Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  Out of the vapours three men approached, each dressed in a flying suit. One of them had a pistol in his belt; another carried a sub-machine gun. I hesitated, but then the unarmed member of the trio pushed up his goggles.

  ‘Meadows!’ cried Pyke, clasping me by the shoulders. ‘Welcome to Habbakuk!’

  ‘So this is Habbakuk,’ I said, looking around. ‘I’m none the wiser.’

  ‘Good. Let me explain. We’re making super-strengthened ice for use in constructing ships. It’s all happening under the auspices of Lord Mountbatten, as I think I already explained. My laboratory assistants are commandos from his Combined Operations staff. I call them Verses One, Two, Three and so on – after Habakkuk in the Bible. Or almost. On official documents it’s spelt with two bs and two ks, because of a typing error.’

  ‘What’s all this got to do with making ships from ice? Is that even possible?’

  ‘“Look among the nations, watch, and wonder marvellously; for I am working a work in your days, which you will not believe though it is told you,”’ Pyke intoned, half repeating what he had said in the pub in Dunoon. ‘Chapter one, verse five. Oh, never mind. Come and see Julius.’

  ‘Brecher? Is he here?’

  ‘Yes. I snaffled him from the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge for a few days. He’s mixing up some Pykerete. That’s the stuff we’re making the ships out of. It was Mountbatten’s idea to name it after me, not mine. Julius,’ he called, ‘look who I’ve got here.’

  Brecher was rotating a large spatula in a basin of loose ice slush mixed with something else. The mixture resembled some kind of bran and the spatula, I realised, was a canoe paddle. The light of the lamps was reflecting off his shaven head.

  Brecher looked up. ‘Meadows! I was thinking of you the other day. That friend of yours in Scotland. I wrote to her with the result of my blood tests but she never replied.’

  I was perversely glad that Gill was as remiss in letter-writing as I; although, of course, the scale of the two omissions was hardly comparable. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Well, it’s all rather personal.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘She’s a friend.’ The overstatement, or lie as it might be called, came out with the squirming fluency of a trout held between a fisherman’s hands.

  Brecher looked at me. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘She wanted to know whether two samples of blood she sent me had any rhesus incompatibility. I told her they probably did not, though one of the samples was very patchy and old, so it was quite hard to do the test. She sent it me on a handkerchief of all things.’

  I realised he was talking about my own blood. He continued stirring the ice as he spoke.

  ‘You see, almost all blood cells carry antibodies of one type or another and under certain conditions – for example, fetal cells crossing over into the maternal circulation during pregnancy – this can cause problems. But we don’t fully understand this aspect of things.’ He pronounced it aspekt, in the German way, with the stress on the second syllable.

  ‘What sort of problems?’

  ‘Ultimately, intrauterine fatality. Death in the womb.’

  I suddenly saw – as if down a long passageway – the series of miscarriages, each little homunculus scampering towards Gill and Ryman, half-formed, screaming. In this field, at least, the role of science as an aid to humanity, a helpmeet for civilisation, was clear.

  ‘This is wood pulp,’ said Pyke, who had shown scant interest in my conversation with Brecher. ‘What we’ve done is mix ice with wood pulp to increase its mechanical strength. There’s a pay-off between ductility and strength, depending on the amount of pulp or sawdust you put in.’

  ‘That should do it,’ said Brecher. He removed the paddle and scraped it against the side of the tub, then left it balanced across the top so the residue of the mixture could drip back in. ‘I’m off back to Cambridge now, Geoffrey. Nice to see you again, Meadows.’ He gave a conspiratorial smile.

  ‘Come and look here.’ Pyke led me to another part of the room where one of the commandos was turning a block of ice on a lathe. ‘A four per cent suspension of the material we are working on. Quite strong. Show him the hammer, Five.’

  The commando put the football-sized block of ice on the floor and picked up a sledge-hammer. He gave it a mighty swing – but on contact the hammer just bounced off the ice as if it were steel. The commando put down the hammer and rubbed his wrist.

  ‘Rather unforgiving,’ said Pyke, grinning, his tobacco-stained teeth glowing like citrine against the surrounding whiteness. ‘There’s something else I want to show you.’

  He led me over to a large panel of ice – six or seven feet high, three feet thick – next to which armed commandos were standing. ‘Show him, Three.’ The commando with the pistol lifted it and fired at the panel. Rather than penetrating it completely, the bullet entered only a few inches.

  I was amazed by the mysterious properties of Pykerete. ‘How did you manage that?’

  ‘Ordinary ice,’ explained Pyke, ‘has a crush resistance of about five hundred pounds per square inch – whereas in the case of Pykerete the figure is more like three thousand pounds.’

  The experiment was repeated with a Tommy gun, which Pyke fired himself, then with a.303 rifle. The noise of the reports was deafening in that confined space, but both times the bullets remained trapped in the Pykerete.

  ‘Depending on the power of the gun, the bullet will only go in between three and six inches,’ Pyke said. He dug out a bullet with a penknife. ‘See? Do the same thing with pure ice and it would penetrate fourteen inches. And what are the other figures, Five?’

  ‘Twenty-five inches into softwood, six inches into brickwork, two inches into concrete, sir!’

  ‘Very good, Five. Now, come and see my only vice, ha ha.’

  He took me over to the industrial vice I had noticed before. It was pressing on a block of ice no more than a foot square. I could hardly see it between the iron jaws, but the piece seemed to be resisting well: the pressure gauge above read 2,000 lb.

  ‘A little block like that could support the weight of a motor car,’ said Pyke. ‘Simply because of the micro-reinforcement of wood particles. Fire at it, torpedo it, saw it, and Pykerete will resist you. We showed it to Churchill and he jarred his hand trying to split a block of it with a chopper, and then he showed it to Roosevelt. It was rather amusing. The PM had a waiter bring in a pitcher of boiling water and two punch bowls. Churchill put a piece of ice in one of the bowls and a piece of Pykerete in the other. Of course, the pure ice melted at once, but the Pykerete just bobbed about in the boiling water as if it were cork.’

  ‘What are you going to do with all this?’

  ‘I was coming to that. Ice warfare has not yet been developed to the levels it could reach. Remember, a bullet fired in Lapland costs fifty times a bullet fired in central Europe.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Because of the transport costs. The idea is that we could build aircraft carriers and other ships from Pykerete for next to nothing. Berg ships, made in the remote recesses of the Arctic night. Refuelling depots for aircraft. Or a mid-Atlantic base from which to attack U-boats. Or ice-breakers to cut a new north-west passage and send supplies from America to Russia. Or sprayed frozen water could be used to incapacitate shore defences during an invasion of mainland Europe.’

  I must have looked a bit sceptical. How much of this was true? There seemed to be no end to his technical abilities and the fecundity of his imagination, but his excitable attitude to it all was like that of a child at Christmas. It struck me again that his enthusiasm was rather similar to Ryman’s – even though he was utterly committed, fervent even, about using science in war.

  Looking into the clouds of ice vapour I suddenly seemed to see Ryman’s face, his bushy hair and downturned mouth becoming different – exaggerated, as if redrawn by the surrounding swirls … becoming contorted as it had been when he was hanging from the wire. I shuddered with nausea, closing my
eyes to put away the vision.

  ‘Mr Churchill himself has said the advantages of Habbakuk are dazzling,’ said Pyke, cheerily. ‘We’ve been given the go-ahead. Workmen on Lake Patricia, Ontario, have already built a prototype berg ship of a thousand tons. She is flat-bottomed, lozenge-shaped, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide. Her Pykerete hull is sheathed in timber and pitch, and a petrol-driven refrig eration plant sends cold air through iron pipes set in the ice.’

  ‘You are joking?’

  ‘Of course not. She’s stayed afloat! Brecher and I went out to see her. The plan now is to move to Corner Brook, Newfoundland, to build a full-scale ship. Will you be our meteorologist and study the effects of turbulence on Pykerete? Have a look at these numbers and think it over. For God’s sake, don’t let them go astray. Right, must crack on!’

  He shoved some papers into my hand and began to hustle me towards the door, which in those bulky suits was not an operation that could be effected at speed. I went up in the lift, changed in the anteroom and, putting on my overcoat, stepped back out into ringing Cockney voices of the meat market.

  14

  I spent the next three days in a state of high excitement. Pyke’s plans were as full of difficulties as fascinations, but they drove the awful incident at Kilmun from my mind. I wrote a note to Sir Peter explaining which way I had jumped. I did not go into too much detail about how I had come to my decision, but did not neglect to thank him for all the support he had given me in my career so far. At last, I thought on posting the note, I now had a clear course of action. I felt I’d reached what meteorologists call a point of occlusion: a moment – a place – where warm and cold fronts meet.

  I had made my choice. I was convinced – what a young fool I was – that the self-disgust I felt at having caused Ryman’s death would now subside.

  In choosing Pyke’s ice over Sir Peter’s fire it might have seemed as though I was travelling in the riskier direction, but it did not feel like that to me then. For while, on the face of it, Pyke’s scheme to build ships out of ice appeared highly fraught, despite its backing from Mountbatten, it felt like a safer proposition than becoming part of the invasion forecast. All that I had learned from proximity to Ryman only seemed to confirm the wild mutability of the weather. I didn’t want to send men to their deaths.

  My pied-à-terre in Richmond being unavailable – I had rented it out while in Scotland – I took a room in a boardinghouse on Claremont Square, within walking distance of Smithfield. It was a nice Bloomsbury house transplanted to ugly Pentonville, where I wrote furiously into the night, smoking heavily, covering – just as I have been lately, on an ice ship heading for the desert – sheet after sheet with spidery blue writing, trying to solve the many problems of fluid dynamics associated with Habbakuk.

  The problems Pyke set me concerned the ship’s draught, which I would only solve when I came at it this time round. Back then, I was staggered by the ambition of the project. A ship 2,000 feet long and thirty yards wide with a thirty-foot-thick hull. The one we made in Antarctica was much smaller, but otherwise many of the details were the same. Motor nacelles mounted along the flanks – 1,000-horsepower electric motors with a propeller; generator turbines inside the hull, protected by box girders; an elaborate system of refrigeration through pipes in the ice; tanks for the oil which drove the turbines, generators for the nacelles and other auxiliary machinery …

  I put all my questions down in a memo and the following morning set off for Pyke’s workshop, with the memo folded in my jacket pocket.

  It was a joy, after all that seclusion, to burst out into the leafy freshness of Amwell Street. I bought a pint of milk from the dairy there and drank it straight from the bottle, enjoying the sensation of coldness in my throat.

  Then I thought of Ryman’s bottle of milk and all that happened afterwards, and my gorge rose. I saw his thin hand pouring it into the stream again.

  Crossing Rosebery Avenue into Exmouth Market, the atmosphere of the city changed. The sweet light of Amwell Street became smokier and more acrid, as if all the poisonous inks of the printing presses in Fleet Street and Bouverie Street, blowing northward, had begun to infect the air.

  I continued on my way to the freezer unit in the bowels of Smithfield. I walked down some steps off Bowling Green Lane, then up past a pub called the Three Kings and down into Clerkenwell Green. Crossing under the St John’s Gatehouse – a stone-blocked medieval building associated with the Templars or Hospitallers or something of that order – I had the sensation of being in many different times at once. How odd that the fighting knights of Christendom once sojourned here, flaming swords at the ready! Now here I was, in 1944, on my way to a meeting about a scheme that could change the course of the war using ships of ice.

  Having passed through the butchers’ hall as before, I rang the bell at Morgan’s. Hardly had I done so when a rather cross-looking soldier appeared from within the vault. He wore an ordinary army uniform, chestnut-coloured boots and Sam Browne belt. He didn’t let me in at first, just stood with the door half-open, eyeing me suspiciously.

  ‘Well?’ he said. He had a sandy moustache and his hair was cropped very short.

  I introduced myself and explained that Pyke had engaged me on a project I could not discuss.

  ‘Which one?’ he asked, warily. ‘You better come in.’

  ‘This one,’ I replied, having stepped inside. I suddenly realised that the freezer vault was no longer freezing.

  ‘Damn fool,’ said the officer. ‘He shouldn’t have done that. Pyke has been stood down from this project. It’s over. He’s too much of a liability, anyway. We’re closing this place and no one is coming in without my say-so.’

  Behind him I could see the protective clothing in the anteroom being piled up into boxes by one of the commandos.

  ‘But he said I might be joining his team,’ I said, plaintively.

  ‘Well I’m telling you you’re not.’

  ‘On whose authority?’

  ‘On Lord Mountbatten’s. Not that it’s any of your concern, Meadows, but my name is Brigadier Wildman-Lushington and I monitor Pyke’s insanities on behalf of Lord Louis. Pyke has quite enough projects on the go at the moment. Habbakuk has been cancelled and he has been told to focus on another.’

  He gave me a suspicious look. ‘What service are you in?’

  ‘I work for the Met Office,’ I explained. ‘I’m a weather observer, with some knowledge of turbulence. That was why Pyke wanted me.’

  He looked at me as if these were inconceivably poor accomplishments for a full-blooded male in wartime.

  ‘I see,’ he said finally. ‘Well, you’d better go and observe some weather, hadn’t you? Don’t come back here.’

  He more or less pushed me out the door. I stood there for a moment, then made my miserable way back through the chumps and chops, across Clerkenwell Green, and headed in the direction of the boarding house, stopping on the way for a drink in the Three Kings. Feeling revulsion towards the world – not just to the mutability of weather but also of events, of life itself – I once again contemplated my fate through the bottom of a pint glass.

  Quite a few pints, in fact, before staggering home to bed in the early afternoon. As I climbed the stairs, something which took a deal of concentration, the crone who ran the boarding house gave me a hard look. How strange it is to be recalling such circumstances while listening to the wine-harvest fugue in The Seasons. I had not harvested anything.

  Pyke went out of my life that day, and so did Habbakuk, at least until the Sheikh’s people got in touch. Pyke himself committed suicide with sleeping pills in 1948, overtaken with gloom that his post-war ideas had not been taken up. He really was a most extraordinary man, about whom there were lots of things I did not know when I encountered him during the war. I had no idea, for instance, that he had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in the First World War, having used statistics to analyse the reasons for the failed escape attempts of others. Or that he made (and lost) a f
ortune in the metal markets, at one point owning futures on a third of the world’s tin. Or set up a school based on the revolutionary educational principles of the philosopher John Dewey. Or that, having been classified as a security risk by the Americans, he spent time in a mental institution in the United States.

  So many unknowns in a life. It’s customary to characterise a biography as having a beginning, middle and end, but what about the spaces in between? What about all the unrecorded moments that are ciphered away, never making it into history? Pile up all those, disappear all those in every human life across time – not to mention other types of life – and you build a massive head of pressure against the future, millions of Pascal units just waiting to come down on us in the form of the unexpected, just waiting to displace us, subject us, unseat us.

  DATE: 1 February 1980

  POSITION @ 0600 LOCAL (GMT +2):

  Latitude 33° 54' South, Longitude 18° 25' East

  Cape Town, Duncan Dock, E-Berth

  DEPARTED BOUVET ISLAND: 23 January

  NEXT DESTINATION: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

  ETA: 15 February

  DISTANCE TO GO: 2248 nm

  CURRENT WEATHER: Sunny and warm

  SEA STATE: Calm

  WIND: 5 kt South-easterly

  BAROMETRIC PRESSURE: 1012.7 mb

  AIR TEMPERATURE: 23°C

  SEA TEMPERATURE: 19°C

  May

  1

  I feel I could still help. If, despite everything that has happened, you can still see your way, Sir Peter, to attaching me to Stagg’s team after all, I should be extremely grateful.

  The failure of Habbakuk hit me like a hammer blow. It seemed to confirm that I was in a narrative of decline, rather than being subjected to a disconnected series of mishaps. I had begun to wonder if success and happiness were now impregnably concealed from me for ever.

  Now I had to go back to Sir Peter on my knees, writing him another letter. I was embarrassed, frankly. It was not the most fluent piece of self-advocacy, but it was the best I could do in the circumstances.