Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “You look,” Cattermole said. “All I can see is a red mist.”

  Fanny Barton raised a hand. “I must say I don’t see the point of having everybody looking everywhere all the time,” he said.

  “You would, if …” CH3 stopped.

  “If what?”

  “Well …” CH3 scratched his jaw. “I was going to say, if you’d flown against the Condor Legion, but …”

  “Oh, Christ,” Miller grumbled. “Not bloody Spain again.”

  There was a discreet knock at the door. “My driver,” Rex said. “Carry on the discussion, if you wish.” He went out.

  The silence was bored and slightly hostile. Eventually Flash Gordon stood up. “Look,” he said, “I had plenty of time to think while I was hanging underneath that brolly yesterday. I mean, it makes you think when something like that happens. It was my life,” he told CH3. “It was your clever idea, but it was my life, and I kept thinking, What would Nicole say if she could see this? She’d say … Well, she’d say something very rude in French.” There were a few quiet chuckles. “So this is what I think,” Flash went on. “I think Rex is a bloody good CO. I mean, look at the way he rescued old Sticky from the bloody Belgians. Look at what he did when Dumbo Dutton pranged. This squadron means everything to him. Of course he’s tough on us, of course he won’t tolerate sloppy flying, and personally I’m damn glad of it. Rex is a hell of a good leader, the best I’ve ever known, and I’ll follow him anywhere. But I’m damned if I’ll follow you.”

  “Because I’m not a hell of a good leader,” CH3 said.

  “You couldn’t lead a church parade.”

  Gordon sat down, looking flushed and angry. It was the longest speech he had ever made.

  The adjutant came in. “Guess what,” he said. “That prick Protheroe. He bought it on the way home. Car smash.”

  “Driving too fast, I expect,” Cattermole said. “Young men are so impetuous nowadays.” He sprawled in his armchair and closed his eyes. “Rush, rush, rush. It’s the curse of the age. Where it will all end I shudder to think.”

  The air grew warmer. Fields changed from brown to green; trees softened their shape; it was possible to walk in the woods without wearing gumboots. The french windows were re-opened and the pilots sat on the terrace in the sunshine. Life was pleasant again; in fact when spring got into its stride, and the orchards displayed their extravagant froth of blossom, life began to be quite cheerful; which made Fitzgerald’s despondency all the more apparent.

  He stared into space a good deal, went for solitary walks, played squash as if he wanted to lose, got tight very easily, and lost five or six pounds in weight. One day he wandered into the adjutant’s office, sat down and said he wanted a transfer.

  “What’s up, Fitz?” Kellaway asked. His left knee hurt. It had never been the same after he’d crashed his SE5a in a shell-hole near Sedan. He pounded it with his fist, which did no good. Nothing did any good. Bloody stupid knee. He gave it another thump for good luck. “Don’t you love us any more? Is it something we said?”

  “I’m letting the squadron down, uncle. I’m not up to scratch any more.”

  “Balls.” Kellaway pulled up his trouser-leg and examined his knee. “Your flight commander hasn’t complained. Rex hasn’t said anything. What’s wrong? Whatever it is, I’ll swap you my knee for it.”

  “Oh, it’s just … everything.” Fitzgerald put his head in his hands and stared at the floor. “I mean, what the hell’s the point of anything? It’s all a waste. It’s a joke. That’s all I am, anyway. A piss-poor joke.”

  The adjutant wasn’t listening to the words. He knew that tone of voice, that wretched growl of self-pity and bitter, unfocused resentment. What Fitzgerald needed now was sympathy, understanding and encouragement. On the other hand Kellaway’s left knee was on fire. “It’s that bloody silly woman, isn’t it?” he said, and Fitzgerald nodded. “What’s wrong?” he asked. Fitzgerald shrugged. “Widow, isn’t she?” Kellaway said. “Well, get over there and give her a good poke. Everything looks different in bed.”

  “That’s just the trouble,” Fitzgerald mumbled. “I can’t seem to … you know … bring it off.”

  “Bollocks,” Kellaway snapped.

  “It’s true. Mary told me, she said it wasn’t any good, she couldn’t go on, and she burst into tears.” Fitzgerald sniffed hard. “She was really upset, uncle. I could tell.”

  “Bloody silly women,” the adjutant said crossly.

  He got his cap and gloves, took a car and drove to the village.

  The midday break had just begun. He met Nicole in the school playground. The children clustered around to stare at the old man in the funny uniform. “Hello,” Nicole said. “If you want to see Mary, she is inside.”

  “Good.” He set off, and then came back, trailing children. “What’s the matter with her?” he demanded.

  Nicole deflected a sticky hand reaching for his shiny tunic buttons. “Mary is …” She blinked, searching for the English word. “Pregnant,” she said.

  “Ah.” Kellaway paused. He ruffled a couple of heads. “That’s better. I don’t think I’ll bother to see her after all. Merci, madame.”

  All the children waved as he drove away. He waved back. “Dirty little horrors,” he said. He really disliked children.

  “Flying a fighter is a dangerous business,” Rex said. “Anyone who cannot accept that fact would be better off doing something else.”

  “I don’t want to do anything else,” CH3 said.

  They were in Rex’s office. The adjutant stood looking out of the window.

  “Flying fighters is also a team business,” Rex said. “And it seems you don’t want to join the team.”

  “Not when it’s playing to lose, no.”

  Rex lost patience. “If I had my way, Hart, I’d boot you out of that uniform in no seconds flat. Ever since you joined this squadron your whole attitude has been carping, negative, presumptuous, insolent and generally crass in the extreme. You’ve done nothing, and yet you think you know everything. You’re a self-righteous, self-opinionated prig.”

  “And you’re a playboy,” CH3 said. “This isn’t a fighter squadron, it’s Rex’s private flying club.”

  “Hey, steady on, lad,” Kellaway said, turning.

  “You’re proud of these trophies, aren’t you?” CH3 picked a silver tankard from Rex’s desk. “Champion Flight, Formation Aerobatics, Hendon Air Pageant, 1938. Very pretty.”

  “Pretty to watch,” Rex said. He was making an effort to control his temper. “Tough to perform, and a supreme test of skill, courage and coordination, but you wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. I know what goes on. You’re keen on close-formation stuff because it flatters your vanity. Everyone has to watch you. You manipulate the squadron. You put them through their tricks. They’re like trained dogs.”

  Rex sniffed. “Your trouble, Hart, is you’re incapable of thinking unselfishly. Certainly I take pride in leading a well-trained squadron. Contrary to your peculiar notions, there is no room for vanity in discipline. There’s no room for cold feet in a cockpit, either. I understand you’ve had armor plating installed behind your seat.”

  Kellaway snorted. “Oh, for God’s sake … Have you really?” CH3 was silent. “Fancy putting a whacking great hunk of iron smack off-center,” Kellaway said. “You’ll ruin the balance of the whole machine.”

  “Flying a fighter is of course a dangerous business,” Rex said. “But you don’t destroy the enemy by wrapping yourself in sheets of steel.”

  CH3 had nothing further to say.

  “Perhaps that explains your pathetic record,” Rex said. “Go away, Hart. You make me tired.”

  When he had left the room, Rex and Kellaway looked at each other.

  “He’s obsessed with safety,” Kellaway said. “Armor plating! I ask you.”

  Fitzgerald was sitting on the front step when Mary came home from school. She sat beside him. The afternoon sun was f
ull on their faces.

  “Oh well,” she said. “I suppose everyone knows now.”

  “Just Kellaway and me. Nobody else.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can’t keep it a secret forever, can I?”

  Fitzgerald examined the backs of his hands, checking the pattern of freckles. “How do you feel about it?” he asked, very cautiously.

  “Mixed.”

  “Oh.” He turned his hands over and examined the palms. “Well, I suppose that’s understandable.”

  “Fitz, for God’s sake stop being so damned reasonable.” She was not angry; just forthright. “It’s not a reasonable state of affairs, is it? I mean, I haven’t behaved reasonably. Neither has nature. It’s all most unreasonable, if you ask me.”

  He scrutinized his thumbs while he thought about that, but he could make no sense of it. He put his thumbs away and tried a different tack. “The point is,” he said, “it seems that I got a rather false impression of … um … things.”

  She leaned against the door and closed her eyes.

  “You see,” he said, “I thought—”

  “I know. I know what you thought.”

  “I mean, when you said that—”

  “Yes, yes, yes. I know what I said.”

  “Stop bloody interrupting.” That made her open her eyes. “We’ve had enough confusion and misunderstandings, Mary. It’s time we got everything straight. I went away because I thought you thought I couldn’t … you know … ring the bell. Sexually speaking. Such, it appears, was not the case. So what was wrong?”

  “Nothing. I was upset, I didn’t know what to do for the best, it was all my fault and I didn’t see why you should suffer for it.”

  “Suffer? Who’s suffering?” He took her hand. “Look, I know I’m supposed to get down on my knees for this, but my left leg’s gone to sleep.”

  “You don’t want to marry me, Fitz.”

  “Mary, stop making my decisions for me. I know what I want. Now then: what do you want?”

  The corners of her mouth turned down in a smile of defeat. “You’re so manly when you’re masterful,” she said.

  “I take it that means yes,” Fitz said. “And about bloody time, too.”

  Horsedrawn plows turned the earth, leaving strips as fresh as corduroy for the birds to feed on. The other war between Russia and Finland went on. Mary Muir Blandin married Jeremy Stanhope Fitzgerald in the Protestant church at Mirecourt and afterward Flash Gordon gave him a lot of boring advice. France and Britain wanted to send troops through Norway and Sweden in order, so they said, to help Finland; Norway and Sweden refused permission. Rex had the grass tennis-courts mown and marked out, and Barton organized a tournament. The Russo-Finnish war ended, in Russia’s favor. “B” flight bagged a Heinkel. Britain and France sent an invasion fleet to neutral Norway but Hitler’s forces landed there the day before it arrived. Germany overran Denmark too. Cattermole received a parcel containing six silk scarves and a bill, which he threw away. The weather suddenly became warm enough for swimming, and the pilots found a perfect pool in the stream that ran through the grounds. “A” flight saw, for the first time, a formation of Messerschmitt 109 fighters, but they were only testing the Allied defenses and no contact was made. Himmler ordered a concentration camp built at Auschwitz in Poland. Swallows and housemartins streaked up and down the stream, hurdling the swimmers and gorging on insects. Both flights saw the Luftwaffe’s new twin-engined fighter-bomber, the Me-110, but only at a distance. Mussolini told the US ambassador in Rome that Germany could not be defeated. Cattermole received an anxious letter from Stickwell, asking him to make Rex pay his bills. Belgium announced yet again that it was neutral. The weather was so fine that Micky Marriott had the grass on the aerodrome cut twice a week. It was going to be a hot summer.

  MAY 1940

  For Hornet squadron the war really began on the tenth of May 1940 at two minutes past noon. At the time, however, none of them realized this. Eleven of the twelve Hornet pilots knew nothing about it because they were all looking the wrong way. The twelfth, Hugo Trevelyan, was dead.

  Even before he died Trevelyan was feeling weary. They all were; nobody had slept terribly well. The fortress guns on the Maginot and Siegfried Lines had rumbled and thundered all night, and the pilots had been pulled out of bed at three-thirty. It was light when they gathered at the airfield, with nothing for breakfast but mugs of tea. Before they could finish drinking it, they were ordered off. According to the ops officer enemy aircraft were all over the place, but a thick haze blotted out everything up to five thousand feet, and above that the sky was a light blue blank. An hour and a quarter later they landed, got the first news of the invasion of Belgium, ate a real breakfast, and flew another patrol. By now fires on the ground were scorching holes in the haze and pushing bundles of smoke up through it. Rex saw several clusters of aircraft at a great distance, looking as tiny as pinheads, and failed to get near any. A second breakfast was eaten at ten-thirty. The ops officer had them airborne again at eleven-fifteen, patrolling a line Metz-Luxembourg. That ended any lingering doubts. If the fighting had entered Luxembourg, the big bust-up was on.

  By twelve noon they were at eighteen thousand feet, and breathing oxygen. Rex had the flights close-echeloned to starboard. The Hurricanes were snugly interlocked, wings well overlapped, and Rex was content; but automatically he said: “Keep it close, chaps. Nice and tight.” Over the town of Luxembourg they turned, sprawling slightly, and tightened up again as they flew south. “Bandits at eleven o’clock,” Rex said. “Prepare for a number two attack.”

  After such a long and empty morning, the shock of seeing twenty German bombers affected everyone: the entire squadron twitched and rippled as the pilots leaned forward to look. They were Heinkel 111’s, rank upon rank parading toward France. Behind them came an escort of Messerschmitt 110’s, a couple of dozen in groups of four, stepped up as if to give everyone a good view ahead. At first glance they looked frighteningly many and powerful. At second glance they were a bloody marvelous target.

  Rex maneuvered the squadron, changing speed and course to bring about the correct angle of interception. Each wingman watched his leader, each leader watched Rex; and when they could they glanced at the glittering enemy, a thousand feet below. Hugo Trevelyan was Green Two, the last man on the right. He was paying special attention to Green Leader, not wanting to lose him if the formation suddenly turned. He neither saw nor heard the Messerschmitt 109 that dropped out of the sky behind him. It fell below and used its momentum to arc upward so that the Hurricane flew into its sights. It opened fire at two hundred yards. The twin machine-guns mounted on top of the engine released a total of one hundred and twenty bullets in two and a half seconds; the two cannon in the wings each fired fifteen rounds. The cannon shells went wide but more than half the bullets ripped through the cockpit floor, through the seat, and through Trevelyan.

  His left thigh was hit first. The blow was so immense, shattering his thigh-bone, that he threw up his arms and arched his back. The parachute protected his buttocks but the bullets hacked and smashed his lower spine, chopping the great veins and arteries it guarded, perforating the flesh, battering the pelvis, almost breaking the body in half. The last few rounds flicked up through his abdomen, missing the kidneys, hitting the stomach, breaking a few ribs. But by then he was dead.

  The 109 flipped and climbed and lost itself in the dazzling sky. Trevelyan hung in his straps, his right foot nudging the rudderpedal. Nobody noticed his Hurricane drift away and tip sideways. “Squadron in aircraft close line astern,” Rex said, “flights echelon starboard. Go!”

  The Hurricanes formed two lines, each nose to tail. Still nobody missed Green Two. Nobody looked for him. “Keep close, keep close,” Rex said. “We’ll take the bombers first. Good hunting.”

  He led them down in a curling dive. The Heinkels paraded immaculately but the 110’s were hurrying forward. Fanny Barton, following Rex, felt a great sense of unreality: it was all too well-order
ed, too formal, too like an air display. Not even the bright beads of tracer pulsing out of the Heinkels persuaded him that this was battle, that these machines could destroy and be destroyed. Then he was choosing his target, and bracing himself, and firing, and with the crash and shudder of guns all unreality vanished. The parade fell apart, the sky was full of dodging, skidding, twisting planes. Barton hauled his Hurricane into a half-turn, glimpsed blurred shapes go charging by, and flew straight through a flight of 110’s. Everyone fired, nobody scored. He was bewildered: there was no shape or sense to this battle, just a lot of rushing about, taking potshots. A Heinkel slid into his vision. He grabbed the chance, thumb hard on the firing button, and saw all his shots pass far behind its tail. As he took his thumb off, a Hurricane slid across the space he’d been shooting at. Barton shouted with horror and relief. His hands were wet with sweat inside his gloves and his heart was hammering as if he had run up a mountain. Something rattled and thumped like a runaway donkey-engine: bullet-streams raced above his head, flickering past the propeller disc. Barton shoved everything into a corner and dragged the Hurricane through a turn that made the rivets creak. His eyeballs were straining to see behind him.

  Nothing. Empty sky. He reversed the turn, searching everywhere. Nothing. His attacker had vanished. He climbed, circling and searching. They had all gone. It was startling. He was quite alone.

  Two long trails of smoke led his eye downward. The aircraft on fire were a mile or more below: tumbling specks. As he watched, a third plane hit the ground and exploded with a tiny spurt of flame. “Goodbye, whoever you were,” he said aloud. It had, in fact, been Trevelyan.

  They were full of excitement when they landed. The ground crews had seen the black streaks behind the gun-ports in the wings and they were eager to hear about the action. There was much shouting and laughter and re-staging of attacks with twisting, aiming hands. Everyone except Barton and Boy Lloyd claimed to have damaged the enemy. Rex, Moran and Patterson claimed probables. Cox and Miller claimed definite kills. Nobody had seen Trevelyan go down. Rex considered it likely that he had simply stopped a bullet in the engine and made a forced-landing somewhere.