The only aircraft of theirs that the RAF will ever admit was shot down deliberately by the Russians was one of a pair of Avro Lincoln bombers, on exercise, that strayed beyond internationally agreed air corridors in 1951. Forgive the emphasis, and my scepticism, but the fact is that the RAF and military institutions all over the world necessarily describe activities as exercises which are anything but.
As it happens, Lincoln losses were about average for its type in the theatres to which it was deployed. The likelihood is that territorial radar mapping of routes to Soviet targets (and targets that were likely to be Soviet by the time that NATO forces pulled their collective fingers out) commenced long before the 1951 incident and now we know that such operations were rightly designated Top Secret. Would aircraft losses in the course of them be admitted, or disguised? You decide. In 1947 the RAF complaining that one of their spy aircraft had been fired upon in Soviet airspace would be like a burglar complaining that a farmer had shot at him in the course of a housebreaking – and until recently we didn’t have to put up with nonsense like that.
If you want to see a Lincoln, the RAF Museum reserve collection at Cosford in Shropshire has a fine example. They’re not far off the M54, and they’d love you to visit. Their Lincoln has, incidentally, the reputation of being the most haunted aircraft in the world: the alleged incidents in and around it are too numerous to document here. Suffice it to say that folk are reluctant to spend any time with her after dark.
I won’t say much about the State of Israel – or more specifically the state of the State of Israel – or Palestine: both of them are neighbours from hell, and they probably deserve each other.
My mother loathed the sound of falling bricks for the whole of her life after the Second World War. Fifty years ago it was easy to find women who would have agreed with her. The experience that generated it was digging my two elder brothers out of a buried air-raid shelter with her bare hands, after the house next door had received an unexpected Christmas gift from Germany. After recovering her sons, in her own words, ‘I turned round and realized we were homeless’: the neighbours’ house, and an entire wall of her own, had disappeared. I don’t know what happened to the neighbours, but I can clearly remember walking down a street with Mum in the 1950s, and seeing her check and grow pale as a hundred yards away a wall was demolished in a rumble of falling bricks, and a cloud of pink brick dust lifted to the sky. Mother gave me a few other elements for this volume of Charlie’s life. The ring I described belonged to her, and she adored it. She gave it to my wife on the day I was married, but it was stolen from our house by a sneak thief some ten years ago. I hope that he catches a perfectly vile disease connected to his thieving ways, and dies from a dose of adulterated heroin. I’ve often wondered whether the ring was destroyed for its scrap value, or whether it’s making someone else happy.
And before you ask, yes, I was the little boy practising his reading skills on a 157 bus, who read a notice aloud, and asked his mother to refrain from spitting. In the days when we were still wrestling with TB and diphtheria, she was horrified to be fingered publicly as a potential disease-carrier. When she was older she loved to tell the story, and it passed into family lore. Her mother, my grandmother, lived with my family for the last thirty years of her life: it was how we did things then. She was a Coughlin, and full of brooding Irish blood. She could cure anything with a potato; principally warts and bruising, but I don’t think that there was a medical condition known to man that she wouldn’t have attacked with a potato if we’d given her the chance. The establishment of an efficient National Health Service must have been a great disappointment to her.
Red Rip of Ripon was our Airedale dog. He was an Australian Airedale, and that breed has a curious and relatively short history which might amuse you. It was the result of a deliberate experimental cross, between the Airedale Terrier and the Border Collie. The purpose of the cross was to provide Australian sheep farmers – we still imagined that we ran Australia then – with a dog that had the instinctive herding abilities of the Collie, and the woolly Airedale’s ability to cope with high daytime and freezing night time temperatures. The stabilized cross did end up with the Collie’s instincts, and the Airedale’s physical resistance to temperature change, it was just a pity that it couldn’t run as fast as a sheep. It wasn’t until the first batch reached Australia that someone identified that as a potential problem. So the failures were returned to the UK, to live out their lives as family dogs. Strange but true. It must have been colonial stupidity on that sort of scale that eventually convinced the Aussies that they’d be better off going it alone, and who could blame them?
I lived and worked in London for fifteen years – more than forty years ago. I love and loathe the place in equal measures. One of my favourite watering holes was the Fountains Abbey in Paddington. There, in the back saloon two stunningly beautiful, and undeservedly notorious women kept court among the medical students. One evening in November 1963 I arrived, anticipating an hour’s flirtation and dirty stories, to find the crowded room as quiet as a mausoleum and to be told about the assassination of President John Kennedy. For readers who weren’t alive then, I can only explain that the effect of the news of his murder was our 9/11: the world simply stopped . . . and the Mannlicher Carcano rifle, of which Les rather approved, is the weapon that Lee Oswald is alleged to have used on him.
The wonderfully cool (in every sense) wine bar in Camden High Street is long gone, I think, but the Parr’s Head is still there – one large bar now, sadly, instead of the three I knew – but it still serves a damned good pint, and is tolerant with strangers.
If you want to learn anything of the men who wear the forget-me-not emblem in their lapels you’ll have to find one, and ask him – because I’m not going to tell you.
I was bewitched by the duelling patch in the grounds of Lord Mansfield’s Kenwood House the first time I set foot on it – it was inevitable that one day it would provide the backdrop for one of my stories. If it is still there, and you live nearby, pay it a visit one Sunday. You will find a hidden oval clearing in which the original owner expected to kill or be killed – there’s something special in the air there. Yes: go yourself, and tell me what you think. Kenwood is one of the best places in my memory; we went to chamber concerts and poetry readings in the orangery in the 1960s and picnicked in drizzle at open-air concerts, on the lawns that you can see in the film Notting Hill.
The first and most perfect pistol I owned was a small Colt Navy Sheriff, or Pocket pistol. The first time one was put into my hand it was love at first shot, and my pistol is still with the shooting club who taught me how to use it safely: although that might be a contradiction in terms, if you think about it. I have sometimes wondered if there is a connection between the pleasure I have had shooting antique firearms and the excitement I felt the first time I stepped up to the mark on the Kenwood duelling ground.
I will finish with the jazz. Every chapter heading, bar one, is the title of a number recorded by a jazz band, and I wrote this novel with their music around me in the room. Let me know if you can spot the odd man out. I love jazz – always have, and always will. It’s the soundtrack I go back to when the world closes in on me. I can provide a play list for anyone who’s interested. Those in the know might recognize the model for the demobbed Guardsman with a horn, blowing up a storm at a (fictional) Cheltenham jazz club in 1947. I won’t name him, but he knows who he is – and this is my opportunity to say thank you. Thank you for the music.
Will Charlie fly again? I don’t really know, but to a certain extent that depends on you who are reading these words right now. I hadn’t originally expected him to fly far enough even for a trilogy, but if, in sufficient numbers, you’ve enjoyed his memories and want to find out what happened next, my guess is that he will have to pull on his old flying jacket once more. He might have started working for a private outfit, but the Berlin Airlift is just around the corner, and Suez, the last British colonial adventure, is not
that far down the road. I have a sinking feeling that Charlie managed to avoid neither: what goes around, comes around – he says it all the time.
Finally, my five-year-old granddaughter asked me if she could write something in one of my novels, so these next three words are hers: Orla, Ciara and Katie. They are simply girls’ names: hers and her sisters’ – the next generation.
David Fiddimore
Edinburgh: 20 10 2006
The Forgotten War Page 40