Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  Mother Cox and the rest of his flight chased this group of eight for thirty miles. Zabarnowski shot one down, Quirk and Renouf scored hits on two, and Gordon got within sniffing distance of three without ever opening fire.

  When they landed, Cox went over to him. “What was the trouble, Flash?” he asked. “Gun stoppages?”

  “No trouble, Mother. I just didn’t fancy any of them today. They weren’t suitable.”

  “Don’t be so bloody silly, Flash. What d’you mean, not suitable?”

  “Well …” Gordon wrinkled his nose. “They weren’t what I was looking for.”

  Cox was accustomed to Gordon’s dottiness, but this was grotesque. They walked in silence to the crewroom. Later, after debriefing, Cox took him aside and asked him what the hell he was up to.

  Gordon pursed his lips and thought. “I think I do it to scare myself.”

  That made no sense. Cox waited, but Gordon linked his hands on the top of his head and blinked drowsily at the hot sunlight.

  “You do it to scare yourself,” Cox said. “Why scare yourself? Aren’t you scared to start with? I am. I’m frightened bloody witless.”

  “Oh, yes. Still, you can’t have too much of a good thing.”

  “Don’t bet on it. The way you’re going, Flash, you’ll scare yourself to death soon.”

  “So what? You die every night.” Gordon rocked on his heels. His eyes were almost closed. A trick of the light showed up a cluster of very faint freckles that crossed his nose. “Ever thought of that, Mother? Each night, you die. You lie down, you slip away, maybe you never come back. It’s not so terrible, is it? I don’t worry about it. I reckon I’ve had so much practice it should come very easily.”

  Without discussing it, Cattermole and Steele-Stebbing had reached a sort of truce. They rarely communicated on the ground. In the air, where they formed Yellow Section, they spoke only when they had something disparaging to say.

  They were crossing the coast on their way back to base when Cattermole’s engine cut out.

  “Boring,” Steele-Stebbing said. “You did that yesterday.”

  “Don’t pick your nose while you’re talking to me.”

  “Whose nose would you like me to pick?”

  “Pay close attention to this advanced method of flying.” Cattermole waggled his wings. “The prop stays still and the plane goes round and round.”

  “Very boring. Can’t you do something thrilling? Crash into an orphanage.”

  The engine coughed and re-started. Cattermole climbed back up. “Something wrong with your undercart,” he said. “I think you’ve got fowl pest.”

  Two minutes later his engine died again. “How dreary,” Steele-Stebbing said. “No imagination.”

  “Shocking smell in here. You been pissing in my tank again?”

  “I’ll go ahead and find you a nice orphanage.”

  Again, the Merlin revived and Cattermole took up station. “Not fowl pest,” he said. “Looks more like pox.”

  They were circling Bodkin Hazel when Steele-Stebbing discovered that Cattermole was right. His undercarriage refused to go down.

  “Nasty,” Cattermole said. “What with all those bunkers and all.” The field had been bombed in their absence: craters pocked the grass.

  “You go first,” Steele-Stebbing said. “Let’s get the big prang out of the way.”

  “Why don’t you get out and walk?”

  “All right, show me. You’re the expert.”

  Cattermole landed. Steele-Stebbing circled, using up fuel, while he tried various remedies suggested by the control tower. Eventually he succeeded, by violent rocking, in getting one wheel down. By now Barton was in the tower. “Bale out,” he ordered. “Climb to five or six thou, point the kite at France and bale out.” Steele-Stebbing spiraled up to six thousand, one wheel dangling, and couldn’t get his cockpit open. It was jammed solid. Even hammering at it with his revolver butt did nothing. The fuel gauge was nudging zero.

  Everyone stopped work to watch him touch down. The single wheel bounced once and raced. The leg stayed firm. Gradually the tail came down, the tail-wheel ran, the other wing lost flying speed and sank. Steele-Stebbing’s rigger closed his eyes just before the wingtip stroked the grass. Then the Hurricane skewed and spun in tight little circles, cracking the wheel-leg, smashing the prop, flinging up a brown-green spray of clods as it skittered along. The fire-truck caught up. Men with axes leaped onto the wing. No smoke, no flame. Everyone went back to work.

  When Steele-Stebbing walked into the crewroom, CH3 said: “Nice work. You okay?”

  “Fine, fine. Piece of cake.” The bridge of his nose was skinned.

  “Grab some tea. Micky’s got a spare kite ready for you.”

  Black Section got scrambled at six. “A” flight got scrambled at six-thirty. The whole squadron went up at eight. It was dusk before Skull finished the last combat summary. “Busy day,” he told Barton and the flight commander. “Seven scrambles, a total of fifty-three sorties. Bing Macfarlane slightly injured with a fragment of cannonshell in the leg, Quirk probably concussed from a forced landing, Brook with a burned left hand and a bruised back. Four machines written-off: Quirk’s in a duckpond, Brook’s shot down in flames, Steele-Stebbing’s you all saw, and of course Macfarlane baled out again.”

  “Oh well,” said Barton. “It could’ve been worse. It could’ve been a bloody sight worse.” He rubbed his eyes and remembered flashes and glimpses of the scrap with the 109’s. “Christ, we were lucky,” he said. “I thought Brook had bought it for certain, I mean with three Jerrys knocking hell out of him all at once … Christ Almighty.”

  “Quirk reckons that duckpond saved him,” Cox said. “He says he set fire to a cornfield and all he could see coming toward him was a socking great barn and all of a sudden there was this lovely duckpond.”

  “Sailors,” CH3 said. “They’ll find water anywhere.”

  “Well,” Barton said to Skull. “That’s us. What about them?”

  “Two definites, two probables.”

  “You’re talking about ‘B’ flight,” Cox said.

  “I’m talking about the whole squadron.”

  “What? Listen, Fitz and Zab alone told me—”

  “Yes, I know what everyone claimed,” Skull said.

  “Look, Skull,” CH3 said, “there were kraut kites going down all over the place. I saw—”

  “The reports have been completed,” Skull said. “You don’t need to tell me all over again, and frankly I’m getting pretty sick of repeating that just because you saw an enemy aircraft go down, that does not justify claiming its destruction.”

  “It does when we’ve hit the buggers,” Cox said.

  “No, with respect, it doesn’t” Skull told him.

  “Two and two,” Barton said. “Seven scrambles, fifty-three sorties, and all you’ll give us is two definite kills? I saw more than that, and half the time I was looking the wrong bloody way!”

  Skull straightened his papers and said nothing.

  “The boys are going to love you,” Barton said. “You’re going to be their sweetheart, you are.”

  “Nobody would be happier than I to raise the score,” Skull said. “All I ask is evidence. Is that unreasonable?”

  “The hell with it,” Barton said. “Do what you like, I don’t give a damn. I feel sorry for the boys, that’s all. They go up and shit themselves seven times a day, and when they finally succeed in blowing a Hun to kingdom come you want to see his death certificate before you … Oh, balls. Let’s get a drink.”

  “Hey,” CH3 said. “I just thought of something. Cine-guns.”

  “No!” Barton snapped. “If he won’t take a pilot’s word of honor then the whole thing’s a farce and I wash my hands of it.”

  “Steady on, Fanny,” Cox said. “Maybe cine-guns aren’t such a bad idea. I mean, suppose you get some film of a Jerry baling out of a 109, that’s pretty definite, isn’t it?”

  “Might be,” Barton said grudgi
ngly.

  “Let’s face it, he’s never going to climb back inside, is he?”

  “All right, if you want cine-guns, let’s all have cine-guns.” Barton glowered at Skull. “Let’s all have Mickey Mouse and icecream at the intervals too, while we’re at it. Do what you like.”

  Skull went out.

  “Trust you to make life more difficult,” Barton said bitterly to CH3. “As if I haven’t got enough trouble with that bloke without you complicating matters.”

  “It was your decision. Don’t blame me for that. If you thought it was such a bum idea you shouldn’t have okayed it.”

  “Cine-gun can’t do any harm,” Cox said.

  “It’s a matter of principle. How can I lead this squadron if nobody trusts anybody?”

  “Come off it, Fanny,” CH3 said. “Do you believe everyone’s claims? I certainly don’t.”

  “Whose bloody side are you on?”

  “We’ve got twenty minutes before that pub shuts,” Cox said. That ended the argument.

  Daybreak in mid-August was about an hour later than it had been in June. This meant that Hornet squadron could sleep until four or four-thirty before flying down to Bodkin Hazel.

  The next couple of hours were the worst. Everyone felt weary and hung-over. They dozed in armchairs and woke, stiff and sweaty, when someone slammed a door, or when the fitters fired up a Hurricane. Tempers were brittle. Everyone looked forward to breakfast, but when it came some of them ate little. They had developed a painful sensitivity to certain sounds: the telephone and the Tannoy. Each made a preliminary, introductory noise. The telephone produced a little click before it rang; the Tannoy uttered a gentle buzz. Those feeble noises could make men like Fitz and Cox and Cattermole, and even CH3 and Barton, start as if stung.

  It was still before breakfast when Barton came into the crewroom with Micky Marriott. “Okay, pay attention,” Barton said. He pounded a table. Everyone groaned and stirred. “Micky’s got something to show you.”

  It was a length of metal channel, much dented. “This came off Iron Filings’ kite,” he said. “It’s the cockpit runner. You can see here why it didn’t run: it’s been hit by something, probably a bullet.”

  “That could happen to anyone,” Barton said. “Now, I’m not laying down any hard-and-fast rules. It’s up to you whether you fly with your cockpit open or shut, just as long as you know you’ve got a choice.”

  “Open for me, thank you very much,” Steele-Stebbing said.

  “Damn drafty at twenty thou,” Fitzgerald muttered.

  “If you’re going to have it open,” CH3 said, “for Christ’s sake lock it open. Otherwise you’ll make a belly-landing and the sodding thing’ll shoot forward and then you’ll be trapped.”

  “I thought we were supposed to be getting a quick-release mechanism,” Macfarlane said.

  “They’ve made one,” Marriott said. “Trouble is, it’s not all that quick.”

  “Yes, but,” Flash Gordon said. “On the other hand it’s not very reliable, either, is it? So in the long run that balances things out.”

  Haducek said: “You talk out of your ass, Flash.”

  “Not at all. I mean, if the silly thing isn’t going to work properly, you don’t want it to go wrong quickly, do you?”

  “God strike me pink,” Haducek muttered.

  “Dash it all, that’s blindingly obvious,” Gordon said. “I must say, Haddy, sometimes I wonder about you.”

  “One other thing,” Barton said. “It’s going to be bloody hot again out there today, and I know some of you prefer to fly in shoes instead of boots and no gloves and so on. Again, it’s up to you, but take a look at Brooky’s hand.” Sergeant Brook held it up. Two fingers were bandaged. “If he hadn’t been wearing gloves,” Barton said, “you can guess what that hand would look like.”

  “Goggles are even more important,” CH3 said. “The more you can cover up, the less there is to get burned.”

  “No, that’s crazy,” Zabarnowski said. “Wear goggles, you can’t see so well, wear gloves and boots you sweat like a pig, no wonder you get jumped. Is crazy.”

  “Zabby believes in comfort,” Haducek said.

  “Clean silk stockings every day?” Cox said.

  “Sure, why not?” Haducek said. “The trouble with you British, you think you got to be uncomfortable or else you’re not doing your proper job.”

  “You guys don’t know how to enjoy war,” Zabarnowski said. “Polish peoples know. Polish peoples got lots of practice.”

  “I hope you followed all that,” Cattermole said. “What it boils down to is you have a choice between being frozen, stifled, or Polish.”

  Each flight got scrambled once before midday. Neither met the enemy. CH3’s flight found nothing; Cox’s flight got close enough to see con-trails reaching out to France but no closer.

  They were sitting down to lunch when the Tannoy made its gentle buzz and Fitzgerald knocked over a glass of water. The scramble sounded and twenty minutes later the squadron was three miles above Tunbridge Wells, searching for a batch of Junkers 88’s that were said to have made a mess of Biggin Hill. CH3 saw them, miles away to the west, dots drifting across the hazy forests and fields of Sussex. They caught them just short of the coast and made repeated attacks. The bombers dipped to sea-level, actually flying through the spray thrown up by the fighters’ fire. It was very difficult to attack: accurate shooting by the German gunners, turbulent air, the sea just a few feet below. The only man to score was Sergeant Brook, bandaged fingers and all. He got close enough to concentrate his fire on a starboard engine. It bled oil, and Brook danced in to have another go, right into the upper gunner’s sights. The Hurricane bucked and reared and dived tail-first into the sea. Barton kept up the chase for another five miles and then quit.

  Nobody mentioned Brook when they sat down to eat their delayed lunch. Only Cattermole and Haducek had seen him go in; the others had been dodging and twisting and climbing and looking the other way. But most of them had seen the splash, and everyone had seen the gap in White Section on the way home. There wasn’t much to say. He’d been a quiet sort of bloke, not a bad pilot. Too bad the 88 didn’t go down with him. Tough old kite, the 88.

  Barton sat down and banged his spoon for attention. “I’ve just been on the phone to Brambledown,” he said. “One of the Spitfire boys went missing last week. They’ve just fished him out of the drink. He was wearing his parachute and he was full of Germancalibre bullets.”

  “Quite legitimate,” Haducek remarked. “You said—”

  “I don’t care what I said. From now on, any German you see, inside or outside his plane, you kill him. Understand?”

  Nobody had anything to add. Barton got up and went out. He found CH3 sitting in the apple-tree, and climbed to a branch above him. “Just been on the phone to Brambledown,” he said.

  “I know. Mother told me about it.”

  “Oh. And what d’you think?”

  “Nothing. I’m surprised it took you so long, that’s all. There’s no nice way to do this job, Fanny. It’s a waste of time looking.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. The thrumming of bees was like an endless drumroll.

  Barton snapped off twigs and shredded them. “I’m glad you’ve got it all worked out,” he said.

  “Don’t take it so seriously,” CH3 murmured. “It’s not something to get worked up about.”

  3:45: squadron scramble. No problem finding the raid: a hundred aircraft were scattered between Dover and Deal. Heinkels and Dorniers had bombed the advance airfields at Lympne, Hawkinge and Manston. Now there was a running fight, with 109’s and 110’s trying to shield the bombers from such fighters as had managed to get off the ground before the bombs started falling. There were plenty of targets: the sky was flecked with them. Bing Macfarlane shot one down within thirty seconds. It was remarkably easy. He picked out a straggling Heinkel and fired a burst at it. His wingman shouted a warning so he broke right, and found that CH3’s advice worked: a 109 sailed
past his left wing, skidding hard. Macfarlane broke left and there he was, most beautifully placed on the 109’s tail. It was perfect, magical, inevitable, the finest thing he had done since a wonderful afternoon on the rugby field when he wrongfooted the whole defense and scored. Now he gave CH3 another chance: he eased a couple of degrees to the right before he fired. Flames wobbled at the edges of his vision: the Hurricane shook; cordite fumes drifted up and made his nose twitch. As he released the button the German pilot broke left. Macfarlane had anticipated him by a fraction of a second. He saw white coolant bubbling out of the 109’s exhaust. He saw the man’s head twisted—where else?—to the left. He saw the whole aircraft flare and swell until it filled his gunsight, and then his bullets touched off a charge and the enemy became a ball of orange flame with a couple of wingtips sticking out of it. Macfarlane felt wonderful.

  His groundcrew heard the soft music of his open gun-ports as he drifted in to land, saw the smokestreaks behind his guns, and ran over to get the news. They too were delighted, and their pride added to his pleasure. Nim Renouf came and congratulated him. It was a golden afternoon. They stood and watched the troops refueling and re-arming the Hurricanes. Four planes were missing: Zabarnowski, Quirk, Cox and Gordon. “I think I saw Mother bale out,” Renouf said. Macfarlane nodded. There was nothing to worry about. He stretched, luxuriously, and filled his lungs with glorious air, laced with the stink of high-octane fuel. “Hell of a scrap, wasn’t it?” he said. “That’ll teach the buggers.” He was looking at the field beyond the hangars, a gentle swell of soft yellow stubble. Stooks of wheat stood in neat, strong ranks. England at her best, he thought. As the song says: this is worth fighting for … Half the stooks collapsed, starting from the right and spreading rapidly, as if a giant hand had brushed the field. He pointed, too surprised to speak. A violent boom walloped the air. “That’s a bomb,” Renouf said. Above the hangar roof the top of a brown fountain appeared. Macfarlane’s mind was still working out the mystery of the flattened stooks, but Renouf was off and running, the klaxon was blaring, signal flares were popping, Merlins were crackling into life. As he dropped into his seat and his groundcrew fixed his straps, Macfarlane looked up. Twenty-plus bombers were doing a fly-past at two thousand. A thin dribble of black was falling from some of them. The bomb-bursts were already marching across the field by the time he came unstuck.