by Michael Gill
He would have my English Poets and Point Counter Point and Joad’s Guide to Modern Thought. More importantly, his spare uniform would now be intended for someone six feet one inch, mine for someone five feet four inches. I looked at his shirts, neatly folded in front of the easel. Collar size fourteen; and he had acquired mine with collar size fifteen-and-a-half. His boots, which I now owned, were size seven; I needed size eight. I tried on the tin helmet: even that was tiny, resting on my head like an inverted ashtray. What a disaster. I groaned aloud. How could I go to a new posting carrying such a weight of demonstrable incompetence?
The other airmen watched my investigations with beady interest. Imagining the sort of charge I would be put on, the fines I would be subjected to, the time it would take to retrieve the lost items, enlivened the tedium of the journey. At the least, I would be put under open arrest for wilfully jeopardising RAF property. I glared out of the window in despair, trying to ignore their sniggering innuendoes. It was like my first train journey to join the RAF. I was a hopeless case, cut off and alienated from my fellow men. The comradeship I had managed to establish at Skegness was only a temporary illusion.
I could not help but blame Wyndham. I should have been sorry for him, swamped in shirts that would come over his ears and down below his knees: instead I felt anger that he had not prevented the disaster. He was older than me, more level-headed and sagacious, and he had not foreseen it. Once you thought about it, it was obviously an easy mistake to occur. A last-minute check of the contents of our equipment would have revealed it instantly. My mother would have done just that. Cautious, caring woman, she always checked and counter-checked everything. Of course, she would have done my packing for me in the first place. I would not expect Wyndham to replace her exactly, but he might have looked after me better.
I looked out at flat wide skies that seemed to have the reflection of the sea in them. Seagulls, like tiny flecks of white paint, were landing on the fresh brown of a ploughed field. Strutting about, they were each an animated question mark to my competence. Why had I not noticed that the shape was different? I could never have created those neatly packed rectangles. Why had I not sensed the difference on my back? And how had little Wyndham borne that misshapen hump that would have been my pack between his shoulders for so long without question? No doubt we were two of a kind. Our mutual insufficiencies had drawn us together. Briefly, we had been able to shove up a fragile bastion against fate. This catastrophe appropriately terminated that blissful interregnum. Now, alone once more, we would suffer the unchecked buffets of malignant fortune.
The train chauntered slowly on, past level-crossings and little houses and gardens spired with dead sunflowers. Wainfleet, Thorpe Calvert, Little Seeping, Sibsey: the porters had the faces of wise old cobnuts. At last my compartment had lost interest in my fate. It was discussing the German campaign in Russia. A terrible battle had been raging at distant Stalingrad. For four weeks the Germans had thrown in attack after attack, but the defendants fought on among the ruins. The opposing strategies were analysed as the train proceeded cautiously along a canal. It was an October day of transient sunlight and high cloud. Old men sat fishing in their overcoats. Near Hubberts Bridge suddenly there was a heron, red beak and grey feathers frozen on one leg above the green slime.
My compartment dwelt with wincing relish on the privations suffered by both sides. In hushed voices it luxuriated in the horror: the disgusting things that the Russians did to captured Germans, the sickening atrocities meted out by the Germans to entire villages. It was well known that the Germans, especially the SS, were fiends incarnate. As for the Russians, they were barely human. Meanwhile, we were making rather better time, each little red brick halt reeling past in its pocket handkerchief of ploughed fields: Swineshead, Heckington, Sleaford. The names proclaimed a long-matured care for the land, a pride that gave each cottage its unique dignity. Unimaginable that the mayhem of total war should ever harrow here. Or that disaster should befall oneself. Yet the final terror lay in this: the whole world was now drawn as tight as a single membrane; distant pain caused a twinge to one’s own skin. The same contagion that had desolated the cottages of the Ukraine might spring up in the back gardens of England; had in modified form already done so, as I had witnessed a few weeks before, looking along the main street of Canterbury, ablaze from end to end. Would the disease be mortal for all mankind? Only time would tell. I was a pessimist by nature, and my brief experience had not made me more sanguine. The sharp rectangles of Wyndham’s back-pack demonstrated that it was only a matter of luck.
We lurched to a halt. NCOs ran along the platform ordering us to de-train. It was Grantham, a largish station, crowded now with troops, standing singly or in bemused groups in the surrounding clutter of their equipment, like so many defrocked Christmas trees. I looked for someone in authority, to whom I could report my loss. No one seemed remotely interested. I supposed it would have to wait until I could report it at my new station. What a way to appear on a course, which I had been selected for on supposed grounds of high intelligence.
I paused on the edge of the platform indecisively. At that moment another train came through. It did not stop but, with airmen leaning from every window, passed with a steady clank and warning shouts from the guards. As if in slow motion, Wyndham passed before my nose. He had not seen me; he was looking off into the middle distance, an absent smile on his lips, obviously entranced by the animated scene. I rushed after him, screaming his name. Startled, he looked round, and broke into a smile of delighted recognition. Trying to keep up, impeded by the crowds and the mass of equipment that covered the platform I waved the back-pack at him. He waved his free hand cheerfully back. Obviously no inkling of the disaster had yet struck him.
‘I’ve got your pack and you’ve got mine!’ I shrieked. ‘Throw it out!’
We were surrounded by laughing, cursing, bawling troops; by warning guards; by other cries of recognition as other acquaintances were renewed and last messages passed; by shouted imprecations as I kicked through piles of gear; by the increasing clatter of the train as it began to pick up speed, the end of the platform coming in sight. Wyndham could not understand what I meant. I shouted again and again, getting hoarser and more desperate. Eventually I threw the pack hard at his chest. He reeled back with the shock but instinctively clutched it.
‘That’s your pack,’ I screamed. ‘Now throw out mine.’
The train was beginning to outpace me, but I caught the look of understanding dawning on his face. He had recognised his own pack, but instead of throwing back mine, he plunged back into the interior of the coach, to be instantly replaced by several other airmen.
‘Get out of the way, let him get back,’ I shrieked and gesticulated, but they only grinned and waved. I knew what had happened. He had been standing in the corridor and was now forcing himself back into the compartment, struggling to retrieve my pack from under the piles of others in the racks, falling over people’s feet, being obstructed by uncomprehending and belligerent multitudes. Meanwhile the train was getting into its stride. I had to run full pelt to keep up with it. Fortunately this was easier because the waiting troops thinned out towards the end of the platform.
In a moment it was going to be too late: the airmen at the window were pulling up the sash. To be cheated at the very moment when all might have been retrieved. Just as I reached the end of the platform where it sloped down into the gravel, Wyndham precipitously reappeared and shoved the window down again.
‘Michael!’ he shouted.
‘Wyndham!’ I shouted back.
For a moment we looked at each other eye to eye. Then the train shot away in a triumphant burst of speed, and the drumming on the tracks beside me rose to a crescendo, drowning the cat-calls and whoops from the platform. From far down the rapidly receding coaches, a hand and arm appeared and tossed in the air a squarish grey canvas object. Heavy, it described a lazy parabola and fell on the gravel between the tracks. Disregarding the warning no
tices, I leapt over the barrier and sprinted the intervening fifty yards or so. Suddenly I felt light as a feather. Perhaps fate was not going to be unremittingly unkind. Perhaps my war was going to be that mixture of solace and boredom that was the dominant tone of life. Perhaps the RAF would turn out to be a sort of extended family, protective, authoritarian, but kindly. Perhaps the terrors that were unleashed and stalking the world would only be allowed to pace nearby at night, in the dreams and perceptions of sleep.
I bent over the fallen pack. Lumpish and now mottled with wheel grease from the tracks, it was undoubtedly mine. I seized it in triumph. As I straightened, a heavy grip fell on my shoulder. I turned to face a couple of Military Policemen.
‘Can’t you read, Airman?’ said one sternly. ‘You’re not allowed on the tracks. And what are you doing, exchanging property? Seems to me you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.’
I had.
9
HUT 50
I
My memory of Leighton Buzzard is scanty. I thought that I was there for a couple of days; letters home show that it was nearly two weeks. Time flies when you are occupied in learning a mass of new and interesting things. Even the detail of that slips away. What remains is a sense of the atmosphere; a not very large private house with lecture halls and demonstration rooms and a comfortable library in which to sit and study the new world of radio direction finding. What we would later call, under American influence: radar.
All that was fascinating and miles away from the spit and polish of Skegness. Most of our instructors seemed to be middle-aged men who smoked pipes and strolled about in their shirt sleeves. If they weren’t turning Finnegans Wake into a crossword puzzle there was likely to be a volume of Euclidean geometry under their arms. I was more concerned in reconstituting the Gill parcel service. Apples travelled up from Kent and in return I posted home my dirty underwear. This system continued pretty well until the end of the war. As for the war itself, the decisive stage had been reached this very week: the battle of El Alamein in the Western Desert and the far more ferocious siege of Stalingrad away in central Asia. As Churchill said (afterwards): ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.’
Not that there weren’t some nasty moments still to come. One was just round the corner. Once the course was over we expected to be posted to a regional centre. Each of those centres had a control room where the aerial defence of the region was planned. But four or five of us were simply given a route order. We were to report to King’s Cross at midday to take a train to an unspecified destination.
‘Ah ha,’ said Peter Williams, a bright lad from Sheffield, ‘you know what that means don’t you? We’re going somewhere by sea.’
‘Why should it mean that?’ I asked.
‘Ships taking troops overseas never get announced,’ said Peter wisely. ‘They don’t want to tell the U-boats they’re coming.’ That was an unpleasant thought.
‘But we haven’t had any embarkation leave,’ protested Barry Shepherd, a twenty-one-year-old Irishman who had come over from neutral Eire hoping to fly a Spitfire. His will was strong, but his heart proved to be weak; so, like Peter and me, he was regraded to special duties, whatever they were.
‘Embarkation leave is not a right, but a privilege,’ said Peter. (He was going to be a lawyer one day.) ‘Besides, we might not be travelling so far away. Iceland perhaps, or Gibraltar; perhaps even Northern Ireland.’
‘Well of that lot I’d prefer Gibraltar,’ said Barry, ‘at least the sun shines there. But all those glaciers in Iceland: it’s such a long way from anywhere.’
‘And King’s Cross is a northern line station,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we’ll go to the Outer Hebrides.’
For a long time we appeared not to be going anywhere. We were sent to the forces canteen on the platform to have powdered egg and sausage. At last, whistles blew and loud-speaker announcements herded us aboard a very long, very dirty train that still stank of its last occupants.
It was 3 p.m. by the time we chuntered slowly out of London. We talked, some played cards. The train was pretty full, entirely of soldiers, airmen, sailors and tough-looking characters who might have been builders or miners. Through the evening, we stopped occasionally at darkened stations; a few, loaded with kit bags and rifles, got off. Similar shrouded groups got on board. It was impossible to read by the dim blue light that blackout allowed us. We were a subdued lot; nobody sang or played the mouth organ as they did in films of troops on the move. As the night progressed, boredom drew us into a disharmony of snores, groans, gasps, coughs, farts and the mumbled expression of uneasy dreams.
Some other sound startled me to wakefulness. The rhythm of the train had changed. The clanking had taken on a deeper, slower note and above it was a shrill squalling. It took a few minutes to recognise the calling of seagulls.
Peter Williams gave me a triumphal wink. It was 4.30 a.m. Shadowy giants slowly passed the carriage windows. With a final grumbling of brakes our train stopped among them. The pallid sky lightened minute by minute revealing the monstrous shapes as the cranes and derricks of a quayside. Among much shouting and clattering of arms we were assembled on the dock and marched in any sort of order up the gangway onto a large grey-painted ship. Lines were cast off and very quickly we were heading out to sea.
It seemed as though our chain of command was anxious to get us out of reach of observers on the land. Yet there were few who could have seen us from the shore. As we passed the last arm of the harbour the landscape fell back and widened. Mountains, snowy-peaked range upon range, rose above the horizon. It was my first view of the Highlands; touched, as I watched, by the earliest gleams of sunlight. This was grandeur beyond anything I had seen.
Leaning on the rail I half-remembered lines by Wordsworth, the first extract from one of his long autobiographical poems, describing a similar vision of mountains appearing when he rowed away from them.
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water, like a swan;
When from behind that craggy steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,
And growing still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measured motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me . . .
. . . . .
Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as e’er I had beheld . . .
‘That’s Stranraer in Galloway where we embarked.’ Barry had come up besides me. ‘We’ll be landing at Larne. It’s just north of Belfast. We’ll soon see Ireland. This is a very short crossing. Just as well perhaps.’
As if to underline his words, a staccato burst of gunfire made me nearly jump out of my skin. It was the Bofors gun in the stern, testing its readiness to respond if any Jerry submarines put in an appearance. Luckily none did.
By 8 a.m. we had landed. Another train journey took us by midday to the grey, rainy city of Belfast. So it was to be Ireland where my wartime adventures were really to begin. I did not take much to the first view of this dreary city seen through the windows of a camouflaged bus. Office blocks gave way to residential suburbs. The bus carried us into a hillside park, topped by an imposing neo-classical building. This was Stormont Park – the Parliament building now taken over as the headquarters of the RAF in Northern Ireland.
On the far side of the park, Nissen huts were scattered among the trees. We were told to find Hut 64. Close up, it was no more inviting. Pools of rainwater lay on the concrete floor between the metal-framed beds. Now we saw the value of the rubber boots we had cursed having to carry all the way from Cardington. We soon grew used to putting them on before we put a foot out of bed.
That first day it was impossible not to think nostalgically of the cosy little room und
er the eaves at Skegness that I had shared with Wyndham. No chance of putting up an intellectual pin-up through the rusting corrugated iron walls of Hut 64. We had plenty of time to contemplate the shortcomings of our new abode. In acknowledgement of the stressed strain of our journey, all the new arrivals were stood down until the following morning. It was the middle of the afternoon. We had been given a meal that seemed a mixture of breakfast, dinner (it was never called lunch) and tea. We were confined to camp. In Ireland we always had to sign out and back at the guard house.
There seemed nothing to do except go to bed. I was just working out how to get my trousers off without getting them soaked when the door was thrown open. A strange humped figure hopped in. I recognised him as Crawford, the least attractive of the group from Leighton Buzzard. Much older than most recruits, he was always making himself unpopular by his sour, spiteful remarks. Now he seemed to be bubbling over with unexpected glee. Positively dancing with delight he shouted: ‘Someone here is from Canterbury. Who is it?’
I said nothing, but several of the others pointed me out. He came huddling across, snorting and grunting like a tetchy pig.