Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  When they had left, the adjutant said: “Well done, old chap. Jolly well done.”

  Fanny Barton was still staring at the door. “Somewhat heavy-handed,” he said.

  “Not a bit.”

  “It felt sort of … What did Sticky say? Officious.”

  “Utter rubbish. You had no choice.”

  Barton sucked in a deep breath, held it, and let it out in a snort of dissatisfaction. “Why do they have to behave like such bloody lunatics, uncle?”

  “Oh well … They’re all a bit mad, you know. They wouldn’t do it unless there was a damn good chance of getting killed, would they? So they can’t be completely normal. They’re not what you’d call model citizens, any of them. More like vandals, I suppose. They’re just itching to be turned loose with an eight-gun Hurricane on some lumbering great bomber. I mean, that’s your average fighter pilot’s attitude, isn’t it? Show him something, anything really, and deep down inside, his first reaction is: What sort of a mess could I make of that with a couple of three-second bursts? Herd of cows, doubledecker bus, garden party—makes no difference what it is, that’s the thought in the back of his mind. Not surprising, really. I’ve often thought it’s a damn good job they’re in the RAF, otherwise they’d all be out there blowing up banks.”

  “You really think most fighter pilots are a bit mad?” Fanny Barton asked.

  “All the ones I’ve known.” Kellaway laughed as he remembered. “We had a chap once. He used to fly upside down between the Lines at fifty feet, just to show them what he thought of them.”

  “Show who?”

  “Both sides. Everyone was firing at him, anyway. The French always fired at any plane they saw, as a matter of policy. He used to say it was easier to dodge the stuff when you were upside down, because you could see it coming up at you.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Good question. What did happen to him? I know they never shot him down, not when he was playing silly-buggers …” Kellaway screwed his face up in an effort of memory. “I think one day he just didn’t come back, that’s all.” He strolled over to the window and examined the soaking night. He flinched as a gust flung rain at the glass. “Not an uncommon state of affairs, of course.”

  “What about you, uncle? Were you a bit mad, too?”

  “Ah, well …” The adjutant smiled roguishly. “I suppose I must have been. I was bloody lucky, I can tell you that.”

  “And me? I’m a fighter pilot. How mad am I?”

  The question made Kellaway slightly nervous, and he took his time considering it, running a fingernail back and forth along his lower lip. “Let’s put it this way, Fanny,” he said. “My guess is, when it comes to the push, you’ll probably find that you’re a good deal madder than you think you are. Anyway, you’ll know soon enough, won’t you?”

  Nothing exciting happened the next day. All morning, the Group controller kept them on fifteen-minute readiness. By lunchtime they were dulled with tedium; they had stopped wearing their flying overalls and boots, because it was too hot; the prospect of the afternoon stretched drearily and endlessly before them, probably even hotter and more tedious. There was a limit to the number of lectures the pilots could be expected to listen to, and Barton had already used up the most interesting ones—emergency landing and ditching procedures; enemy aircraft recognition; how to bale out; ranks and badges of the German Air Force—so he was glad to see a dispatch-rider turn up with an urgent package from Air Ministry.

  It contained two dozen duplicated documents, each numbered and stamped in red CLASSIFIED SECRET. They were titled Useful Polish Terms and Phrases for British Aircrew. With the package came a memorandum, signed by Air Commodore Bletchley, to the effect that each pilot must memorize these terms and phrases within twenty-four hours. It was essential, he said, that not only the contents but also the very existence of this material remain secret.

  Fanny distributed them, got each man to sign for his copy, and gave the signed list (with his own countersignature as confirmation) to the dispatch-rider, who roared off to London.

  For a brief and rare moment, the only sound to be heard in the mess was the whisper of turning pages.

  “Varmvatten,” said Flip Moran, “is Polish for ‘hot water.’”

  “They should know,” Stickwell said. “They’re in it.”

  “Vad ar det som har hant? means ‘What’s going on?’” Mother Cox said.

  “And crash-bang-wallop means the Luftwaffe has just blown up the railway station,” Cattermole remarked. He lay slumped in an armchair, drowsy after too much lunch, his copy lying unopened on his stomach.

  “What a cockeyed country,” Billy Starr said. “They eat something called kottbullar med lingon. Meatballs with cowberries.” He made a face. “Cowberries.”

  “I like it,” said Moke Miller. “Or as we say in Warsaw: Jag tycker om det.”

  “You’ve got until tomorrow to learn that lot,” Fanny said. “I suggest you test each other. Okay? Right. I’m going to phone Group.” He went out.

  Moggy Cattermole took his copy by the corner and dropped it into the wastebasket. “Bumf,” he said, and shut his eyes.

  “Hey, steady on, Moggy,” Billy Starr said. “That stuff’s secret.”

  “The Air Ministry knows no secrets,” Moggy murmured.

  His action produced a few smiles, but only a few; Cattermole was not universally popular. He was bigger and heavier than anyone else, and when he was bored he had a habit of strolling about the mess, snatching newspapers and magazines which he then redistributed arbitrarily, giving the gardening page to someone who had been deep in the football results, and so on. Once, back in the early summer, a member of “B” flight by the name of Gordon—nicknamed “Flash” because he was so reserved—had seen Moggy coming and had taken a firm grip of his Daily Express. A friendly struggle led to a friendly fight, and within a minute Flash Gordon’s nose was bent and his Express was spattered with blood. It was an accident; but as Flip Moran remarked, so was the Titanic. “What you must remember,” Flip said, “is that nine-tenths of Cattermole’s charm lies beneath the surface.” Many agreed.

  “Please yourself, Moggy,” Billy Starr said. “Just don’t come to me for help when we get to Poland.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, old boy.” Cattermole’s breathing had become slow and regular. “The rest of you, please try not to move your lips when you read,” he said. “It makes such a din.”

  He was asleep when Fanny Barton came back with the news that Group had given permission for one section at a time to carry out flying training, as long as the aircraft were fully armed. “Green section goes first,” he said. “Then Blue, Yellow, Red.” Before he had finished speaking, Green Section’s pilots were reaching for their overalls and boots. The others slouched and watched. Fanny looked at this mixture of eagerness and envy and was overtaken by memories of the schoolroom, of inky drudgery, of the lucky few released to play games while the rest remained trapped. “Keep within five minutes of the aerodrome,” he said, and that too raised echoes: Stay in the school grounds … Moggy Cattermole’s eyes half-opened as Green section hurried out. “Deserters,” he said. “Ships leaving the sinking rat. Gun ’em all down.”

  Now that everyone had something to look forward to, the afternoon passed more quickly. And there was soon something else to talk about: an intelligence officer had been posted to the squadron.

  He was a middleaged flying officer with a domed forehead, hornrim glasses and a face that seemed designed to show off his false teeth—beaky nose, narrow jaws, wide cheekbones. His name was Skelton, and they were impressed to learn that he was a Cambridge don, called up because he was in the RAF Reserve.

  “I’ve never met a don before,” Moke Miller said. “What sort of donning do you do?” Skelton frowned. “What Moke means is,” Fitz Fitzgerald explained, “what d’you teach?” Skelton pushed his glasses onto his forehead and compressed his features until his eyes were squeezed shut. “I mean, perhaps dons do
n’t teach anything,” Fitz suggested.

  “In a sense.” Skelton’s face relaxed to normalcy. “And in the greater sense, perhaps nobody teaches anything. Teaching is a fraudulent word that should be abolished. There is no teaching, there is only learning. One encourages learning. At least, that is the theory.” He let out a snort of mirth and replaced his glasses. “History,” he told Moke. “Modern history.”

  “Really?” Pip Patterson was interested. “I’ve always wanted to know about history. You can tell us all about it.”

  “I wish I could. I don’t know all about it.”

  “Oh, come on. You must know something.”

  “I know something about the later sixteenth century. Not much.”

  “Sixteenth …” Pip worked it out. “That was the Tudors, right? Queen Elizabeth, Spanish Armada, Sir Francis Drake, etcetera?”

  Skelton was shaking his head. “I’m afraid my knowledge of them is very sketchy indeed.”

  Fanny Barton asked: “What do you know about?”

  Skelton removed his glasses altogether. Without them, his eyes looked worried. “I know something about the development of radical political thought in Elizabethan England,” he said. “But I can speak with confidence only about the influence of the Puritan sects in the northern counties.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Fanny said.

  “And with absolute confidence, only about those sects in the latter years of Elizabeth.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a very rich field, you know, very rich indeed. The source material is extremely dense. One hardly knows where to begin.”

  “I usually start with A to K,” Cattermole said, “and then look in L to Z later on.”

  “Moggy, behave yourself,” Fanny said.

  “Might you be interested in the work of the later Elizabethan north-country Puritan sects?” Skelton asked Pip.

  Pip weighed politeness against honesty. Honesty won. “No,” he said.

  “I think you’re wise. The more I study them, the less I like them. Thoroughly unattractive people, in the main. It will be refreshing to get away from them.”

  At some point in the evening, Skelton was nicknamed “Skull.” He was rapidly accepted into the squadron, especially when they found he was good at card tricks. As intelligence officer he could tell them nothing new about the war, but then there seemed to be little or nothing worth knowing. The blackout was working. People were busy sticking lengths of tape across their windows to save themselves from being sliced by flying glass. Evacuation continued: the trains were full of mothers and children. Large barrage balloons floated in silvery fleets above the cities. The newspapers were busy with Poland’s heroic resistance, with cavalry fighting tanks while Stukas screamed out of the skies and Warsaw burned; but Poland was more than “abroad,” it was foreign, distant, remote, not really European at all, more like a part of Russia. A year ago, Hitler had been groping for Czechoslovakia and the Prime Minister had talked of this as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Czechoslovakia had gone down. Now it was Poland. As far as the pilots were concerned, it was a distinction without a difference.

  Not surprisingly—with Fanny Barton absent, attending to paperwork—the pilots soon lost interest in the Air Ministry’s secret Anglo-Polish glossary. Flip Moran went around and quietly gathered up the copies and gave them to the barman to keep. The second day of the war ended as boringly as the first, except for one thing. The BBC announced that a passenger ship, the SS Athenia, outward bound from Britain, had been torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic with heavy loss of life, including many children.

  That was nasty. That was a damn sight closer to home than Warsaw. The Navy had better get its finger out and do something about those bloody U-boats. Everyone was agreed on that. Group released the squadron at dusk, just in time to get over to the Squirt for a beer.

  While he was shaving, Fanny Barton realized that this was now his third day as squadron commander. He wondered why Air Ministry was taking so long to replace the Ram. The thought drifted into his head that maybe they were waiting and watching to see what sort of a job he made of it. If he made a good job, maybe they would let him keep the squadron permanently.

  The idea excited and worried him. That face in the mirror looked intelligent and disciplined, but was it old enough? Strong enough? Hard enough? He bared his teeth at himself to see how brave and dashing he looked. Not very. It would certainly be gratifying to be a fullblown squadron leader; thrilling, in fact; on the other hand leading a whole squadron, taking command of a dozen Hurricanes, telling them where to go and what to do, and if he got it wrong then men got blown up, shot down, killed—that was a hell of a responsibility.

  Hell of a responsibility.

  After breakfast he called a meeting of Flip Moran, Kellaway and Skull.

  “I’ve talked to Group again,” he said. “I told them we can’t go on sitting around here waiting to be scrambled from dawn to dusk, it’s bad for the chaps, they’re getting thoroughly browned-off. Well—surprise, surprise, Group agrees. I think they’ve been given the same treatment by other squadrons. Anyway, this is the new deal: one flight released, the other flight on twenty-minute readiness, starting now.”

  “What is twenty-minute readiness, exactly?” Skull asked. Flip looked sideways at him. “My dear fellow,” Skull said sharply, “if I am to be an effective intelligence officer I need to understand these terms.”

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you?” Flip said.

  “Once, a very long time ago. No doubt the system has been changed since then.”

  “We’re either ‘released’ or ‘available,’” Fanny said. “If we’re ‘released’ we can leave the airfield. ‘Available’ means we stay here. ‘Brought to readiness’ means we’ve got to be ready to take off in whatever time the controller says—thirty minutes, twenty, fifteen, it depends how serious he reckons things are. If he knows he’s going to want us off in a hurry he puts us on five-minute standby. If it’s a hell of a hurry, two-minute standby.”

  “I see,” said Skull. “Thank you.”

  “And in an extreme emergency,” said Flip, “the ground crews have been trained to catapult the airplanes into the sky, using powerful lengths of knicker-elastic.”

  “How resourceful of them,” Skull said. “No doubt it creates a most impressive twang.”

  “If you two want to practice your backchat, find a better time for it,” Fanny said. His curtness surprised them. He surprised himself a little, and he rapped on his desk to confirm his authority. “I’m not satisfied with the squadron spirit,” he said. “There’s something lacking, I’m not sure what, but …” He chewed his lip and looked at them. That was pretty bloody feeble, Barton, he thought.

  Nobody answered. Skull couldn’t be expected to comment, and Flip had gone into his shell. The adjutant was lighting his pipe. “Well?” Fanny said.

  Kellaway put his head back. He blew a great plume of smoke at the hanging light and made it rock. “The boys are a bit stale, aren’t they? Cooped-up too much, no action. Why not give them a spot of recreation? Fitz has that dinghy of his down at the harbor, and …” He stopped to take a shred of tobacco off his tongue.

  “I don’t think they’re stale. On the contrary, they’re half-baked.” Fanny looked at Flip and thought he saw a tinge of hostility in Flip’s expression. Again he surprised himself by welcoming this discovery: the act of command provoked tension, and tension could be enjoyable. Well, well. “Right, this is what we’ll do. ‘A’ flight stays at readiness this morning, ‘B’ flight takes over this afternoon. That gives ‘B’ flight all morning to get upstairs and learn a thing or two. Work your flight hard, Flip. I’m sure they’ll feel all the better for it.”

  Flip stood. He seemed to have something in his left eye. He rubbed it unhurriedly. “What do you want us to practice?” he asked at last.

  “What do you need to practice?” Fanny gave him five seconds to answer, and said, �
�It’s up to you, chum. Find their weaknesses and get rid of them. Okay?”

  On his way out, Flip paused. “You haven’t forgotten the Polish phrasebook,” he said. All expression was carefully ironed out of his voice.

  “No.”

  “Is there to be an examination?”

  “Certainly. I test my lot this morning, you test yours this afternoon.”

  “Ah.” Flip nodded several times, and gently closed the door behind him.

  Fanny chewed on a pencil, examined the battered end, looked at the adjutant. “Not exactly jumping for joy, is he?” he said.

  Kellaway sat comfortably, legs crossed, arms folded, pipe drawing nicely. “Nose out of joint,” he said.

  “That’s damn silly. He knew I was senior flight commander. What did he expect?”

  Kellaway nodded. “Funny chap, young Flip. Too much self-control, maybe. He never allows himself to let rip, does he? Lots of ambition steaming away under the surface, I sometimes think.”

  Fanny sniffed. “If he has any ambition to remain a flight commander he’d better buck his ideas up, that’s all.”

  “Should I know what all this is about?” Skull inquired.

  “Oh … nothing serious.” Fanny got up and strolled about the room, scuffing the linoleum. “Some of the fellows don’t seem to approve of me as boss of this outfit. Sticky wouldn’t say a word to me all day yesterday. Moggy won’t miss a chance to make trouble, either.”

  “Nothing new there,” Kellaway observed.

  “And Mother Cox keeps looking at me as if I might bite his head off.”

  “Mother’s chop-happy,” Kellaway said. Skull raised one eyebrow. “Scared of the sack,” Kellaway explained.

  “Perhaps if you were to reassure everybody on that score,” Skull suggested.

  “No fear,” Fanny said. He jumped, grabbed a roof-beam, and hung easily, arms half-bent. “If someone’s no good, I’m going to throw him out.” He began doing slow pull-ups. “I’m not here to make the blighters happy,” he added.

  “I used to be able to do that, once,” Kellaway said wistfully.