Briefing, Esme learned, was at midday, and so far the met. reports were encouraging. It looked, said Snowball, like the start of the Big Show, and according to the gen-boys it would begin with a twin-force blitz on two widely-separated areas of the Ruhr.
After breakfast Esme felt more wide-awake and the crew gathered in Mac’s billet to await the announcement of briefing over the Tannoy. Esme had to face a barrage of good-natured raillery in respect of his postponed wedding and Judy’s hunting accident.
“Well, if you will consort with these Tatler types!” said Hawley, the mid-upper gunner: but Mac’, Esme’s new skipper, told Hawley to ‘get stuffed’, and expressed genuine sympathy with Esme. Mac’ approved of marrying into the W.A.A.F., having himself married an A.C.W. meteorologist less than a year ago.
They sat about round the empty stove, discussing the forth-coming operation in deliberately casual terms. Esme knew that each of them was experiencing the exact duplicate of his own qualms and that each man was using his individual method to conceal them from the other members of the crew.
Snowball, the radio-operator, was steadily dismantling his portable radio once again. Hawley, when he wasn’t recounting ribald and mostly stale stories, was trying to pretend to an interest in an American periodical. ‘Greg’, the bomb-aimer, was writing a letter home, and finding its composition distressing to judge by his grunts and frequent shifts of posture. Gilbert, the flight-engineer, was methodically cleaning his shoes—why, Esme wondered, when he invariably slopped around camp, town and billets in his heavy flying boots? Time hung very heavily for them until the warning click of the Tannoy gave them the cue to throw aside makeshift occupations, and scramble for the briefing hall.
“This is it,” muttered Mac’. “Fingers out, and press on rewardless, chaps!”
They learned that they were to attack Hanover and Bremen in two streams, each composed of over four hundred aircraft. A ‘spoof’ raid was scheduled for the Ruhr, with the object of diverting enemy night-fighter forces and Esme, listening attentively to the string of experts dispensing their detailed information on weather, course, and the kind of opposition they were likely to encounter, was conscious of a thrill that had been absent from previous briefings.
It was soon clear that the gen. merchants had been nearly right for once, and that this was indeed the opening of the offensive Mac’ had prophesied for autumn.
Somehow the knowledge drew each of them more closely into the inner vortex of the air war, so that their personal lives, their homes, womenfolk, grumbles and even their small talk were patterns of long ago and had no significance in this smoke-wreathed hall, jammed tight with earnest young men straining every nerve to appear jovial, carefree, and hard-boiled.
After briefing the day seemed to pass very quickly, for there was much to do and a long letter to be written to Judy. Esme considered for a moment, writing the kind of letter that some of the married men wrote and left behind, with instructions to post in the event of their failure to get home, but he quickly put the idea aside as phoney-dramatic, and compromised with an affectionate three-page summary of their conversation about the farm. He ended his letter with a Rabelaisian admonition to prepare for their next rendezvous, planned for a fortnight hence.
He smiled as he sealed the letter, reflecting that its very tone was a signpost into a new era. A few years ago a man could never have expressed himself thus to a young woman he intended to marry, and it was even doubtful if he would have used phrases like this in a letter to a barmaid who was his mistress…‘get weaving’, ‘get your finger out’, ‘get up them stairs’…. Today these exchanges were normal currency between sexes, particularly between men and women serving in the same arm of the forces. He knew, too, that Judy would read into them the same need to conceal his true feelings as he detected in the brittle gaiety of the men around him.
Greg, the bomb-aimer, found words for this thought, as he sealed his own letter, written to his father, a clerk, in Willesden: “What the hell can you say to the folks anyway? If you gave ’em pukka gen you’d be on the fizzer for blabbing official secrets, and if you talked a lot of cock about home and beauty they’d read it as a last will and testament, written by a bloke who knew dam’ well he was going for a Burton!”
“I wonder,” said Mac’, seriously for once, “I wonder if men talked as we talk before battles in the past, before Waterloo for instance? I wonder if they wrote home trying to give the impression that it was all a bit of a lark, instead of the bloody shambles they knew it was going to be?”
“It was a bit of a lark, then,” said Gilbert, the New Zealand Flight Engineer. “It wouldn’t scare me any to charge a bloody great horse right up to a mob of poor baskets firing bows and arrows! Hell, you had armour all over you didn’t you?”
“Not at Waterloo, you clot!” said Esme, grinning, “and I imagine that grapeshot was as bad as flak any day of the week!”
“What exactly was grapeshot?” asked Snowball, and they drifted into a technical discussion on the relative armaments of Wellington and Bomber Harris. Esme was the crew’s authority on all historical matters and they were still discussing the range of cannon, and the lethal power of horse pistols, when the Waaf arrived in her jeep to take them out to dispersal.
Then, as they humped over the tarmac towards ‘R-for-Ronnie’, the familiar flippancy returned, but with it a deliberate putting aside of everything outside the purely technical sphere relating to a seven-hour flight to and from the Continent. Although no one said as much each of them drew fresh confidence from the presence of so many aircraft, and so much deliberate activity, as crews hoisted their parachute packs out of jeeps and climbed, chattering and yelling, into the bellies of the Lancasters, Stirlings and Halifaxes dotted about the flat, Lincolnshire landscape.
Esme settled himself in the tail and swallowed his wakey-wakey pill as the flight commander’s car appeared from under the wing to give him the last-minute target information to pass to Mac’.
“Hullo, Skip? The target is Hanover! Hanover!”
“That’s a bloody sight healthier than Bremen!” said Mac’, kicking off his microphone.
Esme felt no trace of anxiety now, simply a mild, pleasurable excitement, as the four Merlin engines roared into life and they began to taxi into the queue. Then, with the familiar bumping lift, they were away, and looking right down on the queue as they soared off towards the sea, with other aircraft appearing below them, looking like cut-out toys against an orange sky.
The Ju. 88 came at them on the port bow about twenty minutes after they had made their bomb run and turned for home.
Up to that moment it had been a placid, uneventful flight, with no coastal flak and no night-fighters in the coastal belt or over the target, just a long, monotonous haul into the south-east, with a glimpse of the diversionary attack on the Ruhr, and one dummy run over the winking city, already lit with fires and pathfinder flares.
“So far, so good,” Mac’ had said into the intercom, and then the Ju. 88’s navigational lights had cut past their tail and Esme was firing a long burst at it and shouting to Mac’ to corkscrew before the enemy banked and came in for the kill.
After that scare they bucketed about all over the sky and it was ten minutes before Mac’ called up again; Esme noted the urgency in his voice.
“Bloody outer port’s cut! Any damage down your way?”
“No,” Esme told him, “and we were damned lucky to get away with it? He jumped me out of nowhere!”
“Okay, keep looking!” said Mac’, switching off.
Esme stared up and down, to port, to starboard, until his eyes felt as if they were straining at taut strings attached to the back of his skull. He noticed an interruption in the throb of the engines but a general check-up showed that the aircraft was more than capable of getting back to base.
“Thank God for that!” said Gilbert from his panel. “To hell with landing at a strange base where they’ve run out of beer!”
Another ten minu
tes passed and they picked up their old course, hoping to lose themselves in the returning stream, but their serenity was gone and Esme was wretchedly aware of his thumping heart, and tried to calm himself by picturing Judy’s brown, elfin face as he had bent to kiss it when Maud Somerton had called up to say that his taxi had arrived.
He succeeded, although it required all his powers of concentration. His brain continued to claw him back to the realities of the night, and the terrors they held for a crippled bomber limping home across hundreds of miles of enemy-patrolled sky.
Then, after a long silence, he heard Hawley’s thin voice, piping into the intercom from mid-upper turret:
“Fighter, fighter! Corkscrew!”
And again came the wild, senseless bucketing, as Mac’ took instant evasive action. Then another spasm of fear but before it could overwhelm him, the sudden chatter of Browning guns, a series of dull thumps, and a confused shouting out of which Mac’s voice emerged, terribly urgent this time, calling: “Jump…jump!” as Esme found himself ducking under the mid-upper turret and groping his way across the main spar towards the hatch.
He remembered no more than that of the last, mad moments in the shattered aircraft. He supposed that he must have carried out the routine actions automatically, his brain relying on the distilled wisdom of months of lectures and demonstrations, rather than upon any instinctive moves he made to save his life. The aircraft seemed to be disintegrating around him and the reek of petrol caught at his throat. Someone shot out in front of him and he saw Snowball prancing about near Gilbert’s instrument panel. He remembered a knife-thrust of fear as he tumbled headlong into space; then he was floating, and his chest felt wet and cold, and the silence around him was so intense that he felt he could have reached out and gathered it by the armful.
He did not think about landing, or of the men still in the aircraft, but only of the vast silence of the sky, and his strange, almost lunatic suspension in it.
CHAPTER XXI
Esme Describes The Avenue
HIS FULL CONSCIOUSNESS returned only when his boots brushed against something that crackled, and in the split-second between this contact and his impact on solid ground, he once more fell back on the instinctive lessons of his training, flexing his knees and rolling over and over in what he later recognised as an almost expert landing.
He detached himself from the parachute and crawled on all fours from under the folds of silk that the light wind was wrapping about him. He reached forward blindly with his hands, and the contact they made with moist earth told him he had lost a glove on the way down and was sifting tilled soil through his numbed fingers.
His right hand was very cold, but the rest of his body felt warm, almost cosily warm. He sat back on his haunches, a yard or so from the billowing canopy, and prodded himself all over, flexing his arms, and slowly and carefully putting weight on each of his knees in turn.
Then he said aloud: “I’m alive! Christ, I’m alive! I made it! Christ, I made it!”
The sound of his voice, uttering these words, made him want to laugh and leap about, like a small boy suddenly presented with an unexpected treat, but he resisted the impulse and thought instead of Judy and all this would mean to her, propped up where he had last seen her in her bare little room in Maud Somerton’s Spartan home.
Then, with the memory of Judy, his mind engaged his immediate problems—to stay alive, and to stay free, free to make his way home again somehow, and get to a telephone where he could hear her voice and to tell her that they would be married after all, even if they both had to be wheeled to a register office in bath chairs by her Commando brothers, Berni and Boxer.
He must have been slightly hysterical, for he had even begun to chuckle at the image such a wedding conjured up, when suddenly he remembered that Berni and Boxer were missing, and had not been heard of since the Dieppe raid, more than a month ago.
The thought cheered rather than depressed him, however, for it now seemed to him that he was not alone in the gusty darkness, but that Berni and Boxer might be somewhere around, eager to renew the partnership he had shared with them in the Lower School, before they were split up by Old Longjohn, the Head, and he was set to work in the forcing-house of the Certificate Fifth.
Gradually, he steadied himself until he could think rationally. Gradually, as he sat in the furrow chafing his numbed hand and stretching his legs, he was able to make some kind of shift at assessing his position and chances.
He was almost certainly in France, which was much better than being in Germany. In France there was an active Underground Movement that concerned itself, gallantly and ingeniously so he had heard, with the business of getting stranded air-crew back to Britain.
Meanwhile he had his escape kit, the small folder of silk maps, compass, and French money. He had malted milk tablets in his battledress pocket, and a small rubber bag for water if he could find any.
Little by little he collected himself, even to the point of reckoning up how many hours of darkness were left, but as he gathered up his parachute, and sucked a malted milk tablet, his dominating thought was still one of immense gratitude and surprise at being alive, and this thought was far too absorbing to enable him to spare one as yet for Mac’, Snowball, and the others who had shared that last crazy moment in the kite.
He did not even want to think about the actual cause of the disaster, or how and why they had been ‘jumped’ and shot down, or whether or no Greg had got in a burst at their attacker before the cannon-shells had ripped into the fuselage, and sent them spinning to earth.
He was content, for the time being, to hole up somewhere, and bury his ’chute, and he stumbled off across the soggy ground until he ran headlong into a wooden building, constructed of rough-hewn planks.
Then he remembered his matches and decided to risk striking one. The tiny flame, extinguished after a couple of seconds, showed him that he was standing in the doorless entrance of some kind of barn, piled high with root-crops.
Carefully he felt his way inside and then struck another match. This time he protected the flame from the wind and it flared up, revealing the inside of a gimcrack structure, built on low piles at the extreme edge of the field.
He let the match burn out and then set about burrowing a hole in the roots, stuffing in his parachute and scrambling over the crown of the stack to a hollow against the far wall.
From here, lying on his stomach, he could make out the faint outline of the entrance and beyond it a faint greyness in the sky. He settled himself among the tufted marigolds and it occurred to him that here already was a source of food to supplement his malted milk tablets. He rubbed one of the roots with the palm of his ungloved hand and set his teeth into the rough, gritty surface.
Almost at once he began to retch and between spasms of dry retching he fell asleep, his face pressed to the cold surface of the roots.
It was broad daylight when he awoke and saw, beyond the ridge of marigolds, a slim, middle-aged man enter the shelter, carrying a pitchfork over his shoulder.
He lay quite still and studied the man closely, noting his clothes, his narrow, expressionless face, and his casual demeanour as he fidgeted about near the entrance.
Esme felt stiff and cold, and by no means as elated as when he had entered the barn, for the realities of his situation were much clearer to him by daylight and it was plain to him now that it could only be a matter of time before he was obliged to choose between surrender or making his presence known to the French, if indeed, he was on French soil.
He decided, at length, to stake everything on a straightforward appeal to the Frenchman and was phrasing an introductory speech when another, older man walked quickly into the shed, carrying what appeared to be a canvas shopping bag which he handed to the labourer.
The newcomer was more impressive. He had serious eyes, and a long, waxed moustache that reminded Esme of a paternal figure in an old-fashioned photograph album. He wore a black pork-pie hat, a check coat of stout cloth, baggy bree
ches, and short, yellow leggings. Mentally Esme named him ‘The Agent’.
Neither glanced towards the stack of marigolds where Esme lay but presently, after conversing in low tones to the labourer, the Agent said aloud, and in excellent English:
“Remain where you are! We will come back for you when the first search is finished! Two of your friends are dead and three are already captured. In this bag is wine and bread!”
Esme said nothing, being far too surprised to reply, and in any case it was clear that the Frenchmen did not expect him to speak, for they instantly left the barn, the labourer remaining close to the entrance and busying himself with his pitchfork.
Esme fought a craving to light a cigarette, and fixed his eyes on the bag that the labourer had set down on the lower bank of roots. It was very quiet in the hollow against the planks, and presently he discovered that, by shifting his position somewhat, he could peer through a chink at the hedge that bordered the field.
He was about to wriggle across the roots and secure the bag when he saw through the chink the upper part of what looked like a military vehicle, cruising slowly along the lane. It stopped just beyond the barn and someone got out, calling sharply to the labourer.
Esme burrowed deeper into the roots, finally succeeding in covering himself. He heard brisk steps nearing the barn and then someone entered, approaching so closely to him that he could hear their breathing. He lay quite still, thankful indeed that he had taken the precaution to cover himself for the visitor, whoever it was, actually scrambled up on to the lower bank of roots and kicked his way towards the back of the barn. Then he retreated, climbed down again, and went off. A moment later Esme heard the engine of the vehicle start up in the lane. He remained covered for another ten minutes, then eased himself free, and slid down the shifting roots to fetch the bag. As he did so the labourer slouched in, his face drawn with anxiety.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 32