Rex and Kellaway saw the horse rear and stagger. Its hind legs struggled to keep to the path, and failed. The animal stumbled, twisted in mid-air and plunged down the slope with a violence that hurled Starr onto its neck. It bolted for the bottom, missing trees by inches, kicking up a wake of dead leaves, and releasing a screaming whinny of fear and pain. Finally, unable to stop, it smashed into a patch of scrub and briar and was lost to sight.
“My God, that doesn’t look too good,” said Kellaway.
“He should have fallen off immediately,” Rex said. “Pointless staying on a horse that’s out of control.”
“Blind instinct, I suppose.”
“No wonder the beast panicked, the way he wrapped his arms around its neck. Thoroughly bad form.” Rex cupped his hands and shouted. “Moggy! Go and bring him back, quick as you can. Everyone else, wait here.”
They assembled and waited in silence. It was getting dark, they were tired, the wind was merciless.
“What were you saying about Air Commodore Bletchley?” Rex asked suddenly.
“Oh … Nothing important.” The adjutant tucked his hands into his armpits. “I just remembered him from the old RFC days, that’s all. We used to call him Baggy Bletchley then. He was just a lieutenant, of course.”
They waited. “Why Baggy?” Miller asked.
“Well, you know … Everyone had a nickname.”
“Did he look baggy?”
“Oh no. He was quite smart, as I remember.”
Miller sniffed. “Too complicated for me.”
One of the horses stamped and snorted. They were getting cold, too. “If you want to know, it was because of his balls,” Kellaway said. That revived their interest. “Bletchley had very big balls. They hung unusually low. I suppose they had to, because of their size. Anyway, there was a story that he went to be measured for a new uniform, and the tailor took his inside-leg measurement, and then he asked him …” Kellaway cleared his throat. “He said to him: ‘And do you dress left or right, sir?’ And Bletchley is supposed to have replied: ‘Just make the knees extra baggy.’”
Their laughter was cut short by the distant crack of a rifle. “So that’s why he was called Baggy,” Kellaway said. “I wonder what that was?”
“Moggy’s shot an elephant,” said Patterson.
“Or Dicky’s shot Moggy,” said Barton.
“Maybe Moggy’s shot himself,” said Cox.
“Maybe the elephant shot both of them,” Miller suggested. “In which case we can all go home.”
“Actually, elephants are supposed to be quite harmless,” Barton said. “Unless they get angry.”
“Knowing Moggy,” Cox said, “he probably shot the wrong elephant in the wrong place for the wrong reason, and now the beast’s hopping mad.”
Soon Starr came trudging up the slope. Cattermole followed, leading his own horse.
“Dicky’s nag broke a leg,” Cattermole said. He showed them a rip in his sleeve. “Brute tried to savage me when I went near it. No appreciation at all. I had to shoot it.”
“Damn!” Rex said. “That’s most unfortunate. We shall have to pay for it now, I suppose.”
“How much is a horse these days?” Patterson asked.
“Twenty or thirty quid. Three or four thousand francs.”
“Less the meat value,” Cox pointed out. “Big horsemeat eaters, the frogs.”
“You all right, Dicky?” Kellaway asked. Starr nodded. Blood was congealing from a cut over his right eye. “Better jump up behind me.”
Starr said not a word on the way back, and the adjutant knew better than to try to get him to talk. They returned the horses to the stables and drove to the château.
After dinner, Fanny Barton found Rex in a corner of the anteroom, brushing mud and burrs out of Reilly’s coat.
“In my opinion, sir, Cattermole’s getting rather too big for his boots,” Barton said. “He’s having a bad effect on the other boys. I really think he needs to be cut down to size.”
“I see.” Rex found some seeds stuck to a hind leg, and teased them out. He looked up, reacting to Barton’s silence. “So cut him down to size, then,” he said briskly. “He’s in your flight, isn’t he?”
“I thought a few words from you might have more effect, sir.”
“Of course they’d have more effect. They’d reduce your authority. A flight commander’s job is to command his flight, Fanny. I’m not going to do it for you. I’ve got enough work on my hands keeping this hound presentable. Ah, thank you.” A mess waiter brought a pint of beer. Rex put it on the floor and Reilly started drinking, his tail going like a pump-handle. “It puts gloss on his coat,” Rex said, “and lead in his pencil. By the way: if you want to see Cattermole, he’s just come in.”
“I’ll think it over,” Barton said.
“What a good boy.” Rex stroked Reilly, who had finished the beer and was looking around the room. “He’s picking his target, bless him,” Rex said fondly.
Micky Marriott’s drainage ditches began to work. The aerodrome improved from a swamp to a bog. The air was still bitterly cold, and snow fell in the Vosges, but at least there was some prospect of flying again. When the wind was in the right direction the front windows of the Château St. Pierre trembled gently to the heavy roar of Merlin engines being run-up and tuned. Two or three times a day condensation trails could be seen overhead, but they were thin and high and shortlived and nobody paid them much attention. To the east, the French and German artillery were silent.
Flash Gordon and Fitz Fitzgerald had volunteered to stay on duty while the others went riding. Now they got permission to leave the camp. “Back to school again?” Rex said. “I never knew such a thirst for education.”
“It’s very encouraging, sir,” Fitz said. “The kids can’t get enough of us, it seems.”
Flash said: “We help them with their handwriting, sir.”
Rex rolled his eyes. “Be sure you don’t dip your nib in the wrong ink-pot, that’s all.”
It was a slow morning for the rest of the pilots. They wrote letters, played Ludo, tried to find some jazz on the radio, looked at old copies of the Daily Mail or Daily Mirror. At eleven-thirty a group captain arrived from Area HQ to give a lecture on the importance of not flying over neutral Luxembourg, Belgium or Holland. It was a mercifully short lecture: he had really come to sample Hornet squadron’s famous food. By noon everyone was gathered at the bar.
“Any news from England, sir?” Rex asked the visitor.
“Nothing special. The war’s hit the rugger clubs rather badly but racing’s not affected, thank goodness. All enemy aliens have been arrested, of course, and shipped off to some remote corner of Cumberland, which seems a bit rough on Cumberland. Still, it means we’re spared the endless letters those people used to write to The Times about the Jewish problem. I can’t tell you how bored I got with the Jewish problem. They really are the most depressing people, can’t seem to get along with anyone. All that fuss about foreskins and ham sandwiches; I mean why can’t they unbend a bit and behave normally, like the rest of us? Not that—”
“It’s a matter of religion, sir,” Cox said.
The group captain had not been expecting an answer. “A matter of religion,” he said. “Ah. You … You sound as if you might know something about it.”
“I’m half-Jewish. My mother.” The other pilots glanced at him curiously. Old Mother Cox, half-Jewish; fancy that. Come to think of it he has got rather a long nose. Not that it makes any difference, of course …
The group captain switched his expression to one of interest. “Tell me,” he said. “What do you think of the overall so-to-speak situation, Mr. …”
“Cox,” said Rex.
“How appropriate,” the group captain murmured.
“Well, I’m not an expert, sir,” Cox said. “I mean, I don’t want to live in Palestine; I’m not a Zionist, my parents don’t keep a shop in the East End of London and they haven’t been beaten up by Oswald Mosley’s fascist thugs. But what
I’ve often wondered is how Hitler’s Nazi party thinks that killing off some of the greatest brains in Europe is going to help them win the war.”
Skull asked: “What would you do, if you were Hitler?”
“I’d recruit every Jewish genius in sight,” Cox said promptly. “Even if I had to wear fourteen skullcaps and eat gefilte fish three times a day.”
The group captain chuckled and sipped his beer.
Behind his hand, Miller muttered: “What the hell’s gefilte fish?” Starr shrugged: “Never heard of it.”
“I’m glad you think wars are won by brains,” the group captain said to Cox. “I’m sure our lords and masters would agree.”
Rex led the laughter.
“Mind you, sir,” Cox said, “the other thing I can’t understand is why all those people who escaped from Germany to avoid getting put in Nazi concentration camps have now been arrested and put in British concentration camps instead.”
“Steady on, old chap,” Cattermole protested. “I mean, play the game.” He held his beer against his chest, fingers grasping the tankard, handle pointing outward: it was the squadron style. “British concentration camps? That’s a bit steep, Mother.”
“You are rather off-course, old chap,” Rex said. “We simply don’t go in for that sort of thing.”
“I rather suspect you’ll find it’s more a sort of protective custody,” the group captain said. “Not an actual concentration camp as such.”
“Call it what you like,” Cox said, “it’s still barbed wire, isn’t it?”
“As a matter of fact,” Skull said, “the British invented the concentration camp. Against the Boers.”
“And the South Africans are now our allies and a splendid bunch of chaps they are,” Rex said rapidly, “so they obviously didn’t hold it against us. As you can tell, sir, Hornet is rather a special squadron. We don’t go in for stuffy conventional ideas here. We encourage originality and initiative and so on.”
“Sounds jolly democratic,” the group captain said.
“Well, that’s what we’re fighting for, after all.”
“Is it?” Skull fumbled for a pen. “Are we? I ought to make a note of that. I thought it was something to do with Poland.”
“Correct,” the group captain said.
“Ah.” Skull held up the pen and frowned at the nib. “In that case, when shall we declare war on Russia?”
“Pay no attention to him, sir,” Fitzgerald said. “Old Skull’s got an IQ of seven hundred and forty-three, so he overheats easily. We have to change his oil twice a week.”
“No, it’s a simple question,” Skull said.
“What a fierce fellow you are; Skull,” Rex sighed. “One war isn’t enough.”
“Well, Russia has invaded Poland, just as Germany did. Russia has annexed even more of Poland than Germany did. To be consistent, therefore, we should—”
“We should go in to lunch,” Rex said. “Nothing very grand; I’m afraid, sir: just Strasbourg pâté, a local fish, and some cheese, but I’ll be interested to hear what you think of our Pinot Blanc. I reckon it’s one of the most symmetrical wines available, but you know far more about these things than I do …”
They trooped off.
Mary Blandin walked over to where Fitz Fitzgerald was pushing a little girl on a swing. “Stay to supper,” she said.
“That’s awfully nice of you.” Fitz stopped pushing. The little girl squealed and waved her feet. “The problem is, you see, Flash and I came here in the same car, so …”
“Don’t worry. Flash will be looked after.”
“Really?” Fitz looked across the playground. Nicole Ligier was talking to a red-headed boy who was sitting on Flash Gordon’s shoulders, gripping his hair in both fists. “Well, in that case,” Fitz said, “it would be churlish of me to refuse, wouldn’t it?” The little girl squealed louder. “All right, you noisy monster!” he cried, and began pushing. “Will there be rolypoly pudding?” he asked Mary. “I’m a pushover for rolypoly pudding.”
She narrowed her eyes and looked mysterious. “We shall see,” she said.
Dicky Starr’s handwriting was neat and simple. The important words were underlined in red ink, and there were green-ink lines drawn between the different sections. “Knowledge is power,” his father had once told him; and Starr had kept careful notes of everything the instructors told him at every stage of his flying training. These notes filled ten thick exercise books. The page now open before him had his thumbprint in the top right-hand corner (leaky fountain-pen). He had framed it in red and green.
Dicky Starr kept these notes because he believed that everything in the world could be explained and understood. Disorder worried him. He felt bewildered by the pointlessness of the killings during yesterday’s horseback outing and he was angered by the fact that nobody else seemed to care. Everyone agreed Moggy Cattermole was a chump, but nobody did anything. Not even Fanny Barton. Dicky Starr was very conscious of his own size—he was as short as Sticky Stickwell and a good bit lighter—and he hated having to get other people to fight his battles. So he said nothing. After lunch he went off to study his notes in a corner of the library where there was a turret-like room screened by a red velvet curtain.
The page with the framed thumbprint was all about cloud formations.
Very high cloud (above 20,000 ft). Cirrus: this means “curly,” e.g. cloud looks like lambs’tails. Stratus means “a layer” and resembles faint chalk-marks all going the same way. Cirrocumulus is-made of small blobs of cloud perhaps forming a pattern such as …
Enraged. That was the word. He hadn’t been angry when they shot that fox; he’d been enraged. He’d been overtaken by a rushing fury that seemed to grab him by the guts. At that moment he’d wanted to kill them. Snatch up his gun and blast someone’s head off. If the adj hadn’t been standing there he might have done it, might have run wild, the taste had been in his throat, the raging hunger.
It was a new vision of himself and it shocked him: the Dicky Starr who made lots of model airplanes and brushed his teeth after meals and passed all his exams had somehow turned into a potential killer. Of course as soon as they’d let him go up in an eight-gun Hurricane he’d known that he was in that seat for the purpose of destroying enemy aircraft, but it was a technical task, knocking down planes. Now there was a part of him that wanted to kill, that actually relished the prospect of blowing someone to bits. That wasn’t nice. People had always said what a nice chap Dicky Starr was, and he had believed them. Now it turned out that he wasn’t at all nice. He stared at his framed thumbprint and worried.
The curtain swished. “So there you are, little man,” Cattermole said. “Skulking in your tent. That won’t help you. I want four hundred and thirty-seven francs and fifty centimes, and I want it now.” He strolled around the little room, sniffed at the view, ran his finger along a shelf of books. “Come on, come on,” he said.
“I’m not talking to you,” Starr muttered.
“I don’t care a tiny toss whether you fiddle, fart or sing the old school song. Just pay up.”
Starr began reading his notes. Cattermole plucked the exercise book from his fingers and put it on a high shelf. Starr folded his arms and gripped his biceps until his thumbs hurt. “What a very clever thing to do,” he said. “That must have taken every brain in your body.”
“Cough up, little pygmy.” Cattermole clicked his fingers. “Get your purse out of your knickers.”
“I’d sooner be a little pygmy than a giant shit.”
“Don’t bore me with your dreams, shrimp. Cash, cash, cash. Give.”
“There’s only one thing I’d like to give you, and that’s a red-hot bullet up the backside.”
Cattermole shook his head. “Pleasure later. Business first.”
“What’s this, a lovers’ tiff?” Patterson wandered in, bouncing a ping-pong ball.
“Ah, Pip. You’re another. You owe me four hundred and thirty-seven francs and a bit,” Cattermole told him. �
�The stables charged us three-and-a-half thousand francs for that wretched horse, the one Starr went joyriding on. Eights into three-and-a-half thou go four thirty-seven point five, so that’s your share of the damage.”
“For God’s sake!” Patterson said. “That’s nearly three pounds. I’m not paying that.”
“Lord Rex says you are.”
“It was all your fault,” Starr told Cattermole. “You made it happen, you ought to pay for everything.”
Cattermole perched on the windowsill and examined him. “You’re in a proper little tizz because I shot your pet fox, aren’t you?” he said.
“If you mean I was disgusted, yes I was. It was barbaric, just the sort of behavior you expect the Gestapo to—”
“Pip shot the animal too. Why not blame him?”
“I only shot it because everyone else was having a go,” Patterson said. “I mean, if it was going to be dead, I might as well make sure it was good and dead.”
“You nearly all missed,” Starr said.
“There you are then, it’s just as well I shot straight, otherwise …” Patterson stopped as he realized where that argument led. “Anyway, it was only a fox,” he said. Starr clenched his teeth. “Damn good fox, of course,” Patterson added.
“I’ll tell you your trouble, Dicky Dwarf,” Cattermole said. “You’re squeamish. That’s why you’ll never be any good as a fighter pilot. You’re completely covered with squeam, my lad. Squeam all over you. You ought to see a doctor about it. Tell him—”
“Oh, shut up, Moggy!” Patterson cried. “Dicky’s a bloody good pilot, as good as anyone in this squadron. Christ, you’re never happy unless you’re kicking someone in the balls, are you?”
“I do it for their own good,” Cattermole said blandly. “It hurts me, I assure you. I suffer agonies.”
“Oh yes? What about Micky Marriott?” Starr demanded. “You treated him pretty badly, didn’t you? That day when you came back early because your engine was overheating. You treated him like dirt.”
“Did I? Possibly. Ages ago. I scarcely remember.”
“I remember all right,” Patterson said. “You were bloody rude.”
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