Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  CH3 was drinking in the mess when he was called to the phone. “Popsy,” Flash said, and for once he was right. The caller was Jacky Bellamy.

  “I want a chance to apologize,” she said. “And I also need your advice.”

  “I see.” He looked at all the names and numbers scribbled on the wall. “Look, are you sure this is such a good idea?”

  “No, I’m not. And look, you don’t have to meet me if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “About three months.”

  “A lot can happen in three months.”

  “Stop dodging. This is a pay phone and I’m out of change. Say yes or no.”

  Pause. “No.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Hey, hey! You didn’t talk like that three months ago.”

  “I’ve changed. I’ve turned hard and cold and ruthless and …”

  “Is that right? Sounds much more interesting. Okay, where do we meet?”

  “Outside the main gate in ten minutes?”

  She had a car. They drove a mile or so to a quiet lane, and walked down a long avenue of beech trees. It was dusk, and the air was as warm as milk.

  “First off,” she said, “you were right and I was wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything. Tactics, gunnery, back-armor, all the stuff you said was wrong with the Hurricane. And all I can say in defense is that I went along with the majority vote. Experts always disagree, and there comes a point when … Oh, forget it. I’m making excuses.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I was somewhat wrong too. Turns out there’s nothing much wrong with the Hurricane. It needed sorting out, that’s all.”

  “So here we both are. Older and wiser.”

  They stopped to watch a pair of squirrels dash along some branches and vanish.

  “Anyway, what does it matter?” he said. “It’s all over and done with.”

  “It mattered to me. I hate getting anything wrong. I believe in taking pains and double-checking everything twice. I hate being caught out.”

  He gave an amused grunt. “So did I, once. Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it.”

  “Stop trying to sound paternal. I’m two years older than you.”

  “Are you really?” He cocked his head and studied her face. “Prove it. Say something maternal.”

  “Have you got a clean handkerchief?” she asked.

  He laughed. “That’s very good,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more he laughed; until she began laughing too. He said: “You just wrote the story of my life.”

  “Gee whiz. I must have been inspired, or something.”

  He looked away. They walked on. Old beech leaves crunched sweetly underfoot. He said, “Flip Moran bought it this afternoon.”

  “Dead?” She reached up to a low-hanging branch and broke off a leaf. “Dumb question … Well, I’m sorry. I really liked Flip.”

  “Yes, he had his points.”

  “That’s not much of an epitaph. He was worth more than that.”

  CH3 shrugged. “Chaps are always getting the chop. It’s not something to get worked up about.” They reached the end of the avenue, and turned. “You said you wanted to ask my advice. What about?”

  “Oh, nothing special. Statistics. RAF claims. My boss in the States wants me to check out the figures … Look, why did you do that, just now?”

  “What?”

  “You know what. One moment you’re actually treating me like a human being, the next moment you’re a hundred miles away, telling me Flip Moran has bought it.”

  He said nothing.

  “I’ve been kissed before, you know,” she said. “Even a withered old bag like me gets kissed from time to time.”

  “Come to that,” he said, “you could have kissed me.”

  “Too late now. Anyway, it’s not something to get worked up about, is it?”

  They walked in silence to the car.

  The Spreadeagle had been an important coaching inn, and it was spacious. The ceiling of the public bar, for instance, was fourteen feet high. To get Flash Gordon’s feet on the ceiling was quite a job.

  All the bar tables had been dragged into the middle of the room and stacked in a pyramid. This in itself was not easy, because the pub was crowded with locals and Spitfire pilots and a sprinkling of soldiers, and some of them had been reluctant to give up their tables. But the landlord supported the feet-on-the-ceiling idea. When Barton had walked in and said, “Thirteen pints, please,” the landlord had said, “You must be Hornet squadron,” and it turned out his nephew was Mother Cox’s armorer.

  CH3 found a man who could play the piano and he bought him a drink. Singing began. There was a slightly dangerous darts match, Hurricanes versus Spits, with a lot of insults about marksmanship. Zab and Haddy took no part in any of it. They had been ordered to come and now they stood by the fireplace and sneered into their beer. “Jag tycker om det!” Fitzgerald shouted at them from a safe distance, and when they scowled, others shouted it too. Fitzgerald was feeling guilty about not going home to Mary, but orders were orders, weren’t they? So now he shouted twice as loudly, to make the guilt worthwhile.

  They all shouted, they all barged about, pinched each other’s hats, threw beermats, sang, bawled catchphrases from radio shows. Skull watched Macfarlane and Brooke stagger and howl with laughter at a joke that Cattermole had told, and he said to CH3: “It’s amazing how very drunk they can get so very quickly, isn’t it?”

  “They’re not really drunk. It’s a sort of post-combat autointoxication, I guess.”

  “In celebration of life? Affirmation of survival?”

  “Christ, no. Nothing so high-falutin’. They’ve been wound up as tight as a fiddle-string all day, so now they make whoopee. These guys could get smashed out of their minds on soda-water.”

  “Not that one, apparently.” Skull was looking at Steele-Stebbing, who had just left the piano, having failed to join in the singing because he didn’t know the words, and was now reading a brewer’s calendar.

  The landlord, pulling pints as he talked, said to Barton: “Tell you what. I wouldn’t mind some sort of memento or souvenir. You know: something to hang on the wall. You got a squadron plaque, or a photograph or something?”

  “No, nothing of that sort, I’m afraid.” The landlord was disappointed. Barton looked around for inspiration. “You could always have our footprints,” he said. “Like they do in Hollywood.”

  “That takes cement. I’ve got no cement, have I?”

  Barton was looking at the pub ceiling. “Got any soot?” he asked.

  “What? You’ll never get up there,” the landlord said.

  “Bet you a pint we will.” Barton emptied his glass.

  “Hornet boys can get up anywhere,” the adjutant said.

  They stacked the pub tables in a three-tiered pyramid. Barton climbed to the top with half a bucket of soot that the landlord had meant for his rhubarb. CH3 handed up a chair. “Right!” Barton shouted. “Now this is a very hazardous mission, bloody dangerous in fact, because as you can see it will take you very close to your operational ceiling.” He pointed upward.

  The crowd howled and groaned. “Piss-poor joke!” Cattermole roared. Cushions and beermats flew. Barton drank his beer.

  “And because it’s so extremely bloody dangerous,” he declared, “I have decided to call for a volunteer. Where’s Flash?”

  Gordon was manhandled up the pyramid. He struck a dramatic pose and cried: “There was a young lady named Buckingham—”

  Barton shoved him into the chair. Using an old paint brush he slathered soot onto the soles of his shoes. Gordon swung himself around until his shoulders were resting on the seat of the chair and he pressed his feet on the ceiling, to warm applause. “Now sing a song,” Barton ordered. Gordon, still upside down, sang a verse of Stormy Weather. “Enough!” Barton said. Gordon slid off the chair head-first and rolled down the pyramid into the arms of the
crowd, spilling much beer. “Mother Cox!” Barton shouted.

  Cox was followed by CH3. He made his mark and sang Trees, and then took over the bucket and ordered Barton up. Barton sang Run, Rabbit. CH3 gave him back the bucket and went down as Patterson came up. One by one the pilots stamped their sooty footprints and sang their upside-down songs until only two were left: Renouf and Steele-Stebbing. As Nim Renouf clambered up, grinning with anticipation, CH3 found Steele-Stebbing at the back of the crowd. “You’re next,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”

  “That’s not possible. Nobody can be bad at it. The worse you are, the better they like it. Got a song ready?”

  “I honestly can’t think of anything.” He drank some beer to hide his embarrassment.

  CH3 dragged down the glass, and slopped beer. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never sung a song in all your long and miserable life?”

  Steele-Stebbing, mopping his wrists with his handkerchief, showed a tiny flash of anger. “There’s no need to make such a fuss,” he said. “If it makes you any happier I’ll sing The Red Flag.”

  “Attaboy.” CH3 drank his beer. “Now get up there and knock ’em dead.”

  But when Steele-Stebbing found himself up there with his feet on the ceiling he couldn’t think of the words of The Red Flag, so he sang The Eton Boating Song instead.

  To his amazement they all joined in. Hardly anybody knew the words, but they la-la-ed lustily. Then they demanded an encore so he had to sing it again. He could see their mouths opening wide and closing, and their bodies swaying in time with the easy, infectious rhythm, everyone upside down. When they released him he was scarlet in the face, and his heart was walloping furiously. They cheered him as he stumbled down the stacked tables. His back was slapped and his hair was ruffled by cheerful strangers as he made his way to the bar.

  “Well done,” the landlord said. “I always liked that tune. Very catchy.” Steele-Stebbing nodded. He discovered that he was grinning. It felt very odd.

  Barton was still sitting on the top of the pyramid. His hands and face were more black than white. He was thinking: It’s simple, really. Not Flash. Not Pip. Not Moggy. Not Fitz, because Mary’s about to produce. “Hey, Mother!” he shouted. Cox climbed up and sat beside him. “How would you like to take over ‘B’ flight?” he asked.

  Cox stared at him. He gestured theatrically, and sang: “I’d walk a million miles for one of those smiles …” Barton grabbed a handful of soot and smeared it over Cox’s face. Together they sang Mammy. The crowd joined in. Kellaway, Skull and the landlord joined in. Even Steele-Stebbing joined in. In a corner, Cattermole was fighting a Canadian Spitfire pilot who had tried to sabotage the pyramid, but nobody paid any attention to that.

  At 6:20 a.m., Group scrambled two sections to patrol Dover-Ramsgate at fifteen thousand feet. Mother Cox led the patrol in Blue Section with Renouf as his number two, plus Pip Patterson and Fitz as Green Section.

  They climbed through a screen of ten-tenths cloud at six thousand and found themselves in a skyscape of Alpine purity. The blue above looked freshly scrubbed, the white below rippled like a snowfield to the horizon. Cox inhaled deeply and swelled his chest, partly from pleasure, partly from pride. Hurricanes had always looked good to him: there was something slightly hunched about the fuselage, the way the engine sloped down to the prop, that gave the plane a poised and searching look. These Hurricanes looked even better to him now that he was leading them.

  The controller sent them up to eighteen thousand, then to twenty-two thousand. Cox calculated when they were above Dover, and turned north. The cloud was now more than two miles below. It looked as flat and smooth as a bedsheet. It covered the Channel and London and reached far into the North Sea. Blue and Green Sections cruised at a couple of hundred miles an hour and made no visible progress at all. The world was vast and lovely and, apart from four Hurricanes, utterly empty.

  After ten minutes, Cox reckoned they were over Ramsgate so he wheeled them around and flew south. It was cold at that height. His legs were getting chilled and stiff, and no matter how he adjusted his scarf, a bitter little draft kept finding his neck. He could see Fitz swinging his arms and beating his fists together while he gripped the stick with his legs. Not for the first time, Cox wondered why nobody had thought to put cockpit heating in the Hurricane.

  Now that Snowball had got them up here, it seemed there was nothing to do.

  They patrolled up and down for half an hour. Snowball kept in touch, but his transmissions became increasingly scratchy and sometimes they faded altogether. Cox worried: maybe he was drifting out of R/T range. Maybe there were strong winds at this height. Maybe he was getting blown out to sea. He called the others: “Stay awake, keep looking, watch your wingman, acknowledge.” They came back to him in turn: Blue Two, Green Leader, Green Two. He was thinking about fuel, converting gallons into time, time into distance. Snowball called and said something blurred about a bandit. Or maybe several bandits. Cox swore. Snowball had sounded urgent, but what the shit was he urgent about? “Snowball, this is Mango Blue Leader,” he said. “Your transmission garbled, say again please.” Snowball came back with a mouthful of broken biscuits.

  “Anybody get any of that?” Cox asked.

  “Sure,” Fitz answered. “He said Slush Flush Hush Slush Mush. And I agree with him.”

  “Keep your eyes skinned,” Cox warned.

  They turned again over Dover, or maybe it was Rotterdam, and steered north. A long way ahead, an aircraft emerged from the cloud and flew south, a tiny blemish traveling over the blanket of white.

  Cox called Snowball and reported a bogey at angels eight. Snowball’s reply died of asthma. Cox gave up on Snowball, and wondered whether or not to go down. If they went down it would be a hell of a slog to get up again. The plane was a softly penciled cross that moved.

  “Green to Blue,” Patterson said. “Bogey has twin engines.”

  Everyone was looking down. Cox stared but he couldn’t see how many engines the damn thing had. He glanced up: left, right, behind. Empty sky. He checked time, speed, fuel; and he thought: Bloody stupid patrol. Dunno where we are, or why, or what that bastard is. He leaned forward and stared. Now he saw the twin engines, pin-heads on the tiny cross.

  “Single fin,” Fitz said. “Could be a Ju-88.”

  “Could be a Blenheim,” Cox said. “We’ll wait a bit.” Wait for what? he asked himself. There’s bugger-all up here. All the same he repeated his automatic scan. As he searched from left to right he saw Blue Two’s Hurricane drop a wing and lift its nose in a clumsy, sprawling, tail-dragging climb that could never succeed. Before Cox could touch his transmission switch the Hurricane had stalled and gone into a slow spin, flip-flopping down like an autumn leaf.

  “Bandits at twelve o’clock!” someone shouted. Cox jerked his head to the front. Sunlight caught a row of prop-discs stuck on razor-thin wings. They magnified with startling speed into four Me-109’s, hurtling toward the Hurricanes at the same height. Before Cox could get his thumb on the gun-button the 109’s broke to their right, changing in a single flick from head-on silhouette to a flaring plan-view. “Tally-ho!” Cox shouted, too late because Fitz and Pip were already giving chase, but the tally-ho was the leader’s privilege and it might never come to him again …

  They caught the 109’s quickly, and lost them even more quickly: almost instantly, in fact. For a couple of seconds Cox labored to drag his sights onto the enemy but the enemy drifted sideways amazingly fast, like a gull caught in a gale, and was lost. By now Cox’s Hurricane was steeply canted. The giant hand of centrifugal force pressed him solidly into his seat, and the horizon unreeled itself endlessly down his windscreen. Arms and legs were braced to force the most from the controls: his stomach muscles hardened, he sucked oxygen and gasped, but no matter how he worked he could feel the Hurricane losing its grip. It was drifting outward, skidding on the too-thin air that the German fighters grasped so easily. Cox
’s eyes kept flickering toward his mirror. He knew what he was going to see but nevertheless his heart kicked painfully when the 109 edged into view. Its shape trembled furiously from the vibrations of the Hurricane, creating a sense of demoniac rage that brought Cox near to panic: he desperately wanted to jink and dodge, to escape this specter. Guns rattled and tracer raced above his starboard wing: a sighting shot. It was hugely tempting to reverse the turn, slam everything over, flip from one wingtip to the other—the worst possible move: reversing the turn took you clean across the enemy’s sights. Cox hunched himself, held his turn, prayed. Bits flew off his right wing, the plane felt as if it were being kicked by an enormous horse, Cox said to himself This can’t last, and it didn’t. His Hurricane took another vicious kick and flung itself onto its back. Cox snatched the column into his stomach in a yearning for height, but since he was inverted he dived instead. The 109 lost him.

  It caught him again, a couple of thousand feet below. Cox pulled the tit and slammed the throttle through the gate but he couldn’t pull away from the Messerschmitt. His feet kept bashing the rudder-pedals, left-right, left-right. Like riding a bike, he thought stupidly; uselessly. Cramp suddenly knotted his right calf and the leg froze with pain. He forced it off the pedal and abandoned it to its agony while the left leg worked double-time. And eternally, it seemed, machine-guns rattled like noisemakers at a football match and tracer streamed around the zigzagging Hurricane. Cox felt bitter about his emergency boost, just when you needed the bloody thing it let you down. As if it heard him think, the Merlin started howling its head off and he remembered guiltily that emergency boost didn’t work above twelve or fourteen thousand. At the same time the controls felt a lot better, much keener, more responsive, so he took a deep breath and got both hands on the stick and pulled hard. The Hurricane bottomed out and bounced like a rubber ball. Just before Cox blacked out he glimpsed the 109, still diving.

  When he could think again, his Hurricane was hanging on its prop, screaming and wondering whether to stall. He punched home the tit, throttled back and persuaded the plane to roll onto its back. Blood rushed to his brain and his vision cleared. What he saw was the bunch of 109’s diving and trailing smoke. He rolled level, searched for Hurricanes, and found two, far below him, circling a third. The third was on fire. It was making more smoke than seemed possible from one small aircraft.