The stink-maker had been back in… Yes. His Majesty’s new Flying Officer O’Regan, M. himself. At first sight of the Australian, Jessop had assumed he must be in to challenge his latest Request for Transfer rejection. Yet not even O’Regan knew why he was there. Curiouser, when Jessop had phoned downstairs, his eminently capable Assistant Section Officer Victoria Haimes hadn’t the foggiest – a state of affairs without precedent for young Victoria… And, insult to injury, she said there was another Australian on his way in for no apparent reason. She had his name somewhere, took an eternity to find it – what was wrong with the girl this morning? Ah yes, Quinn was the name – at long last… A name Jessop found he recalled; chap’d been in a few months back, another troublemaker and just one in an endless succession but this one had been in on April Fools’ Day… Still, young Victoria had come up trumps in the end: She had very firmly agreed with Jessop that Australian HQ was, as ever, the weak link in the chain here and she made the problem go away. Ah, the lovely Miss Haimes…
Just as Jessop thought of his blonde assistant, she walked past outside the tea rooms, a manner of urgency in her step, it seemed to Jessop. He checked his watch, yes, coming up to 10, her usual tea break, no doubt in a beeline for her latest young pilot. Alas, Jessop resigned, the unattainable Victoria: the sort of really top-drawer girl who accepted nothing less than young men with wings on their chests. The class of girl Jessop would never win. To think he’d once picked these tea rooms for his usual as Miss Haimes took her break here. Though he didn’t see her much after that; seems she migrated a few shops down, closer to the Pier. In any case, thanks to Miss Haimes, this morning Jessop had been able to tell young O’Regan where to go: Away. And to advise the other Aussie ditto.
Jessop stared out at the Channel, churning a spoon through his tea. What was it? What was it about these Australians, he pondered, that so unsettled him?
If you told a young British pilot what was what, he accepted it. Oh, he may not like it, but he’d accept it. Indeed, the British population, Jessop reflected, seemed born to accept anything: They put up with any deprivation, any hardship – The Blitz had proved that… Unable to win his Battle of Britain by the light of day, Hitler’s fire-bombing of London every night for ten weeks had been designed to wear down its population, wither morale, turn them against their own government. All it did was strengthen their resolve. Indeed, it united them. Together, they just put up with it, and even cheerfully – ‘mucking in’, they called it. Courage, Jessop called it. The courage to accept the unacceptable.
Australians, apparently, were not in the habit of so readily accepting things. Was it their ‘convict mentality’ as so often bemoaned? Were they perhaps, by contrast to the British, simply too ‘young’ a nation to be accustomed to accepting things? Such thoughts unsettled Crispin Jessop…
As he sipped his tea, the nearby town clock began its 10 o’clock chime. Dash it all, the English Channel was blue today… It really was, the day out over it so very clear. Indeed, the water sparkled – He’d never seen that before, lovely! Sparkles and black birds at a hover… What was that? – bit of a to-do outside on the street… Town clock still chiming… Someone running hell for leather right to left past the window…
Between the chimes Jessop now caught a sound like jackhammers starting up a way off, close by him a teacup saucering heavily. On his own saucer, he then noticed, the teaspoon was rattling.
‘GET-ON-THE- FLOOR!’ boomed a male voice from behind him. A cluster of sharp cracks shot his attention upwards: Through a twinkling dust he saw penny-sized holes in the shop’s upper window glass, just as a picture-frame fell off the right-hand wall and soundly smashed. This wall now shook, audible through it, an unseen riot of shattering objects.
Through the front window Jessop saw a man ducking to a crouch, pointing, arm outstretched at the water, at the black birds. Peering hard through his spectacles Jessop saw the flock coming in over the water not landing but lifting, and as one. Standing from his table with a force that knocked his chair away behind him, Jessop made for the door to the street.
Stepping onto the sidewalk, his shoe crunched on broken glass, the man still pointing at the birds, his arm tracking them steadily to the right. Jessop now saw the black birds were black and olive: birds with black-and-white crosses on them, lifting as a flock over the shops down by the Pier, and gone from sight.
The shops now blossomed into numberless pieces, pieces still going straight up as the stinging blast hit Jessop’s ears as one with the lightning veil of fog that knocked him flat.
Lifting his face off broken glass, his spectacles gone, Jessop’s near-sighted eyes could make out a dark blue figure coming towards him – sprinting towards him, a rock-hard determined face flashing clean over him, a glimpse of wings patch. And another was coming, also in dark blue, yet tripping, tumbling, now skidding across the ground towards Jessop, a face grinding to a halt mere inches from his own, a face that, though distorted with pain, Jessop recognised: one from this morning – the Australian – O’Regan, his mouth yelling something. Though so close that Jessop felt his breath, the Aussie’s words were a blur as if under water. But already he had sprung up and was gone.
Jessop squinted in his wake: down towards the Pier, he could make out that much, O’Regan’s bolting form now dwarfed by the rising pyre of black smoke.
Jessop staggered painfully to his feet.
And ran after him.
*
For Crispin Jessop the firemen, the medical staff close about him, the policemen, the gathering crowds were just forms that shifted and fused into one another. As a nurse very carefully applied a field-dressing to one of the cuts on his face, a realisation was settling within Crispin, a realisation of stunning clarity. And it was this: One did not know ‘courage’ until one saw another run into a building with its roof on fire to drag out a friend. One did not know courage. O’Regan had come back out in frantic reverse, his hands hooked up under a chap’s armpits – the sprinter, as it turned out; though caked in grey masonry dust, parts of his dark blue RAAF uniform were just visible, at which point O’Regan and some of the firemen had to fight to restrain the poor chap – ‘She’s still in there, still in there,’ he’d kept choking and spluttering – until they got him into an ambulance, and away.
Then Jessop had seen who ‘she’ was, O’Regan confirming her identity in his subdued exchange with one of the firemen: She was his friend’s ‘girl’. In due course she was brought out on a stretcher, her face as yet uncovered. Eyes wide open. Victoria Haimes. Dead as a doornail. The first dead person Crispin had ever seen. Then there was a horrid moment when her severed arm had rolled off the stretcher, though quickly, deftly picked up off the rubbly ground by a fireman and placed back under her blanket, and she was taken away.
Crispin Jessop wasn’t going to recommend young O’Regan for a medal for bravery; he was going to set something in train that might do the chap some actual good. Crispin Jessop was going to get in personal contact with whoever pulled the strings at 611 Squadron and recommend to him that O’Regan, M., RAAF be approved for transfer anywhere on the planet he bloody-well liked.
*
Dear Michael.
Thank you very very much for the lovely letters you sent to us. Each one that came we all sat down in the big room like we always do Joseph read them out Mike I closed my eyes and pretended it was you reading them not Jo and after each time we listened to the wireless and to the places where you are. Geraldine is still writing this for me because I still have trouble with writing words so I am very grateful to her and I know she wont tell anyone I closed my eyes and pretended Jo was you cause if she does Ill stomp on her wont I Gezza. Anyway Jo read each letter to us more than once even until the next one came.
Next week it is my birthday Ill be 6 Mike I wish you could be here for it maybe you will but if not then at least for your birthday which will be in October youll be 23. Gee thats old. I dont think Ill ever be 23 Im just so tired of being 5 its like Iv
e been 5 forever except when I was 4 and that was worse. ! For my birthday present Jo says it cant be done but I would like you to fly me in a Spitfighter from Mascot to Bankstown I worked it out I have a map. It was torn out of a atlas book I look at it every night I got it from a boy at school I was in a fight with I got in huge trouble for that one but it was worth it cause Ive got my map now dont I. Jo says it cant be done the Spitfighter only sits one thats you Mike but Im pretty small as you know and can sit on your lap Ill have to anyway to see out wont I. Jo just said the air force couldnt afford it theres a war on and wars cost money I said the minute they cant afford the war no more Ill catch the flipping bus. !
Jo just went all quiet I said Im sorry to him Mike. That will be my birthday present to you Mike not to get mad at people all year. For one whole year really and truth. If youd just come home I reckon I could do anything it would be so much easier everything would be.
Just come home Mike. Love you to pieces.
Bridie.
PS Gezza writes real fast doesnt she I reckon Ill do the special lessons with her she wants me to.
*
Mick pressed his firing button, and kept it very firmly depressed through the long curving bank behind the Focke-Wulf. Through the whole extended burst of his tracers spitting out ahead he could have sworn not a round didn’t punch into the target; several feet cut off one wing, then off the other, engine cowling peppered and smashed, he only stopped firing as the Focke-Wulf’s ammunition supply exploded: white-hot pieces shooting dead straight in all directions, some in mad tight-spiraling arcs. As others passed beneath like spent crazyjacks, Mick knew it…
It was getting easier.
*
Brozek raised his glass.
‘Is bluddy good, Mike. Is what these English call “a good show”: one yesterday for you and two today? So six, this makes you now an “ace”, my friend, plus one.’ Brozek swallowed his vodka, as did Mick. ‘And there is news for you, my friend. Yes.’
Mick’s eyes widened. ‘My transfer’s come through…’
‘No. They have made you Flight Lieutenant.’
‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ released Mick.
‘What is this?’
‘Don’ worry,’ Mick chuckled.
‘Oh. And there is more, my friend. And you had better be sitting down, I think, when you hear it.’ Brozek leant forward to pour another measure of vodka into Mick’s glass.
Mick grinned. ‘I am sitting down…’
Brozek looked up momentarily as he poured. ‘Is true…’ He sat back again, poured his own glass. ‘They have made me Squadron Leader.’
Mick raised his glass, smiling broadly indeed. ‘ Na zdrowie,’ he offered.
‘Your accent it improves,’ grinned Brozek.
Wednesday, August 19, 1942
The Spitfire Mark IX was such a lovely fighter that to Mick the two-plane ‘thatch-weave manoeuvre’ life-or-death-essential with the Mark V now seemed redundant; you no longer flew to get a Focke-Wulf off your tail, you got on his tail. And shot the bastard. You just went after him; you could in a Mark IX… That or the Focke-Wulf Mick had just taken out had had a novice pilot at its controls: With Mick on his tail the German had rolled this way and that as if he didn’t really know what he was doing. Mick gave him just a short squirt, put at least one cannon shell directly into his cockpit and that was that, a successful start the day and no ordinary day evidently: 611 Squadron had been woken at 0200 Hours, mass briefing, ‘a flap-on’ as the English pilots termed it, something called ‘Operation Jubilee’…
It didn’t make sense to Mick at the briefing. It still didn’t: Ship half the Canadian Army in England across the Channel, land them at the German-held French port of Dieppe. Their mission? Reconnaissance. Into doing such things. All Mick could think was that it seemed a very big and very bloody dangerous sort of ‘reconnaissance’. In any event, his job this day along with 611 Squadron and half the Royal Air Force apparently was to keep the Luftwaffe off all these Canadians the whole time they crossed the English Channel, got off their ships, hung about for a bit, got back onto their ships and back across the Channel. ‘By Lunchtime’, so stated at the briefing. The only other thing Mick could think was that, in order for all of this to happen without incurring the actual loss of half the Canadian Army, this ‘Operation Jubilee’ would have to be a very well-planned sort of operation…
Having flown above it since first light, Mick had got his kill and come back across the Channel with 611 to refuel and rearm at Hawkinge after which, according to the plan, they would return to Dieppe. It was at Hawkinge, smack bang in the middle of a revolving door madhouse of Spits, that Mick had an unexpected reunion. With Daniel Quinn.
He seemed okay at first, standing by his Mark V all kitted up and ready to go again. He appeared really quite glad to see Mick, they had a first few words when just right out of nowhere Quinn had a bloody good cry.
Poor bloke: How long had it been? Not three weeks since Bournemouth… Physically, Quinn seemed to have come good: His hands had been a bit torn up from trying to get the girl out from under all that rubble and glass and the fallen beams. They seemed to have healed well. Mick didn’t mention the girl, let alone her name considering Quinn’s state, but that had to be it – that and who knows what else.
Mick did his best to straighten him out: told him he didn’t have to be ashamed; it was understandable given all he’d been through on the way to becoming and then staying a bloody fighter pilot. But now, now he couldn’t afford to focus on what he’d lost, only on what he had to keep: Everything together. Not lose it in front of his new wingman. Or his wingman’d lose it, that’d be the end of him and in a Mark V still that’d be the end of Daniel Quinn, wouldn’t it.
Luckily, talking straight to him like this, keeping things simple to see, it seemed to work. They even had a bit of a laugh in the end and Quinn was back together again by the time his new wingman got back from the gents’: A pastier-looking Pom Mick had never seen. Still, the young bloke seemed pretty devoted to Quinn and that was good.
Funny but, on take-off again with 611 Squadron, Mick realised he’d just done himself a bit of good too – when it dawned on him he’d just averted an impossible situation: a Spitfire pilot in tears, so his wingman with no one to follow, so no one to keep the other alive and battle just minutes away. As Mick drove his throttle forward, his Spit winding up into its sweet, sweet internal roar, he knew he’d only done what was necessary but he’d done it quickly, correctly, and right now felt a way he’d never known… More like a Flight Lieutenant or something… As his Spit left the ground, lifted a little, undercarriage lever to ‘UP’, Mick considered what he’d just said to Quinn: You know you have to let each one go, don’t you. And it hit Mick that he’d have to let go too. He’d better; right now he had some new blokes to look after, as a Section Leader now, three of them. He switched his cockpit radio set to transmit.
‘Green Section, Green Leader. Report in, please.’
The young voices came back strong and clear…
‘Green 2.’
‘Green 3.’
‘Green 4.’
‘Green Section, Green Leader. Stay with me but spread out: Finger Four formation. 2, cover my tail. 4, cover 3. Safety catches off. Out.’
Mick scanned hard ahead through his windscreen. In the moment he had a sense at long last of feeling completely comfortable in the cockpit of the Spit – despite the ‘snug fit’ with all the layers of gear you needed on you to fly it. And even less space this morning: Right after the briefing Brozek had given him some actual bullets for the large pistol that had been at the bottom of his duffle bag since Bradfield Park. Mick now wore it, loaded, inside his flying jacket’s map pocket, its press-stud flap firmly secure, the safety catch of the Webley & Scott 455 revolver set firmly ‘on’.
*
Unteroffizier Franz Mueller was sick of the war. Sick to death of it. Most Germans were. They just had to finish it. Which, with their German discipline
, they would. And win it…
In his rear-facing seat within the cockpit of the Dornier 217 heavy bomber, the aircraft’s twin BMW engines mere feet away from Franz outside the ‘glass-house’ of the cockpit obliterated all sound except that which came through the headphones of his flying suit. In these Franz now heard the radio message being transmitted by the lead bomber of their formation. He made a note of it in his log, and activated the Dornier’s cockpit cabin intercom.
‘Dieppe coming up, Herr Leutnant.’
Though Leutnant Schiller, the Dornier’s navigator/bomb-aimer, sat less than an arm’s length away over Franz’s left shoulder, the time the intercom system had failed they’d had to pass hand-written notes to each other. Schiller’s voice now returned in Franz’s headphones, as ever, preoccupied, precise: ‘ I know, Franz, I know…’
Seated on the Leutnant’s direct left, Oberleutnant Scheckter, their pilot, now spoke over the intercom, his voice, as ever, measured, methodical.
‘Watch out for enemy fighters, Franz…’
‘Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant.’
The pilot spoke again. ‘You too, Niki…’
‘Jawohl, mein Führer.’
In his headphones Franz heard more than one voice chuckling. They all agreed Flieger ‘Niki’ Hertzfeld looked too young to be in a uniform of any kind; even Schiller called him ‘the Hitler Youth’. Niki… A genuine character: Nothing he didn’t find or couldn’t make seem funny. Yet his irrepressible sense of humour would land him in trouble one day, Franz feared. Though not today: At this moment young Nikolas was flat on his stomach behind his machine-gun, unseen by the rest of the crew in his ‘ventral’ gunner position, watching out behind and beneath the Dornier.
‘…Ja-wohl.’
Franz, upper rear gunner as well as radio operator of the bomber, pulled back on the breach of his MG15 machine-gun, cocking it – now ready to fire, and turned to scan forward over the shoulders of his pilot and navigator/bomb-aimer. Only the English Channel down ahead. And what looked like columns of smoke rising up from it. He scanned port then starboard then straight up though the glass-house – no sign of British fighters as yet – so settled back in his rear-facing position. All clear: Only the morning horizon of France in their wake and a whole Kampfgeschwader of Dorniers perched in neat formation.
Ghosts of the Empire Page 14