by Noel Hynd
“Mrs. Cameron-Butler?” Cochrane asked, holding a still damp, collapsed umbrella in his hand.
“Of course,” Victoria said. “Do come in.”
She ushered her visitors into the small entrance foyer and then to a large foyer on the floor above street level. She closed both doors behind her guests as they proceeded into a living room that was part of the upstairs suite.
Bill Cochrane placed his fedora on an available rack and stood his umbrella in the entrance foyer. No more than two minutes of introductory small talk followed.
Then, “Well, I’m already convinced we’ll be happy to have you,” Mrs. Cameron-Butler replied, even though she was still nursing one reservation. “Come along then. Let me show you the quarters,” Victoria said, leading her visitors farther into the sitting room.
The chamber was small with a divan, a cleaned grate for a coke fire, two chairs, a narrow table before the divan, and a bookcase packed with what appeared to be academic and military texts. The books did not look as if they had been disturbed for years.
There was a modest kitchen with a rudimentary refrigerator, a table, and a gas range. There was a washroom for laundry, adjoining a pantry. The kitchen had a narrow door that exited to a small rear garden around which rose a high brick wall, topped with broken bottles sealed in cement that added a small measure of security. The door had a flimsy lock and chain.
“Mind your head on the staircase. Low overhang,” Victoria pointed out as she guided them to a set of rickety wooden stairs that led to the top floor. “We’re going up a flight. Bear with me, I’m slow. Bad knees, you know.”
Victoria picked up a cane that had been leaning at the base of the steps.
They arrived on the upstairs landing.
There was a hallway with a musty smell, two dim sconces, and maroon-flecked wallpaper. Then there were two bedrooms. The one at the front of the building had a card table set up as a desk and two windows that overlooked Orchard Street. Both bedrooms had dressers, but no closets. The back bedroom, perfect for their daughter, had a standard bed, the large front room had a queen-size bed.
Throughout the upstairs suite, there was a unique collection of clashing and contrasting rugs, wallpapers, shades, lampshades, and curtains. There was an aura of neediness prevailing over solvency, yet a quirkiness that pulled it all together.
Cochrane quickly concluded that she had sold off her better stuff. He couldn’t blame her if she had. Laura later recalled her first view of it as reminding her of an explosion in a junk shop. Overall, the vision was both jarring and charming.
“Lovely,” Laura said as they worked their way through.
Laura held Victoria in conversation in the master bedroom while Bill paid special attention to the two windows. As he looked through them, he noted that he could see over the lower roofs of the houses across the street. More importantly, as he examined the angles, he could survey the entire block from corner to corner. Most of the doorways, except for numbers twelve and thirteen down the block to the east, were not recessed. They opened directly to the street, meaning there was no room for anyone to lurk.
He turned from the window. He gave Laura a nod.
“In any case, I hope this will be to your approval,” Victoria said. “I’m picking up highly positive feelings from you.” She eyed them back and forth. “I’ll reveal a secret. I judge a man by the woman who has married him. Mr. Cochrane, your wife is charming.”
“And I’m not?” Cochrane asked with a sly smile, making Mrs. Cameron-Butler smile for the first time.
Victoria patted his arm and withdrew her hand quickly. “Oh, you’re just fine,” she answered quickly. “As is this lovely little lady who accompanies you,” she added, her eyes narrowing and jumping to Caroline. The child smiled and half hid behind her mother again.
“I quite agree about my wife,” Cochrane said. “Both my ladies. I’m a lucky man.”
He gave Laura a wink and a squeeze of the hand as Victoria led them room to room and then downstairs again.
“So?” Victoria asked. “Do you have other places to look at?”
Bill and Laura looked at each other. Then Cochrane looked back to Mrs. Cameron-Butler. “I don’t think we need to,” he said. “If we are acceptable to you.”
There was a pause. “Well, then. There’s one thing I must ask,” Victoria said, preparing to address her only lingering hesitation. “Please don’t disappoint me. And I hope you’ll take no offense at my inquiry.”
“Ask me anything you wish,” Bill Cochrane said.
“You’re not one of those filthy Communist-socialist Fabians, are you, Mr. Cochrane?” she inquired in a low but mellow voice.
Laura laughed.
“Oh, I can assure you that I am not,” Bill said hastily.
“Have no fear about that,” Laura added quickly. “Neither of us.”
“And my daughter hasn’t had time yet to join any political party,” Cochrane said, unleashing the warmth of his charm at Victoria. “I’d know if she had.”
“Well, that’s wonderful, Mr. Cochrane!” Victoria continued. “Had enough of them, I have,” she said sharply. “I had a Marxist economist here last term. No-good chap, name of Egon Henkel. Paid the rent late every month. Never washed. Never kept house. Australian,” she added as if that explained everything. “He used to sit all day in the back room at the Eagle Pub on Benet Street or The Witch’s Caldron or The Hero of the Thames. Wore a fisherman’s hat with a red star, he did, and chain-smoked these ghastly small cigars. An ‘intellectual’, he called himself. Whoever heard of a Marxist-Australian intellectual?”
“New one on me,” Bill Cochrane said.
“Glad to be rid of Comrade Henkel. Australians! They’re all sheep ranchers at heart,” she said. “Descendants of convicts. Fooey! I used to have a collection of prints. He stole a Jacques Callot. Wonderful etching of a dwarf with a violin. Sixteenth-century! I bloody well locked up the rest of the prints and the family silver as well after I found it missing.” She sniffed. “Moved out two weeks later. Good riddance.”
“The world is full of strange people,” Laura said to mollify her.
“Yes. It is,” she answered, cooling down. “Sometimes I think of the world as a tabletop with marbles upon it. Sometimes someone tilts it toward Cambridge and everything loose rolls in our direction.”
On a nearby table, there was a short letter of rental agreement – all three paragraphs of it – and a pristine Parker pen. Owner and tenant proceeded quickly and executed the document which had an open date of termination. Thirty days’ notice to the other party was all that was required to terminate the agreement.
Bill Cochrane took out a billfold and counted out a hundred pounds sterling in cash - new tens and twenties - as advance rental and deposit. Mrs. Cameron-Butler produced her keenest smile yet. The cash swiftly disappeared into her skirt pocket.
That easily, the Cochranes took possession of their temporary living quarters in England. It was a golden time. Their new residence was a hundred meters from a pleasant patch of a quiet park on the west side of the city, a five minute walk from the far edge of the university and less than ten minutes by foot – or three minutes by bicycle – from the hall in Magdalene College where Bill Cochrane would be delivering his discussions.
Nonetheless, there were frequent reminders that the world remained an unsettled place. Almost every day at least once, a British or American fighter jet on practice maneuvers would roar low over Orchard Street on takeoffs and landings.
From having spent ample time in England in the 1930s and 1940s, Bill and Laura knew exactly the source of the aircraft: the Allied air base a few miles north of Cambridge, named after the closest English town: Alconbury. In the late 1930s, the British Air Ministry purchased close to two hundred acres around Alconbury to use as a satellite RAF base. Intentionally, the initial construction was minimal. For the first few years, the base was nothing more than a few camouflaged hangars and some rickety huts for the men who servic
ed the aircraft.
The base at Alconbury was almost impossible to discern from the air but could scramble a dozen aircraft on a few minutes’ notice. Several such bases were built by the British forces in the late 1930s against the growing possibility of war in Europe. When such attacks began by the Luftwaffe in 1939, the “secret” aircraft at Alconbury were relatively far from the real bases yet stationed close to where they would be needed.
After Nazi Germany and its guiding genius, Adolf Hitler, declared war on Great Britain in 1939, British forces upgraded what was now “RAF Alconbury.” More aircraft snuggled into the hidden hangars. The RAF disguised the base to look like an abandoned industrial site. The Luftwaffe searched for the base in occasional raids and bombed the area indiscriminately but never landed knockout blows to the primary targets, though there were civilian casualties in Cambridge and the surrounding towns.
In retaliation as the war intensified, the RAF used low-altitude attack bombers to hit German industrial areas, as well as northern seaports, and territory held by the Wehrmacht in northwestern Europe following the fall of France. Most such RAF attack bombers lifted from Alconbury after dark. The night raids infuriated the Germans even more, who attacked the base several more times, always striking at night, never having the precise coordinates and never hitting more than a single aircraft each time.
In January 1942, a month after Hitler had made the stupidest move of World War II - unnecessarily declaring war on the United States - the RAF turned the base over to the United States Eighth Air Force which immediately re-established itself as the Eighth Bomber Command.
“Eight Bomber” launched its first raid in northwestern Europe on July fourth, 1942, as a twenty-year-old Captain Charles C. Kegelman led a squadron of A-20 Bostons to attack several Nazi-held airfields in the Netherlands. While over his target at De Koog, a Dutch town on the North Sea, the right propeller of Kegelman’s Douglas Boston was torn off by German anti-aircraft fire. Further hits caused damage to his right wing, and fire began on the engine.
Kegelman's aircraft lost altitude rapidly, descended to earth and even bounced twice off the terrain of Nazi-occupied Holland. While flying away from his target on one engine, Kegelman opened fire on the flak tower that had shot him. Through outstanding airmanship, Kegelman forced his aircraft to climb, nursed it to several hundred meters, flew at what seemed like barely above the treetops, made the channel, descended to a few dozen meters above water level, was astonished to see that he still had fuel, and guided his battered bomber back to Alconbury. It was a hell of a first day for his unit. Captain Kegelman was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross on a week later. It was the first DSC earned by a member of the Eighth Air Force in World War II, but far from the last.
Chapter 11
USA – June 1948
One week after her recruitment, Tommy – or Thomasina – Olson was at Westover Air Base, the sprawling facility east of Springfield, Massachusetts. The base had opened in 1940. It had become America’s busiest air terminal during the war and retained that status in 1948.
In her first twelve hours on the ground in Massachusetts, she completed her physical and met with a dozen other of Mr. Forsythe’s recruits, including Glenn Taylor and Victor Marino. There were two other female aviators. The women tended to keep to themselves.
A day later, the whole group of new recruits departed on a civilian C-54, headed for Europe. The aircraft stopped in Newfoundland and then headed out over a six-hour, fifteen-hundred mile stretch of the Atlantic Ocean until it eventually landed in the Azores.
After a one-hour rest for food and fuel, the travelers and their cargo flew two more hours to Rhein-Main, south of Frankfurt, the airfield from which the Hindenburg and other German Zeppelins had flown to and from the United States. The C-54 touched down in a violent morning electric storm during which the plane was hit by lightning. Water started leaking into the cockpit and the entire instrument panel failed. There were two dozen planes on approach and radar was intermittent because of the heavy rain. From the cockpit, visibility was zero and so was the ceiling. Radio chatter was edgy and borderline frantic as several aircraft were below three thousand feet, all converging on the same approach. All talk in the Flying Fortress ceased. Neither the pilot, USAF Captain Brian Beatty, nor the co-pilot could see the runway until the C-54’s wheels bounced on it.
There the recruited pilots were subdivided into specific assignments. Not surprisingly, Tommy was the only female in her final group. Her next stop would be Fassberg, an old Luftwaffe base in lower Saxony, now in the British Zone, that the RAF had now pressed into service.
Fassberg had its own history. An airfield was secretly established there in 1934 by Hermann Göring and camouflaged. Since Germany was not allowed to possess an air force under the rules of the Treaty of Versailles, the airfield – in the middle of a forest - was kept secret. During the World War, the Luftwaffe used the field to fly and hide Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts.
In April 1945, the airfield was overrun by the British Army and subsequently used by the Royal Air Force. Because of a shortage of British personnel able to fly both C-47s and C-54s, a few American pilots were also flying British planes in and out of Germany.
Three new pilots were bound for Fassberg, at least to start their tour: Tommy Olson, Glenn Taylor, and Victor Marino. The trio bonded quickly, Olson and Taylor in particular. They arrived late on June sixth and took shifts the next morning, flying either as pilots or copilots.
Taylor drew the assignment of flying with Olson. The first time he saw a female headed toward the cockpit with him, he was skeptical. “So? How does a lady know how to fly?” he asked as they buckled in.
“I learned on airplanes,” she said. “How about you?”
“Which ones? Pipers? Crop dusters?”
“Let’s get this out of the way fast, Mr. Taylor. I flew air transport during the war. C-47s and C-54s. B-17s, B-26s and B-29s. I flew in heavy weather and I flew in God’s bright sunshine. I ferried new planes long distances from factories to military bases and departure points across the country. I tested newly overhauled planes and I towed targets over Oklahoma, Texas and Utah to give halfwit ground and air gunners training shooting. That’s with live ammunition, amigo, sometimes launched into the sky by dumb privates who couldn’t hit the ocean from the end of a pier. So when you ask me what I can fly, Mr. Taylor, hell! There’s nothing I can’t fly! Got it?”
After a moment, Taylor’s expression changed, as did his skepticism.
“Yeah. Got it,” he said. “Let’s go up!”
Sometimes the working distinction between pilot and co-pilot was vague, particularly while in the air. It was evident to all three new arrivals that the situation was hard-pressed and understaffed. There was a single mess hall at Fassberg and it ran twenty-four hours a day, staffed by German workers and “DPs,” displaced persons from the war. There were about eight million of them in the wreckage of the world war. The DP’s who worked at Fassberg and Tempelhof wore gritty old U.S. Army overalls that had been died black. The DPs had bonded into their own subgroups by language – Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and German. Crews were flying three and four shifts a day, shuttling supplies to French, British, and American military bases in the occupied zones, barely spending a half-hour in Berlin before it was time to bring a plane back.
It was common to see an aviator come into the mess hall and fall asleep over his food. Tommy noticed two other women in the larger group that was already on duty. They, too, were ATC veterans and looked tired and haggard.
Olson, Taylor, and Marino all held junior officers’ rank. They ate together and shared notes on their flights, not the least of which were warnings about Yaks.
“The Yaks are killers. Dumbass commie cowboys in the sky,” said an American major named Elmer Haley, a U.S. Army man, who broke into their conversation. “Reckless! Stay as clear of them as you can. We already had fatalities in April when one of those Russian em-effs nicked the wing of a Limey comm
ercial flight, a Viking, on approach to Gatow.”
“I heard about that,” Lt. Glenn Taylor said.
The major also had other stories to tell. Three weeks earlier, three Americans had died when a C-47 flew off course into a mountainside in heavy fog in the Soviet Zone. The United States was still trying to get the bodies back as well as the wreckage. The Soviets were being their usual uncooperative selves. Rumor had it that the C-47 had been harassed by a Yak, same as the Viking in April.
Further rumor had it that one of the dead Americans was a German-born civilian who had been in the employ of the CIA. Had Soviet intelligence known who was in the aircraft? The question remained unanswered.
“How the hell long can this go on?” Tommy Olson asked.
“Not long at all,” Major Haley said. “Look guys, I know you just flew in, but do the goddamn math. This can’t succeed. It’s just a bargaining chip. Doomed to failure. A publicity stunt designed to keep the newspapers and the politicians happy. It’ll all be over in a month, and you can go home.”
“I enlisted for six months, minimum,” Marino said.
“Me too,” Glenn Taylor said
“I committed for a year,” Tommy Olson said.
The major laughed. “You’ve all been snookered. Shame on you all,” he said. “Should have stayed home, the bunch of you. Washington will sell us out. You’ll be here when everyone else is gone and you’ll be learning to speak Russian.”
Major Haley eyed the pilots from one to the next. “Who recruited you gullible kiddies? A guy named ‘Forsythe’?” he asked. “Said he worked for the US Air Force?”
Taylor, Marino, and Olson admitted that had been the case.
“Yeah, right,” said Major Haley. “Listen up, there isn’t any son of a bitch named Forsythe. You might as well be flying for Air Easter Bunny. The USAF might be signing your pay stub, but you’re working for some kind of spook operation out of northern Virginia. Get it?”