Flames Over Norway

by Robert Jackson

  Armstrong wanted to take a look at the remains of their Wellington, so they called briefly at the Watch Office to obtain permission to drive across the airfield. Since nothing was flying, nor likely to be in the immediate future, there were no objections.

  The Wellington lay close to the airfield perimeter, a grey, broken ghost surrounded by wraiths of swirling fog. They walked around it slowly, Armstrong seeing the damage it had suffered for the first time. The aircraft lay on its belly at the end of a swathe of churned-up earth. Pittaway told his companion, who could not remember, that despite frantic efforts the undercarriage had refused to come down. There were rents in the wings where bullets had torn their way through, and strips of fabric dangled from the fuselage, revealing the criss-cross girders of the main frame. Armstrong marvelled that anyone had got out alive.

  “Come on,” he said. “I really need that drink now.”

  It took them the best part of an hour to crawl through the murk to the Blue Bells, which was deserted. Phyllis was behind the bar. She looked at the newcomers with consternation.

  “Gawd!” she exclaimed. “What happened to you two?”

  “We fell off our bicycles,” Pittaway said laconically. “You must be the lovely Phyllis. This bloke’s been doing nothing but sing your praises.” He motioned in the direction of his embarrassed companion with his free thumb. The barmaid simpered and fluttered her eyelashes at Armstrong, who turned bright red and became suddenly tongue-tied.

  The New Zealander looked around at the empty room and asked where everyone was. “Potato-picking,” Phyllis told him. “Busy time of the year, this is.”

  “Rather them than me,” Pittaway said. The barmaid placed their beers in front of them and looked at him with mild curiosity. “Are you an Australian?” she wanted to know. The pilot drew himself up to his full five feet seven inches and glared at her in mock anger. “Madam, how dare you! I am a New Zealander, I will have you know, the citizen of a land filled with wonder and beauty.”

  “And sheep,” Armstrong murmured, his face in his beer mug.

  “Leave my sex life out of it,” Pittaway said. Phyllis looked aghast. “Now then, gents, that’s no way to talk. We’ll have no smut in here, thanks very much.” She adopted a prim expression and turned her back on them to polish some glasses. In the bar mirror they caught sight of her expression. She was grinning.

  They chatted for half an hour about nothing in particular, exchanging pleasantries with one or two farming folk who wandered in, then Pittaway had a sudden thought. “I reckon we’ll be in for a spot of leave,” he said. “Where’s home?”

  “Berwick-on-Tweed,” Armstrong informed him. Pittaway nodded. “Oh, yeah, right up on the Scottish border. Flown over it a few times when I was doing my training. Isn’t that where the Scots and English used to fight one another all the time?”

  “Something like that,” Armstrong said. “They were a pretty nasty lot by all accounts, too. There’s a story, for instance, about one of the English kings besieging Berwick — Edward the First, I think it was — who put it about that any Scot who let in the English army would be given his weight in gold. Some chap fell for it, and when he’d opened the gate and let the English in they poured molten gold down his neck.”

  “Nice people,” Pittaway said with a raised eyebrow. “You haven’t got a Scots accent, though. How’s that? I’ve come across people of Scottish extraction who’ve lived in New Zealand for generations and they’ve still got an accent you could cut with a knife.”

  “If I’ve got an accent at all, it’s Northumbrian,” Armstrong said. “It all depends where you were brought up. The river Tweed runs right through the middle of Berwick, so on the north side you’re a Scot, on the south a Northumbrian. My family were border rievers,” he added, smiling.

  “Border what?”

  “Rievers. They used to go around doing people in, stealing their livestock and so on. Everybody was at it in the olden days up on the borders. They ran protection rackets that made A1 Capone look like an amateur. The word ‘blackmail’ originated on the borders; it means ‘black rent’, in other words the extortion money people used to have to pay to my ancestors and their chums if they wanted to keep their heads on their shoulders.”

  “I don’t think I want to know you,” Pittaway said, eyeing his companion in mock horror. “Better have another couple of beers, quick, Phyllis.”

  The barmaid was about to serve them when a telephone jangled somewhere. She excused herself and went through a door that led from the bar to a small, private parlour. A couple of minutes later she returned and told Armstrong that there was a telephone call for him. She had no idea who was on the other end of the line.

  “It’s probably your murky past catching up with you,” Pittaway said as Phyllis ushered Armstrong through the counter flap that gave access to the area behind the bar, and the room beyond.

  “No such luck,” Armstrong answered. “More likely it’s the doc, who’s found out where we are and is about to raise hell.”

  But the voice on the telephone didn’t belong to the Station Medical Officer. It belonged to Dickie Baird.

  The naval officer came in 40 minutes later and ordered a large gin. He swallowed it in a single gulp and ordered another. Only then did he address Armstrong and Pittaway.

  “They told me I’d find you here,” he said, eyeing their respective injuries. “A rough ride, was it?”

  “Bloody hell, Dickie!” Armstrong burst out. “Never mind about us. What about you? We thought you were a goner! Come on, what’s the story?”

  “Not much to it, really,” Baird told them modestly. “Our fuel tanks were holed to hell, but they didn’t catch fire, thank God. They just kept on losing fuel until it ran out, somewhere off the Zuider Zee. Luckily, the fighters had long since given up on us; they must have been short of fuel too, I guess.”

  Baird eyed his gin, took a sip, then continued: “Anyway, the skipper pulled off an absolutely first-class ditching and we all got out OK except for the rear gunner, who had a smashed kneecap. The poor devil was in a lot of pain, but we got him into the dinghy and sat there, pretty wet and miserable and expecting to be picked up by the Huns. As it turned out, a Dutch trawler came along after a while and hauled us in. The crew filled us full of brandy, gave us something to eat, and a few hours later they rendezvoused with one of our boats and handed us over. We landed at Lowestoft. And that was that.”

  “Talk about luck!” Pittaway said. “They should have interned you, by rights. After all, the Dutch are neutral.”

  “So they are,” Baird agreed. “They also dislike the Huns, as we discovered. Well, here’s to the Dutch fishing fleet.” He despatched his gin and turned to Phyllis to order his third.

  “Hang on a minute, dear,” the barmaid said. “Something’s up.”

  Her voice was full of concern, and they saw that she was looking at a man who had just entered the room. He was elderly, and Armstrong vaguely remembered that he had been one of the domino players when he had visited the inn previously. The man’s usually weathered face was white, and he tottered to the bar as though intoxicated.

  “For God’s sake, Phyllis, give me a whisky.” His voice was hoarse and tremulous.

  “George, whatever’s the matter?” The barmaid asked. “You look quite done in.” He looked at her with eyes that were filled with tears.

  “They’ve sunk the Courageous,” he whispered. “The buggers have sunk the Courageous. I’ve had a telegram …” His voice tailed away miserably.

  “Oh, God!” Phyllis’s hand flew to her mouth and her eyes widened in horror. “John’s ship?”

  The old man nodded dumbly, choking back sobs. “Aye. My lad’s ship. I got a telegram …”

  “Excuse me, Sir.” Baird gently took the old man’s elbow. “Did you say the Courageous — the aircraft carrier? She’s my ship, too.”

  The old man looked at him for the first time. Baird saw that tears were coursing down his cheeks. “Not any more she’s
not, son. They’ve sunk her. Torpedoed, she was. Heavy loss of life, they said. My lad’s gone. He was all I had. Did you know him, then, son? John Farmer. Able Seaman.” There was a plea in his voice, a longing to establish a contact, however slender, with a past that was lost forever.

  Baird nodded. “Yes, I knew him,” he lied. “A very fine sailor, and a great asset to the ship.”

  “Aye. Aye, I thought you would. Everybody knew John.” He picked up the glass of whisky that Phyllis had set in front of him and drank deeply. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then said: “Listen, son, would you mind coming home with me for a few minutes? Maybe you’d like to see some photographs … I’d like to talk to somebody, just for a little while. My missus is dead, you see …”

  “Of course. I’d be glad to. Shall we go now?”

  They left the room together, Baird making a silent gesture to his companions that said: What else can I do? The others nodded, understanding. Phyllis turned away, crying silently.

  Later, they learned that the carrier had been sunk by a U-boat in the Western Approaches, and that over 500 of her crew had gone down with her. And so the cold hand of war touched this quiet, cosy backwater for the first time, leaving its fingerprints on the ravaged face of an old man who would never see his son again.

  Chapter Nine

  Life was full of little surprises, Armstrong reflected, and a place called Wick in the grip of a January snowstorm must surely be one of the nastiest. Sticking out like a pimple on the north-east tip of Scotland, the place was subject to every kind of unpleasant weather the Arctic winds chose to hurl at it.

  He had reported back to Deanland in December following his stint with Bomber Command, and after a fortnight spent kicking his heels around the airfield with nothing to do — the promised Spitfires having still not materialised — he had been sent off on leave by Wing Commander Royston. So, astride his trusty Norton — which to his relief he had found none the worse for its weeks of enforced idleness — he had ridden north to Berwick to spend Christmas with his parents.

  He had not really enjoyed his leave. His father, anxious to show him off at his local pub; couldn’t understand why Armstrong disliked being bought round after round of drinks while never being allowed to put his hand in his own pocket; nor could he understand why the pilot tended to become irritable when his mother and sister fussed over him. How could Armstrong explain that he was embarrassed not by the attention, but by the fact that his mother was obviously putting on a brave face, and by the knowledge that she was secretly willing every minute of his leave to extend into hours, and every hour into days? How could he explain the difficulty in making small talk with his sister’s boyfriend, a Royal Artillery gunner serving with a nearby coastal battery?

  There was nothing of the snob in Armstrong. It had taken his father to put his feelings into words.

  “The war’s changing you, son. It’s to be expected. We all go through it. You can spend years in the forces and never alter a bit, but action makes a man different. I don’t know what you are up to, but you didn’t get that medal for nothing. Try to relax a bit, and be patient with your mother. She worries about you. And there’s Jean. She’s hardly had a word from you since war broke out.”

  In that, he was right; Armstrong had only written two or three times to his girlfriend since last August, when he had first arrived at Deanland. He felt bad about that now, for Jean deserved better. She was a librarian, a gentle, quiet girl who had been his friend since schooldays. He felt a deep affection for her, but he had never made the mistake of confusing it with love — although he felt sure that she loved him, in her own way. He was sexually attracted to her, but his occasional foray up the sexual path with her had always ended at a brick wall; it bore a big sign that said “This far, but no further.” The end result, for him, had been frustration, and for her an apologetic shyness.

  The trouble was that his feelings for her were now tainted by guilt, for Phyllis had shown him what the real thing could be like. The first time it had happened they had both had too much to drink, but on subsequent occasions it had happened because they had both wanted it to. No, he thought, his leave had not been a truly happy time; and Phyllis was still in Cambridge, while he was stuck in this God-forsaken Scottish outpost.

  The telegram ordering him to Wick had arrived on the second day of January, its content cutting through an exceedingly bad hangover. Wisely, he had decided to leave his motor cycle at his parents’ house, and had taken the train north. The train had been dirty and overcrowded, filled mostly with comatose sailors returning from leave and a few civilians who grumbled constantly because they were unable to get seats. Change at Edinburgh; change again at Dundee, and again at Aberdeen, and yet again at Inverness; what a bloody nightmare of a journey!

  And Wick airfield itself: that was pretty nightmarish, too, a slushy quagmire with half-completed tarmac runways, only one of which was operational, and three canvas hangars. It looked like a construction site, which it was. The Officers’ and NCOs’ Messes were wooden huts, the accommodation areas radiating from a central bar and dining area, like spokes around the hub of a wheel.

  The airfield, thought Armstrong, was not exactly over-populated, even though it had recently assumed the role of a Fighter Command Sector Station. Sector HQ was in a nearby elementary school. Every now and then, Armstrong understood, a flight of Spitfires or Hurricanes turned up to form an air defence detachment, stayed for a few days, then went away again. There were none there at the moment. The “resident” air defence force seemed to be four Blackburn Skua fighters of the Fleet Air Arm’s No 803 Squadron, and a few Avro Ansons of No 269 Squadron carried out patrols around the coastline to Cape Wrath and occasionally went as far as the Faeroes when the weather was flyable, which it had not been for some days.

  Armstrong had been allocated a small office in Station Headquarters. He sat in it now, gazing moodily at the swirling snowflakes through a gap he had rubbed in the frosted window pane and feeling like a lost soul, time and boredom settling on his shoulders like a ton weight. He knew what he had to do, but the weather thwarted him. He wished with all his heart that it would break. The bleakness of Caithness was utterly depressing.

  Damn it, anything was better than this! Making up his mind suddenly, he set down his half-finished mug of coffee — it was cold anyway — on the desk and put on his greatcoat. Taking his cap from a hook, he went out into the corridor, locking the office door behind him. Pausing only to stick his head into the Orderly Room to tell the duty corporal where he was going — not that anyone was likely to want him — he put on his cap, turned up his coat collar and left the building by a side entrance.

  Large, damp snowflakes settled on him as he walked quickly along the track — for it was no more than that — leading to the hangars. As he drew near them, he was challenged by a snowman with a rifle and bayonet: a luckless sentry doing his stint on watch. Satisfied that Armstrong wasn’t a company of German paratroopers, the man let him pass.

  The hangar was well lit. Armstrong shook the snow off himself and nodded to some naval air mechanics who were working on a Skua’s engine. Then his eyes lit upon the object of his visit.

  She stood alone at the far end of the hangar in all her beauty, segregated from the main area by a rope attached to an array of oil drums and a large sign that proclaimed: KEEP CLEAR — NO UNAUTHORISED PERSONS PAST THIS POINT. Her upper surfaces were painted pale blue; her undersides were white. She carried no armament; only two F.24 cameras, mounted in her fuselage and pointing vertically downwards. She had been delivered just before the onset of the bad weather by a member of the Air Transport Auxiliary — who had turned out, much to everyone’s surprise, to be an extremely attractive blonde called Diana. She had dined that evening in the Mess, politely tolerated the attentions of the young Fleet Air Arm pilots who had clustered around her like wasps around a pot of jam, gone to bed, and departed by train the next morning. Armstrong had exchanged a few words with her, and tha
t was all.

  Since then, because of the weather, there had been the opportunity for no more than a few circuits around the aerodrome — enough for Armstrong once again to revel in the feel of a Spitfire under his touch. But this was no ordinary Spitfire. Stripped of the usual eight machine-guns and radio and therefore lighter than the standard Mk I of her breed, she would fly at 35,000 feet with ease. She had a Rolls-Royce Merlin III engine, the best available. The gun ports in the leading edges of the wings were filled by metal plates and every crack in her external surfaces was blocked by plaster of paris. She was polished all over to a hard, sleek gloss, and an extra fuel tank fitted behind the cockpit gave her a range of 800 miles or more. In practical terms, that meant that she could cover the whole area from northern Scotland to the Norwegian Sea and across to Iceland, the happy hunting ground for the German surface raiders and submarines. She was called the Spitfire PR 1B, she was the first of her kind, and she was Armstrong’s.

  Armstrong stepped over the protective ropes and walked around the Spitfire, checking that all was well. He did it every day, even though he was aware that his ground crew did exactly the same thing each morning, running his hands over the smoothness of her wings and fuselage, taking in her heady perfume of paint and oil and petrol and aluminium, the typical smell of a thoroughbred aircraft.

  Her wings were cold to the touch, and a sudden chill passed through him, transmitted not by the metal, but by the foreknowledge of the tasks he would soon have to perform. Flights lasting for hours on end, cramped in the Spitfire’s tiny cockpit, with a single engine, all that stood between him and the merciless winter sea …

  *

  … the sea. Three miles below him it stretched away to a curved horizon, a sheet of blue-grey glass shot here and there with whorls and eddies of green. Far away, to the north, where the sea and sky mingled, there was a reflection of white and pink, where the sun’s rays touched the ice floes that drifted over the barren seas between Norway’s North Cape and Jan Mayen Island.