Click, ‘No: he’s dead.’
‘Say again . . .’
‘Dead. He just died on us. Pegged out. Can anyone else do his work?’
After a silence that stretched a bit Tim clicked, ‘Can you come forward a min, Charlie?’
It was a beautiful night. We flew up a fjord. I could see farms, acres of trees, and beyond them the high ground and a ridge of mountains clad in gleaming snow. Perce would have liked to have seen that. Except in Lincoln bombers at night he wasn’t particularly well travelled. Too late for that now. The cabin heating was working for once, and Tim was flying in his shirtsleeves. He said, ‘Silly question, I know, but are you sure, Charlie? Perce is dead? We can’t do anything for him? You’ve seen dead people before?’
I decided to change the sequence. ‘I’m sure. He’s gone: I don’t know why. I’ve seen some dead people before, yes, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.’
Tim tried the navigator, Henry Morgan. I always thought that Henry was a neat name for a navigator, even if I didn’t like the bastard. Don’t worry; you’ll get it eventually.
‘Nav, can you operate Perce’s station?’
‘Negative, Skipper. I can manage with the radio, but not the radar station.’
‘Don’t look at me, Skip,’ I told our driver. ‘The RAF didn’t think I needed to know.’
The bomb aimer, Lambert, had been following this. He said, ‘It doesn’t help, but you can count me out as well. That radar-mapping kit is under development . . . it means bugger-all to me, sir.’
The engineer, up in the office with us, shook his head. That left the two gunners and Tim didn’t even bother to ask them. Henry broke back in: ‘What’s going on?’
‘You heard,’ I told him. ‘Perce is a goner, and we’re fucked. Give the Boss a heading for home.’ I shouldn’t have taken Tim’s decision for him, but someone had to. ‘OK, Skip?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine now, Charlie. You can go back to your radios.’ It wasn’t what I meant, but who fucking cared? The truth is that Tim wasn’t cut out for this kind of flying, and everybody in the bloody crate knew it.
It was a long haul back. It always is when you have dead or injured on board: the ninety-minute-hour phenomenon. Somewhere over the North Sea I tuned into a radio station broadcasting jazz music from Holland. After the first slow number Nutty Neil came on and said, ‘That’s Louis Armstrong playing “Skid-dat-de-dat”.’
Turnaway Tim didn’t reprimand us, although I expected him to. Henry surprised me. He said, ‘No; it’s “Blues for Percy”.’ He was only making it up, but how come everyone except me knew so much about jazz all of a sudden? Behind us the eastern sky was lightening already, but we were flying at a narrow front, heavy with rain.
I couldn’t argue about Tim’s flying skills. He put us down on the long runway at Dyce so smoothly that I wasn’t aware of the actual moment of touchdown. That’s a rare skill. The runway was very wet. We bowled along it in a dirty great ball of spray to be met by a civvy police car and the Aberdeen police surgeon. Both were sopping wet. He came on board to verify that Perce was dead, and examined him in his seat. I stood over them and watched. The surgeon said, ‘Yes, he’s gone. You knew that, of course.’
‘Yes. What was it?’
‘I don’t know. Your own surgeon will find that out, I expect. What exactly happened?’
‘Nothing. I made a joke, and he laughed. Then he bumped against my shoulder, and when I turned round he was dead.’
‘I’ve always wanted to put that on a death certificate.’
‘What?’
‘Died laughing.’
I had thought that he’d looked ex-services the moment I saw him: now I was sure. But I wasn’t sure whether that was funny or not.
What I did know was that he’d scrounged a load of thermoses from somewhere, and had brought tomato soup and coffee onto the aircraft for us. A couple of service policemen with ineffectual rain capes stayed at the aircraft: one at the fuselage door, and one by the escape hatch under the nose. They made sure that we weren’t going anywhere. We were topped up from a National fuel bowser marked up for a local Scottish airline, and an hour later we climbed back up through the rain for the long drag south. It was a sombre homecoming. Perce was lying on the floor at the back, wrapped in a tarpaulin bag. The Aberdeen doctor had given me a sealed envelope for the Station Commander at Waddington; it flew tucked into the top of my flying suit.
Nobody talked much. Even Henry’s voice, giving the Skipper his navigation coordinates, was an intrusion. I found myself turning a couple of times and looking at Perce’s empty seat. All the lights on his equipment were still showing. Occasionally they blinked, as if looking for some direction. I didn’t even know the sequence to power it down. Tim flew three low circuits around Waddington when we got there. It was almost as if he didn’t know what to do next.
I clicked, and told him, ‘Put her down, Skip. It’s time Percy went home.’
‘OK, Charlie, as you wish.’
It was still raining, but not as heavily. The wheels squealed as we touched down. We were met by three ambulances: one for Perce, and two for the rest of us – the station doctor had insisted. Henry touched my elbow as we waited to climb into one. He said, ‘Thank you, Charlie.’ It didn’t change the way I thought about him, but it helped.
I nodded because I didn’t feel like saying anything.
Waddington stayed locked down for the duration of my visit, which turned out to be longer than planned. Just before I climbed into the ambulance I had seen Joe Humm and his navigator preparing to board the silver Hudson they had brought me there in. They were fifty feet away, but I waved, and he waved back. He must have recognized me, and someone must have already informed him that I was going nowhere. He was ferrying the empty aircraft back to Little Riss. I watched his take-off before I climbed into the ambulance. The small silver aircraft disappeared into the rain, and I suddenly felt lonely and abandoned.
They kept us locked up in the isolation unit at Waddington for three days. It was like a greenhouse with a wooden roof and a wide veranda, and was located as far from the other station buildings as it was possible to get. The hefty nurse who stayed with us told us that it was their old TB ward. We had separate rooms, and time on our hands. I played chess with Henry, and got to like him better. You always like men you can consistently beat at something or other.
The place had a good library, and I found some poetry by an American called Whitman. I didn’t understand a line of it, but found I liked the way that inappropriate word linked with inappropriate word to make a logical sequence of sound. We were also interrogated to pieces, of course, and I was subject to the most intense medical examinations of my life. The third time I saw the doc he said, ‘Do you want the good news first, Charlie, or the bad?’
‘Give me the good news, sir.’
‘We’ve tested your specimens. You’re definitely not pregnant . . . and we don’t think you have VD.’
These medical bastards are just like coppers: they all fancy themselves as comedians – you noticed that?
‘And the bad news?’
‘We still haven’t got a clue what happened to your radar operator – and we can’t let you go until we do know.’
‘You don’t know anything, sir?’
‘Not much. I know that his heart stopped, but I’m damned if I know why. Some clever bods in the RAF wing at Ely have speculated that you flew into something like a beam weapon.’
‘You mean the Norwegians zapped us with a death ray, like in the Superman comics?’
‘Mmm. Something like that.’
‘That’s ruddy ridiculous, sir! They’re on our side. Anyway; then why haven’t the rest of us died?’
‘That’s the point. I’m hanging around just in case you do. In the meantime the station’s locked down, and nobody can go on leave. You lot are about as popular as pox in a nunnery.’
‘Couldn’t he just have had a stroke or a heart attack, sir?
Whatever it was, it happened very quickly. He was laughing at a daft thing I said, there was a brief bit of interference, and then he died. I wouldn’t mind dying laughing.’
The doc was still working on his notes, and didn’t look up. ‘What interference was that? I don’t think that you mentioned it before.’
‘I’ve just remembered it. Just a quick crackle; it happens all the time. It wasn’t your death ray – or if it was then I’ve flown through hundreds of them.’
‘So what was it?’
‘Static, probably. It’s not supposed to build up in the radio frames – they’re insulated to prevent it, and properly earthed – but you can never screen it out completely. It has to earth through something.’
He was supposed to be seeing Bombs after me, but suddenly the doctor shut his notebook with a snap, grinned and said, ‘Apologize to Lambert for me, will you, Charlie? I’ve just remembered something I have to look at.’ Then he almost jumped up, and ran to his jeep. Funny man. Lam wasn’t disappointed: he was in a card school with three of the others.
The doc came back after lunch, and signed us off. Just like that. He carried a pair of dirty white silk gloves into our airy recreation room. When we examined them we saw that their finger tips were discoloured. I asked, ‘What’s up, doc?’
‘Burn marks. Carrington got an electric shock from the metal table he was working at. Probably not a very big one. Not even a jolt, I expect – but it was enough to interfere with the electrical impulses which kept his heart pumping. Bang. There you go.’ To the others he said, ‘Charlie remembered a short burst of static just before it happened. His radios picked up the discharge.’
‘So Perce had a weak heart?’ Tim asked. ‘Simple as that?’
‘No, Flight Lieutenant. He had a braw heart. It was one of the best I’ve seen. No: there was something wrong with his electrics, that’s all – and that little charge was enough to shut the pump down.’
‘Could we have done anything, sir?’
The doc frowned, and sort of stroked his chin. Eventually he said, ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’ But I knew that he was lying.
The others were all on a squadron there anyway, and they wasted no time. They made for their messes, or their quarters. Perce and I had been the only outsiders. Perce wasn’t going anywhere, was he? The doc told me that transport had been laid on for me; someone was driving over from CFS who wouldn’t get in until evening. I’d seen enough of the others for the time being, so I turned down invitations to the bar and waited where I was. There were plenty of books, a radio and a gramophone. I’d been wrong about the nurse. She wasn’t that much of a hard case because she showed me a cupboard containing a crate of beer before she signed off, and told me to help myself. I had a party on my own in an empty TB sanatorium. I drank too much. That’s probably why I looked up when twilight was closing in to see a tall thin sergeant standing in the shadows outside the glass, watching me. He was touching his chin the way Perce had done as he spoke, but it can’t have been Perce. I’d seen people like him before. I glanced briefly away, and then back . . . he was no longer there. I unscrewed another beer, and silently toasted the space he’d been in.
Miller had used her own car, but had dressed in uniform. I was sitting on the veranda under a single light when she arrived. Moths must have been Japs: they were crashing into the light like kamikazes. Bats, lurking like night fighters at the light’s extreme limits, picked them off one by one. My packed bag was on the stoop alongside me. I don’t know who I had expected, but it hadn’t been her. She ran up the three wooden steps and hugged me so hard and for so long that I thought we’d get stuck that way. I was out of breath as I spoke into her hair: ‘I can have you here, now, or on the way home. No real choice; but your choice, anyway.’
‘In a hotel, Charlie. Fifteen minutes away. We’re already booked.’
‘What did you tell Charles?’
‘Exigencies of the service.’
She didn’t say anything else, because I kissed her.
Miller’s idea of a hotel matched mine: an old pub with bedrooms. The landlord was about thirty, and walked with a limp. Even so, he insisted on carrying our bags, and before he left us pointed out a battered biscuit tin on the dresser: it was full of candle stubs.
‘We’re getting electricity cuts all the time,’ he told us. ‘Use as many as you like.’
After he left Miller lit about a dozen around the room, and turned the light off.
‘I love your legs.’ I kissed Miller’s stomach, just below her navel. Her tummy wasn’t flat, and I liked it for that.
‘I’m glad. I like you loving my legs, but they’re a bit on the short side.’
‘They’re shapely. I love their curves. I knew a girl with straight legs once: stilts.’
‘Is that the girl you go to London to see?’
It came out – just like that.
‘I go to London to work with Piers. I thought that you knew that.’
‘And to see a girl.’
‘I know some girls there, yes.’
‘The way you know me?’
‘Not any more. Not until I’ve stopped knowing you.’
Miller had kept her eyes closed throughout the exchange and now, at last, she smiled. I’d said something she wanted to hear, but she couldn’t resist teasing me. ‘You’ll stop knowing me one day, then?’
‘You’ll kick me out eventually, won’t you? Maybe after the novelty has worn off.’
‘You think that?’
‘Yes. I daren’t think otherwise, or I’d be lost.’ She smiled again when I said that. I wondered if she knew that she was smiling. ‘There’s no telephone in here. What are you going to do in the morning?’
‘Creep downstairs, and use the one in the bar.’
‘Why not let it go for once?’
‘Not a good idea. Charles would wonder if I was with a man.’
‘And you’re not, of course?’ I kissed her stomach again. She put a hand on my head, and combed gently through my hair with her fingers. Without looking I knew that her eyes were still closed; it was like being explored by a blind person.
‘No: I’m meeting with a group of other WREN officers to discuss careers for women in the Navy. Charles actually wants me to leave the service, settle down and churn out babies.’
‘How would you react if you found Charles with another woman?’
‘Feel a bit insulted, I suppose. I always feel that I should be enough for any man.’
‘And what do you feel about being married?’
‘Being married isn’t quite enough for me, Charlie.’ Miller’s fingers tightened in my hair. ‘Do you want to go down for a drink now? We could see if he has anything left to eat. I’m starving.’ Apparently making love always made her hungry.
As she went down the narrow stair ahead of me she stopped suddenly and turned. ‘I forgot. Piers Fortingale phoned a couple of times. He sounded quite concerned.’
‘Thanks. What else did I miss?’
‘Joopeman radioed in – from France, he said. He wants to talk to you.’
I’d lost a fiver.
All four of my hens clucked sympathetically over me. Boulder brought me coffee. She was putting on weight, and was wearing a very red lipstick. Whatever the treatment was, it appeared to be working. I wondered who the doctor was.
Watson wanted to see me. ‘Fancy a spot of crash leave, old son?’
‘We didn’t crash. Are you trying to get rid of me, sir?’
‘Perish the thought, Charlie. We’re just getting used to you. Air House was on the blower a couple of days ago asking me if you could be persuaded to stay.’
‘But they’re not really in charge here, are they?’
‘No: they were just speaking for whoever pays our salaries.’
‘Which is?’
‘The people round here have been told that we work for the Foreign Office.’
‘But that’s not true, either.’
‘No. What is it that Winnie s
aid? The truth has to be defended by a bodyguard of lies – don’t you like that?’
‘No, sir – and I don’t like flying out over the Soviet Zone every week or so, either. It’s like putting your hand into a cage of rattlesnakes, waving it around and hoping they’ll miss.’
‘You’d know about that, old man, wouldn’t you? I hear that you’re quite good with rattlesnakes.’ Someone had moaned again; probably the cleaners.
‘Piers offered me a job with a private airline when I’ve served my time here.’
‘Good man; pleased to know you’re still on side. Fancy a snifter before you toddle off?’
It wasn’t hard to work out what Watson had done to fall into Piers’s clutches the same as the rest of us.
My car wasn’t behind the guardroom where I’d left it. Ming had gone into Capability Brown mode and was weeding a rose bed, so I asked him. He led me to a building as big as a bus garage, and showed me where it was parked up in a corner with a dust sheet over it. I pulled it off to find I had a freshly polished automobile: it looked quite the thing. Gleaming. The dark paintwork shone and even the leather seats had been cleaned and polished. ‘The Motor Section did it,’ Ming explained. ‘They serviced it as well, and changed the front brake shoes – you were almost down to the metals.’
‘What do I do, Ming? How do I say thank you?’
‘It was no big deal: the lads had nothing else to do – and it was probably a nice change from working on big Humbers, or trucks. A bottle of Scotch would probably be very well received, if you could find one. It’s still pretty scarce down here.’
‘OK. What would have happened if I hadn’t come back?’
‘They would have said nothing to no one, most like . . . and if no one came asking for it in six months they would have flogged it.’
‘Same old army, then?’
‘Yes, sir. Don’t know why I would ever want to leave.’
‘Can you thank them for me?’
‘Thank them yourself, sir. They’re in the small office against the wall, having a brew-up.’
I got away an hour later. They gave me tea in a chipped enamelled mug, and wanted to know about what it was like being in Germany on the day the war ended. I had Pete to thank for that. They even produced a copy of his book, and asked me to sign my name on the page where Pete first mentioned me. It was depressingly close to the beginning.
The Forgotten War Page 28