. Pacifist subversion may be twisting that AEO’s brain. The humanitarian weevil may be boring into his soul. Or not. Dare we risk it? Should we sack him? Just in case?”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Allen said unhappily. “I can’t start an inquisition into aircrew wives. Morale would fall through the floor.”

  “And what about CND in bed with a Vulcan pilot?” Renouf said. “Will that be good for morale?”

  “Whatever we do is wrong,” Skull said. “The question is, how wrong are we willing to be?”

  Pulvertaft wasn’t listening. “I’d better see him,” he said. “Where is he?”

  “Over Benbecula,” Allen said. “Jamming the seagulls.”

  5

  The Benbecula task was routine: cruise the 400 miles to the Isle of Lewis, arrive at forty thousand feet, fly straight and level towards the Signals Unit while Nick Dando switched his electronic gear on and off at various strengths, then do it again and again on different bearings.

  Silk flew the Vulcan. Quinlan kept the blinds up and got an occasional glimpse of the Western Isles. They looked like emeralds scattered over blue velvet, which meant they were no place to make an emergency landing. Very few places were. You couldn’t put a hundred tons of Vulcan down on a field of sheep and walk away from it.

  Their route home was clockwise around Britain. Ten minutes after they left Benbecula, Tucker told Quinlan that the aeroplane was being illuminated by somebody’s radar.

  “From below? We’re nowhere near land.”

  “So it’s a ship. Strong signal.”

  “Cheeky devil.” To Silk he said, “Russian trawler. No fish, of course. Stuffed with electronic gubbins. They’re snooping on us. Okay, I’ve got control. We’ll go down and see.”

  Tucker guided Quinlan down the radar signal. The Vulcan fell easily in the thin air. The signal vanished but by then Tucker had found the ship on his own radar, and soon Quinlan saw it: a black blob trailing a short white wake. He circled, shedding speed, creeping closer. “They’ve got antennae like my dog has fleas,” he said.

  “Now they’re transmitting on a VHF channel,” Dando said. “Sounds familiar.” Quinlan told him to put it on the intercom. The crew listened to the lazy strut of a jazz trumpet. Its volume rose and fell as the trawler climbed and dipped in the Atlantic swells. “That’s Kenny Ball,” Silk said. “Midnight in Moscow. Unmistakeable.”

  Quinlan banked and flew directly at the ship. The Vulcan was three hundred feet above the sea. “Full throttle,” he said, “now.” The bomber stood on its tail and went up as near to vertically as made no different. The trawler got the deafening blast of its roar, and the hammering backlash of its power. He took it up to ten thousand and levelled out.

  “All transmissions have ceased,” Dando said.

  “Maybe they were just trying to be friendly,” Silk said.

  “I don’t like friends,” Quinlan said. “Never have.”

  6

  The crew walked into debriefing and Skull told Silk the station commander wanted to see him. Now. The others turned and looked. “He probably needs my advice,” Silk explained. “I saved his life several times in 1943, over Berlin. Or was it Bremen?” Tucker raised his right leg and broke wind, loud and long. “He always says that,” Hallett remarked.

  Silk got shown straight into the station commander’s office. Pulvertaft told him to take a seat. “Why didn’t you inform us that your wife is up to her neck in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament?”

  Silk’s head recoiled as if he had been punched between the eyes. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “Why didn’t you inform me?” Pulvertaft glared. “Sir,” Silk added. Short silence. Then: “Crikey. It’s a bugger, isn’t it? Sir.” Which wasn’t what Pulvertaft wanted to hear but he couldn’t disagree. So he started talking about the implications, the consequences, the risks.

  Silk was only half-listening. He felt as if a shutter in his mind had been thrown open and the light was dazzling. Now he understood what Zoë had been saying to him, and also not saying, in recent weeks. He realized how much he had contributed to his own ignorance: nothing mattered more than flying, so nothing mattered except flying. Not true: being with Zoë mattered. But each of them had somehow made a tacit agreement: your business is your business, not mine. Until now. Suddenly, her business was his business, and vice versa. He was looking at a head-on collision. No escape, no survivors... Pulvertaft was talking about the indivisibility of peace and security. “Shit and corruption,” Silk said. “I’m for the chop, aren’t I? Sir.”

  “It’s one solution. Fortunately for you, there are arguments against it.”

  All the colours in the room brightened. It was a strangely exhilarating phenomenon. Silk had experienced it only a few times in his life. He relaxed and enjoyed listening to Pulvertaft. He had dodged the head-on collision. Survival was pure happiness. “Talk to your wife,” Pulvertaft said, urgently. “You know what to say.” He walked with Silk to the door, shook hands, watched him go. “At least, I bloody well hope you do,” he said softly. He went around the room, opening the blinds.

  BREAK A LEG

  1

  The prospect of public speaking frightened Zoë. Not the reality, but the prospect. When she first went into politics she had revelled in talking to crowds; but now she knew how dangerous it was. As the time approached for her to walk onto a stage, her heart pounded, even though she knew she was good at this because she’d done it a thousand times before. So the hour before the event was something of an ordeal, whether it was in a village hall or the Albert Hall. You could make an idiot of yourself in front of two dozen people as easily as five thousand or five million.

  Tonight it looked like two thousand had come to a rally at the Central Hall in Bristol. They were standing at the back and all down the side aisles. Not to see Zoë – Bristol was a long way from Lincoln South – but to hear Bertrand Russell. Some came because he was a great humanist philosopher, most because he was so old that he had known Robert Browning and Lord Tennyson and had met Gladstone and Lenin, and because he had gone to prison as a pacifist in the First World War. They came because he’d been hired, fired, and hired again by American universities; and because he held the Order of Merit and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature and inherited a peerage but discarded the title; and because he denounced both Kennedy and Kruschev as nuclear villains; and not least because he’d divorced three wives and married four. Plus other reasons. Russell was a hell of an act to follow, and Zoë was glad to be the opening speaker. Her job was to warm up the audience. After that Canon Collins, chairman of CND, would introduce the big man. By then Zoë would be in the wings, listening, with a large and well-earned gin-and-tonic.

  The house lights dimmed. The PA system announced her name. She took three deep breaths and walked from the wings. Smile, for God’s sake, she told herself. Applause surprised her. Her reputation had reached Bristol. Now to kick-start the evening.

  “Welcome,” she said. “I should warn you, the last time I came to the West of England to speak, the local paper wrote that I made a Rolls-Royce of a speech: old-fashioned, inaudible, and it went on for ever and ever.”

  Several people laughed. That’s what she wanted. This was a CND rally but there was still room for enjoyment. “Now, I have another confession to make. I don’t know much about Bristol. Or about Bath, your near neighbour, which I’m told is different. In Bath they walk down the street as if they own it.” A coup
le of shouts from the balcony, blurred by distance. “Whereas in Bristol they walk down the street as if they don’t give a damn who owns it.” Not the greatest joke in the world, but it scored, it made her one of them. Laughter surged like surf. Then applause. She was off and running.

  “Another thing I knew little of until yesterday was Tory illness. Tory influenza, Tory bronchitis, maybe even Tory boils on the backside, because there exists such a thing as a Conservative Medical Association. You’re a diehard Tory, you don’t want to take your Tory kidney stones to a doctor who votes Labour, you never know what he might find. I hear you say: So what? Who cares? Well, the Conservative Medical Association – the CMA – has a Conservative Medical answer to the bomb. A CMA report, just out, calls for an end to defeatist attitudes, an end to disarmament because, they say, it’s possible to reduce casualties and curb disease from a nuclear explosion, by simple and inexpensive remedies. How simple? Well, if you have a basement or a central room in your house, you turn it into a survival shelter. How cheap? The CMA reckons about £100 per house. And if you don’t think your sad and miserable life is worth a hundred quid, stay way from the CMA. Join the Liberal Medical Association, maybe they can save you from nuclear annihilation for only fifty pounds. Maybe the Fabian Society Medical Association will do it for twenty-five. No. Wait. I’ve just thought of something...”

  Zoë took a moment to stare into space.

  “Central room. What is that? A room in the centre of a house, yes? With no external walls. So...how many people here have a central room?” A few hands went up. “And how many have a basement?” Perhaps two hundred hands. “Thank you... That means... Well, it means the rest of us are dead, aren’t we? Should we feel badly about that? Certainly not. Because all our friends here, cosy and snug in their basements and their central rooms – they’re dead too! The CMA report is junk. Junk. It focuses on radiation hazard. You and I know better. You and I know that, by the time radiation kills you, you’re long since dead from heat and blast. Ask any nurse! The Royal College of Nursing has calculated what would happen to us here in Bristol when a one-megaton bomb explodes half a mile away, at Bristol Bridge. Heat and blast immediately kill a quarter of a million people and injure countless others. Did I say countless? Apologies. Nobody’s left to do the counting. And even if someone could count the injured, nearly all nurses and doctors are dead too. Hospitals? Blasted flat. Police? Fire services? No help there. As far as eight miles from ground zero, Bristol is finished, blown flat, burned to a crisp. Government talk of planning for mass casualties is lies. No help would come. How could it? No transport, in or out. Anyone who survives in a shelter and emerges after two or three weeks is exposed to infection, dehydration, starvation and hypothermia, with the very real risk of leukaemia, other cancers, and blindness to follow. And all that from a single, solitary, one-megaton bomb. Why drop only one? Why not ten? Twenty? Fifty?”

  Zoë let that thought sink in. She took out a booklet and opened it. “We British are said to be very level-headed. Calm in a crisis. Phlegmatic: isn’t that the word? By God, we shall need to be. This is the official Home Office booklet on surviving nuclear attack. It ends with these words: ‘The All-Clear signal means that there is no longer an immediate danger and...’” She spread her arms wide. Now she gave each word the same punishing emphasis: “‘and you may resume normal activities.’ How I would like to meet the civil servant who wrote that! What a comfort he is in time of trouble!”

  Fifteen minutes later, Zoë wound up, damning the suicidal stupidity of nuclear powers, in contrast to the shining sanity of ordinary men and women, and she won thunderous applause. As she left the stage, Canon Collins came on. He paused to shake her hand. “Excellent. Truly excellent,” he said. “Bertrand Russell’s train has broken down somewhere in the Midlands. You’ll have to go on again and fill in for him. Truly, truly excellent.”

  * * *

  Delegate. When the burden is too great, delegate. Share the load.

  Zoë couldn’t go back onstage alone. “Get me three actors now,” she told the local CND organiser. “Men.” He said he knew no actors. “Ask the audience, for Christ’s sake!” she shouted. “There must be a dozen actors out there! Go, go, go!” He ran. She switched on the PA microphone, named six people she knew were in the audience, and asked them to come backstage at once: two doctors, a military historian, a retired general, a university lecturer, a journalist. All were friends or acquaintances. By the time she’d washed her face and gargled with mouthwash (good for the voicebox) they had assembled. “Russell can’t make it,” she told them. “I need your help so I can do another hour. I want thirty nuclear questions – ten from Kruschev, ten from Kennedy, ten from Macmillan. Can you do it? In five minutes? My goodness,” she said, turning and smiling at three men, “My most favourite actors.” She cast them there and then: “Harold Macmillan, Nikita Kruschev, Jack Kennedy. Can you do it?”

  “Is there a script?” one asked.

  “Just notes. I’m relying on a certain amount of improvisation. In fact, a hell of a lot.”

  The questions were ready in eight minutes. Zoë dealt them out. “You three rule the world,” she said. “Be tough. Be ruthless. Be creative.”

  “What’s your rôle?” Jack Kennedy asked.

  “I play God. We’re on. Break a leg.”

  * * *

  She hoped for forty-five minutes. They did an hour. There was passionate dialogue, accusation, interruption. Zoë chaired the fight. It was brilliant, ragged, angry, briefly chaotic, hilarious, and above all surprising. Nobody – not the audience, certainly not the actors – knew where they were going next, until it happened. The only thing Zoë had planned was the end. All three actors were bawling at each other, all shouting: “Mine’s bigger than yours!” when she raised an arm and the stage went suddenly totally, black. Silence. Slowly the lights came up. “Thank you, everyone,” Zoë said. “All the nuclear bombs have exploded. You are now officially free to resume normal activities.” Tentative applause, swelling to hugeness.

  She walked offstage, feeling both exhilarated and exhausted. Waiting in the wings was, of all people, Silk, wearing a foolish grin. “What a load of old crap,” he said. She punched him in the eye and he went down with a crash that raised dust ten feet away.

  2

  Backstage at a CND rally is a good place to get decked. There was no lack of doctors in the building. “He’s my husband,” Zoë told them. “He walks into things. Poor judgement. Wanders about.”

  “She hit me,” Silk said, thickly.

  “Then he rambles. He wanders and he rambles.”

  By the time the doctors had decided he was fit to travel, the last London train had gone. That left a night in a hotel or a trip in the Citroën. “Sod hotels,” he said. Zoë drove.

  He angled his seat back to its maximum and stared at the roof. Someone had given him an eyepatch. Now his injured eye was manufacturing a sequence of big, soft hairy stars. They changed colour, mauve to green to pink, and drifted left. He tried to watch one move, but it didn’t like being watched and it hid. Hid where? Whose eyeball was it, for God’s sake? He felt cheated. It was easier to close both eyes. He slept.

  They stopped near Leicester, at a 24-hour transport café. The night was black as treacle. He clung to her sleeve and stumbled over the broken asphalt. “I’m blind,” he said. “The CO will kill me for this.”

  “Show him the eyepatch,” she said. “It’s the height of fashion in Vulcan squadrons. Everybody’s got one.”

  “What d’you mean?” He trod in a deep puddle. “Explain.” She said nothing. His foot squelched inside his shoe. He gave up.

  Fluorescent lights were softened by a layer of blue-grey cigarette smoke. The jukebox was playing Rock Around The Clock. Silk’s nostrils twitched at the heavy aroma of fried onions. “Biological warfare,” he said. “And I’ve got trench foot. Not that you care.”

  She ordered bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea. They sat at a wooden table. There was a caterin
g-size flagon of brown sauce, loosely chained through the handle. “Here’s a question,” she said, and rattled the chain. “Is the bottle chained to the table, or is the table chained to the bottle?”

  “Both. Neither. I’m not going to argue with an idiot like you. Why did you hit me? I only made a joke. Can’t you take a joke?”

  She sipped her tea and studied him over the rim of the mug. “I didn’t hear a joke,” she said. “I heard a load of old crap. Was that you?”

  He couldn’t think of an answer that would do him any good.

  He ate only half his sandwich. She ate the other half, and steered him back to the Citroën. She drove without another break, all the way to The Grange. Freshly washed by the light of dawn, it was a welcome sight, even with one eye.

  SEE ENGLAND AND DROWN

  1

  Silk got some sleep, had some breakfast, and felt just about fit to drive. He reached RAF Kindrick at midday. The sun was out, he was ready to annihilate Chernyakhovsk, a Soviet bomber base south of the Baltic and Quinlan’s allocated target of the week. Skull had said that Chernyakhovsk was like Kindrick with medals. Russian aircrew got awarded a lot of medals. Got taught a lot of Marxism, too. Medals and Marxism: an odd combination. Maybe they won a medal for listening to the Marxism. Silk wondered if there was a pilot at Chernyakhovsk right now, leaning over a map, tunic clinking with heroic medals, picking out his Aiming Point on Kindrick. The squash courts were pretty central. Don’t bother, Ivan. By the time you get scrambled, the Vulcans won’t be here. We’ll be at one of the dispersal airfields, far far away.

  Silk was wearing his eyepatch. He lifted it, to see what he could see, and saw double, so he put it back. He didn’t want to go near the Mess or the Ops Block, where people would ask what had happened, so he walked onto the airfield and saw Group Captain Pulvertaft. Worse still, Pulvertaft saw him, and beckoned. Silk was still working on a reason for the black eye when Pulvertaft called: “Ever kept wicket, Silk? Innes Allen’s team needs a wicket-keeper.”