Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  I needed to inoculate against my dizziness, uncertainty in general as it effectively was, but were the shell cases and their contents really the medicine? They seemed in one light like another type of dizziness in themselves, but maybe that was the point. What the Africans did, in Zomba after the slide, was allow themselves to be bitten by whirligig beetles. The beetles were collected from mountain rivers and pools and held to the breast near the nipple where they bit in a defensive reaction, releasing a powerful steroid.

  So the kizunguzungu epidemic ended.

  4

  In the early hours of Sunday 4 June, with the 3 a.m. conference over, I was working bleary-eyed on my equations in the hut on the bluff. Outside, the sentry stirred and the Channel fretted against the boundary shore. The far-called navy was melting towards the battle line, pushing forth tentatively, like the shy anemone, unlooked at on its ocean bed. In France, on the moon-blanched land, waves turned, foam fell, whiting more the sepulchre. Meanwhile on each page, as I was writing, the figures seemed to move. These are the images that return.

  An hour or so later Stagg would attend the first of what turned out to be two crucial commanders’ conferences in the library at Southwick. At the first meeting, even though the weather was still fine, Stagg told them he thought it could go bad on Monday, with wind and cloud appearing in four or five hours’ time. Eisenhower confirmed the previous evening’s tentative decision to postpone.

  Everything was in the balance, we were indeed not yet at the end of the story. We seemed to be stuck in the middle of the end, waiting for the variables to come into alignment.

  I tried not to become frozen in the terrible immobility that this provisionality can entail. Smoking heavily, I continued with my calculations, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other, shell cases and numbers on the table in front of me. I knew I needed to have patience – as every silent sheet could be the one that bore fruit. But first a tree had to grow, hurrying its rivulets of roots and fibres, each one a boundary for the next, across the waiting page. An equation tree, glowing and strong.

  It wasn’t easy. At one point I knocked one of the shell cases off the table and had to scrabble around on the floor picking up the precious numbers. This meant I had to start all over again, just in case I had lost one of the numbers. Extremely tense, feeling as if iron hooks were being inserted into my shoulders, I decided the best thing would be to go for a walk. Stiff from sitting for so long, I hobbled down the hill into the woods, until I came to the pond.

  The rowing boat which Stagg had kicked was still moored to its jetty. Dispersed through the branches and leaves of surrounding trees the moonlight was shining, honeycombing the wine-dark water and the ribbed shell of the boat’s interior. It was still a gloomy place, hooded with melancholy, but now it was a beautiful gloom.

  From among the trees’ black bars an owl hooted, making the air tremor. On an impulse I climbed into the boat. Having released the painter, I picked up the oars and began to row round that moon-dappled pond. With each stroke, as I leaned into the resisting water, the tension went out of my shoulders, and the mental exhaustion – like muscle pain in the brain – started to lift.

  With each circuit of the pond, it was as if I was making a tour d’horizon of the workmanship of turbulence, not just in the zones of air and water, where vapour is lifted by the sun from oceans, lakes and rivers and diversely distributed by the wind, but the uncertain edges, where curls of mixing gas give meaning to the idea of space.

  The boat shivered. I became undecided again. Once you leap the limits and start on further considerations you begin wondering – since the earth is just a little prick in space compared with the galaxy, never mind the whole – where it is all going to end.

  I righted the skew.

  The sound of the blades dipping in and out of the water together with the rattle of the rowlocks was like music accompanying the slow song of my thoughts. Even though I was conscious that I was sitting on the cross-plank of a rowing boat, pulling myself from eddy to eddy, it was as if I were elsewhere, seeing myself from above as I made my circuits. As I might appear to the tree-perched owl. Or from below, among the myriad mansions of submerged bacterial life. Or from the side, where a moorhen anxiously called each time I passed. Or that distant rift on Venus, from within whose folds a quite alien species might watch.

  I listened. Gradually, like the appearance of a new shoreline, the realisation came upon me that to see the pond I was circumnavigating as a gloomy place, or even as a beautiful gloomy place, was to impose on it as Europeans had imposed upon Africa. As my family had imposed on Africa. As I had myself. Trying to make the world speak in human terms alone was akin to making Cecilia and Gideon speak the kitchen-Kaffir English we foisted upon them.

  Somehow or other I had to learn to see the limit-rich, frame-filled world as one without limits, without frames – see it, feel it, speak it in that other language of turbulence which was itself differential from the start. Promiscuous of perspective, it was less liable to the drag of bias and error. Could this programme have any place in the canon of the physical sciences? Surely that was a vain ambition.

  Science is not about ‘feelings’. But nor, at least at the highest level, is it the reductionist activity it is commonly supposed to be. Great scientists use their imagination, they feel their way towards a theory, then seek to prove it. With turbulence, exactly because of its intermittency and mutability, I realised that night that this ‘feeling towards’ was actually key. Extrapolating from immediate connections, we have to keep an idea of all connections hovering before us, as an ideal insight into the whole. Because the whole cannot be reached, we can grasp it only by intuition – by chasing not the specifics but the beautiful ghost of an idea.

  Once this thought had rushed in on me, others came, relating directly to the modal variety I ought to employ in calculating the forecast. I would have to keep shifting between Ryman’s, Krick’s, Douglas’s and Petterssen’s methods to get the required promiscuity of perspective. Effectively this was what we had been doing, but no one had tried to turn the to-and-fro of the conferences into an active programme.

  Exhilarated, I returned to the hut with new vigour. My hand moved quickly under the desk lamp, covering the blank sheets. I solved calculation after calculation, working methodically forward through the charts, through tomorrow to expected conditions on Tuesday.

  Sitting south of Iceland, on the eastern flank of a major deepening low south of Greenland, was a small parcel of warm air thrown up by the motion of the main surface low. It was this parcel that WANTAC had been reporting. By about 8.30 a.m. tomorrow, I calculated, the Atlantic parcel would develop into a higher-pressure ridge at 300 mb. Within an hour and a half the ridge would intensify at 500 mb. It was heading east, at a rate fast enough to cause, from early on Tuesday morning, a small temporary block in the Channel from the prevailing bad weather. There would be rough seas, heavy rain and gale-force winds later on Monday, but after that (I was as sure of it as I have ever been of anything) would come an invasion-friendly haven: a brief time of immunity from storms.

  Perhaps only a mathematician can understand how suddenly the treasure can come. It is as if a key has been deftly turned and a casket sprung open, revealing contents within more precious than could be thought possible.

  I stared at the lamp. At the paper. At the lamp. The filament of the electric light burned in its bulb, like the sun filling an arch of sky. The filigree of black figures grew, rising against the white sheet. It was as if they were the rigging of a ship setting forth on a voyage of validation, a voyage in which vessel and sail carried on into the future, somehow leaving the spars of mast and yards behind.

  My tree.

  That was what was left onshore.

  My equation tree.

  Night decayed, morning came, the sentries changed their station. A beam of dawn light descended through the hut window, beating rose-red on the page. Did the tree promise forgiveness? For killing Ryman, hanged from his ba
lloon, arms collapsed? For damaging Gill, stranded widowed and childless in Seaview? For making myself a monomaniac, subject to an idea of change and flux that actually fixed me like a butterfly on a pin?

  I could not say ‘yes’ to any of these. But in that moment, which seemed to win to my side both chaos and order, I think I came close to an ideal of life. Recognising its mutability, I experienced a moment of freedom.

  As for the final calculation, it’s hard to explain: you just know it is right. Ryman was a big reason why. What he had taught me, I realised then, was the importance of intermittency. Not just scientific intermittency, but mental and emotional intermittency, too. How, in a world of disintegration and endless renewal – a continuum, a world of flow – one must find one’s own rhythm exactly by recognising the incompleteness of the melody.

  It was a great gift, because incompleteness is what points to that ideal of the whole. It shows the way to whatever is emergent at the limits of any system, from an ant-lion’s nest in Nyasaland to the ever-expanding edges of the universe.

  I sat for some time with the full calculation of the Ryman numbers for all the adjoining areas of weather between Iceland and the Channel in front of me – along with the lamp, the piles of brass numbers relating to each quadrant, and the shell cases standing like statues on the table. Looking behind at every step was like peering into a dream of becoming – watching something inspire, move, breathe, awaken …

  There was a danger in savouring the showing of the thing like this, I knew that. I was cautious of ecstasy, but the highest branch of the tree – God’s mercy! what a stroke was there. It was not just the one forecast I saw emanating from that twig-tip but something larger, something more glorious. The jubilant intimation of a new era in meteorology, affecting not just D-Day but the whole empire of the atmosphere.

  I looked at my watch. It was 9.05 a.m. and I was starving.

  With a whoop of triumph I grabbed the papers on which I had done the sums and burst out of the hut, startling the new sentry, who was already dozing. I laughed into the brightening air, took a gust of it into my lungs, then ran down the hill to the main house. On the gravel outside, Don Yates was consoling Stagg about the non-arrival of the bad weather which had caused the postponement of the next day’s plans. They were quite oblivious to my revelation, still worrying about the bad weather in which I believed I had spotted a future chink.

  ‘We’re in a wood, chum. We’re sheltered from the wind and a cold front has definitely been measured in Ireland,’ Yates was saying, rubbing the dark hair on the top of his head. The Irish cold front confirmed that the decision to postpone had indeed been correct.

  ‘Anyway, look!’ Yates’s hand extended into the air. Stagg and I followed the American’s pointing finger. I was breathing hard from running down the hill.

  Sure enough, in the west the tree tops were swaying. Wind was bearing cloud along in threatening armadas. The clouds were of the heaped, turreted, galleonish type that often spells thunderstorms. Altocumulus castellatus. ‘But it sure feels weird to be celebrating a non-invasion, however successful the forecast,’ Yates continued.

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ Stagg said.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ I said, breathlessly. ‘I’ve found it!’

  ‘Found what?’ said Stagg crossly.

  ‘There will be an intermezzo. I finally worked out the Ryman numbers down from WANTAC to the Channel. It is going to be a very stormy night, and the bad weather will continue through to Monday morning. Nothing can stop that cold front coming through now, but it will be followed by a short space of more settled weather. And that means, once the cold front has passed through the Channel, that we will be clear for an invasion on Tuesday.’

  I wanted to tell them how I had come to my conclusion by deliberately subduing the complete mathematics in the way Gill had suggested, and allowing in a simulation of randomness. I wanted to tell them that it was all to do with thin layers between adjacent weather systems, just as Ryman had said. But neither of them was interested in the theory.

  So I explained in more detail that WANTAC, which Stagg and the others had lost faith in, was in fact the key. Its apparently discontinuous data (discontinuous with the context) was in fact a sign of a small-scale, good-weather pattern within the large-scale and extraordinary bad-weather pattern. It didn’t mean Krick’s generalised optimism was right – the worst summer storm series in twenty years was about to whip the Channel and would continue to do so for a day – but it meant we had a chance.

  ‘There will be a gap,’ I said. ‘I’m certain there will be an opening. WANTAC isn’t wrong, it is just reporting a movement on a different scale to those we were focusing on. If the Germans see only the main depression and not the high ridge on its flank, then we will actually have a tactical advantage. Our counterparts will see only the general panorama of bad weather, not the interval in it.’

  At the end of my speech I didn’t get quite the heroic reception I was hoping for. Stagg looked uncertain after listening to what I had to say, but Yates’s face broke into a grin. ‘I hope you’re right. C’mon, let’s go eat.’

  Over breakfast we heard that Allied troops had begun to enter Rome. It would be the first European capital to be prised back from the Nazis, but it did not stay long in our minds. We were all thinking about the D-Day assault. I confirmed to Yates and Stagg that I wanted to go in with the American weathermen as had been suggested. I told them I was sick of sitting with the telephone at my ear and that, meteorologically as well as personally speaking, it indeed would be interesting to see how local weather related to the synoptic forecasts for large areas that we had been doing.

  ‘Maybe not interesting enough to get killed for,’ drawled Yates, who was the closest thing to a man of action among us.

  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’ said Stagg. ‘You should feel no compulsion.’

  ‘I am sure,’ I said confidently. ‘I want to see for myself whether my theory is right. The ratio I worked out, the Ryman number, it’s what Sir Peter sent me to find in Scotland. And I think I have, by applying a strange avoidance of elaboration. I want to see the results for real.’

  Yates said he would arrange for a car to take me up to join the American Weather Squadron, which was waiting for the off in Berkshire.

  As soon as we had eaten we went to the hut and pored over the latest charts for a few hours. During this time, to everyone’s relief, the sky became overcast. In a few hours it would start to rain heavily. Then we had the Sunday morning telephone conference during which Dunstable and Widewing argued as normal.

  Holzman and Krick thought a surge of high pressure, associated with but separate from my minor WANTAC high, would protect the Channel. Petterssen was concerned about the rapid evolution of the second storm – Storm E – in the Atlantic; but he now thought it might not come to us as quickly as he had previously anticipated. The Admiralty concurred.

  I told people about my work with the WANTAC gauges and my positive attitude fed into the discussion, with hearty support from the American contingent. I think this, apart from getting the telephone conferences together physically, was where I made my contribution to it all. It was partly just a question of language, of conviction, of getting people to believe the story you were telling. Even the words you choose to represent such things can make a difference. What is the difference between ‘a reasonable possibility’, ‘the nearest we can get to a certainty in these conditions’, and ‘unsafe but feasible’?

  This is the marginal area we were in, reflecting the extreme complexity and rarity of the weather as set against that of a more typical June. The essential general point, which people never seem to grasp, is that volatility has a direct effect on predictability itself, as well as on whatever it is you are predicting; or (another way of putting it), don’t expect the same level of predictability all the time.

  This is a mistake often made by those who speculate in stocks and shares, but in fact its relevance is to the whole rang
e of human activity: why, having been thrown into life in the first place and when everything else is so variable, should we expect predictability, of all things, to dance at an even tempo? It is just a smooth dream of comfort that life’s roughnesses should yield themselves up with eyes of meek surrender like that. All the same, it is hard to live without such illusions.

  I personally supported Krick and Holzman in being more forthright. There was a slot coming, of a day or two, which presented conditions that were tolerable for the operation. The Admiralty’s sea forecasts matched this analysis. Petterssen and Douglas, on the other hand, still harboured doubts, though it would be a distortion to say they advised ‘don’t go on Tuesday’. It was a matter of emphasis. They fell into line with the others, predicting clear weather for bombing and ‘just about’ tolerable conditions on the beaches. Technically their reservations related mainly to the further outlook after 6 June, and in this they would prove to be justified.

  So, anyway, Stagg and Yates went off to Eisenhower and told him they thought a fair interval would become possible from early on Tuesday morning.

  The compatibility between the forecasters hardened later on Sunday, at least for a while. I myself missed the moment when peace broke out among them, leaving in the car Yates had ordered for me.

  There was just enough time for me to gather some belongings and to make some further brief points to Stagg about WANTAC, which I thought he should communicate to the supreme commander. Next minute I was bumping along in a khaki Packard towards Newbury, which was one of the marshalling stations for airborne troops.

  The sky was darkening, it was raining heavily, and a gale was beginning to blow – but I was smiling as I was driven along. Thousands of men whose lives depended on our forecasts had been saved from catastrophe by the postponement. Soon there would be force 5 or 6 winds on the Normandy beaches and complete low cloud cover, preventing aerial bombardment or the landing of gliders and paratroops. It would have been a complete disaster; and in making the right forecast, notwithstanding the hedged-about manner in which it came, we had turned away a calamity.