Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “Some hundred thousand years ago we could all do it quite expertly,” said Skull.

  Fanny dropped to the floor and dusted his hands. “Uncle, can you look after this Polish test? Don’t ask them everything, just the basic stuff.”

  “Sorry, old boy. I’ve got to attend the inquiry.” Fanny looked blank. The adjutant said: “You know, about what happened to the Ram. Air Ministry inquiry. Starts at ten in the lecture room.”

  “Oh.” Fanny had completely forgotten. “Of course. Well, you’d better do it then, Skull.”

  “Actually, Skull ought to be there too,” Kellaway said. “I’m attending as a witness, you see, so we need someone to represent the squadron, and obviously you can’t go in case of a scramble.”

  “Blast. No, I suppose you’re right. Hell. I’ll just have to test them myself, then. What a bind.”

  “Oblige me with a little information about the Ram,” Skull said.

  “Fanny’s predecessor,” the adjutant said. “Fell out of his Hurricane and broke his neck.”

  “Goodness.” This bald statement quite startled Skull. “How tragic.”

  “These things happen.”

  “I know, but … It must have been a terrible blow.”

  “Not really.” Kellaway tapped out his pipe. “More of a snap than a blow. I doubt if he felt a thing.”

  “They’re not going to like swatting up all that Polish stuff, are they?” Fanny said gloomily. “What am I going to do if they get everything wrong?” There was no answer to that. “Oh well,” he said. “Better get on with it.”

  His first problem was finding the Polish stuff so that they could swot it up. Nobody knew where the Air Ministry papers were. Mother Cox thought that Flip Moran had collected them and put them somewhere. The rest of “A” flight stood or sat around and tried to look concerned. Fanny heard “B” flight taking off, and briefly contemplated going over to the control tower, calling up Moran on the R/T, and getting the information from him. He remembered what Moran had looked and sounded like when last seen: unhelpful. Moran would fiddle with his radio to create a lot of howls and crackles and would then report, Sorry, your transmission garbled. Fanny turned away and organized a search.

  “A” flight hunted enthusiastically in all the most unlikely places: under the carpets, inside the lavatory cisterns, down the backs of the sofas (Pip Patterson found sixpence and half a bar of chocolate), behind the pictures on the walls. Sticky Stickwell accidentally burst a cushion, and got severely blamed by the others: too severely, Fanny decided, after they had worked it up into a kind of contest in condemnation, and he made them shut up. Mother Cox found a mouse in a broom cupboard, and at once they were all in full chase. The mouse escaped, but not before Moggy had broken a lampstand; which prompted another barrage of blame, until again Fanny had to step in and use his authority.

  It was galling. He knew they were playing the fool, he knew he was being mocked. He could feel his temper slipping, and yet he didn’t know what else to do. For one thing, it was worrying to have lost all those secret papers, for which the Air Ministry had his signature. He stood in the middle of the mess, clenching his fingers around his thumbs, and saw something sticking out behind a row of bottles on the top shelf above the bar.

  “A” flight showed loud astonishment and pleasure at the discovery of the papers. “Never mind all that,” Fanny snapped. “Who searched the bar?”

  “Moggy did,” said Sticky.

  “Oooh, what a whopper!” Moggy said. “It was you. You know it was you.”

  “Never. It must have been Dicky, then.”

  “Me? I’m too small, I can’t see up there, I—”

  “Who was it got the stepladder?” Pip asked. “Someone did. Wasn’t it you, Mother?”

  “That’s right, put the blame on me,” Mother said huffily. “Every time something goes wrong it’s always—”

  Fanny hammered a glass ashtray on the bar. “Forget it!” he shouted. “We’ve found the bloody things. Now let’s get to work. Written test at twelve o’clock.”

  The rest of the morning was silent except for yawns, sighs, the shuffling of feet and the rustling of paper. At noon, Fanny distributed sheets of foolscap and read out his questions, one by one. Half of them called for the translation of Polish phrases into English; the other half, of English into Polish. There were forty questions in all. He was relieved to see that everyone took the test seriously; indeed they looked quite weary by the time it was finished.

  As he was collecting their answers, Kellaway and Skull came in with the members of the panel of inquiry. Fanny stuffed the papers inside his tunic and went over to play host.

  During lunch the talk was not of the Ram’s accident but of Bomber Command’s attacks on German warships in their North Sea bases. This, it seemed, was the only form of air offensive approved by the Cabinet, and the bomber crews had been ordered to take the greatest care to avoid injuring German civilians. Twenty-nine Blenheims and Wellingtons had reached their targets; seven had been shot down. Another formation of bombers had dropped leaflets over Hamburg and Bremen by night.

  “Leaflets?” Fanny said. “What are we trying to do: bore them to death?”

  “Don’t you be so sure,” said one of the visitors. “When I was on the Northwest Frontier we often dropped leaflets. And in Mesopotamia. It was a jolly good way to tell Johnny Arab to behave himself, or else! It worked, too, as often as not. They knew we meant what we said, and they changed their ways.”

  “Suppose they didn’t,” Skull said. “What then?”

  “Oh, we went back and blew them to bits, of course. But they couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned, d’you see? That was the point. It’s very important to follow correct form with these people.”

  “Did our bombers sink any German ships?” Kellaway inquired.

  “I expect we knocked a few of them about a bit,” said the visitor. “The really interesting thing is what happens now. I can’t see Jerry letting us have a go at him without him coming over here and having a go at us, can you? Frankly I hope he does, and the sooner the better. Then the Government will have to think again. The gloves’ll be off, and we can really hit Jerry where it hurts.”

  “So you expect a counter-attack pretty soon?” Fanny said.

  “Don’t you?” The visitor steered his last potato into the middle of his plate and forked it with a deadly stab. “I think you should.”

  The warning increased Fanny’s nervousness about leaving Flip Moran in charge while he took “A” flight up. He went to his office and telephoned Group operations room. They had no news. Nothing had changed. The only plots on the table were friendly.

  “The weather’s begun to close in a bit,” Fanny said. “We’ve got three-tenths cloud at about five thousand feet here.”

  “That will probably thicken. The met men expect six- or seven-tenths by the end of the afternoon. Still fairly high, though. Nothing to worry about.”

  Fanny thought: The sooner I’m up, the sooner I’m down. “We’ll go now,” he said.

  “Good for you. I shall watch your perambulations with interest.”

  Fanny called the officers’ mess, asked for Pip Patterson, and told him to get “A” flight off their backsides and moving because takeoff was in twenty minutes. He also told him to ask Flight Lieutenant Moran to report to the CO’s office at once. Then he telephoned the flight sergeant in charge of the ground crews and gave orders for “A” flight’s aircraft to be warmed up. He sat back and listened to the silence and realized he had done it all wrong: he should have left the ground crews to Pip, and he should have told Flip to meet him in the locker room, or better yet at his plane. Now he was stuck here, waiting. Blast. Why didn’t he think first?

  Five minutes passed. Fanny was twitching with angry impatience; he could feel his heart thumping as if it were trying to get out. He allowed one more minute, watching the second hand stroll around the face of his watch, and then he set off. He met Flip Moran coming along the corridor:
not slowly, but not rapidly, either. “For Christ’s sake, Flip,” Fanny said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I’ve been in the lavatory, moving my bowels,” Flip said. “That’s something we mere humans have to do occasionally.” His voice was dead level.

  “Well, you chose a bright bloody time to do it.”

  “Is that so?” Flip allowed his eyebrows the smallest flicker. “Had I known you were interested in my bowel movements I would have recorded the size, weight and specific—”

  “Don’t be so bloody silly. Anyway, I haven’t got time to argue about it now.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Flip said.

  Fanny looked at his watch. Thirteen minutes to takeoff, and the locker room was miles away. He forced himself to be calm. “Listen,” he said. “Two things. First: if there’s any kind of flap while we’re up, any kind, I want to know about it straight away, which means you get on the R/T and tell me. Understood?”

  “Even a thick Irishman can understand what that means.”

  Fanny felt the sting of sarcasm. “Good. Secondly, I want to know what you were up to with those Polish-language papers. Why the hell did you hide them behind the bar?”

  “Hide? I hid nothing. The stuff was left lying all over the mess, so I gathered it up for safe keeping.”

  “Too damn safe. We couldn’t find it.”

  “I don’t know why that should be. Everyone saw me give it to the barman.”

  Fanny opened his mouth to say Then why … But he knew the answer, and looking at Moran he knew that he knew it too. Which meant that everyone knew. “A” flight had made an ass of him. He was their squadron commander and they were treating him like some doddering old school-teacher. Jesus Christ Almighty, there was a war on! Did they want to start another?

  He turned and walked out of the building, fast. An airman was cycling by. He ordered him off the bicycle, took it and pedaled hard, past the admin block, past the mess, past the stores and the sickbay and the camp cinema, to the huts where the pilots had their locker room. Hurricanes were roaring in the dispersal bays; some were beginning to taxi out. He dropped the bicycle and ran inside. The room was empty. He unbuttoned his tunic with one hand while he rummaged in his locker for a long white sweater. His tunic opened and a bundle of papers splashed to the floor: the Polish test answers. Fanny swore, scrambled them together and was stuffing them into the locker when he noticed something odd about the top sheet. He pulled it out. Every question had been answered with the same short phrase: BALLS TO YOU. Nothing else. BALLS TO YOU, forty times over. He looked for the name at the top. Mickey Mouse.

  Fanny pulled out the next sheet. Another Mickey Mouse had written UP YOUR KILT! forty times. He checked the next. Mickey Mouse again: ARSENAL 3, BLACKPOOL I, was the answer to everything. Another sheet, same name. I must not pick my nose in class, it said, over and over. Only Mother Cox had signed his name and made an attempt to do the test, and most of his answers were blank.

  Fanny’s hands trembled as he shoved the papers into his locker. There was a heavy stiffness deep in his gut, as if he had swallowed a stone. He knew that this sort of thing could not go on. There had to be a showdown, and soon. One part of him demanded it. Another part dreaded it.

  The light at twelve thousand feet was like watered whiskey. “A” flight had climbed through layer after layer of cloud spreading in from the North Sea: ragged, mucky-looking stuff, torn with holes. The last lot lay spread below them now, like all the world’s dirty laundry, and the next layer hung gloomily a couple of hundred feet above. Fanny Barton studied it, calculated that the sunlight was too far away to be worth reaching, and decided to stay here, in this cramped and cheerless stretch of air. Training would be more difficult here, and that suited his frame of mind very well.

  He put the flight into sections astern, increased speed to just over 250, and warmed them up with a sort of giant slalom, diving and climbing in a snaking series of S-bends. For five minutes he threw the flight about as severely and as unpredictably as he could, seeking to shake the wingmen loose. The formation stretched under the strain but it never broke. Finally, when his legs were beginning to ache and his lungs to gasp, he called for a loop. It carried the flight, inverted, up in to the belly of the top cloud; and as they curved down out of it he saw, with a sideways flicker of his eyes, that Red Two and Three were still more or less where they should be. They might be idiots but they could fly. It made him angrier than ever.

  So much for the warm-up. Now for serious training.

  At that moment his radio crackled and the Sector controller spoke.

  “Jester Red Leader, this is Cowslip. Are you receiving me?”

  Barton acknowledged. Cowslip requested his position. Barton thought fast and said they were approximately over Foulness Point. He was guessing but a guess was better than nothing.

  For ten seconds the radio was silent. “A” flight cruised along its dank corridor, going from nowhere to nowhere. Then another crackle.

  “Jester Red Leader, this is Cowslip. Ten-plus bandits approaching Thames Estuary. Steer one-five-zero. Make angels five, over.”

  Barton was so startled that for a moment he did nothing. The prospect of actual imminent combat with enemy aircraft briefly took his wits away. The radio crackled and he woke up, acknowledged, and led his flight in a steep, diving turn to the southeast, plunging them into the shabby mass of cloud like a blade into a mattress.

  As they flashed into clear air again, Cowslip gave him a new course to steer: one-three-zero, and told him of a second hostile force, strength five-plus, following the first. By the time “A” flight was down to seven thousand feet a third raid had been reported, strength fifteen-plus; less than a minute later they were told that a fourth had been detected, this one the biggest of all: over twenty aircraft. Every plot was heading for the Thames Estuary. It was a massive German attack, and it was aimed at London.

  The atmosphere at five thousand feet was murky, a moving junkyard of grubby cloud which made even the gaps look somehow stained and dark. To Fanny Barton it was the perfect setting for a fight: already in his imagination he could see Hun bombers blazing in this gloom; and he drove his flight along at a tearing speed, desperately afraid that other squadrons might get there first. The sky was a shifting jumble, some of it stacked high, some of it dumped like rubble, and he searched the gaps in a kind of suppressed frenzy so that when at last he glimpsed the enemy he blinked, and at once they were gone again, lost. But others in the flight had seen them too. “Bandits ahead one mile, Red Leader. Crossing port to starboard, gone into cloud.”

  “Okay, I saw them. Jester aircraft, turning starboard, go.” Barton banked steeply and set a course that might—if the bombers flew straight—bring about an interception. The air was more turbulent at this lower level, and the Hurricanes were bucketing about like a fairground ride. Barton had to keep both hands on the control column, which suddenly reminded him (with a lurch of panic) that his gun-button was on “safety.” He thumbed the catch off, took a deep breath to steady his voice, and said: “Jester aircraft: arm your guns.” He was just in time. As he spoke the bombers slid into view, ahead and above, perfectly silhouetted: three Junkers 88’s. They appeared so beautifully, so cleanly, that his lungs expanded for sheer joy. “Attack, attack!” he called. He hauled back on the stick and tasted jubilation as the leader swam steadily bigger and blacker in his sights. Every muscle was tensed to hold the Hurricane steady when he pressed the button, but even so the blaze of fire that raced from his wings made him flinch. His eight guns shaped a long cone of golden destruction. It passed in front of the bomber’s nose at first, and then seemed to wash down its fuselage, the tracer sparkling and beading like a magic show, until it slid off the tail and Barton half-rolled away, eager to clear the space so that Yellow Leader coming up behind him could have a crack too. He overdid the maneuver, turned too hard. His vision went foggy. Centrifugal force had sucked blood from his brain, and he wasted long seconds in recovery. When he
could see clearly again, far away to his left a bomber was dropping in a long spiral of smoke, a spiral that grew tighter and faster as the smoke grew denser. Well, that was one less Junkers 88 to worry about.

  No other plane was in sight. He flew straight and level for a moment, searching. He couldn’t believe they had all gone, and yet the sky was vacant. A stuttering crackle caught his attention. It was like a row of toy balloons bring burst. Yellow lights streamed past his cockpit. He was being shot at. He shoved all the controls into a corner and flung the plane onto a wingtip. A blurred shape whizzed past and soared away. His Hurricane clawed its way around the turn and he caught a glimpse of his attacker, a tail-end profile: Messerschmitt 109. Cheeky bugger! Barton gave his plane full bore and chased hard, but the closest he could get was six hundred yards. He shot off the remainder of his ammunition and saw the German vanish into cloud.

  He went home.

  “Thus your total claim,” Skull said, “is two Junkers 88 bombers definitely destroyed, one severely damaged and probably destroyed, and three Messerschmitt 109 fighters damaged, of which one was possibly destroyed.”

  “A” flight had all landed safely, they were in the locker room, and they were thoroughly pleased with themselves.

  “Damn good show,” said Stickwell. “Extremely damn good show. Highly extremely very wizard damn good show all round. What?”

  The others laughed. Even Fanny Barton smiled, sharing in the general relief and excitement and pride, although he kept his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking. He tried to stop thinking of his kill but his memory would not abandon those three or four lethal seconds; it kept returning again and again, fascinated by the focus of those splendid streams of fire ripping their way down the belly of the bomber. That was the most wonderful thing he had ever done. It had all been so quick, so good, so right. His mind was gloating over it, but why not? It was sheer perfection. And the rest of “A” flight had seen him do it. Marvelous. Superb. Exactly what was wanted.