by Giles Foden
On my way up to the hut I met Yates, coming down the hill. He told me that, during the morning interrogation from the generals, Stagg had clammed up, momentarily crushed by the weight of responsibility on his shoulders.
‘Look after that guy,’ said the kindly American. ‘He’s carrying a lot. He’s up in the hut.’
I went in and found Stagg lying on the floor with his eyes closed, and his arms crossed on his chest. He looked like the effigy of a medieval knight lying in stone in a church. I knelt down beside him and was about to pat his shoulder when his eyes opened and his head jerked up, making me start back in shock.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, sitting up. ‘I wasn’t sleeping. Just thinking.’
He drew in a series of short, sharp breaths. I helped him to his feet and made him some coffee and tried to talk inconsequentialities to him – something about my childhood in Africa, I think it was – but he would have none of it, waving me out of the room, smiling grimly.
In this atmosphere of extraordinary tension, I took the opportunity of the window between meetings to go for a walk in the hope it would shake the anxiety from my own head. As I was walking, up on the bluffs above Portsmouth, I looked up at a hill and saw that it was completely covered in odd-seeming foliage. Which, as I looked, proceeded to move. The whole hillside was alive with men. They were commandos, crawling forward in a solid mass, all wearing camouflage – ‘disruptive pattern material’ as the military officially call it. As they crossed the turf, turning and winding like some vast snake, the definition between each man was pruned back by the pattern. Equally, the resolution of their bodies – I mean between individual limbs and torsos – was also undercut by the tentative nature of the design.
I walked back down into the middle of the woods which surrounded Southwick. Coming into a grove, I sat down with my back against the spongy, moss-encrusted surface of a fallen tree. I noticed a snail, horns and tail out, which was making its way across a boulder nearby, leaving a trail of slime. When I picked it up there was a sucking noise, and it shrank back into its spiral shell.
I thought of something curling into being, in the very abyss of time. Before time exerted its mystery, before meaning was given to length and breadth, left and right, inside and outside, before we were able to distinguish between the edges of objects and the space around them. Before things could be bound together, or held apart, before gaps opened in cells and more cells were made and individuals were produced by that sundering. Before, before, before … Before all except the original vortex, whose cluster of vapour must itself have been sucked into being in order to form in formlessness …
I remember trying to say all this to myself, or something like it, looking inward and at the same time at the snail in the bowl of my palm. In that moment it was like I was that snail for all time and its shell, somehow, every place. But of course it all sounds quite nuts now. There are no words to convey this feeling between individuals.
Mathematics, by contrast, is universal. If you write
which is the formula for the Ryman number, at least you will be understood by competent mathematicians in all countries. The other truly international language is music, my other great passion. Place a piece of music in front of a piano player or a singer and you will be likewise understood, give or take a measure of interpretation. In point of which – I have just passed, listening to Haydn’s Creation in my cabin, the moment when the fortissimo modulates to C major on the word Licht.
Light!
Im Anfange schuf Gott Himmel und Erde …
I like to practise my German exactly because it is so unfashionable. This recent takeover by English, despite the advantages it gives us and the Americans, is actually very regrettable. It makes people think in straight lines. When Heinz Wirbel, the weather scientist who jumped from the Junkers, got in touch with me after the war, wanting to correspond (he too became an academic), I said we could so long as we did so in German.
I put down the snail. Across the black bars of the trees, something moved. A person, breaking the poplars’ plumb-line regularity, someone with a forward-angled stoop and rangy legs that never quite seemed in continuity with the rest.
It was Stagg, crunching impatiently across the stick-littered leaf mould. I watched him for a minute or two, pacing round and round in a circle, obscured at intervals by the trees. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose several times. I felt impatient with myself at not being able to help, and not a little embarrassment that he was behaving like this. But who was I to talk of embarrassment?
Calling out so as not to startle him, I went and joined Stagg. He did not seem surprised to see me. We walked silently through the dripping woods until we came to a place where there was a large pond, sombre and still except where drops of water fell into it from overhanging trees.
There was a rowing boat moored there. I remember Stagg standing on the jetty and pushing that boat violently with his foot, so that it rocked wildly, oars rattling in the ribbed wood. Wild ripples pulsed over the black water. We waited till the boat came back to equipoise, then walked back to the house, still saying nothing.
My instruments from WANTAC had finally arrived, I discovered on my return. I went to collect them from the Snowballs at the secure post room (everything that went in and out of Southwick had to be checked and signed for). The instruments came in a metal box filled with straw and labelled with my name. Inside the box was a sealed rubber bag, which I presume was the very one which had been hooked up from the WANTAC ship.
Excited, I carried the bag back to my tent and, sitting cross-legged under the flysheet, took the gauges out. There were two barometers and three anemometers, all them encased in gleaming brass. It was strange to think of them hanging from storm-tossed masts.
Weighing the instruments in my hands, I sat there thinking about what form, exactly, the experiments should take, assuming Stagg would give me permission to go to the Saunders-Roe factory in Cowes, which was by no means a certainty. Then, realising I would also have to get permission from Saunders Roe, I rushed back to the hut and used one of the telephones to call the exchange and get myself put through to the Isle of Wight.
On being asked by the telephone operator at the factory to whom I wished to speak, I could not think of anyone but Gill’s father, Chief Engineer Blackford. After a long wait, it was he who eventually announced himself at the other end of the line.
‘My name’s Meadows,’ I said. ‘I work in the meteorological department here at SHAEF in Portsmouth. We urgently need to test some instruments in your wind tunnel …’
There was silence on the other end of the line, so I continued. ‘Your daughter, Mrs Ryman, she may by now have received a letter from me. I knew her in Scotland.’
Again there was silence. ‘It really is important, sir, that I come to the factory and have use of its facilities,’ I said. ‘My name is Henry–’
‘I know very well who you are,’ said Mr Blackford then, in a stern voice. ‘Your letter arrived this morning. How dare you!’
‘I wrote only to apologise. If I were able to meet Gill I could do so in person.’
‘She does not want to see you. You are the last person she would want … And I. I would not want to see you. I might not be able to control myself. Wallace and I worked together here. You are not welcome …’
His voice trailed off, as if extinguished by its own anger.
‘I am sorry to hear that,’ I said – and I was sorry. ‘But the fact remains, for military reasons, that I must have access to the wind tunnel, and it must be tomorrow.’
‘That’s another matter,’ he said abruptly. ‘I will leave instructions that you are to be permitted entry. But do not think that excuses what you have done, Meadows. I don’t just mean Wallace. I also hold you responsible for the loss of my daughter’s child. She might have made it through this time, were it not for the anxiety she suffered following Wallace’s death.’
He put down the phone.
Shaken, I put
down my own and leaned my back against the wall. I slid down, feeling my balance shifting. Was I never to be free of this event from what already now seemed like another life? Ever since it has often suddenly returned to me, covering me again; it is as if a trapdoor opens and mud comes pouring from the sky. Mud that swirls then turns solid around me, that bakes like a crater on the moon, mud which I have to break out of, move out of, snap myself out of – until the fall happens again and I am back in that deep pit, summoning up the energy to jerk myself out.
By the time of the evening conference, which began at 8 p.m. that Friday, I was feeling marginally better. But so far as the forecast went, the deadlock was the same. Widewing utterly for an invasion on Monday, Dunstable utterly against. The Admiralty, whose sea and swell forecasts were invaluable, were also pessimistic. There was uproar, a chaos of voices.
By the time it had turned half past eight, Stagg had had enough. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he cried. ‘Listen, all of you. In half an hour I have to present an agreed forecast to General Eisenhower. Help me, please.’
Gagging, he banged down the phone and rushed outside. I heard him being sick on the ground, the retching noise making my own stomach turn.
‘Boy,’ said Krick. ‘That is one angry man. I don’t know why he’s getting so pissed. Maybe we need to accept that we’re never gonna agree.’
‘Now that I agree with,’ said Petterssen.
They both laughed, a little cruelly to my mind, and then the door of the hut opened.
‘I’m sorry, Meadows,’ Stagg said, coming back in, wiping his face with a handkerchief. ‘It’s those things.’ He flapped the vomit-stained hankie at the weather charts. ‘I’m not sure I can stand to look at another one. Tell them they can put their telephones down. I’m going to have to wing it again.’
He left the room. After doing as he said, I sat studying the WANTAC figures. There was a mystery there, that much was certain. Whether it had to do with the instruments themselves or was a factor of narrowly adjacent turbulent fluxes – in which case Ryman’s number would come into play – I did not know. But I was determined to find out.
At about 11 p.m. Stagg came back from seeing Eisenhower. He seemed a little more relaxed. He told me that he had broadly confirmed yesterday’s forecast and, therefore – at least from a weather perspective – the impossibility of invasion on Monday. ‘I took more of the Dunstable view and said the situation was now potentially full of menace. Eisenhower asked me about the weather for Tuesday. I told him that would be pure guesswork at this stage, but added that the weather on Tuesday and Wednesday is unlikely to be any worse than on Sunday and Monday.’
‘What did Eisenhower say?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. He just said nothing. And according to General Bull, D-Day is still on for Monday.’ Stagg walked up to the little window of the hut and looked out into the night sky, which showed no signs of disturbance. ‘You know, I have almost given up hope that we will get it right. Some of those bloody generals simply look outside, see fine weather and say, go!’
‘Look,’ I said, summoning up courage before that formidably tempestuous personality. ‘I really think you should let me have a look at those WANTAC instruments. They have arrived now.’
‘And what do you propose?’ Stagg asked, gritting his teeth as if to prevent angry words from flying between them.
‘There is a wind tunnel and the other necessary equipment at the Saunders-Roe factory across in Cowes. I could be there and back in a day, taking the gauges with me. I will do some tests and the results will tell us whether WANTAC’s readings have been mistakes or genuine. We will know whether it was a case of the instruments or the weather.’
It seemed like an age before he replied. I remember he appeared to shiver as he sat there in that hut on the bluff, as if trembling under the weight of the responsibility that had been placed upon him.
‘Very well, Henry. One day only, mind.’
3
The wind tunnel at Saunders-Roe was octagonal in cross-section and about forty feet long. Constructed in perspex, so that experiments could be viewed from outside, it had a useable floor area twelve feet across and there was a door at each end. Wind was blown down the tunnel by a heavy-duty electric fan. Turbulence was produced by its three vanes, shaped to act as aerofoils, the angle of which could be adjusted to produce the required frequency and amplitude of perturbation.
Earlier that morning, grateful there were not many people about because it was a Saturday, I had already tested the barometers in a pressure chamber on the site. They worked perfectly. Now it was a question of letting winds of different speeds run past the anemometers I had set up in the tunnel, to see how they performed.
I could see down the tunnel, the length of which was illuminated by incandescent lamps flaring overhead. I switched on the fan and, with a roar, the blast began. It was jolly hard work, writing down the measurements on each dial – the wind kept flipping up my notepad – but very quickly I came to the conclusion that the WANTAC anemometers, too, could be trusted.
If it wasn’t a question of instrument error, then it could only be the weather itself that was responsible for the anomalous readings. I was so excited that, with the man-made wind still roaring about me, I paced up and down behind the installations like a boy on the beach pointing out ships in a storm, trying to calculate what this meant for Monday’s invasion. The coming weather suggested by WANTAC was still not yet calm enough to make landings possible; but it looked as if more favourable conditions were coming, and soon.
The question was still when? Working out how long it would take for the calmer weather to reach the Channel would involve analysis of the range of values of the Ryman number, but there was very little time to do the calculations. How could I possibly do all that maths in one day? It seemed impossible as a solo effort.
As I was deliberating whether it might be feasible, the door at the other end of the tunnel opened and somebody walked in. At first I thought it was the tunnel supervisor at Saunders-Roe, who had greeted me when I first arrived – there had been no sign of Mr Blackford – but it was a woman carrying a small brown-leather suitcase.
She wore a woollen black coat and a long knitted red scarf tied loosely round her neck, streaming out behind her like a windsock in the onrushing gale. The coat was open, revealing a blouse with a high white collar, a V-neck jumper, and a skirt reaching almost to the floor. The suitcase was swinging like a pendulum.
I dumbly recognised Gill Ryman. She walked towards me quickly, knocking from side to side, blown off balance by the blast roaring by, her clothes flapping around her.
She looked older, and the clothing pressed hard against her body by the wind confirmed clearly that she was no longer pregnant. Her hair streamed out behind, parallel with the scarf. Behind its knitted length, tassels fluttered in turn, each one trembling its own little wake.
Immobile for a second, I felt as if my confused feelings for her, so long shut away in darkness and sighing, were about to be released; as if a squeezing hand was being released and something springing forth.
‘Gill!’ I cried, eventually rushing forward to embrace her. She felt extremely thin. She stood there awkwardly for a few seconds, inert in my arms with the wind tearing at us down the tunnel, plucking at our clothes and hair.
Time seemed to stand still, and then she freed herself from me – pushing me away with the little brown case. I heard myself begin to speak, ‘I’m so sorry … I wrote, just yesterday, but I expect you haven’t–’
‘I can’t hear you!’ Shouting into the wind’s roar, she staggered, almost falling down. I clasped her again.
As she spoke, we wheeled about in the rush and she had to hold on to me. I was aware of a blurring of boundaries. It was as if, in that moment, her spirit and mine were clustering together under the influence of something larger – something fundamental in which we were both intimately involved, like molecules moving in the same direction, following the flow of the medium in which they we
re carried.
‘I’ll turn it off,’ I shouted back.
I walked to the control panel and reached down for the switch. With an unearthly moan, the fan slowed. The gale ceased. Suddenly, all was quiet.
As I came back towards her, Gill put down the suitcase. She came close, studying me hard, both of us still blinking from the effect of wind. ‘I wrote,’ I said, eventually. ‘Not the right words I expect, but … well, I am sorry.’
She covered her ears with her hands. ‘Do stop all that, please.’ She was frowning as she did this, and screwing up her eyes.
‘You destroyed me by destroying him,’ she continued eventually, letting her hands fall and reopening her eyes, ‘but I have not come here to hear you apologise. You already did that in your letter. And besides, I owe you an apology myself, for that business with the blood and … Embarrassing – I was not myself.’
‘Of course not.’
‘It only came yesterday.’ She had taken my letter out of her pocket. ‘My father did not want me to come here today. He refused to bring me. I had to drive myself. He was very fond of Wallace. He holds you entirely to blame for his death.’
I felt nausea in my stomach and a rising whirling in my head. ‘And for your baby’s, I gather. I’m so sorry, Gill – if I had thought …’
She shook her head. ‘That was not your fault, though obviously Wallace’s death did not help. But I have miscarried on many occasions previously. The rhesus factor – which is why I sat up when I heard you talk about Brecher at lunch that day. This was my eighth, so I am quite used to it by now. But each did seem to happen earlier than the last, which is why I left Kilmun when I did.’ She spoke coldly, as if not about herself or her body.
‘I’m so sorry, Gill, all the same. About the child as well as Wallace.’
‘For God’s sake!’ She stepped towards me, lifting a hand as if to strike me, then reached out for my face, squeezing it hard and painfully between her fingers and thumb. Her face was inches from mine. ‘Shut up. Just shut up.’ Then she pushed away from me, shaking her head and falling to her knees on the floor of the wind tunnel, sobbing.