A Blind Man's War

by David Fiddimore

  I found myself standing alongside an Auster AOP bearing the fuselage code letter L, watching Fiona’s departure. A sergeant my size in KD lights walked around it.

  ‘Hello, squire. Is she your bird?’ he asked me. Stiff fair hair and a smooth face. His face, arms and knees were browned by overenthusiastic exposure to the sun. His flying jacket was draped over one of the long bracing struts which supported the high wing.

  ‘No, she works for my boss.’ I stuck out my paw. ‘Charlie Bassett.’ Then I nodded at the green and brown aircraft. ‘I’m looking for a driver.’

  He had a decent handshake. A lot of pilots have good hands, have you noticed that? He sported a set of wings of course: a sergeant pilot. Always get an NCO if you can.

  ‘You’ve got one, squire. Wilf Pickles, but without the Mabel.’ Wilfred Pickles and Mabel were a couple of comedians on the radio. Who remembers them now? ‘A chappie named de Whitt was here yesterday, and wired your radio into the back – bit of a big heavy bastard, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s supposed to have a long reach, just like Freddie Mills. Do we get a briefing for this mission?’ The word mission slipped out by mistake. That’s what we called the trips we made over Germany in 1944.

  ‘Yeah, and the CO wants to see you before we go. He’ll brief you for the army’s end of this jaunt.’ He picked up his jacket, pointed out a big open-faced tent to me, and casually asked, ‘Weren’t you in Lancasters in the war?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘Like it? The Lanc, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  He kicked one of the Auster’s small main wheels, saying, ‘You won’t like this.’

  At least he was upfront about it. I shrugged, and said, ‘Take me to your leader.’

  There is less room in an Auster than in a Morris Minor, even for men my size. I want you to get that into your head right away. I was used to aircraft you could get up and walk around in, and not at all keen on tiddlers. I looked aft, from my rear-facing seat – I have a natural prejudice for facing the direction of travel, but nobody had asked me – the fuselage dimensions behind my newly rigged receiver were barely sufficient to slot a coffin into. Maybe that’s a bad simile. I sat back-to-back with Pickles, and we both wore earphones, mics and seat harnesses. We needed the earphones because the damned thing was so damned noisy.

  He clicked over the intercom, and said, ‘Sorry about all the racket, squire. The nice little Bombardier engine she was born with didn’t like the heat and dust out here, so we swapped it for a power pack robbed out of an old Chipmunk – much more reliable.’

  I didn’t care what was under the bonnet as long as it got me up in the air, and down again – but I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  ‘OK. Let me know when you’re about to go.’

  I had stood outside the aircraft to watch them fire it up. They thought I was showing a professional interest in the starting procedures: actually I was delaying getting into the dusty glass-and-metal box as long as I could.

  A glaikit-looking mechanic swung the propeller slowly four times through the priming sequence and Pickles, grinning from the cockpit, gave it three full strokes on the priming pump, and a thumbs-up. Then the mechanic gave the prop one more decent pull, through the compression stroke, and stepped smartly back. The nasty little bugger – the Auster, not the fitter; it wasn’t his fault – coughed, and sprang to life. The arc of the spinning prop shimmered in the hard light, and grey-blue smoke from the exhaust quickly became invisible. That said it was time for me to mount up, through the back door on the starboard side. As I strapped in I reflected that the army was still using a start-up sequence that the RAF had ditched not long after the First World War. What had happened to cartridge starters, or mobile electrical sources, while I had been away?

  Sitting in the Auster was like sitting inside a closely tailored greenhouse which vibrated at the rate a modern electric toothbrush would work up to today. I hated it, and so would you. You have to trust me in this, although I can’t say that Pickles hadn’t warned me.

  He did his checks, and ran the engine at various rev settings. Then he ran it up against the chocks for a couple of minutes. I could feel the beast straining to fly. Pickles clicked, and said, ‘Luna One. Taxiing.’

  The guy in flying control was having a fit of the giggles when he came back with, ‘Permission to taxi, Luna One,’ and then, ‘Permission to take off.’ I looked at the rudder in front of me as he checked its travel, and privately doubted that this little kite would be able to get us over the top of Box Hill.

  Pickles taxied the beast fast. It was light on its feet when it was on the ground. That was good, because it was as slow as a pregnant pachyderm in the air. In 1943 the clapped-out Wellington bombers I did my primary training in were quicker than this thing. I know that some people love them, but the Auster is actually the technological equivalent of a grasshopper.

  A nippy little cross wind told us to use the cross runway. Against the Auster’s small main wheels it felt a bit lumpy, but Pickles gave it the gun, and it seemed to me that we were flying almost immediately. Maybe grasshopper wasn’t too bad a description of it. It didn’t need much room; either on the ground or to get airborne. On the other hand one of the bad points was that the rear-facing observer – yours truly – was left looking almost vertically down at an airfield receding slowly beneath him: a steep rate of climb but not a good one.

  A few years ago another old army pilot told me I should have picked up on the fact that we were going to climb steeply when I heard Pickles’s voice crackle, ‘Fifty knots,’ in my ear. Apparently there was a tree not all that far away that took a bit of hurdling, and fifty knots gave you the best engine setting for a steep rate of climb. I looked down at the tents getting smaller, and felt sick.

  He climbed us in lazy circles, calling out high points from time to time, and other prominent features below. After twenty minutes he got us to eight thousand feet. That’s a mile and a half in your language: far enough for anyone to fall in mine. Every time he turned up sun the cabin warmed noticeably.

  ‘High enough for you, Radios?’ I think he momentarily forgot my name. Not bad, actually: it reminded me what I was there to do, and to stop feeling sorry for myself.

  ‘Fine, Wilf. Where’s the aerial spool?’

  ‘In the roof. Look over your left shoulder, and up.’

  It looked a proper Heath Robinson lash-up to me, but it worked. Wilf slowed our IAS so much before we deployed the aerial, that it was almost as if we hung motionless in the air: aircraft aren’t supposed to do that. Ten minutes later, when we were out over Famagusta Bay, I fired up the radio, and the signals came in from everywhere, like a pack of hungry foxhounds disappearing underneath your bed.

  My first thought was to tear off my phones to prevent my eardrums bursting. Then I settled down to it, cranked it back to comfortable, and swept and wrote whilst Pickles flew us slowly eastwards in reciprocal parallels – like a farmer ploughing his best field. He was probably bored, but we gave it a good hour.

  There was no doubt about it. The 108 enjoyed its trip to the roof of the world: a bit of height, and a hundred and fifty feet of trailing aerial, made a ridiculous difference. The only signals I could identify for certain, of course, were the Saudis and their damned train . . . because I knew their call signs. But I had the wavelength and the frequencies of everything else, and de Whitt could compare them with what he was getting on the ground. The interesting thing, of course, was that the Saudi signals were just as easy to intercept as any of the others. I thought this probably finally proved that no signal meant that no one was signalling. The trouble was that I knew in my heart the boffins wouldn’t buy it: it was too simple an answer, and no one would win a Nobel Prize for it.

  ‘You got enough yet?’ Pickles clicked.

  ‘Fine. Ready to go when you are.’

  He slowed us to about sixty knots again as we recovered the trailing aerial. Again I had that odd feeling of hanging motionless above t
he island. Then he put us into a gentle side-slip – but only for half a minute or so – and we dropped down, and round towards the West. The sun was overhead, and those bloody mountains were somewhere in front of us. I had the feeling it was going to be a long day.

  ‘The trouble is the fuel tanks,’ Wilf clicked. ‘They’re in the wings – close to the roots.’ Just up above my head, he meant. ‘They’re self-sealing of course, but if the GCs have a crack at us, it’s what they’re aiming for.’

  ‘Do they catch fire?’

  Click. ‘Sometimes, Charlie.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’m supposed to side-slip to keep the flames from the cockpit.’

  Click. ‘Does that work?’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘What then?’

  Click. ‘We ditch the doors, and jump for it.’

  ‘We have parachutes?’

  ‘Nah, they’re fer cissies. You’re in the army now.’

  Where did they find these people?

  Over a small village in the Cedar valley an hour later I began to understand what the army was up against. From above it looked like the village that Warboys had taken us into. That wasn’t all that surprising. After an hour of flying over them, I realized that most of them looked the same. I guessed that anyone who lived in the Troodos spent most of his income supporting a bleeding great local church.

  Wilf had handed me a map marked with areas from which the EOKA radios had previously been thought to be active. The army intercept vans – all four of them – had been deployed around the foothills of the Troodos for me. The idea was that they would triangulate on anything I picked up from the plane, so that we could plot a map of exact locations, and send patrols in to switch them off.

  The village was called Agios something – they were all called Agios something – and Wilf spiralled us gently out of the clear blue sky above the church.

  Unexpectedly, the church fought back.

  Well, the half-dozen guys on its roof did. Luckily for us they had no automatic weapons, but the rifle and pistol fire were bad enough. They didn’t start until we were about five hundred feet above them, and at that height it was like flying into light flak. Two bullets went through the cabin. One careered off the bracing spar above my head, and exited out of the side window with a snap. Showers of Plexiglas shards. I probably screamed. I know that Pickles did.

  He skidded us sideways in the air. I still don’t know if it was a brilliant bit of flying or pure funk. Our horrible little aircraft staggered away, clawing for height like a cat trapped in a cage. By then, of course, I was looking down at the church, over the tail . . . and was surprised by the grenade. I put it down to the errant ambition of an oversexed teenager: teenagers are the same the world over.

  I suppose that it is theoretically possible to bring down an aircraft with a hand-thrown grenade. But it would take a hefty throw, and for the fates to be well and truly on your side. His fates had deserted him that day. Maybe Godfrey Evans could have managed a throw like that, but my little grenadier didn’t stand a chance. It’s a horrible bloody feeling to see blokes shooting at you, and to be unable to do anything except duck. It’s even worse when they start to chuck bombs at you.

  I saw the little matchstick man throw something up at us. At first I thought it was a stone, hurled in frustration. Then within microseconds I knew it was a Mills bomb. He simply forgot to wait long enough before he threw the damned thing: he just chucked it, and threw himself flat on the walkway around the church roof. Ten seconds later the grenade returned to sender – it fell back alongside him, of course. I saw one of the gunmen give it a quick look, then take a header over the side. Under the circumstances it’s a decision I would have agreed with.

  Then the grenade exploded. And the church roof fell in. I lost sight of the building immediately because we were on our side, and hanging from our straps. That was because of the updraft, or because Pickles had an idle moment, and was trying to see what the airframe would put up with before it fell to bits. When I had my bearings again we were up at a thousand feet, the church roof had caved in completely, and there were small fires inside the building: God was having a very bad day. A dust cloud hung in the air above it like the demon in a Dennis Wheatley story. There were two bodies spreadeagled in the square – and people were running from their houses with buckets. I put the earphones back on, and did a quick sweep.

  ‘Their radio’s gone very quiet,’ I told Wilf.

  He laughed: quietly at first, and then like the Laughing Policeman. Eventually he clicked and said, ‘Balls. You know who’s going to get the blame for this, don’t you? The papers will say we bombed a church.’

  ‘They threw a grenade at us,’ I told him, ‘and then caught the fucking thing again before it went off. It was self-inflicted idiocy.’

  I thought the engine sounded a bit clattery, and maybe we were leaving a visible blue exhaust trail in the sky. Pickles sighed. ‘I think our ride’s a mite weary. Let’s fuck off, shall we?’

  We did a slow circuit low around Kermia, and a man with a trailing mic, outside the control tent, examined us through binoculars. It wasn’t because he didn’t know who we were; it was to examine the airframe to see if he could spot any damage we hadn’t logged yet. I heard his considered reply to the pilot: it was, ‘OK to land, Luna One, but my, haven’t we a dirty arse!’

  There had only been one jangly moment on the return, and that was when the engine pop-popped, threw out a trail of black smoke, and cut completely. Pickles had managed to restart it after we had lost a thou, and before he did reassured me.

  ‘Don’t worry, Charlie. I can glide her in from here.’

  In the event I was glad he didn’t have to.

  A Land Rover crash tender followed us down the runway. When I stepped down on to the good earth again I thought its crew looked disappointed that their skills hadn’t been called for. When we walked around our little mechanical insect it was impossible to miss the fact that most of her engine oil was spread along the bottom of the nose, and the fuselage. In the army the technical description of that was a dirty arse.

  ‘What kind of engine did you say it was?’ I asked Pickles.

  ‘From a Chipmunk. Why?’

  ‘Apparently it runs without oil. It’s wearing it all on the outside.’

  He grinned back.

  ‘She doesn’t know when she’s beaten.’

  I could feel the heat coming from the engine bay from a couple of feet away, and hoped that my firefighting training wasn’t about to come into question. Even so, Wilf stretched out his right hand, and gave her an affectionate pat.

  ‘Shall we go and find a beer?’ he asked. I wonder what my life would have been like without alcohol.

  In their mess tent we swallowed a couple of quick Keos before Wilf’s major, Brede, found us. He signalled up another round, and sat at a long table with us.

  ‘What did you get, Wilf ?’

  ‘About ten decent signatures, sir. Charlie will give you the details.’ I’d already been introduced to the guy at briefing, of course. I think he didn’t quite know how to relate to a civvy working for the military: I was neither fish nor fowl.

  ‘I’ll write my report up later, if that’s OK,’ I said.

  Then Wilf said, ‘Suddenly I don’t feel very well,’ in a distant voice, and surprised both of us by collapsing, sprawled across the table.

  I think I’d noticed that since we’d climbed down from the crate he’d kept a handkerchief balled up in his left hand. He let go of it as he passed out, and we saw that it was heavily stained with blood . . . and his hand, open and slack on the table, told its own story. There was a bloodstained hole through the palm. It began to bleed again as we watched. Brede called the mess servant back with, ‘Run for the MO, there’s a good chap. Tell him to jildi: Mr Pickles has a bit of bullet trouble.’

  A nice khaki-green Austin ambulance came for Wilf a little later. It had MBH Famagusta stencilled on the door, big red crosses
and a pretty nurse from Queen Alex’s: a fully paid-up member of the Grey Mafia. Before Wilf was whisked away the mechanic who’d seen us off came in with a buggered-up bullet wrapped in a piece of muslin. He’d found it on the cockpit floor, and now he put it in Pickles’s good hand for luck.

  ‘I knew a fitter who lost a finger in ’44,’ I told him. ‘A pig bit it off. We buried the finger with full military honours, and ate the pig.’

  The engineer looked at me for a few seconds before he replied. He was trying to work out if I was pulling his plonker. Then he said, ‘Changed times, sir. They’d try to sew it back on again today. Ain’t science wonderful?’

  I walked out to the ambulance with Wilf. He was on a stretcher because the MO had banged him full of morphine, and if we’d left him on his feet he would have walked in circles.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d been hit?’ I asked him as they lifted him into the back of the meat wagon. He gave me back that ghastly drugged grin.

  ‘Didn’t want to worry you, squire.’ Then his brain kicked in again, and he asked, ‘Was my flying up to scratch? RAF piloting standards?’

  ‘Better than that. Much,’ I told him. ‘Look, I run a small civvy airline in my spare time. Why don’t you come and ask me for a job when you demob?’

  I could see from his eyes that I was losing him to the drug, and the nurse looked impatient anyway. I had to bend to hear what he said next.

  ‘Knew it . . .’

  ‘Knew what, Wilf ?’

  ‘Knew I hadn’t seen the last of you.’ Then he closed his eyes.

  The next voice I heard was from slightly above me, and behind my right shoulder.

  ‘Have I missed something?’ Fiona: she hadn’t forgotten me.

  I had Pickles’s bloody handkerchief in my hand. She nodded at it. I dropped it in a waste bucket, where it lay among the beer-bottle caps.

  ‘Not all that much.’ I probably grimaced. ‘I’ll need to wash before we can get going. Thanks for coming.’ Coming back for me, I meant, but I didn’t get to finish the sentence.