The Perils and the Prize

by Jim Crossley

  “Stand by for emergency re start drills. Both throttles closed. Ignitions are both on. Feathering push button pressed. Release at six to eight hundred rpm.”

  He watched the rev counter as the props windmilled in the slipstream. “Releasing now.” He watched the engine instruments. Not a flicker. He pushed the throttles gently forward. Nothing. Without power the Beaufighter glided like a brick. They were losing height fast, seven thousand… six thousand… five thousand feet.

  “Trying again.”

  “Skipper, I think we’re meant to let the revs get up to over eight hundred or they won’t start.”

  Jimmy’s voice was urgent. He was plainly frightened, but thank God, he was still thinking clearly.

  “OK, Jimmy, but we’re running out of height.”

  It was true; they were descending uncomfortably fast. William refused to look at the altimeter. If they tried to crash land without power in the dark they would almost certainly be killed. He kept his eyes solely on the rev counter. It inched up maddeningly slowly. There would not be a third chance. Seven hundred… eight hundred… nine hundred… one thousand.

  “Releasing feathering button!”

  There was no change of sound in the cockpit, the rush of air and the roar of the windmilling propellers drowned out any other noise, but William noticed the engine oil pressure gauge needles begin to tremble, then rise to normal idling levels. Muttering a prayer of thanks, he moved the throttles slowly forward. Both engines responded. They were flying again. Easing back the stick William glanced at the altimeter. Five hundred feet! That had been close. He climbed steadily on a southerly heading towards Tangmere.

  “Bloody hell, skip, you had me scared there,” said Jimmy.

  “Not half as scared as I was. Thank God you remembered the critical rev number.”

  “It was drummed into us on our training course, but I never thought I’d need to use it. Let’s hope that’s the first and last time – I swear I could see the ground under us when you began to pull up.”

  Magnet gave them a course to return to base. When they landed, William was surprised to find himself quite calm and unshaken. His experience of the results of the London blitz had hardened his attitude towards German flyers, and that night’s experience had taught him how risky his own job really was. But there was something else. Jimmy had shown that night that he was more than just a cocky, lively crew. He was made of strong stuff, cool and resourceful in an emergency with a brain that was razor-sharp when it was most needed.

  All the drama would not have happened, of course, if the engines had not cut out for no apparent reason. A new Flight Sergeant had taken over the care of their aircraft. He had just completed a specialist’s course at Bristol’s so after breakfast Jimmy and William walked over to talk to him. Somehow he looked familiar to William but at first he couldn’t place him, then the Irish accent gave him away. It was Tuoy, the aircraftsman who had ripped the fabric of the Heyford four years ago.

  “Good morning, sir, and you’re the very man who saved my bacon back in the Duxford days,” he began. “Well, it’s a real pleasure to see you again, if I may say so, sir, a real pleasure indeed.”

  Many Irishmen have an uncanny affinity with horses or dogs. Tuoy, on the other hand, had an almost psychic relationship with radial aircraft engines. He would stand and watch his flight take off, listening intently for the slightest hint of roughness, watching the exhausts for any hint of oil leaks or incorrect mixture. He knew where a cigarette paper would give just the right clearance between sliding parts in a fuel pump, or a single tap with a copper hammer would ensure that a cylinder liner seated right home in its sleeve. He had heard of unexplained cut outs before and hinted that there might be a solution. Possibly, he thought, the violent turn caused by the explosion of the enemy close ahead had caused an interruption of the fuel supply, or perhaps the sudden blast had sucked the oxygen out of the air. Maybe he could work out an unofficial fix for the problem.

  “What I’d advise also, sir,” he said, smiling, “is to shoot them down a bit further away in future. You’d be much safer. And by the way, sir, do try not to run into things, I’ve never seen so many holes in the wings of an aircraft.”

  As William and Jimmy left the hangar, Tuoy made an excuse to call William back alone.

  “Sir,” he said, “I’ve not forgotten what you did at that enquiry. I can never repay you but you have my word that the boys and I will not leave a stone unturned to make sure you have the best, most reliable Beau in the whole RAF, you have my word on it, sir.”

  He was to prove as good as his word; not only was the cutting-out problem dealt with by a minute adjustment to fuel pump settings, but engineering standards in William’s flight became superb.

  As winter turned to spring and the nights grew shorter, German night-time raids on the British mainland became infrequent. The Owls kept up their night-time patrols but enemy encounters were rare. William and Jimmy achieved only one more kill, bringing their total to five. The reduced level of activity suited William well as he had another matter on which to focus his attention. It must be almost time for Angela to arrive home.

  The Owls continued to patrol throughout spring and summer 1941. Night-time hit-and-run raids in their sector were becoming less common, but there were some particularly damaging mass attacks. Two heavy raids on Plymouth carried out by over six hundred bombers in April cost seven hundred and fifty civilian lives and determined attacks were also made on Belfast, Liverpool and Bristol. On 10th May a final massive assault on London marked the end of the night-time offensive, and the Luftwaffe bombers found themselves being diverted to prepare for the ferocious Barbarossa campaign against Soviet Russia. Bombing had killed some forty thousand people and seriously injured as many more, but British morale remained high. Although there was heavy damage to property and infrastructure, the bombing did not seriously affect war production or the will of the people to fight on. Successes by the night-fighter force did much to sustain civilian morale so their activities were given all possible publicity, but William himself was somehow dissatisfied with his role. Jumping enemy bombers at night was neither easy nor, as he had discovered, without risk, but somehow he felt he had had enough of it. He did not like the constant late nights, hanging around in the crew room in the darkness waiting to be summoned, circling the beacon, sometimes for hours waiting to be allocated a target, or increasingly often, to be sent home; the dull days hanging around the airfield, unable to sleep and with nothing much to do. In particular, he was beginning to feel rather like a footpad, jumping out on unsuspecting victims in the dark and smashing them up before they even knew that they were under attack. True, the enemy were killing innocent civilians and causing horrific scenes such as those he had seen himself in east London, but they were skilled, brave fellow flyers and creeping up on them in the dark seemed somehow unsporting.

  He was feeling particularly sorry for himself one rainy summer afternoon when a letter at last arrived from Angela. It had been rapidly scribbled in Southampton where she had just arrived, and it begged him to get the weekend off so as to be able to meet at her parents’ house in Hampshire. He knew he was scheduled to fly on Sunday, but another pilot owed him a favour and he lost no time in arranging a swap and clearing it with Whiskers. “Oh by the way,” said the CO, as William was leaving his office, “I believe there may be a change of scene on the way for you – drop into my office on Monday morning and I may be able to put you in the picture.” A change of scene! Normally this would have put William into a fever of excitement and speculation, but he had no time for that. He could think only of Angela. He dug out her last letter. Yes, yes, he had remembered correctly, she had signed herself Your Angela. His hand shook as he held the precious bit of paper. He got out his best uniform, gave it to his batman to press, and paid a young aircraftsman two shillings to clean up his car. Ample petrol was scrounged from the motor transport officer. No flowers were available anywhere for sale, but he knew where there were blu
ebells still in flower, wild, just off the aerodrome, and he surreptitiously slipped off to pick a large bunch, hoping not to be seen by any of his colleagues.

  He was all nerves in the mess that evening, so much so that someone asked him if he was flying a special detail that night and he shut them up with an uncharacteristically sharp reply. Even Jimmy, who came round to consult him about a problem with the radar set, found him tense and curt. He set off early in the morning, glad to be away from Air Force life at last and revelled in the drive through the May countryside, feeling that every moment took him farther from the sordid world of war.

  Exton Grange was a fine brick-built Queen Anne house set back from a small country lane in the beautiful Meon Valley. Behind it, a fine stand of beech trees clothed a low chalky hill and, as William drove up to the front door, a pair of insolent cock pheasants strutted across the lawn and through a wrought-iron gate into a walled vegetable garden. Immediately there was a sharp crack from a small-bore rifle and a cry of, “Got you, you bugger.” Sir Felix Pointer appeared from the garden, rifle in one hand, pheasant in the other. He greeted William heartily.

  “Are you any good at plucking pheasants, old boy? We could do with this fellow for lunch or it’ll be a bit sparse, but you’ll have to be quick, we’ll be eating in a couple of hours. Angela and her mother are off down the village on their bikes, back soon, I should think, so you’d better make a start.”

  Trying to hide his disappointment at not seeing his love immediately, William went round to the garden shed and dealt with the pheasant, the judge chatting to him as he worked. The family had adapted to wartime conditions with the sort of amateur fortitude characteristic of British families of their kind. Lady Pointer, typical of her class, had not so much as boiled an egg until 1939, but now she was without a cook or any help in the house and was coping single-handed, learning her cooking from the Ministry of Food leaflets and her housekeeping from the local Women’s Institute. She also worked three days a week for a local hostel for distressed sailors. Sir Felix, although now in his late seventies, had volunteered for a job in Whitehall, vaguely connected with the oversight of the various military courts. He spent four nights a week in London, at his club, in the midst of the bombing. Rory, Angela’s brother, was with his regiment in North Africa. William detected a note of unease in the judge’s comments about the fighting there and the latest German advances, but as far as anyone knew, Rory was safe. At weekends the two old people helped Watkins, the ancient gardener, in the vegetable patch “Digging for Victory” as the posters put it, and tended their flock of twelve fat brown hens. “Instead of an egg ration the Ministry gives us an issue of chicken meal and of course we keep all our scraps,” the judge explained.

  “And how about you, William? I hear you are now in a night fighter unit. Is that exciting?”

  “Well, sir, not really, quite routine mostly, but we have seen a little action in the last few months.”

  “You certainly seem to have had. A Jerry, a Junkers I think they said, came down just the other side of the road in the middle of the night last week.”

  “Do you remember which day that was?”

  “Yes, the eighteenth, I think.”

  William knew about this one. Peewee Brown, newly posted to the Owls, had got a JU88 over the Meon Valley on the eighteenth. He did not like to tell the judge of how Peewee had misjudged his landing at four a.m. after his first and only victory, dug a wing into the ground, turned his machine over and caught fire. He could not tell of the screams coming from the burning wreck as he, with half a dozen other aircrew and firemen, tried fruitlessly to tackle the blazing petrol. It had been criminal to put such an inexperienced officer in charge of an operational night fighter. He bit his lip and plucked savagely at the pheasant.

  Peewee and everything else was forgotten five minutes later, when two ancient bicycles wheezed up the drive. Angela was looking lovely in a bright floral dress and a wide hat, the very picture of a pretty English rose in the summer time. William could not help himself; he swept her off her feet, and carried her laughing and protesting to the door. Then, remembering his manners, he turned round to greet her mother. Retrieving the bluebells from the car, he shyly presented them to her, feeling embarrassed by his over enthusiastic greeting of his lady love. Lady Pointer immediately put him at his ease, admiring the flowers and saying how much the family had been looking forward to his visit. He could not help noticing how well and vigorous both the old Pointers looked. Hard work, fresh air and a reduced diet obviously suited them. As for Angela, she was delightfully brown from the Mediterranean sun and her happiness at being home and, he prayed, at seeing him, blotted out the cares and traumas of life caring for the sick and terribly wounded on the hospital ship. The pheasant was roasted and enjoyed, together with fresh vegetables and followed by fruit from the garden. It made a wonderful change from spam fritters and canned beans in the mess, and the conversation flowed freely. There was a lot the two young people could not discuss openly for security reasons but both had funds of funny stories about things they had seen and done and had the parents in stitches. After lunch, as the women worked in the kitchen, Sir Felix took William into the study and, with the subtlety which could only have been learnt over many years in the courts, began to question him about his family and ambitions. Obviously he had detected that this was the man his daughter loved and was determined to find out more about him. William was afraid that his answers, especially as regards what he intended to do after the war, were far from reassuring, but the old man seemed happy enough, and at long last he was released to take a walk through the country lanes with his love.

  The English countryside had been dramatically changed by the war. Where once had been woodland and old pasture the “War Ag”, as the department charged with maximising home-grown food production was called, had been at work grubbing out trees and ploughing up grassland. A host of tractors had taken the place of many of the old plough horses and they ground their way slowly across the fields tugging reaper and binders as men, women and boys collected the sheaves and built hundreds of little stooks. Away on the hill behind the village a yellow bulldozer was at work clearing more land for food production. Women and girls had replaced men in many of the jobs on the farms, tractor driving, milking, harvesting and working with animals, their brown arms made strong by the heavy work and their faces ripened rosy by the summer sun. It was an idyllic walk in the warm sun, up a chalky track to a clump of beeches on top of a low hill. Talk came easily and they swapped war experiences, not the frightening kind, but funny or ridiculous things which had happened to them and their colleagues. Angela was especially interested in the visit to Flopsy in London and William’s description of the blitz. She had seen something similar in Southampton a few days earlier and she felt a terrible anxiety that Hans might have had a hand in it. In fact, most bad things about the war reminded her of Hans. Though this didn’t seem the time to mention it to William, Hans was lurking at the back of her consciousness like a grumbling cancer deep inside her which she could not ignore or forget. Somehow, however, not even Hans could spoil that day, the companionship of the walk, the warm feeling of his body against her as they sat together, hidden by the friendly beech leaves, the delightful excitement of his kisses, the boyish sincerity of his declarations of love. He was still the simple, sensitive, kindly man she had dreamed of in her little bunk in the hospital ship. How would she ever be able to let him out of her sight?

  It was actually William who introduced the unwelcome guest to the party, asking Angela, rather surprisingly what her German friend had looked like.

  “You see,” he said, “your brother Rory told me his name at Waterloo Station. I think he may be my first cousin. My father’s name was von Pilsen; he changed it during the First War.”

  “Oh, darling, he didn’t really look like you, he was taller and blond. Darling, I never loved him, all that happened is that he, Rory and I had a little holiday in Essex together while I was working on my the
sis. Yes, he was fun to be with, but as soon as I thought about what might happen if there was a war, I couldn’t stop myself from hating him.”

  “Essex, where in Essex?”

  “Near a place called Bawdsey it was, wonderful for birds and for sailing.”

  William’s heart froze, his own Angela, staying near Bawdsey, with a German!

  “Why so worried, darling? It was completely innocent and Rory was with us all the time?”

  William had no choice but to believe his lovely girl, and after all, anything that bloody German might have learnt at Bawdsey would be way out of date by now. Both the lovers made an unspoken resolution to put Hans out of their minds (though neither actually managed it).

  Chapter 11

  Hans awoke from a long sleep which had been interrupted occasionally by odd sensations and distant, mumbling voices. He somehow felt detached from the world, floating above it on a cloud of something slightly wet but downy and soft. Waking, he saw a greenish room all round him and somewhere near, but out of focus, two faces peering down. Was he in heaven? Where was he? He remembered something about a motorbike ride, leaving someone behind, a fight… Then something brought him sharply back to reality. Someone was speaking to him. How clever! This someone spoke perfect English. “Hello,” he said. “Do you speak any English?” Hans felt himself nodding.

  “What is your name?” Hans thought for a moment. “Hans, Hans, von Pilsen, Hauptmann von Pilsen, Luftwaffe.” Then somehow he seemed to drift off again onto his cloud, looking down on the greenish world around and the two white-clad figures who had been near him. A little later he awoke again. This time it was less pleasant; he felt a throbbing pain, somewhere in his body, and a sense that something was wrong. One of the white figures reappeared. This time what he said was clear and precise.