Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  As quickly deflated as I had become elated, I slunk off and found the motorcycle where I had parked it by the Pavilion the previous night. Riding up Argyll Street, past FH Carey the tobacconist, Abel the chemist, Muirhead the grocer, and then the NAAFI run by the local scout troop, I wondered if I was ever going to distinguish myself. Mathematics? The Sheepshanks Prize felt a long way away. I certainly wasn’t excelling as an amateur spy, and now my efforts as a spotter of submarines had been dashed.

  Maybe, I reflected as I chugged under the hills between Dunoon and Kilmun, I would have to become a tobacconist, chemist or grocer. Or even a Scoutmaster.

  I passed Kilmun church. What about a priest? I could give up all idea of sexual conquest and become a priest. A monk like my teachers at Douai. But I could hardly remember my Hail Mary in those days.

  In the course of the ride home, as my hangover returned with a vengeance, the Virgin merged – across an imperceptible mental boundary – with that other Mary, she under whose statue I’d had my appointment with Messrs Whyte & Mackay.

  That was a long time ago. But I can still remember that hangover coming back, borne like Satan on the clouds of my pipe smoke. It was painful. It was superfluous. It piled Pelion on Ossa. It was nasty – like a sneak thief returning to steal something that had belonged to him in the first place, left by accident at a premises he has already burgled. Yes, it was a supreme hangover, as only a spirits hangover can be.

  The remainder of the month passed in a similar alcoholic fug. Alcohol and nicotine, too. My household gods. I remember looking at a piled-up ashtray of cigarette ends and bottle tops and thinking what a salad of despair it was.

  March

  1

  According to my diary, I worked begrudgingly on local upper-air forecasts for Whybrow, my calculations punctuated by meals and the thump of logs coming down the chute. I wrote that this noise reminded me of the sound the African villagers’ pestles made in the mortars in which they ground their maize, which first had to be laid out and dried on straw mats in the sun, each kernel having been picked off the cob by hand.

  The foresters worked hard, too. Sometimes I’d see them passing to and fro, carrying tools or provisions for their camp. I myself ate well in Kilmun (much better than I had in London). With scones or porridge for breakfast next to my tea, corned beef sandwiches for lunch and mutton or herring or haggis for supper, it was as if the whole providence of Scotland was in my mouth. Now and then I grilled a lamb chop, and there was always fresh mackerel from the loch to be had. Ryman sometimes left vegetables from his garden on my doorstep.

  But despite all these kindnesses I felt beached, becalmed. The only respite came from my beginning to study, in what would soon seem in retrospect a very amateur way, the weather patterns that would relate to an invasion across the Channel. It made me realise again how tough the challenge was going to be, with or without the help of the Ryman number.

  One Saturday, in search of entertainment, I went with Mackellar to Dunoon, where there was a race meeting and fair. He had his dog in tow, I my equations – and my frailties, for I’m embarrassed to say I got blotto again in the course of this expedition. But some things still stand like cromlechs in the memory through the haze of whisky and beer. Mackellar writing out his bets with a licky old stub of pencil. The trainers with their trilbies and medal-like passes. The jockeys’ coloured silks fluttering in the wind. Little men carrying big saddles out of the weighing room, leading their mounts into the parade ring, their hard human faces contrasting with the beauty of the horses’.

  Round the edges of the racecourse, excited children capered through the inexhaustible fair, sucking on ice-cream cones, chewing on liquorice, jumping on the merry-go-round – I remember it was painted in uncontrollable swirls of gold and yellow – and pelting small wooden balls at a coconut shy. Soldiers with roll-up cigarettes in their mouths were walking their tottering sweethearts into tunnels of love or showing off on test-your-strength machines, lifting up the heavy rubber mallet to send a projectile up a column – at the top of which a bell sounded, if reached.

  Ignoring the bustle around them, a pair of pipers played, the distinctive mournfulness of their appalling noise – it was like a cat being hit with a poker – quite at odds with the chaotic jollity going on around them.

  Though no boundary could be distinguished between them, the two crowds – the crowd of racegoers and the crowd of fairgoers – moved round each other independently as if in a kind of dance. I have often thought since that the movement of crowds might be analysed in the same way as particles in a weather system. That day, more foolishly, I thought the same kind of approach might be taken with a horse race.

  Mackellar and I took up a position on the rail, near to the starting line. Finally the hullabaloo of those around us was silenced by the sound of the starter’s call. It was David Rennie up there on the rostrum, not in milk-spattered overalls nor his Home Guard uniform, but sporting now a splendid set of tweeds. The sight of him, hand aloft, made me think of Ryman’s weather conductor, the wizard of storms, the king of turbulence, controlling all from his pulpit in the Albert Hall. And then of Pyke – that was the tweeds, I suppose. It struck me then that Pyke was the opposite of Ryman. Two geniuses landed on the Cowal shore, one hot for peace, the other for war.

  It is said a horse’s face will tell you about the outcome of the race in which it is about to participate. This was one of Mackellar’s methods. He looked for ‘generous eyes’, he said, and I guffawed, not realising he was offering this homespun wisdom only in response to the abstract idiocies with which I’d regaled him on the way here, and the sums I’d been feverishly scrawling on the back of the racecard since we arrived.

  He had breathed scepticism as he sat in front of me in the trap, and he exuded it now as he stood next to me on the rail, watching me do more calculations on the back of the card. Of course I lost, as many times as he won.

  When we got back from the course, having celebrated Mackellar’s successes in the pub, his wife was waiting for us, leaning over the gate with her long white hair hanging down like bunches of bleached-out seaweed. The sun shone through it, the last of the light, for dusk was advancing.

  Mackellar held up a fistful of notes. ‘And you say he brings bad luck!’ he said to her.

  She gave me a look, half-mad, half-sneering. ‘I didnae say he brought bad luck. I said he should keep them round him close. I said that they could be in danger.’

  Uttering an indecipherable curse, Mackellar punched her on the shoulder. ‘Am I in danger, wummin? Stoap yer nonsense.’ Mrs Mackellar slipped, staggered, and then fell down, dirtying her red coat in the mud.

  It must have been quite a forceful blow as she was a heavy lady. She pulled herself up on the gate, staring at me with fire in her eyes, then turned and walked back to the farmhouse. Mackellar followed her, looking as if he meant to beat her further.

  It was a wretched scene, turning my gut. I realised I had as little notion of their marriage as I did of the Rymans’.

  2

  I didn’t have much idea about making hydrogen either. I was cooking some up in the cot-house, a couple of weeks after the trip to the races. Distracted by all that had happened, and depressed by my continuing failure to elicit anything useful from Ryman, I overdid the catalyst.

  The noise in the drum was terrific. The reaction was too violent. I had put my foot on the safety weight but it blew off all the same, throwing me to the floor. One of my feet was soaked in caustic soda up to the ankle and I had to be rushed to hospital in Dunoon. An ambulance came to pick me up.

  The whole episode was both embarrassing and extremely painful. The doctor said I would have a scar on my ankle: one prediction, at least, that has been proven true. The only bright spot in the whole story was that I received a lot of visits and fond attention from Joan and Gwen. One or other, and sometimes both, came and sat by my bed each morning.

  I was there for about a week. Whybrow visited and gave me a ticking off,
saying he hoped I would learn from the experience. What a snake that man was. Constantly removing and replacing his spectacles as he spoke to me, saying he had had ‘so many complaints’ about my dealings with other Met staff, and that on visiting ‘the scene of the accident’ he was ‘dismayed’ to find so many empty bottles of alcohol lying about. I felt like telling him next time I’d leave some full ones there for him.

  Ryman was equally critical when he arrived to take me back to Kilmun. ‘Very silly thing to have happened. I’ve cleaned up the place for you. Neutralised the caustic soda.’ I was so miserable I didn’t even reply when he said this next to me in the car, still less start harping on about his bloody number again.

  It was strange, returning to the cot-house. Once Ryman had gone I lay on the bed, feeling sorry for myself. Looking back, it seems rather melodramatic. I suppose at base I felt my career was not progressing and that I was spending the war stuck in a bog. I was beginning to wish I had never come to Scotland at all, and instead stayed with Stagg in Kew. But, of course, he wasn’t there any more either. He’d moved to an American air base near Twickenham, from where he was preparing for the invasion forecast.

  I had recently had a note from him, but not about D-Day. It was something related to our previous work together which had been passed back to him: a problem which defence radar was beginning to get on cloud reflections – at that time they were described by the radar people as ‘angels’ – and the scattering of radio signals in the lower atmosphere. I was able to give a satisfactory answer, which I suppose stood me in good stead with Stagg later on.

  My mind went back to our farewell, which took place between my meeting with Sir Peter and my flight north in Reynolds’s plane. I’d been a bit nervous about telling Stagg I’d taken another job. He was quite a puritanical character, deadly serious, and a dedicated worker.

  So it was with some trepidation that I’d approached him across the lawns at Kew with the news that I was leaving his team. He was up in a tower checking instruments at the time, and as his gaunt, tall frame descended the iron rungs of the ladder – he looked like a machine unfolding – I expected to be spoken to in harsh tones. Super-conscientious, Stagg did not like to be interrupted.

  ‘What is it, Meadows?’ He began brushing fragments of rust off the sleeves of his suit jacket.

  I swallowed, looking into that ascetic face. ‘Yesterday I was summoned to Adastral House by an urgent telegram. To see Sir Peter Vaward.’

  Stagg gave a curious smile. ‘Oh yes? I did see that you hadn’t lodged a docket from that glob.’

  I swallowed again. ‘The thing is, sir …’

  ‘It’s all right, Meadows,’ Stagg said pleasantly, and began to walk back to the main observatory building. ‘I know all about your new appointment. Good to be out of the city, I should think.’

  As I followed him, I wondered how much he knew of Vaward’s instructions to me. I thought it best not to mention it. Then Stagg, walking quickly, dropped his own bombshell.

  ‘Try to do it right, whatever Sir Peter has set you to. I have requested that you join me later as my clerk – I need someone who is proficient at maths – but he told me he has given you another assignment and you can come to me only if you fulfil it.’

  Lying there in the cot-house, listening to the ships moving in the loch – sometimes a signal gun would sound – there seemed little chance of living up to Stagg’s and Sir Peter’s expectations. As darkness fell, half drifting off despite my throbbing ankle and cawing of crows outside, I experienced a tremor of panic, as if I were falling – backwards, endlessly down a mountain slope engulfed in mud.

  I was not dreaming. Somehow I was cognisant, perceptual, as well as being half asleep … and what I perceived in this twilight world, in the course of my own tumbling fright, were the crawling, stumbling figures of my parents. Pallid forms floundering, resurrected skeletons reaching out from the deep, noisome mud.

  Behind them stretched a road crowded with African bodies, all struggling in ghastly pandemonium, inhaling mud as the boundary stones of the road flew up on either side on them.

  April

  1

  Spring came, but it didn’t seem like a blessing to me. I listened to the wind singing in the beech trees, mournful even though winter had passed. The midges arrived very early that year, swirling round me like a personal cloud as I walked, then landing and biting ferociously, raising large weals on the skin. Their movements in the air seemed random but, just as Mackellar had said, they responded to perturbation, accumulating where a body caused agitation in the air.

  In the middle of the loch, over salt water, the sailors on Forth, Titania and Alrhoda were free of these pests, but on shore no one was safe. Ryman gave me some of his homemade midge repellent – a mixture of rosewater and petroleum jelly – but I still had to make sure I kept as little skin exposed as possible. I was constantly squirming, wriggling, swishing my body like a horse’s tail. On some evenings, when they descended in swarms, the only way to escape was to jump in the bath and lie there until the weals went down.

  I did this a lot, wondering as I lay there how I could get the information I needed out of Ryman. I felt trapped, immobile, passive. It is astonishing how little that experience is recorded in the annals of human time – I suppose because it is so common and what we want from our observers of history is the drive towards the active and the extraordinary, as opposed to the usual swimming against the flow of the river, getting nowhere except older.

  The truth was, I didn’t really want to stay in Kilmun any longer, but I didn’t want to admit failure either. Not, now (I had grown up that much, at least), because I craved success, but because of sheer stubbornness. Because of a kind of friction against the world. Because of not giving up as a virtue in itself.

  But a recipe for midge repellent was hardly likely to satisfy Sir Peter. Thus it seemed – then as always in my mind – that he was likely to remain unsatisfied, waiting for me to explain.

  Sometimes, after the midges had subsided, I emerged from the safety of my bath and walked bare-chested outside, as if feeling the night-time breezes on my body might free me from the trap I was in. There is a Nyasaland tribe whose witch-doctors think the future can be predicted by the sensation of wind on their skin. There is a certain folkloric common sense to this, but it would not do for the generals, even though I suspected that they understood no better the science they demanded in its stead.

  Applying the Ryman number properly was the key. Like the chorus in Haydn’s oratorio, it told the heavens. It was the code that showed how weather fitted together, the variance and the invariance – and really I was no nearer to breaking it than I had been when I first arrived. Even though it was a beautiful place, Kilmun had come to seem like a bleak hermitage to me.

  But I wasn’t going to give up. I was resolved to see the thing through. I pursued Ryman like a demon, contriving reasons to visit him, ask him things, chancing to bump into him at every opportunity. Slowly, like a piece of ice beginning to melt in a glass of gin, he began to relent, to admit me into his life.

  Nothing more was said of the shell-case fiasco, nor of the strange incident concerning Mrs Ryman and the citric acid. She blushed slightly when – in the course of my importunings of her husband – I next saw her, but otherwise it was as if nothing had happened.

  The situation was all made more odd by the growth of a firm conviction in me that Gill was a very good person, a real Christian. She was concerned by such problems as famine relief and was keen that we should not be too beastly to the Germans if we won the war.

  It wasn’t just talk, her goodness. She often used to have the poorer children of the village into the house for buns and tea (it was they who used the rocking horse), and gave some of them piano lessons. One day I passed the window of the house and saw her standing listening to one of the children play a tune I recognised as Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. She had her hand on her stomach and this confirmed to me my suspicion she was pregnant. I
put my belief that she had been trying to seduce me down to male arrogance; it’s a fact that unless we receive very clear information to the contrary, men believe all women want to sleep with them.

  Sometimes Ryman joined in the sessions with the children, especially if they had questions about science. I remember once watching him, having been asked about the points of the compass, magnetise a needle in his laboratory and float it in a bowl of water to show how it spun round.

  Another day in April, so my diary says, Ryman showed me on my own the collection of glowing valves and electric wires by which he had once hoped to calculate the vast field of future meteorological phenomena. The circuitry was mounted on a piece of ply drilled with holes. (Ryman called it a ‘breadboard’.) He showed me how variable resistances and the switching on and off of the valves could represent different inputs like wind strength, temperature, pressure and so on. Even different height levels in the atmosphere, something we were only just getting to grips with on paper in the Met Office.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said as we bent over the breadboard, ‘I think machines on these lines are the only way my forecast factory will be realised.’

  ‘Your Albert Hall scheme?’

  ‘Yes.’ He twisted a piece of wire round a capacitor. ‘But I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.’

  I helped him to resolder some circuits which had come loose, dripping the bright molten metal onto the brush-like ends of the wires. Later I wondered whether I should tell Sir Peter about this rudimentary calculating machine. But it was theories the director wanted, not electric toys. I had by this stage sent him a report containing summations of what I gathered about Ryman’s work, hoping he would agree I was making progress.