The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘I think so, James. I only hope the people upstairs know what they’re doing . . .’ Then I told him, ‘I may not get home for a few weeks to begin with. Can you tell the boys?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell Dieter yourself? He’s still up; helping Mrs Maggs with the washing up.’ That sounded better; although I wondered how you could call the woman you shared your bed with Mrs Maggs. Perhaps I had it wrong.

  I had to wait a couple of minutes for Dieter. When he came on he said, ‘Sorry, Dad; I had to wipe my hands.’ I was a bit choked. I don’t think he’d actually called me Dad before.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m just sitting in the office adding up petrol bills.’

  ‘I could do that for you.’

  ‘You could probably do it better. I just called to tell you that I may not be home for a few weeks. I didn’t want you and Carlo to worry about me.’

  ‘I’ll tell him. Is it to do with what’s happening in Germany?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Major England’s newspaper says that people in Berlin will all starve.’ Bugger.

  ‘It’s wrong. We won’t let them.’

  He didn’t respond immediately, then he said, ‘Do you remember the German girl we chose a doll for?’

  ‘Lottie. Of course I do. Do you want me to give her another message?’

  ‘No, but if people begin to die in Berlin again I want you to bring her out. Just like you did me.’

  ‘It won’t get that bad, and anyway, her mother may not like that.’

  ‘Her mother too.’ I sensed something in the next pause. It was as if he was weighing up whether or not to tell me something. ‘You could marry her. You ought to be married.’ The little bugger had it all worked out.

  I tried to laugh it off. ‘She wouldn’t want me, Dieter. Anyway, I’m not the marrying kind.’

  He did it again. The five-beat pause. ‘I think that you are, Dad. In fact I’m sure of it.’

  What had started as a simple call to pass on some information had suddenly become a bit deep for me. I said, ‘Look, Dieter, can we talk about this when I next come down?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll remind you. I’ll remember to tell Carlo in the morning. Did you know he can say his alphabet, and write his name and address? I taught him. Mrs Maggs helped me.’

  ‘Give him a hug from me, and tell him Well done. I’m proud of him. I’m proud of you too. Are you getting on OK with Mrs Maggs now?’

  ‘Mrs Maggs is like a mother for me,’ he said rather formally, ‘although I’d rather we had one of our own.’ It was something he was not going to let go of easily.

  ‘OK, Dieter,’ I sighed. ‘I get the message. I’d better speak to James again.’

  I told James I’d phone every few days if I could, and that there was an envelope addressed to him under the mattress of my bed in the prefab. He didn’t need to ask what was in it. The call went on a bit because Mrs Maggs insisted on getting a word.

  ‘You’re doing a grand job with the kids,’ I told her. ‘Does anyone tell you that?’

  ‘You do. But thank you all the same.’

  ‘Dieter’s got me married off already.’

  ‘. . . Time someone did, innit?’

  Her quick putdowns always left me smiling. I think that she knew that. It was a good way to leave it.

  I stared at the telephone for a minute after I had put it down. It was dark outside, but not cold. I recalled that as late as 1944 I was shy of using a telephone, because we’d never had one in the house. My eight-year-old son had just chatted to me on one for five minutes as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Things were changing. Then I caught the word. I had just thought of Dieter as my son. That was a first too. I stood up from the desk, and pulled the office curtains in case Elaine looked in for that spot of hanky panky. When I went back to the desk I saw that I’d doodled the words Marthe and Lottie on the blotting pad, and drawn a dark circle around them.

  Airworks and Flight Refuelling got the call before we did. Five days into the Airlift proper Berlin ran out of petrol, and one of them already had most of that side of the business all sewn up. They’d been buying up Lancastrians like there was no tomorrow, and converting them into flying petrol tankers. We lent them a couple of pilots to ferry them into Germany: every time I saw one I momentarily saw Milton’s silly face, and lost my place in the day.

  Then I went up to Cardiff in Dorothy, with Scroton and Mortensen . . . and after that I nearly bought it.

  It was a simple run between Cardiff and Lorient in Brittany. I’ve sometimes wondered why the French call a port just about as west as they can go in their country, the orient. Peculiar sense of direction maybe. We had thirty-five war-surplus US tractors for the Brittany farmers. Scroton had filed a flight plan for Rennes, which was the nearest place with a proper airfield for Customs and freight, but the Old Man vetoed that. He’d taken a door-to-door contract, and didn’t want to shell out for road transport at the other end. A local farmer who was fronting the deal assured us that he had a field large enough and firm enough for Dorothy’s fat footprint. He’d promised us farmhouse bed-and-breakfast, and a petrol bowser waiting to top her up. Reading between the lines I think that meant les Douanes knew nothing at all about the trip.

  Mortensen said he no longer farted. He’d been to the Doc when everyone refused to fly with him, and had been dosed up. He sweated instead, and his sweat was more rancid than his farts. He smelled positively unhealthy. The armpits of his white shirt had stiffened to a lemon yellow colour.

  One of the tractors broke loose in turbulence over the Channel, and raced around the cargo space like a fighting bull in the Ronda ring. Mortensen and I eventually managed to rope it down, but not before it had dealt Dorothy’s flanks some spectacular dents, and it still moved about under its shackles. I couldn’t stop myself from going back to check on it every ten minutes. When I went back to report to Scroton I distinctly heard Mortensen drop one, and got the shock of the sickly, sweet smell we were familiar with.

  ‘I’m not due any more linctus for an hour,’ he told us. ‘You’ll bloody well have to put up with it: I have to.’

  Then there was the rain out of Cardiff so deep we took half an hour to climb out of it. Dorothy was cold and clammy, and wallowed around in the wet air as if she was ready to give up. Flights like that can discourage you. We broke clear of the squalls over Torquay, and a couple of Fleet Air Arm Sea Hornets came up to play silly buggers for ten minutes. Anyone would think they hadn’t seen a red-painted big job before. They pushed off as soon as the weather began to catch up again. So much for the Navy’s vaunted all-weather fighters. The precipitation chased us all the way down to Rennes and then across to Lorient, which is where things got a little awkward.

  Scroton circled Dorothy around the field a couple of times, at about a hundred feet. We’d shared the navigation, and were pretty pleased with ourselves for finding it without too much difficulty. Dave said it was plenty long enough if we touched down in one corner and ran diagonally across it. The Frenchman obviously thought the same, because he’d pinned a big white arrow, made from sheets, at the touch-down corner, and marked the course across the field with half a dozen swan-necked flares – he’d done this before. Each flare burned with a sharp orange light and a narrow plume of black smoke, so the smoke gave us a wind drift as well. Piece of piss really – well, you’d think so.

  Scroton committed us to the landing with a short flat run, and dropped her just inside the boundary, almost on the arrow, and immediately shut down all four throttles. Then Mortensen said, ‘’s funny. The hydraulic pressure’s . . .’

  He didn’t get a chance to say anything else, because Dave had tramped on the pedals, and nothing happened. He screamed, ‘Fu-u-cked . . . no brakes! . . .’ You could have heard that shout back in Cardiff.

  The field ran away from us, and we were crossing it like a comet. It dropped a few feet into its far corner, beyond which was a big stone farmhouse, a line of jaunty washing, and about six cot
tages: there was no way we were going to clear or avoid them. Scroton told me later that he didn’t think about what he did next . . . he just selected undercarriage up, and dropped the York onto the field in a classic belly flop. Look, Ma, no wheels! Like all the best dancers Dot had a nice flat tummy, and we careered across the wet grass on it like a toboggan on Hampstead Heath. Dave hung on to the controls by instinct, but they weren’t doing anything any more. The noise was tremendous, and clods of earth and grass billowed around Dorothy’s run like a thundercloud. Then she stopped. Mortensen hit his head on the side screen, and closed his eyes. I slammed into the back of his seat.

  What followed wasn’t silence, it was the pattering and banging of all of the shit we’d flung into the air falling back down onto us again. Then there was the silence, and Scroton began to laugh.

  ‘I think that was my best crash so far,’ he told us.

  We had lost the crew door, which was on the port side, under the wing. A big Frog wearing one of those smashing small black berets put his head and shoulders through the space. He said, ‘’allo?’

  I was sitting on the floor. My shoulder hurt, and my face was telling me to expect a black eye in the morning. Dave was laughing, and Mortensen was out cold. The Frenchman tried again, ‘’allo, ’allo?’

  ‘’allo,’ I responded. I was probably grinning like a fool.

  ‘Les tracteurs?’

  ‘Oui. Tout va bien. Très forts.’ Then I switched wearily to English, because my brain wouldn’t work. ‘You’re supposed to say, For you the war is over.’

  He shook his head and smiled, and said in better English than my French, ‘Welcome to France. Your first visit?’

  ‘No. I was here in ’45 and ’47.’

  ‘She has changed.’

  ‘So have I. I’m older, and I get hurt more easily.’

  ‘What’s the bad smell in your aeroplane?’

  That made me smile again. ‘That’s a long story . . .’

  ‘A glass of wine perhaps?’

  ‘Delighted, old fellow.’

  He helped me out. Scroton scrambled after me, dragging Mortensen. We laid him on the grass, but he was having none of it, because he woke up, and sat up.

  ‘If you say, Where am I?’ I said, ‘I’ll clout you and lay you out again.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘In France.’

  ‘That’s OK. For a moment I thought we were still in Wales. I couldn’t bear to be in Wales.’

  It wasn’t wine, it was bloody cider. Bloody gallons of the bloody stuff. I phoned Lympne from an odd-shaped public pay phone outside one of the cottages, and explained to Elaine that although our crew and cargo had arrived approximately intact, the same couldn’t be said for Dorothy: she was going to need some determined nursing.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Bruised and just a little drunk. Dorothy slid on her belly for damned nigh a hundred yards before she stopped. No word on the Squadron Leader coming back?’

  ‘Complications: he’s been transferred to the dental hospital in an ambulance.’

  ‘Any decisions you want me to make then? I’m good at that when I’m drunk.’

  ‘Why don’t I do it for you, and just put your name to them?’

  ‘OK. Will you tell the boss we had a problem?’

  ‘How big is the problem? Will Dorothy fly again?’

  ‘Eventually . . . why don’t you get Randall to drop the Chiefy over here to look at her?’

  ‘OK, Charlie . . . you’re in charge.’ The odd thing was it bloody felt like it as well.

  You may not believe this but there was a party going when I found my way back to the farmhouse: someone had produced a whole cask of cider, and half a dozen bottles of clear spirits. The farmer paid me in cash for the tractors, which was a bit nervy. It was a wallet of franc notes that he asked me to give to Halton: I hadn’t known that they were his bloody tractors as well. I don’t know where all the folk came from, but the farmer, Gaspard, had the best collection of Tommy Dorsey 78s I’ve ever seen. I danced a couple with a very pretty young wife, but didn’t like the way her husband watched us – cleaning his fingernails with a nasty-looking lock knife with black grips. After ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ I led her back across the floor and gave him her hand, a small bow and a Merci. Later we danced to bagpipe music in large rings, just like the Scots, and didn’t go out to Dorothy again till next morning.

  She didn’t look all that good in the morning; like your girlfriend without her make-up. I probably didn’t look so good myself; I had a hell of a headache, I’ll tell you that. If someone from Brittany ever offers you some sloppy white spirits in a greasy bottle, do yourself a favour and say No. Randall flew the drab Oxford in at about half past ten. He said that he hadn’t wanted to attract attention to us. I think we’d already done that ourselves; we’d left a ruddy great red aeroplane in the middle of someone’s best field. Chiefy had brought a fitter with him. They both had overnight bags with them, and got down from Randall’s aircraft looking around for the enemy. We left Mortensen with them, and were back in Lympne after lunch.

  The Chief phoned me before I jacked it in for the day. He said, ‘You’ve left yon Dorothy with a very dirty pair of knickers, Mr Bassett.’ Yon.

  ‘I didn’t think you were a Scottie, Chief.’

  ‘I aren’t. I belong to Consett. Why did you think that?’

  ‘Never mind. How’s our aeroplane?’

  ‘Not as bad as I thought. These Yorks have a very strong frame, but I’ll have to reskin her belly, and you need three new propeller blades. I’ll look to her engines tomorrow.’

  ‘What do I tell the boss?’

  ‘Tell him she might fly out of here in a fortnight; there again, she might not. If she’s part of his cunning plan, tell him to claim on the insurance and go out and buy another. We can always sell one later.’ That’s always the problem with engineers: they tend to be too free with other folk’s money.

  ‘Where will I find the parts and materials you’ll need, Avro’s?’

  ‘Leave it to Mrs Curtis. She’ll know. I’ll send her a telegram. Is that all for the time being, Mr Bassett? . . . There seems to be some sort of dance starting up, and I don’t want to miss anything.’

  ‘Don’t they ever bloody stop?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, sir; ask me in a week.’

  Elaine assured me that he wouldn’t be out there a week. He’d get the work started, then we would send in another erk with the spares and the Chief would come back on the same flight. He’d probably go out with a pilot to get Dorothy into the air again. Ground-crew chiefs are like your mother; you don’t know where you’d be without them.

  Elaine said, ‘You’ve a proper shiner there, Charlie. Did some woman’s husband catch up with you at last?’

  ‘You could almost say that, but actually no. Dorothy did it to me.’ If I had a smile, it was at a recent memory. When I walked out to the Oxford with Scroton and Randall, the pretty woman I had danced with, and her husband, accompanied us. They were neighbouring farmers who had bought one of the tractors. She gave me a kiss on each cheek, and he held out his hand for a shake. I felt something pressed into my palm. When I looked down it was his wicked little lock knife. He closed my fist over it, smiled and nodded . . . being one of the first farmers in France to own a tractor was going to give him an edge. I suppose he thought that he was giving me an edge too. It was an evil little thing, and I loved it immediately. I put my hand in my overalls pocket as I spoke to Elaine, just to make sure that it was still there.

  Old Man Halton made a flying visit. It’s what owners of pocket airlines do. I should have guessed that he could fly, although I wouldn’t have liked sitting alongside him for a landing when he started to cough his lungs up. He had a nice shiny new Auster, which he taxied right up to the office as if he owned the place. I walked out to greet him. On its cabin door it had the words Lionheart and Halton Airways in neat black stencil.

  ‘I couldn’t call
her plain Lion, or Cowardly Lion, could I?’

  ‘I suppose not, boss. What will you do when you run out of Wizard of Oz?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that; I thought I’d make a start on Alice. Am I going to need a new Dorothy?’

  ‘Only if you want her within the next fortnight. Chiefy says she’ll be back in the air by then: good as new.’ My left hand was behind my back, fingers crossed.

  He was shaking his head, and coughing at the same time. ‘I won’t buy another. She’s been nothing but bother.’

  I rather liked the way she’d walked away from her first crash landing, but decided to hold that observation for later. He stooged around what was temporarily my office, looked through the clips of clearances and flight dockets, and checked them against the readiness board.

  ‘You’re rather good at this, Charlie,’ he told me.

  ‘I’m doing Mr Brunton’s job, and flying as well. I should get double the pay.’

  He laughed. ‘Not that good.’

  I wasn’t going to push it. I had a good number and knew it.

  ‘It’s not all that difficult, boss. You just need to keep tabs of where our assets are, if they’re serviceable, what they’re doing . . . and where you want them next.’

  ‘Assets?’

  ‘Sorry: aircraft and crews.’

  ‘You’re thinking like a capitalist, Charlie, I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of you.’ We’d just dumped his biggest aircraft in a field in France, and the little bugger was cracking jokes. Even more, they were weak jokes with a little bit of poison inside. I’d have to watch him. Before he left an hour later he told me to jump on the next bus to Celle and Berlin . . . he wanted to be certain that things were ready for us. He always seemed to know that much quicker than the rest of them.

  Getting across to Germany at no expense – which is what the Old Man expected – entailed a delay of nearly two days. A new pilot we’d taken on was due to fly the Pink Pig and a load of American PX stores over from an American base in the UK. We arranged for him to flop down at Lympne to pick me up. The Old Man said it would give me a chance to check out both the pilot and the Pig.