Damned Good Show

by Derek Robinson

  “It means scruffy, dirty, squalid. That’s what Piggott is. You’re known as Manky Piggott from end to end of this camp, aren’t you?” Piggott couldn’t find a helpful answer, so he stayed silent. Duff massaged his brow. Airmen must not hit policemen. Corporal Black was all mouth and no brain. Piggott was a good mechanic, and Coney Garth was short of mechanics. Policemen were two a penny. What mattered most? Operational efficiency. He looked up.

  “Many things have gone wrong this morning, Piggott. Things your manky brain never even considers. For instance, I’ve got three Wimpys unserviceable. Last night, they could fly. Today: no damn good. I’ve just heard that Group wants volunteers for some new cloak-and-dagger squadron. Bang goes my best crew, I expect. All our bombsights have got to be re-calibrated, yet again. There’s food poisoning in the Sergeants’ Mess, for God’s sake. Those bloody silly moles are back, digging holes in the flare-path. There’s a funeral for Pilot Officer Diamond and the rest of S-Sugar to be arranged. And you’re in trouble once more. Not a happy list, is it?”

  “No, sir.” Piggott sounded genuinely worried.

  “Then consider yourself extremely fortunate. Loss of pay and confined to camp for twenty-eight days. Next time: the glasshouse.”

  Piggott saluted and marched out, well satisfied.

  “Bloody idiots.” Duff threw the papers into his out-tray. “That includes you, Silko. You’re still running your petrol swindle, aren’t you?”

  “Not a swindle, Pug. Bloody good value.”

  “Bloody quick cremation. One day some sprog PO will fill his Austin Seven with hundred-octane juice and go out in a blaze of glory.”

  “I had the Frazer-Nash converted. She loves aviation gas.”

  “I don’t care. Look: do me a favor and remember that the Waafs’ letters are censored. All women lie, I know, but… What do they see in you? You’re bloody scruffy, Silko.”

  “Scruffy, but not manky.”

  “Can’t you leave the poor girls alone?”

  “That’s rich, coming from you. Don’t forget I knew you in Elementary Flying Training. You humped anything that would lie still for five minutes.”

  “Ancient history. Beat it, I’ve got work to do.”

  “Three minutes, sometimes. Is it true you’ve got the lead in this MGM epic?”

  “What epic? It hasn’t been officially announced yet.” Duff couldn’t disguise the satisfaction in his voice.

  “Everyone knows,” Silk said. “Security here is a disgrace.”

  In the afternoon, Rollo and Kate separated. Rollo tried to talk to the mechanics, with no success. If he looked in a hangar, a flight sergeant with a spanner ordered him away. He wasn’t allowed anywhere near a bomber on the perimeter. “There’s a flap on,” a fitter told him. “Don’t hang about. A prop might chop your head off.”

  Kate went elsewhere and sought out unemployed aircrew who might like to go for a walk and discuss ops. After a couple of hours she returned to married quarters. Rollo was in an armchair, rubbing his scar with the eraser end of a pencil, and scowling at a foolscap pad. “Any luck?” he said.

  “Yes and no. I met three lonely lads. One poor boy just lost his mum. Died of injuries she got in the Blitz. I held his hand. The other two said flying is boring and did I feel like a quick roll in the hay? Not in so many words, of course.”

  “Bastards. I hope you told them you’re happily married.”

  “My poor feet.” She sat on the floor and rested against his legs. “You’re so innocent, Rollo. They want their mothers. Haven’t you ever read Freud?”

  He waved Freud away. “I don’t want to know about it. Go and see the MO, he’ll give you some special double-strength vulcanized condoms made out of Russian tractor tires. I’ve got a script.”

  She took the pad and read. “Bombs,” she said. “More bombs.” She turned a page. “Oh, look: another bomb.”

  “Use your imagination, Kate. 409 is all about bombing, okay, so we tell the story from the bomb’s point of view. It arrives at the base, overhears scraps of conversation, all about the next op. The big day comes, it’s towed out to a Wimpy, someone chalks a message on it, ‘To Hitler from 409’ or something, and we take off. Finally: climax! Picture this: a black screen slowly opening, dividing in half. We’re in the bomb bay. Looking past our bomb, at Germany, miles below. It falls.” He whistled down the scale. “Bombs gone! We watch, and watch, until bang! Target erupts. Doors close. End of film.”

  “End of career, more likely.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It stinks. Nobody loves a bomb, Rollo. Nothing interesting happens in a bomb dump. This tells me zero about 409. Where are the people? Twelve hundred people here, and you show me a bomb.”

  “You’re a cruel, cruel woman.” He tore up the script. “AH right. You want people, I’ll give you people. That sergeant Waaf, Felicity Somebody, she’s got to be in this film. I see her in the Operations Room, sitting by the phone, waiting for the last Wellington to return. Courage personified.”

  “She’s not Ops. She’s Admin,” Kate said.

  “She’s stunning. And nobody will know the difference.”

  4

  Rollo met the Wingco in his office. “Problem,” he said. “This film isn’t about things or places, it’s about people. But every time we try to talk to your people, they clam up.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Frankly, I could get more information out of a bomb.”

  “Well, that won’t do.”

  “We need them to tell us what it’s like to do their job. I mean, really like. All the details, good and bad. So we’ll have something to build a framework with.”

  “Aircrew are a modest lot, Mr. Blazer. It’s not done to brag in the RAF. Makes chaps uncomfortable. Still, leave it to me. I’ll sort something out.”

  Duff sent for his two flight commanders and explained the need for complete cooperation with the film crew. “This movie is to be absolutely honest,” he said. “Nothing phony. They want to know exactly what it’s like to be on a bomber squadron. As it’s a film, I suppose they want action. A few gory details wouldn’t do any harm.”

  “They’ll wet their knickers if they hear the truth,” said Squadron Leader Pratten. He was Australian: chunky, balding, with a deeply corrugated forehead.

  Duff said, “Well, I wet my knickers often enough when we were bombing those invasion barges last summer.”

  The other squadron leader was a tall Cornishman called Hazard, a permanently serious man who only removed his pipe in order to eat or sleep. “It’s not easy to get the boys to talk,” he said. “You know how they feel about shooting a line.”

  “Nobody else will be present. All I want is the truth, and bags of it.”

  “Even if it hurts?” Pratten said.

  “The truth always hurts.”

  Next morning, the Wingco told Rollo that a few aircrew had agreed to discuss some of their memorable experiences. Rollo was delighted. “AH in total confidence,” Duff said. Rollo put his hand on his heart.

  They used a quiet office, empty except for a few chairs. “Coffee and biscuits have been organized,” Duff said; and left.

  The first man was a flight-lieutenant pilot, nothing special to look at, medium build, forgettable face. He said, “I’m told you’re interested in the sort of stuff one never hears on the BBC or reads in the papers. Well, I saw this happen. Over Munster. Heavy flak, very concentrated, you could smell it. The searchlights found a Wimpy, not from 409, and they coned it.” His hands made a cone shape, fingertips touching. “So all the flak batteries plastered it and soon it was on fire.” The more he spoke, the softer his voice. “I was counting the parachutes. Bins always wants to know. Somebody came out of the top, probably the nav, maybe the wireless op. Anyway, he smashed straight into the tail. The Wimpy has a very high tail-fin, you’ve seen it, I expect. Tall and sharp. Then the pilot got out. Exit in the cockpit roof. Not easy, with all that clobber we wear, but he got out. Now he’s in the sl
ipstream, a hundred and fifty miles an hour and it blows him against the radio mast. The poor bastard is hooked around the mast. And the speed’s going up because his Wimpy’s going down. If he gets off the mast, the tail’s waiting.” The flight lieutenant stood up. “And all as bright as day” He nodded goodbye and went.

  “He didn’t finish,” Rollo said.

  “He told us all he knew,” Kate said.

  Next was a wireless op, not yet nineteen, with two scraps of toilet paper on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving, not having practiced much. He had a lopsided grin to match his bent teeth.

  “Over the target, see,” he said. “Can’t remember where, they all look the bloody same to me. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Nobody can see the ground, too much haze. Must have been the Ruhr. Skipper says, drop a flare, so I plopped one down the flare-chute and the bloody thing gets stuck! And ignites! That’s half a million candle-power! I’m blinded, I’m choking on smoke, Jerry can’t believe his luck, he’s chucking flak at us with both hands, and the crew’s screaming at me to do something.” He found the memory very funny.

  “You’re here, so you must have done something,” Rollo said.

  “Yeah. I put my leg in the chute and stamped down hard. That shifted the bugger. Nearly chopped off the family jewels, too. Long chute, short legs, goodbye goolies!”

  “But you got back all right,” Kate said.

  “Some of us did. The rear gunner bought it. Lump of shell cut his head off.”

  He was followed by a sergeant pilot with the ribbon of a DFM. “Short and sweet. We were doing an NFT. Night-Flying Test,” he said before they could ask. “The port prop fell off. Whole airscrew just flew away, still spinning. Quite pretty. The manufacturers tell you a Wellington can fly with one dead engine but unfortunately nobody had told that airplane and she flew like a brick. Thank God the rear gunner saw an airfield, about the size of a cricket pitch. A small cricket pitch. I managed to put her down first time, just as well, because there wasn’t going to be a second. Hit a Tiger Moth, flattened it. Wiped out the undercarriage on a wall. Carried on at speed across a plowed field. Starboard wingtip just missed a farmer on a tractor. Matter of inches. Finally stopped. We all jumped out quick, and when I looked back he was still plowing!” He shook his head. “I dream about that farmer sometimes. Silly sod.”

  He was replaced by a rear gunner with an untidy scar which wandered from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. The rest of his face was handsome.

  “I’d better explain about the doors.” He had a soft Irish accent. “When you get into the rear turret, you shut the doors behind you. They’re like those bat-wing doors you see in westerns, only they’re steel and they fill the space altogether. It’s to stop any cannon shells flying up the fuselage, if a night fighter catches us. Anyway, we’d bombed Kiel, we were always bombing Kiel in them days, and on our way home, crossing Holland, the flak got us and knocked the bejesus out of us and damaged the doors so they wouldn’t open. Now I’m trapped. My parachute’s in a container on the other side of the doors, there’s no room for it in the turret. Intercom’s dead. For all I know the rest of the crew are dead too, and George is flying the kite. The autopilot?” They nodded; they’d heard of George. “Nobody was dead,” he said. “The wireless op got the fire ax and chopped the door down. Took him an hour. Now we’re over England. The Wimpy’s shaking like a wet dog. The pilot says bale out, so we jump. Never jumped before. It’s as black as sin. Rough landing, but it didn’t kill me, unlike some. Then I’m captured by a Home Guard who wants to shoot me for being a Jerry, or a member of the IRA, he doesn’t care which. I got taken to a railway station, put on a train to London, crossed London by Tube, took two trains to get here, and everywhere—everywhere—the RTOs, that’s Rail Transport Officers, wanted to see my travel warrant. One long argument. No warrant, no travel, they said. And when I got here the Equipment Officer said I’d have to pay for losing my parachute.”

  They waited. “And did you?” Rollo asked.

  “I told him I’d kill him first, and he seemed to lose interest.”

  Men came and went for the rest of the morning. A pilot described a near head-on collision with a Ju 88 over the North Sea: a quarter of a million cubic miles of air to play with, and two machines chose the same spot. “Just think,” he said. “If we’d hit, nobody would ever have known. Except us, of course.” A navigator spoke of what he called “the unspeakable”: ditching in the sea. There was a ditching drill but pilots never discussed it; obviously they couldn’t practice it, and it would never happen to them. Same with the dinghy drill. Crews weren’t interested. The RAF had an air-sea rescue system but first of all they had to find you. While they were looking, you were sitting in your little rubber dinghy, and if the kite had been shot-up, chances were the dinghy had holes in it. If you weren’t found soon, you wouldn’t last long. “Soaked to the skin, freezing cold, scared stiff,” he said. “The North Sea just sucks the life out of you.”

  “You’ve done it,” Rollo said: “You know.”

  He nodded. “No fuel, both engines quit together. Stroke of luck: the moon came out, so the pilot could see the waves. You’ve got to ditch toward the waves, tail-down, or you sink like a stone. We got into the dinghy okay. Fifty miles off-shore, I reckoned. The predicted winds were all to cock, as usual. We were only five miles from England. By dawn we were on the beach, got blown there. Minefields everywhere, but we didn’t know, we walked past them. God looks after idiots and aircrew. Well, sometimes.”

  A wireless op had a story about Pranging Irons. These were bits of scrap metal that crews dropped on Germany. He personally dismantled an old motorbike and dropped it, piece by piece. Also two bricks and a rusty chamber-pot. “A jerry for the Jerries,” he explained.

  “D’you think they got the point?” Kate asked.

  “Hope so. It had ‘Made in England’ on it.”

  When he left, Rollo said, “Maybe we can use that. Nice bit of light relief.”

  “It’s pathetic. He’s like a schoolboy blowing a raspberry.”

  “Well, most of them were schoolboys not so long ago.”

  “He’s dropped the jerry. It’s gone. What are you going to do? Buy another?”

  “I might.”

  “Yeah? What happened to truth? Not changing anything?”

  “This is the truth. We’d just be underlining it.”

  A pilot came in and talked about low flying: strictly forbidden and everyone did it, often on NFTs. If he came back from Germany and got diverted to another field because of fog, he always returned to Coney Garth next day at treetop level. Hedgetop level. He had a wireless op who’d got chopped from the pilots course. Mouthy. Cocky. Pain in the ass. “I put him in the front gunner’s position, in the nose.” The pilot said. “Then I flew really low. Flew below the trees. Flew into a damned great quarry. He saw the rock face coming straight at him. Then—throttles open, stick back, up and away. I’m told his underpants were not a pretty sight.”

  Rollo thanked him, and saw him to the door.

  “You could use that,” Kate suggested. “Very dramatic”

  “He’s totally mad,” Rollo said. “What’s your excuse?”

  There were more experiences: the sergeant pilot who ate a dodgy pre-op meal of savory mince and had the squits all the way to Hanover and back, along with his crew; the rear gunner who fired off all his ammunition at a twisting, dodging night fighter until he realized it was the Wimpy’s moon-shadow on cloud; the wireless op who had been posted to 409 from a squadron where two bombers had been shot down by RAF night fighters; and others. The last man to appear was Flight Lieutenant Silk.

  They were impressed by the age of his uniform and his genial attitude. “I bet you know Hedy Lemarr,” he said.

  “Never had the pleasure,” Rollo said.

  “Damn. I bet someone five bob you did.”

  “I suppose I could lie.”

  “Tell you what. You lie for me and I’ll lie for you. I’ll tell you abo
ut a pilot called Sam Blackett who reckoned that it was safest to fly where the flak was thickest.”

  “Was he right?” Freddy asked.

  “Apparently not. Damn! That was supposed to be a lie.” Silk hooked a spare chair with a foot, dragged it nearer, and rested his feet on it. “I’ve got Cary Grant’s autograph, you know.”

  “This has been a strange morning,” Rollo said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Oh, believe it all. I’m sure it’s true. Why should these chaps invent anything?” Silk was serious. “The facts are horrible enough.”

  “But we can’t use them. My notes are a catalog of disaster. This can’t be the story of Bomber Command, can it?”

  “It’s just Pug Duff’s little joke. I trained with Pug, we got our wings together, he’s a bit tight-assed since they gave him a squadron but he means well. He doesn’t want you to turn 409 into a bunch of farts with handlebar mustaches. Types who say ‘Wizard prang’ and give a chivalrous salute to the dying Hun as his Messerschmitt goes down in flames. Pug can’t stand horseshit. Bullshit is different, there’s always bullshit in the RAF, but horseshit is waste, it’s killing crews for nothing. We pick up these dreadful terms from visiting Yanks.”

  “Yanks?” Kate asked.

  “American air force officers. They attend briefings from time to time, in civvies of course. Awfully decent types. Never chew tobacco. We’ve got a Jamaican gunner in ‘B’ Flight and so far the Yanks haven’t tried to lynch him at all. Awfully decent.”

  “Look, Mr. Silk,” Rollo said, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, and I don’t see how I can make a film about 409. It’s too big, too complicated, too technical. Have you any advice?”

  “Get in a kite,” Silk said. “Go on an op.” He shook hands with them and strolled out.

  “Why are you looking like that?” Kate said. “It’s the obvious thing to do. It’s been obvious to me ever since we got here.”

  “Hey, just wait a damn minute. Blake Gunnery never said anything about going on an op. Harry Frobisher never told me—”