by Giles Foden
‘Well, that’s why I’m here,’ I said. ‘I mean, at your door. I’m a follower of his weather work.’
‘Really? But he gave all that up ages ago. He concentrates on his peace studies now.’
Peace studies. How strange that sounded in wartime. A blasphemy. For a moment I was lost for anything to say. I didn’t want to arouse suspicion.
‘All the same,’ I said eventually, ‘I am very interested in his mathematics.’
‘I can’t promise he will see you, but do come in.’
I stepped towards the front door again.
‘Oh, we don’t use that one,’ she said. ‘This way.’
I followed her round to the back. I found myself gazing at her well-covered form. She had a roundness across the hips; otherwise she was bony, all knees and elbows and shoulders. Behind the house, stretching up a hillside towards the low stone building and Mackellar’s, were vegetable gardens in which I noticed a tall labourer digging.
‘That’s the cot-house up there,’ she said, gesturing at the old stone building as she opened the back door. Cot-house. Mackellar had used the same odd term, which I later learned was just an old word for a dwelling on agricultural land. The little black Highland cattle I’d seen earlier had moved closer to the stone structure. Now they were gathering round it, angling down their malevolent-looking horns as if they might lift it from its ancient foundations.
‘Those are our gardens in between.’ My gaze drew back down nearer, to the old man, digging.
‘Parsnips,’ added Mrs Ryman by way of explanation as I followed her into the hall. Directly, something hit me on the head.
‘Sorry. Should have warned you. That’s my husband’s special heating system. It hangs from cables. Don’t ask me how it works.’
A series of pipes, supported by wires, ran down the centre of the hallway. The whole place smelt strongly of steam and chemicals. I followed her through into a large country kitchen.
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please.’ The kitchen was rather spartan. ‘Excuse me, but – is your husband here?’
‘He’s always here,’ she said. ‘That was him, digging in the garden.’
‘That was Professor Ryman?’ I was amazed.
‘Yes. He does most of the heavy digging. Though we get Mackellar to scythe the grass. I hope he was pleasant to you on the way up from Blairmore. It’s a pain, our own pier being out of action; usually you would have been able to walk.’
‘Mackellar? Pleasant enough.’
‘He can be a little surly. And as for his wife …’ I was surprised she was so candid.
The kettle whistled loudly. She turned her attention to making the tea – not a pot, just a mug with a steel diffuser in it – then vanished into an adjoining room.
She returned with a bowl of broad beans. ‘Hungry? Go on, try them. They’re delicious.’
I took a couple of beans. They had been boiled and sprinkled with salt and were surprisingly good.
‘We don’t keep sugar in the house, I’m afraid. Or biscuits. Wallace says there is as much glucose in a broad bean as in a spoonful of sugar.’
I wondered if that was true. It sounded as if it might be, though with so little sugar available at this stage of the war it would have been hard to verify the issue.
‘There now,’ she added, handing me the mug of tea. ‘You drink that up and I’ll ask if he will see you.’ She went out into the garden.
I sipped my tea, which was a bit too strong, then peeped into the drawing room. The walls were whitewashed, and it was plainly furnished with antique black-oak furniture. Sideboards and dressers and the like: the sort of thing people inherit – though I had received nothing like that. It all stayed in Africa.
There were also two threadbare armchairs in the Rymans’ drawing room, and a chaise-longue upholstered in pink satin – a rare hint of luxury. The overwhelming impression was one of self-denial, although in one corner of the room there stood a large rocking horse. There were indentations in the wall opposite its head and ears, clearly made by too-enthusiastic usage.
Apart from the chaise-longue and the rocking horse, the only other softening touch was a piece of embroidery in a wooden frame behind glass. It was the kind of fancy lacework you might see displayed in Madeira or Nantes, or even in Nottingham long ago. I realised it was a child’s christening gown.
‘I’m afraid my husband cannot see you now,’ said Mrs Ryman from behind me. She had returned from the garden without my noticing. There was a little chill in her voice. We both looked at the gown for a moment and she gave a blink. ‘He has some calculations to do once he has finished digging. He doesn’t like unexpected visitors.’ She expelled air from between her lips. ‘Unexpected anything, really.’
In light of this rebuttal I recalculated my own options, trying at the same time to cover my annoyance. ‘Oh. What a shame. Another time, perhaps?’
‘Sunday lunch,’ she said. ‘Do come. The minister will be there.’
I shook her hand, and then she said, with a curious smile, ‘I look forward to it.’
7
The Met Office had been busy in Mackellar’s cot-house. As I approached the building I noticed a green motorcycle leaning against the wall by the door, its handle pressing against lichen on the stone. Inside I found my suitcase, a desk, and about five torpedo-like hydrogen cylinders. There were also a large number of labelled wooden crates, some drums of caustic soda and several new cable points. Electricity had been run up from the road on wooden poles. A stove and sink stood in one corner; in another a door opened to a small bathroom with a red-tiled floor.
On the desk was a letter from Gordon Whybrow, my immediate notional superior at the main station in Dunoon. Typewritten in a distinctive font, it listed the materials that had been delivered. The note also detailed the charting and plotting that would be required of me. It added that the motorcycle outside was for my own use as I had a balloon schedule involving releases in some quite remote locations.
Having read it, I felt a bit glum. It was all very well Sir Peter giving me a cover under which to spy on Ryman, but the cover itself would mean quite hard work. How was I going to manage it all? Still, there were compensations. I had never been on a motorcycle before.
So the first thing I did was I tuck my trousers into my socks and go back outside to try it. I fell off a few times, skidding about the field and frightening the cattle, but it was tremendous fun. I’d more or less got the hang of it after an hour. Spattered with mud, I went back in to inspect the crates.
I read some of the labels: EDDYSTONE RADIOSONDE, ROTATABLE ADCOCK AERIAL SYSTEM, RADIO TRANSCEIVER … There was also a teleprinter for contacting the main station at Dunoon, plus an AO, an oscillator device for comparing the radiosonde transmissions against a known frequency.
I picked up a hydrogen cylinder and shook it. It was empty, which explained the drums of caustic soda. From these and other ingredients, I was to make my own hydrogen. I had never made it before, but I knew this was common practice on substations, unlike at Kew. It would have been impracticable to deliver pressurised ready-filled cylinders to observers in rural locations.
Realising the unpacking was going to be a big job, I walked down to the village shop to buy some bread, cheese and pickle and other provisions, then set to work on my return. It would take me the rest of the day to sort it all. I began splitting open the crates with a crowbar – labelled CROWBAR, in inimitable Met Office style – and I finished around midnight. The floor was covered with splinters of wood; they looked like arrows and spears left over from some terrible colonial massacre.
That night, as I lay in the darkness, with the cattle coughing around me in the field and bits of slate dust falling on my face from the roof when the wind blew, I actually found myself looking forward to plotting some charts. Brain work rather than brawn work. But, having unpacked the equipment, I still had to prepare it.
The next morning, after doing my ablutions, I went up to Mackellar’s far
m to scrounge some milk. The gruff old farmer – pipe sticking out of his mouth even at that early hour – gave of it freely, taking me to the dairy and dipping a steel jug into a bucket.
‘You keep that jug and come here in the mornings, do the same thing yersel’. Never you mind if my wife comes bawling. Tell her you have the permission.’
‘Righto,’ I said cheerfully, and made my way back down the grassy hill, carefully holding the milk-slopping jug in front of me with both hands.
I had some breakfast, then began testing the audio oscillator. The regular sounds it produced were compared with the altering transmissions from the radiosondes that hung beneath each balloon, which I could pick up on the high-frequency radio set. The signals varied in pitch according to the height of the balloon, thus enabling me to get a fix on its position as it recorded meteorological phenomena.
The oscillator was quite loud – it made a series of pips – and could be heard outside, even though it was standing on the desk in the cot-house. It soon attracted the attention of the cows in the field. They gathered round the building in a circle, which made me vaguely uneasy. The sight of them provoked a memory.
As a young man I once helped round up cattle on a farm somewhere on the earth road between Blantyre and Zomba, where one of my father’s friends had tried his hand at dairy. Those animals, feeding on yellow grass amid clusters of native huts, were a cross between Friesians and African zebu and they were pretty lively. These Scottish beasts, spikily horned, impishly black, seemed far less tractable. They regarded me moodily, with a certainty of interspecies difference that reminded me of the way baboons would face up to lions. Where was Vickers when I needed him, to give them a nip?
By the end of my first full day in the cot-house I had got the HF set playing big-band music from the Home Service and the teleprinter, switched into receive mode, churning out observations and forecasts. Combined with other readings from the local area, my own information would be telexed from Dunoon to Met Office operational headquarters and fed into the general weather picture. This, in turn, would be the basis of briefings to the Allied forces all over the world.
The teleprinter made a chuh-chuh noise as its keys hit the paper, which jerked out off the roll and snaked to the floor. It was heartening to think of all those Met observers and Waafs and Wrens punching in their messages. The meteorological realm presided over by Sir Peter Vaward was very well organised. It had to be. Consider just for a moment how the constant changeability of the weather had to be gauged, now and in the future, against a background of the chaos and upheaval of war.
But having global weather information is one thing; using it is quite another. If your measurement is even slightly wrong – as we now know it always will be – there’s a danger of the data degrading very rapidly. There’s also a more basic problem of measurements (which are mental artefacts) being taken on certain sizes of eddies (which are physical artefacts) and not others. There are always scales and dimensions that are being ignored. And this is dangerous because the whole point is that all these sizes of turbulence are interconnected; they are both separate and continuous, feeding energy from large to small then back again.
Each scale must be viewed as information that contributes to understanding the likely pattern of the whole; and they don’t last long anyway, these eddies, even when you do spot them. New information, yes, but now it’s changing, now it’s gone – and what have you understood?
Ryman’s method did not solve the missing dimensions problem but it went closer to doing so than anything done before. But the Ryman number was clearly not something one could tick off on one’s fingers. So although it was frustrating to have to wait a week before I could see him, I was grateful for an interval in which to marshal my thoughts and try out his techniques as best I could, using Channel weather as a proving ground.
I spent the second night in the cot-house, as I would many over the forthcoming four months, doing calculations – sometimes in my head, sometimes with a wooden slide-rule, notched and ink-stained, which I still possess. Squeezing precision out of continuous domains in a mustering tumult of differential calculus – such was my life in that strange time.
Lying on the bed doing calculus. Sitting on the crapper doing calculus. Shaving doing calculus. Doing calculus while listening to the radio, hearing what was going on in the war or, for preference, some classical music. Doing calculus while eating. Doing calculus while squeezing the toothpaste tube.
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. I am sure I even did it while I was sleeping. Sometimes that can happen. You can go to bed with a problem in your head and wake up with it solved.
But not this problem: how to supply, on the strategic scale and with enough lead time, a safe weather forecast that would allow thousands of men to land by sea and air on a stretch of the French coast on a single day at the optimum time.
8
Early on my third day I set off on the motorcycle to Dunoon, in order to report to Whybrow, my notional superior there. I had left it rather late, telling myself the important thing was to ready myself for the encounter with Ryman. Presumably Sir Peter had given Whybrow some indication that I was also doing work other than local observations.
Feeling the wind-chill on my face and hands, I rode alongside the water, past the row of large loch-front houses which constituted Kilmun itself, passing an old church with a tower in its graveyard. I then turned left under bumpy green hills, travelling for several miles (and at one point falling off) until I reached Dunoon.
It was a busy place. As well as local residents there were an awful lot of people in one sort or uniform or another. Colonial troops and Americans as well as British servicemen. On asking where I might find HMS Osprey, where Sir Peter had said Whybrow was based, I found it to be one of the shore-based establishments – in this case a former convalescent home – which the navy insists on calling a ship. The floor is referred to as the deck, right starboard and left port. Even to leave by the front door is to take a liberty boat.
As I arrived, a flag-raising ceremony was taking place outside the building, complete with buglers and ratings in blue and white uniforms. The event was unpopular with the townsfolk as it brought the main road to a standstill.
We stood waiting and watching, our way barred by sentries with rifles. At the crucial moment, much to the amusement of civilian onlookers, an old fellow in a blue jersey, who was selling fish and oysters from a wheelbarrow, shouted out ‘Loch Eck herrings, fresh Loch Eck herrings!’
Once the performance was over, it turned out my wait had been for nothing, as on gaining entrance I learned that the Met station at Dunoon was actually inland rather than on Osprey itself. Yet even this second site was still conceived as part of the ‘ship’.
I remounted my motorbike and eventually found, on the outskirts of the town, a group of Nissen huts dotted around an old white-painted farmhouse. There was a cookhouse and a washhouse and a hydrogen shed (formerly a grain barn), some dormitories and not much else. The conditions were quite primitive. There was mud everywhere. The sight of it made me shudder.
Gordon Whybrow was bald and short-sighted, with a pair of thick-lensed spectacles balanced on the end of his long, thin nose. I first found him in the Ops Room, as the farmhouse drawing room had been rechristened. He was wearing RAF uniform, like all Met staff who have been conscripted, even if they’re actually working in another branch of the services, as he was on Osprey. I was still a civilian employee at this stage.
Bent over a desk bearing the large typewriter on which, I presumed, his letter to me had been written, he was studying another machine, or part of it. I recognised it as the switching mechanism on a new type of radiosonde.
Three inflated red balloons bumped on the ceiling of the room, their strings draping over Whybrow as he peered at the device. Behind him, on a large board on the wall, a Waaf was plotting combined readings. A slight brunette, she was reaching up for strings – held in place by brass ‘mice’ – which showed the directional
lines of balloons released from different stations.
Little red flags marked the positions of weather ships in the Atlantic, the Channel and the North Sea, while lines of green flags marked the tracks of the met recs, the meteorological reconnaissance flights which took off from airfields all over Britain each morning.
Another Waaf, plumpish with short fair hair, was kneeling on the floor, reading data to her colleague as the teleprinter roll spilled down. Her chubby face was dotted with freckles. She was the only person in the room to notice my entrance, smiling pleasantly and brushing a hand against her skirt as if doing so would compensate for the awkwardness of kneeling.
‘You have to set the switch sequence before you put on the windmill,’ I said to Whybrow’s bald head. He looked up with a face full of surprise, swiftly followed by irritation, whether at my remark, which I suppose was a bit know-it-all, or simply my arrival I could not tell.
‘Henry Meadows. The director probably mentioned …’
‘Ah,’ said Whybrow, straightening. ‘There you are at last. Our man of mystery. I noticed you had hooked up the teleprinter yesterday. Why has it taken you so long to report in?’ He seemed to speak through his long nose.
‘I wanted to get myself established first,’ I replied. ‘Seeing as the equipment was all there … And as I’m sure you know, Sir Peter has given me some other duties, too.’
He blinked through the spectacles. ‘Other duties, eh? How about that? Yes, the director did say you had a special project you were working on for him.’ He turned to the two Waafs. ‘A special project. How about that, girls?’
‘Allow me to introduce Gwen Liss and Joan Lamb,’ said Whybrow, pointing at each in turn. ‘I say, he should have come here first of all, shouldn’t he, girls?’
I ignored him. One of the women giggled. It was Gwen, the thin brown-haired one, whose cheeks were rather drawn in. This gave her a look of passionate austerity. Joan, meanwhile, was fair and broad, Germanic or Scandinavian in appearance if one had to put a label on it, but with dark eyes. With her blonde hair and freckles, the combination was also rather striking.