by Giles Foden
During the Depression Krick sold pianos and worked as a jobbing concert pianist for the NBC Orchestra. He was also a radio disc jockey for a while. Eventually he found his way back to university, studying meteorology under Theodore von Kármán and Robert Millikan at Caltech in Los Angeles. It was uncanny to hear about these giants of meteorology in a Glasgow hotel – stranger still to do so with a glass of whisky in one hand and a busted flush in the other.
As the talk flowed, I drank more and more. I won a couple of pots. So did Krick, leaning his big face forward as he collected. The other Americans won one apiece. As the cards were dealt and shuffled and stacked, the smoke from our cigarettes and cigars swirled up the oak panelling, with its pictures of sporting scenes and moody Highland cattle. How well I would come to know their glowering stares.
Krick told more anecdotes as we played. ‘Goering tried to lure back von Kármán to Europe to head up the Luftwaffe’s weather forecasting,’ he said. ‘Von Kármán refused, simply sending Goering a drawing of his Jewish profile.’ We all laughed. It was a meteorologists’ joke, a ‘profile’ being a technical term in weather forecasting.
As Krick talked I slowly began to realise the anecdotes were diversion tactics. The tales were intended to distract his opponents from their game – and it was working. All the time he was recounting his experiences, or expounding pet theories, he was taking money off us.
The diverting stories continued. The duo had met at Caltech. Then Krick had joined an airline, as had Holzman, who became chief meteorologist for American Airlines. They began swapping tales about the aviation industry.
‘I used to get in trouble in that first job,’ Krick drawled, showing another hand. A pair of deuces – plus another pair of deuces. Four of a kind against my full house, and there he was scooping up our money again. ‘They hadn’t heard of weather fronts then, and hated me drawing them on the charts. But obviously it was more useful for the pilots. Then they could see where the action was coming from. Predictable as a corny movie.’
‘Irv worked in Hollywood,’ chipped in Holzman. ‘He was weather prophet for Gone with the Wind.’
Krick grinned as he added our money to his stack. ‘I picked the night they burnt Atlanta. It had to be a clear one.’
‘Another time, he advised Bogart on the weather for the Ensenada yacht race,’ said Holzman.
‘I flubbed that. Bogie never got to Mexico. He stayed in US waters. A dead calm.’
Holzman laughed. ‘Will you go back to it, Irv, when the war’s over?’
‘I doubt it. I was forecasting for the citrus industry before I got called up. Reckon I’ll get back into it. That’s where the money is.’
‘Commercial forecasting,’ nodded Holzman.
‘Transporting airplanes is another good one,’ added Krick. ‘Forty planes going from A to B, you don’t wanna get that wrong. One of my first duties in the air force in this war was to pick the days when our guys could fly safely across the Atlantic.’
‘Days with minimum turbulence?’ I asked.
‘Oh no,’ said Krick. ‘Pick those days and our friends in the Luftwaffe would be waiting. It was more a case of just enough turbulence.’ He produced a cigar from under the table and, as prelude to another tale, blew a near-perfect smoke ring over my head …
It has always struck me as fate that I met those two at the beginning of my working life. From my Cambridge ivory tower I have followed their careers with interest since the war, now and then bumping into one or other of them on trips to America. They became sort of alter egos for me, standing for all the possibilities I shut off when I chose withdrawal into academic life.
Later in the war Holzman would work on the weather forecast for the atom bomb at Los Alamos. He stayed in the US Air Force for all of his career, becoming a general and commander of the USAF Research Laboratory. He was involved in virtually every major phase of research into missile and space systems, all through the Cold War. His security clearance was cosmic, so I didn’t get to see him much.
Krick, as he indicated during that poker session, would pretty much found the new industry of selling the weather. Cotton growers wanting to know what the harvest will be like. The Edison Company having difficulties with storms knocking out power lines. The California Division of Highways worrying about snow in the mountains. The Brooklyn Dodgers wanting advice on whether they should buy rain insurance for an important game. Loggers, fruit growers, the managers of hydroelectric schemes …
Krick pursued all this and more. He was weather forecaster for the 1960 Winter Olympics and, the following year, for the inauguration of President Kennedy. But his biggest thing was cloud-seeding, which involved modifying weather by dispersing chemicals, usually silver iodide, or dry ice, into clouds to induce precipitation.
Krick got into this still-controversial practice in a major way, selling thousands of ground-based generators to farmers all over the US. These machines, rocketing crystals into the reluctant sky, were all controlled by radio from a complex in Palm Springs, California, where Krick himself still lives in a Moorish-style mansion in the shadow of Mount San Jacinto.
I went to visit him there once – the place had marble floors – and he was extremely hospitable, serving up frozen margaritas. But to the US Weather Bureau he became a kind of bête noire. There were accusations of quackery and exploitation. He was always very charming to me, and I never brought up something which troubled my colleagues: that he may have been the source of the rumours, still current to this day in the US, that the British teams ‘failed’ in their predictions for Overlord – and that D-Day was saved by Krick himself. He even maintained, somewhat astonishingly, that it would have been better to have gone a day earlier after all. I let it pass.
This was the extravagant future which lay ahead of my poker opponents. I drank far more than I should have done and lost more money than I could afford. Some time in the early hours I staggered up to bed, wallet half emptied, shoelaces trailing, mounting unsteadily a staircase, the steps of which seemed to have been frustratingly rearranged, before losing myself in a warren of interconnecting, treacherously carpeted corridors and the hiding-places of mops and buckets and boiler-room pipes. I suppose I must have booked a room in the course of that long afternoon which had stretched into evening, and eventually found my way to it, but I can’t remember doing either.
3
With sheets and blankets bound ingeniously about me, competing with half-removed clothing, I woke in a vortex of nausea and remorse – the customary bedfellows of a hangover. Very quickly these old friends were trussed up themselves, tied down by an overwhelming feeling of guilt, that still older friend. How stupid to have squandered some brain cells on whisky and cards, especially when I had a further journey to make, and such important work to do. What would Sir Peter Vaward have thought of such behaviour?
I ran a bath, and as I languished in the water I recalled my first meeting with him at Adastral House on the corner of Kingsway and Aldwych in London. Having been summoned from Kew by telegram, I’d climbed the stairs to the third floor, where I was met by Miss Clements, at that time a young secretary in a cashmere jumper. Standing before the door’s tall, grand panel, I waited some time in the ‘vestibule’, as she called it, smiling sweetly. In life’s troubled mirror I try to conjure her back – before the approaching night, before the threshold, before time wrapped itself round her throat.
As it was, she left me outside Sir Peter’s office. On the wall there was a large oil painting of Admiral FitzRoy, Darwin’s captain on the Beagle and the original director of the Met Office. He suffered from depression and committed suicide with a razor in his washroom. I want to see her again, that pretty girl, but all that comes back is that damned painting.
I had no idea why I was there. The summons had come the previous day. A Motorcycle Corps messenger had roared into the gardens at Kew, where I was preparing to send up a glob. I was handed a flimsy blue envelope marked PRIORITY. Inside was an order to be at Adastral
House by 3 p.m. the next day.
Coming in to London proper, I was struck as always by the sight of the barrage balloons over the city: silver-coloured and sixty feet long, they floated about 2,000 feet above the ground, to which they were tethered by steel cables. There were also sandbags everywhere, and corrugated-iron Anderson shelters.
Sir Peter shook my hand. He had a long white face with a prominent upper lip that seemed to be missing a moustache. A watch-chain gleamed on his waistcoat, catching the light of a fire that flickered effortfully under a marble mantlepiece. The grate was piled with nutty slack, a brownish, fine-grained variety of coal prized for its slow-burning qualities. It has been forgotten now, like so many things, but it was just what it was called: slack (coal dust) with nuts of coal spread amongst it.
My glance came back to Sir Peter. All in all, he was what my mother would have called ‘a tidy man’, but cadaverously pale – as if subject every night to some vampire-like extraction of blood.
In my lukewarm bath I watched the tap drip as his physiognomy and words reformed in my mind. ‘Welcome, Meadows,’ he said. ‘Glad you could come at such short notice.’
Via an intercom, he instructed Miss Clements not to disturb us as I sat down, opposite him at his desk. There was a loud bong! The room was filled with antique clocks and as the hour turned they all started sounding, slightly out of synchronisation.
Once the noise had subsided, Vaward spoke. ‘You are probably wondering why I asked you here.’ A tall clock with a man-in-the-moon face gave a valedictory plink. He paused, studying me carefully. ‘Before we begin, I must ask you to sign this.’
He slid a sheet of paper across the desk. It was stamped SECRET in red letters and it began ‘I, ___ ___, hereby declare …’
This was something new. My job thus far in the war had been to send balloons carrying small radio transmitters – radiosondes, or ‘globs’, as we called them – into the upper air to measure pressure, temperature and humidity. They were used to forecast the weather. Weather as a set of changing conditions. Weather as a transitional state of affairs. Weather as how things were – are – will be. Weather as a source of information.
But the information is perishable, lasting no longer than the structure to which it refers, just as the bathwater I was sitting in as I recalled all this would no longer be my bathwater once it ran down the plughole. But perhaps that is the wrong way to think about water, anyway.
I often had to put up these balloons in thunderstorms, sweating in uncomfortable oilskins. I also worked on something called the Free Balloon Barrage, which was more exciting. It involved sending up small hydrogen-filled balloons trailing wires with small bombs on the end. The idea was that these devices, floating at about 20,000 feet, would create a sort of aerial minefield for unwary German bombers. There was no indication enemy aircraft ever did collide with any element of the barrage, although what was assumed to be evasive action by German pilots was observed on a couple of occasions, so perhaps we gave them the odd scare.
Apart from that work, I acted as a pure scientist, so whatever it was Sir Peter had in mind unnerved me.
‘I assume you have no objections to signing the Official Secrets Act,’ he said as I studied the document before me. ‘It is merely a formality before we get down to business.’
My stomach jittered. ‘Have I done something wrong at Kew, sir?’ I asked.
‘Not at all. In fact, that’s one of the matters I wanted to raise with you. We are breaking up the Kew team. Some will go to a special forecasting unit at Bushey Park, henceforth to have overall control of developments on the continent. Others will be sent to the chemical warfare station at Porton Down on Salisbury Plain. The rest will be distributed about the services as we see fit.’
I found myself signing the paper as he spoke. I didn’t want to go to Porton.
‘Many civilian Met Office staffers will be mobilised into the RAF – so you will see a lot more blue uniforms about the place.’
‘What about Dr Stagg?’ I asked, thinking of my superintendent at Kew.
‘His knowledge and experience will be used to direct a forecasting issue of acute national importance,’ Sir Peter replied smoothly, leaving me none the wiser.
‘And the readings?’ It was also part of my job to tend to the vast bank of meters, dials and other equipment under the Kew observatory’s dome.
‘A skeleton staff,’ said Sir Peter, gruffly. ‘Enough. Be it accepted that for you I have other plans. They involve a stay at Kilmun, in Argyll.’
‘Is there a weather station there?’
Sir Peter laughed. ‘You could call him that. You will set up your own operation as a blind, but be attached to a Met station nearby.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m not sure I quite understand.’
‘Listen, Meadows. Before I tell you any more I should point out that, if you accept this position, it will mean promotion to TO. It seems to me that you are not best employed at Kew. You won the Sheepshanks Prize at Cambridge, for goodness’ sake.’ He lit a cigarette, fixing me with his eyes over the flame. ‘You’re not a conchie, are you?’
‘Absolutely not, sir,’ I protested.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘There are many ways a man can help his country. What I am about to propose is not dangerous. It does, however, require a certain cunning, and a nose for snooping around. It is most definitely scientific work, if of a surreptitious nature.’
He waited, as if expecting me to say something in response. I said nothing.
‘We want you to set up an outstation from Dunoon at Kilmun, on the banks of the Holy Loch. It’s not entirely a cover; the Royal Navy have made a submarine base in the loch and we run a weather station in Dunoon itself for them, attached to HMS Osprey.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And that’s my job?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Sir Peter, leaning back in his chair. ‘Have you heard of Wallace Ryman?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The originator of numerical weather forecasting.’ As well as being one of the foremost theorists of turbulence, Ryman had invented a system of weather forecasting based on mathematics.
Sir Peter looked at me, as if expecting me to continue.
‘The Ryman method involves describing every weather situation in figures and making a mathematically informed estimate of how it could develop,’ I said. ‘He divides the atmosphere into three-dimensional “parcels” of air and assigns numerical values to each aspect of the weather within them. Then he uses maths to see where things may go.’
The Met Office director interrupted me. ‘But it doesn’t work. Ryman himself got it wrong. He tried out the scheme during the first war and it went awry.’
‘So I understand. But the impossibility was in the computation, sir. The theory itself is sound. In principle, this kind of prediction is possible.’
‘Maybe so. I hope it is, for our sake. Anything else?’
‘Someone told me Ryman used to work for the Met Office, but he protested when it was taken over by the Air Ministry. I don’t know why.’
‘He’s a Quaker,’ said Sir Peter, with barely concealed disdain. ‘His conscientious objections led to him leaving the Met Office in the 1920s. He was always a difficult man …’
Sir Peter stopped, as if suddenly aware of having said too much. He reached out a bony hand for the paper I had signed, folded it once and placed it in a drawer of his desk, turning a key on it before speaking again.
‘The truth is, Meadows, he’s not an easy man but he is a brilliant one, and the British meteorological community has felt the lack of him keenly. Now we come to the nub of the thing. Are you acquainted with the so-called Ryman number?’
I was coming to the limit of my knowledge. ‘Only in the most basic sense, sir,’ I admitted. ‘It explains the dynamic relationship between the two types of energy, kinetic and potential, that change weather.’
Sir Peter nodded. He did not seem surprised. ‘No one has got much beyond the basics. That is what I am
sending you to Scotland for. Though I once used some of his work, I myself know only a little about this side of things.’
‘Why do you need to …? If I may ask …?’
‘The Ryman number is of enormous significance because it defines the amount of turbulence in a given situation. Of the few that know about it at all, no one but him knows exactly how to implement it … it changes in different contexts, as you might expect. The government wants to use this number for a particular operation. Airborne and amphibious and enormous in scale. The long-expected invasion across the Channel into mainland Europe. We think Ryman himself is the only man alive who really understands how a range of values of his number might be practically applied – around a specific geographical area and over a particular time window – but he has not responded to my letters.’
‘What about the Germans?’
‘They have convened a special group of forecasters whose task is to predict the date of the Allied invasion. It is led by Professor Ludwig Weickmann and includes men such as Baur and Wagemann, of whom you will have heard in the course of your academic studies. And Prandtl is somewhere there in the background, too. They have certainly heard of Ryman, we know this from citations in scientific papers.’
He paused, looking at me with pellucid eyes. ‘So it’s important we ourselves understand his number properly before preparing the meteorology. We cannot, in this issue, rely on providence. Dr Stagg has been selected to lead the forecast team for the invasion. If you play your cards right …’
He watched me, gauging my reaction. I remember I tried to keep my features impassive, waiting for him to speak again, but he did not elaborate.
‘Well … we believe Ryman has been working on his coherent programme in secret, applying his number to other lines of research. Now it’s all very well to have free thinkers in the scientific community, but in wartime nothing that might bring about victory should be kept a secret from the government.’