“Yes.”
“Well, that’s something, I suppose. I mean, he might be wounded for all we know. Head injury. Paralyzed, even.”
“Not paralyzed,” the wing commander said. “Not if he managed to bale out.”
“No, I suppose not,” Dalgleish said grudgingly. “Still, semiparalysed, maybe.”
“I can easily arrange to have him maimed, if you like,” Barton said. “I mean, we have the weapons.” The wing commander’s eyes opened wide.
“He was obviously suffering from shock,” Bletchley declared.
“His controls must have been useless,” Dalgleish said. “Shot to pieces.”
“Not according to his wingman,” Barton said. “He told me it was just engine-failure, he—”
“And what he doesn’t know,” Bletchley said, “is the kite crashed into a row of houses in Ashford and killed four people, including an infant.”
“Oh,” Barton said.
“So it must have been out of control, mustn’t it?” Dalgleish said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Well, that’s certainly a point of view, sir,” Barton said.
“Look: it’s absolutely paramount that the press don’t get wind of this,” Bletchley said. “No loose talk in pubs, no gossip in letters home. Understand, Barton? Tell your chaps to forget it ever happened. And I want to see that pilot as soon as he turns up.”
“Right, sir.”
“And Barton,” Dalgleish said, “I know it’s difficult upstairs, but can’t you do something about your squadron’s language? It all gets relayed over the Tannoy in the ops room, you know, and the Waafs hear you fellows stiffing and blinding like fishwives.”
“If the controllers didn’t mess us about, sir, we wouldn’t have so much to swear at.”
“They have a very difficult job,” Bletchley said.
“Yes, sir. And some of them can’t do it.”
“Be fair, old boy. What about all those kills you’ve got?”
“And what about all the scrambles that lead to nothing?”
Dalgleish sighed. “You expect rather a lot, don’t you? Is there anything else we can do for you?”
“Yes, sir, since you ask: I’d like fuel-injection, a radio that transmits more than forty miles, and a catering officer who knows what peas and beans do to the average fighter pilot’s stomach at twenty thousand feet. A couple of days ago some of my chaps got scrambled after lunch and they nearly blew themselves in half.”
Dalgleish made a note, and looked at the wing commander. “Your turn,” he said.
“I’m in charge of accounts,” the wing commander told Barton.
“Ah! You’ve got our back-pay?”
“Not yet, but don’t worry. The matter is being pursued.”
Bletchley said: “That means they’ve lost the files.”
“Oh no, sir. I can assure you it’s being very actively pursued.”
“That means they’ve lost the files,” Bletchley said, “but they’re looking for them.”
The wing commander gave Bletchley a bleak little smile. “Very droll,” he murmured. “The matter of arrears is, I’m afraid, out of my hands,” he told Barton. “What concerns me at the moment is the size of some of your officers’ mess-bills. To be frank, they’re living far beyond their income.”
He produced a typewritten list. Barton looked at the names and the amounts.
“You see?” the wing commander said. “I’m afraid I shall have to have a word with them.”
“Don’t do that,” Barton said. “Just … leave them alone, please.”
“Yes, but … Something’s got to be done, hasn’t it? They can’t go on like this?”
“They won’t,” Barton said. “I can assure you of that.”
Fanny Barton showered, changed, went to the mess and found CH3 in a corner with Moggy Cattermole.
Cattermole was badly scratched on both cheeks. “Bloody brambles,” he said. “They had to cut me out with scythes. I got rescued by a mob of sweaty peasants with string around their knees. None of them spoke English. I think it was the chorus from Cavalleria Rusticana, although what they’re doing in Kent at this time of year is hard to—”
“Listen,” Barton said. “What happened to you?”
“I just told CH3. Engine quit, so I hopped out.”
“Did you know the kite hit a house?”
“No, really? Pity. I was quite fond of that kite. Complete writeoff, I suppose?”
“Yes. Also three adults and a kid.”
“Ah.” Cattermole signaled a waiter. “Beers,” he said.
CH3 said: “You told me you were down to about a thousand feet when you jumped. You know that area, Moggy. You’ve flown over it a dozen times. You must have realized the kite would hit Ashford.”
“Yes. More or less.”
“You could have banked it away before you jumped, couldn’t you?”
Cattermole sucked in his breath. “Very dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Not much height, not much speed. She’d stall as quick as winking, wouldn’t she? And then where would I be? Baling out at five hundred feet? No, no. That’s not what the instructions say on the side of the packet.”
“But you could see Ashford was up ahead,” Barton said.
“Yes.”
“It didn’t occur to you to sit tight and try to miss the houses.”
“No.”
“Were you feeling okay?” CH3 asked. “Any dizziness or sickness or—”
“This is all very boring,” Cattermole said. “It was perfectly obvious that if I sat in that kite it was bound to crash and I would probably get killed. Anyone with an ounce of gallantry would have stayed at the controls and tried to miss the innocent bystanders. I haven’t got an ounce of gallantry. I don’t intend to kill myself to save three and a half civilians. It’s their war as well as mine, so they can jolly well take some of the risk.”
“That’s pretty bloody callous,” Barton said.
“I’m not so sure,” CH3 said. Their beers arrived. “People talk a lot of bullshit about civilians. Do civilians feel pain any more than you or I do? Of course not. So why give them special status?”
“Women and children last,” Barton said. “That’s charming.”
“Three and a half civilians can’t fly a Hurricane,” CH3 said.
“Get this straight,” Barton said to Cattermole. “We’re going to see Baggy Bletchley now. When you baled out, that kite was uncontrollable, and you were in a state of shock. Okay?”
“No, that’s pathetic,” CH3 said. “What have you got the jitters about? If Baggy can’t take the truth, that’s his tough luck.”
“And mine too. I carry the can, not you. We’ll do as I said.”
They finished their beers. Cattermole signed Barton’s name on the bar-chit. They went to see Baggy Bletchley.
“Bad luck, eh?” Bletchley said. “It seems you were left without any choice.”
“Not at all, sir,” Cattermole said. “I baled out because if I’d stayed in the plane I’d have been killed. I didn’t care a hoot about any civilians.”
“What did I tell you?” Bletchley said to Barton. “The poor fellow’s suffering from shock.” He slapped Cattermole on the back. “Shock does funny things to a man. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d forgotten all about it by tomorrow.”
“All about what, sir?” Cattermole asked.
“That’s the idea,” Bletchley said. “By the way, have you heard today’s score? Jerry lost forty-nine to our sixteen. Good, eh?”
“Told you so,” said CH3 to Barton.
“Oh, go to hell,” Barton snapped. Bletchley smiled benignly.
CH3 was woken by the tap and flicker of rain on his window. It was the most marvelous sound. He got up and looked out: ten-tenths cloud at five hundred feet and visibility so dreadful he couldn’t see the other side of the mess. A thoroughly unblitzy day. Lovely. It was half-past six. He went back to bed and slept until nine.
Nim Renouf was at break
fast. “That’s his third lot of bacon and eggs,” Cox told CH3. “On top of two bowls of porridge.”
“I’ve got to catch up,” Renouf said, buttering toast. “I didn’t get much to eat yesterday. Or the day before.”
“I thought hospitals fed you every other hour,” CH3 said.
“Possibly. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t wake up till last night.”
“You mean you were unconscious all that time?”
“Dunno. Can’t remember. Shove the marmalade over, will you?”
They watched him spoon marmalade onto toast. His face was as pale as skimmed milk and his eyelids were curiously heavy, as if he were shielding his eyes from glare. His fingers gripped the marmalade spoon so tightly that his nails were half-white.
“I’m surprised they sent you back so soon,” CH3 said.
“They didn’t. I did a bunk in the middle of the night.”
“Ah!” Cox exclaimed. “And I bet you couldn’t catch a train, could you?”
“Didn’t try,” Renouf said. “Hitch-hiked.” Already, he was buttering his next piece of toast. “More coffee, please,” he told a waiter.
“Hitch-hiked?” CH3 said. “From Ramsgate? In the middle of the night?”
“Gorgeous blond in an MG picked me up. Very friendly. Drove me all the way here. Nice girl. Couldn’t do enough for me.”
“I’m sure,” Cox said. “Have some more porridge, Nim.”
Cattermole and Macfarlane had joined them. “It can’t be done in an MG,” Macfarlane said. “The gearstick gets in the way.”
“I never found any difficulty,” Cattermole said. “Mind you, she was a Japanese trapeze-artist with a degree in engineering. You look bloody awful.”
Renouf said: “Well, I feel okay.”
“I can’t help that. You look bloody awful. Good morning, sir.” Barton had just sat down. “Don’t you think Nim looks bloody awful?”
“Later,” Barton said. “Somebody give me some coffee.”
“I need some decent grub inside me, that’s all.” Renouf looked at his latest slice of toast, breathed deeply, and tried to pick it up; but his fingers failed to grip, his eyes closed, and he slumped gently against Cox’s shoulder.
They carried him to a sofa, where he slept with his thumb in his mouth until early afternoon.
Later, Barton called everybody into his office.
“It’s pretty certain that Nim went down because of oxygen starvation,” he said. “Either his bottle wasn’t full or his mask went duff or something. He was lucky. In most cases the pilot never comes to again. What d’you remember?”
“Not much,” Renouf said. “It happened very fast. One moment I was fine, a couple of seconds later I began to feel sort of woozy, but the strange thing is I couldn’t seem to take it seriously. I felt quite relaxed and happy.”
“A bit pissed?” the adjutant said. Renouf nodded. “It used to happen to us all the time,” the adjutant told them.
“Nothing mattered,” Renouf said.
“Anything else?” Barton asked. “Did your Mae West work okay?”
“Yes, it held me up. What I really needed, of course, was a dinghy. I tell you, that Channel’s bloody cold, even in August. It was too bloody cold for me. I don’t remember getting fished out. Not a thing.”
“So now you know,” Barton told them. “Try and come down near a boat if you possibly can. There’s a hell of a lot of drink out there. Okay, that’s all. We’re released for the rest of the day.”
It was too late to go up to London. Most of them wandered back to the mess and played cards, waiting for the cinemas to open.
Pip Patterson stood and watched a game of gin rummy. Now that there was definitely no flying he felt hugely relieved, and yet there was nothing he wanted to do with the free time. The rain depressed him. He slowly realized that it would always be like this. It would always be bad weather when he was released, and always good weather when he was trapped at dispersal.
Cattermole won a hand, and pretended to notice Patterson. “Ah, this will interest you, Pip,” he said. “Young Fitz has asked me to be godfather to his imminent child.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Suit yourself.”
“One of these days,” Patterson said, “I think I’ll take Fitz aside and tell him some of the facts of life.”
Cattermole shuffled and dealt. “Apparently it was Mary’s idea,” he said. “Smart girl, Mary.”
Next day the blitzy weather returned, and with it the raids. Hornet squadron got scrambled five times. Brambledown was bombed again; this time they hit the airfield. Bodkin Hazel was strafed by lowflying Me-110’s. By evening, Skull had reports of similar raids on seven other fighter fields. It was clear that the Luftwaffe could not wait to destroy Fighter Command in the air, and so was planning to knock out its bases in southeast England. The BBC gave the day’s score as Luftwaffe thirty-three, RAF ten, and the sun set in a saffron sky.
The next day was fine and dry. So was the next. And the next. There was no rest. The raids got bigger and more frequent, until the pilots were doing little more than flying and fighting and sleeping. Some enjoyed this enormously. Whenever Zabarnowski and Haducek took off, it was with a feeling of eagerness that approached exultation. They relished the fight, pressed home their attacks more savagely than anyone else, often closed to fifty yards in order to make sure of the kill, then sheered away with the debris of the explosion scarring their planes. They quickly became the top-scoring Hornet pilots. Zab and Haddy loathed Germans. They wanted to shoot down German planes all day, every day, preferably in flames. Zab had learned the word flamer from the adjutant and he used it a lot. “Today, another flamer for me,” he would tell Skull happily. “Heinkel bomber. That’s a crew of five, you know? Sizzle, sizzle, crackle, crackle. I sent them all to hell and I gave them a little taste of it on the way.”
“Just the facts, please.” Skull’s face was expressionless. “Were there no parachutes?”
“Oh, one fellow tried to jump but it didn’t open.”
“That is a lie,” Haducek said. “I saw it open but you went down and shot at him and it closed.”
Barton heard that. “Look here, Zab,” he said. “That’s not on, you know, shooting at Jerry parachutists.”
“Was a mistake,” Zabarnowski said. “I aim at a Messerschmitt but I miss and hit a parachute, very sorry.”
“No, I mean it,” Barton said, and stared until Zabarnowski met his gaze. “When a Jerry bales out over England he’s a prisoner-of-war and we don’t shoot him. He’s out of the war, see? Those are the rules.”
“Rules, rules,” Zabarnowski muttered, and said something brisk and spiky in Polish.
“That’s an order,” CH3 told him. “Jerry parachutists are non-combatants, understand? They can’t fight any more, so we leave them alone.” Zabarnowski sniffed, and scowled at his boots.
“Very interesting,” Haducek said. “Now tell me please, what are the German rules? If I bale out, I can fight again, can’t I? So—”
“That’s the theory, I agree,” Barton said, “but Jerry seems to be playing the game so far, and—”
“Game?” Zabarnowski said. “You call this a game?”
The only other pilot with anything like the same insatiable appetite for combat was Flash Gordon. There was no doubt any more that he was, from time to time, mentally unstable. On the ground his moods varied sharply and unpredictably, from a schoolboy petulance to a bland, middleaged amiability that might suddenly turn to acid contempt or—what several pilots found more disturbing—a prolonged and enthusiastic analysis of bulletwounds. Gordon would delight in plotting the longest and most destructive course that a bullet could take. “Let’s say it chops through your shoulder, cracks your collarbone and hacks its merry way down through your right lung … That would bring it to your liver, which is a very prominent item, I mean it could hardly miss that, and who knows, it might take a slice out of your diaphragm in passing. None of that stuff is very resista
nt, of course, it’s all soft and mushy, so the bullet still has plenty of power to use up, which means it could make a very thorough mess of your stomach before it took a whack at your plumbing. The only thing I’m not sure of is, would it get a chance to hit your gall bladder on the way?”
“Shut up, Flash, for Christ’s sake.”
“Probably not. Still, there’s all of your colon just waiting to be ripped apart. Yards and bloody yards of colon, you’ve got. Say, for the sake of argument, it tunnels its busy way through your colon, and then blows a bloody great hole in your bladder, it still might have just enough go left in it to knock out one of your goolies, mightn’t it?”
“Flash, give it a rest or I’ll kill you.”
“Pity about the kidneys. The trouble is, I don’t see how you can hit the kidneys and the stomach unless you start from the armpit. That might be a better idea. Suppose …”
In the air, Gordon saved his eccentricities for the enemy. The solo head-on attack on a large bomber formation was his favorite. A closing speed of well over five hundred miles an hour left no time to aim, but the sight of a Hurricane streaking past his wingtip or hurtling under his cockpit or even slashing diagonally across his nose was enough to test the nerve of the steadiest Luftwaffe pilot, and many a Dornier or Heinkel went lurching and stumbling out of formation as a result of Gordon’s apparently suicidal charges. Fanny Barton let him get on with them. For one thing, nothing anyone said was likely to stop him; and for another, it was a damn sight easier to attack a shaken and twitchy bunch of bombers struggling to regroup.
Gordon seemed to be fearless. One glorious summer’s morning, “B” flight intercepted eight Me-110’s on their way back to France. The German fighters had no wish to do battle, which was natural: the myth of the 110’s invincibility had long since vanished: it was big and fast and could blow you apart if you were foolish enough to sit in front of it, but it had the agility of a grand piano. Any Hurricane easily out-turned it. Escorts of 110’s were beginning to be a joke. When the raid they were escorting got attacked, they usually withdrew and formed a protective circle, guarding each other’s tails until the danger had passed.
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