‘It’s the way it goes.’
‘I know, I know. But God, I do miss him.’ She buried her face in her glass to hide the sudden tears. ‘Two children and no father,’ she said at length. ‘You don’t know what alone is until there’s just you and two utterly dependent kids. Petey keeps asking when’s Daddy coming home, but not so often now. Well, six months – it’s a big fraction of his entire lifetime, isn’t it? It already feels like the whole of my bloody lifetime. And to think that we put off having children for all those years just so he could get properly promoted and settled. What will we do? Everything’s so . . . shapeless now.’
‘I’ve been asking myself the same question recently. Between you and me, Rilly, I’m getting pretty fed up with Amos. He’s always sort of heavy at home but whenever I see him with his crewmates he’s light again, like the Amos I used to know when we first met. What the hell did we think we were doing, you and I, a couple of Grantham girls becoming service wives? I mean, it wasn’t as if we didn’t know about the accident rate, the sudden postings and absentee husbands, all that. Living in caravans. No say in anything. What I mean is, Rilly, what on earth got into us?’
‘Love, probably. You forget practical things when you’re under the influence. Or at least I did.’
‘Mm.’ Jo set her empty glass down. ‘I’m . . . I’m . . .’ She gave up.
‘Yes?’
‘I was going to say I’m not sure I ever had that excuse. Oh, I did love Amos, no doubt about that. But at the same time I wasn’t blind to the drawbacks of being a service wife. We all just hoped for the best, didn’t we? Love conquers all. I now think it may be a blessing we don’t have children. Much as I should have loved them.’
‘Amos was a terrific catch,’ Avril said encouragingly. ‘Film star good looks and a hell of a nice guy, too. And you got him. My Marty would never have won a beauty competition, would he? Not that I cared. Once he’d got me into Mavis – you remember that ratty old Humber Super Snipe of his? – I was gone. But I could always see it was more complicated with you two.’
‘It bloody well was. I could only get to work on Amos once he’d had a few drinks to break the ice. Remember those evenings in the Serpent’s Tooth? He was such a shy boy. Still is, though I suppose it’s an odd thing to say of a Vulcan captain. You don’t really associate dropping nuclear bombs with shyness, do you?’
‘Marty once said something about him that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Old Amos has a broad streak of chastity in him.” I had to laugh.’
Voices were raised in the sandpit.
Avril glanced at the sun. ‘It’s nearly jam sandwich time,’ she said. ‘Will you kill me if I ask you something personal, Jo? I mean, you don’t have to answer it. It’s not really a question, more just wondering aloud. It was Dr Summertown and those apes of hers that got me thinking.’
‘Oh?’
‘You know – their odd behaviour. Surely you must have wondered yourself now and then? About Amos, I mean. You must admit that, looking back, he always did seem to have much better relations with his men friends than he did with us girls. Even down the dance hall with a few drinks inside him. Well, especially then, actually. Don’t get me wrong, Jo, I’m not saying he’s, well, you know. But maybe just a bit?’
‘The one thing I can promise you Amos most certainly is not,’ Jo said a little stiffly, ‘is a Communist.’
‘No, of course I didn’t mean that.’
Jo’s expression grew puzzled. ‘But I always thought men like that, the ones you’re saying, are mostly Communists as well. Look at all those spy scandals we’ve been having, the papers have been full of them. What’s his name, Vassall? And the one that’s just died – Guy Burgess? And don’t you remember that bloke who used to work behind the bar in the Serpent – the la-di-da one? They put him away a couple of years ago – Mum sent me the cutting. They said he was corrupting national servicemen and getting information out of them for political purposes.’
‘Yeah, if you can believe it,’ snorted Avril. ‘How much useful information are you going to get out of eighteen-year-old conscripts? The latest top-secret British way of peeling potatoes and whitewashing coal? No, I remember him. He was the one they used to call Julie. They caught him doing things in the Gents behind the town hall, and that’s against the law. Nothing to do with communism. I think he got eighteen months.’
The two sandy children chose this moment to prance up and tell their mother that they were hungry.
‘I could do with a pot of tea myself,’ said Avril. ‘Let’s go in and see what we can find. Then we’ll have a hose-bath. All right?’
After tea the two children danced naked on the lawn with squeals of pleasure while Jo and Avril took turns to play the hose on them and remove their liberal covering of sand and jam. An image of them shining like little pink seals remained in Jo’s mind on her return journey, suffusing her with a faint sense of envy. However much trouble children were, however boring and insistent, they undeniably filled a mother’s life and fixed her days’ boundaries for years to come. There was a lot to be said for that. Jo had one or two good friends at Wearsby – mostly other wives, it was true, and a couple of them also without children. But the flat tulip fields outside Spalding and the yawning dome of sky above Lincolnshire suddenly seemed appallingly empty. The prospect of returning to her quarters and the view of wartime brick buildings with the back of a hangar off to one side, its fading camouflage in oblique blotches that somehow became mournful in the evening light, hollowed her out with a sudden, almost irritable, sense of futility. It had all been a dreadful mistake. No, it hadn’t been. A squadron leader’s wife had some standing, after all. But if only the squadron leader himself would sometimes be there, the presence she still craved, the return she waited for as she read her magazines and sipped her Nescafé.
As she drove on, what Avril had been saying about him stubbornly refused to be silenced. Might it be true? She really knew nothing about things like that, nothing apart from her friends’ occasional jocular references with lowered voice to something they’d read in ‘The Screws’, as they called The News of the World. A line from some long-ago school religious knowledge class suddenly popped up from nowhere and, like Mary, Jo kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.
5
The group captain’s choosing him to lead a special flight for unknown operations was weighing more heavily on his mind than Amos cared to admit. A couple of weeks had passed without any further mention of the plan, but he knew that meant nothing. Whatever was afoot would sooner or later materialise. Meanwhile it gave him ample opportunity to worry about whether he would be equal to the task, whatever it was. He only hoped it wouldn’t involve overflying Soviet Bloc territory on clandestine missions.
In the last few years Amos had thought increasingly about capture and interrogation: about loyalty, in short. In the closeness of the cockpit, in the hugger-mugger of the bar, in the ops block briefing room, everybody felt the same confident camaraderie. But cut off and on his own on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, maybe injured and exhausted and certainly frightened, how would he shape up? Name and number: that was the only information you were authorised to give. The rest had to be silence, provided you could hold out until a crucial date had passed, your captors gave up or perhaps found a better source.
It wasn’t really a matter of not betraying one’s country, which God knew was old enough to take care of itself. It was obvious the country would already be lost if its fortunes could hang on anything a wretched squadron leader might know. No, it was the thought of betraying his mates, his crew, that obsessed him. While he was training a few years earlier it had seemed to Amos that he was always bumping into officers who had survived capture by North Koreans or Chinese during the Korean War. Some were British military men who had come to give talks but most were Americans, usually airmen whose F-86 Sabres had been downed on the wrong side of the Yalu river and had been lucky enough to reach the ground alive and return.
One day, thought Amos, it might be acknowledged or even written about: the extent to which everybody in this Cold War – military and civilian alike – was haunted by the notion of borders, frontiers, blocs. A tiny gap in the Iron Curtain like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, with its multiple barriers and armed guards with wheeled mirrors for looking under cars, became a mythic node like the entry to Tartarus. On the other side lay a menacing world of the utterly foreign, of brutal snares and traps; of arrest and interrogation and being for ever cut off from help. Any friendly gesture was a bitter ruse. He had heard the story of a captured RAF pilot from Bermondsey who had been kept in solitary in a bare, whitewashed cell and who had resisted all interrogation. Then one day after being returned half-conscious to his freezing hutch he found in the middle of the floor a small pink rectangle of paper with a hole punched in it and a list in tiny print: Southwark Pk., The Crown, Abbey St., Ldn. Bridge. It was a bus ticket from home, and it broke him.
It scarcely mattered whether the story was genuine; Amos believed absolutely in its truth. He knew that he, too, could be broken by something so familiar, by a token from the warm, lost world on the far side of that fatal frontier. His training had never reduced him to that extent, but it had supplied a recurrent memory of fear and duress that came for a while and replayed itself over and over like a tune that can’t be got rid of. He would break off and once more be lost in total blackness. The dark had been appalling. He had blundered slowly through the forest, his gloves held in front of him, exhausted and frozen. His hands were so cold they had no more feeling left in them than the buffers on the front of a steam locomotive. They banged bluntly into tree trunks or, each time he tripped and fell, skidded off rocks beneath the thin layer of snow. He would sprawl there for a while, winded, the snow numbing the flap of hairy scalp that a stub of fir branch had torn loose above his left ear when he walked into it, drenching his face and neck with blood. He knew he might just as easily have lost an eye.
His sole glimmers of light were phosphorescent: the face of his watch and the luminous green triangle that revolved on the tiny compass he wore on its lanyard around his neck. The crash of his own fall seemed to echo around the forest. His pursuers had surely heard it and would even now be stealthily closing in: men who not only knew the forest but who were past masters at woodcraft, able like wolves to move silently. Was he imagining things or had there been the brief flash of a torch somewhere off to the right of where he lay? Homa had a torch: his buddy Homa. Dare he risk calling out? It was sixteen hours now since they had become separated while trying to avoid that bloody farm dog. He thought Homa had got away with a chicken as planned, and they had arranged to meet up in the hanging wood that rose behind a dilapidated barn. But when eventually he was plunging breathlessly uphill through the trees towards the rendezvous point, he heard no sign of Homa’s parallel progress. Had he been caught? Amos had waited ten minutes, itching with nerves and impatience, before giving up and moving on. He now reckoned he still had a good six miles to cover to the frontier. Much as his body was pleading for rest he couldn’t afford to lie there in the snow getting rapidly colder and weaker. He hadn’t eaten for a day and a half, not since the scorched potatoes he and Homa had built a fire over before devouring them half raw, as apprehensive about the loss of time as about the thin smoke giving away their position.
So up on his feet again, the crust of blood and stubble a rigid plate clamped to the left side of his head. If he could get out of this damned forest by dawn he would be in a better position to cover the remaining distance before nightfall the next day. Then under cover of renewed darkness he would face the biggest obstacle of all: the frontier with its guards and trip wires that would send up magnesium flares. Maybe Homa was ahead of him? He surely couldn’t be far away unless he’d been caught. They were both aiming for the same spot and it was hard to imagine he could have avoided this forest entirely. So Amos resumed his sleep-walker’s progress, leaden arms thrust out in front to ward off the tree trunks, stopping frequently to steady the whirling luminous dots on the compass to check that his course was as near south-south-west as he could manage. For the first time the thought of capture was beginning to seem almost welcome. At least it would mean an end to this living famished in the wilds, hunted like an animal. The worst would have happened and from then on it was a matter of resisting interrogation. But the voice of an instructor came back to him, warning him of the danger of this kind of thinking. Once one began longing for it to be over, capture became ever more likely. So he went blunderingly on, aware that the ground was getting steeper and drawing hope from his memory of the map which showed that the forest stopped halfway up the flank of this particular minor mountain.
And what a brilliant example all this had been of the brain’s ability to confuse different types of reality! Half of Amos was desperately trying to escape from East Germany with GDR border guards in hot pursuit; the other half knew he was taking part in a compulsory ‘escape and evasion’ exercise run by the USAF Survival School in southern Bavaria. Based at a barracks on the eastern outskirts of Bad Tölz, Flint Kaserne had the worst reputation of any of these courses. ‘It doesn’t get badder than Bad Tölz,’ the saying went. The barracks was a huge fortress-like affair that had been built in the 1930s to provide Sandhurst-style training for the Waffen-SS. It had exclusive access to thousands of hectares of wooded hills that stretched to the Austrian border a dozen miles to the south. Nowadays it was home to the 10th Special Forces Airborne Group, who were not known for their easy-going approach to capture by Communists. The RAF hierarchy, eager to show their American allies they were no less serious and motivated, made an E&E course a necessary part of becoming V-bomber aircrew, and it was often at Bad Tölz. By the time Amos came to do it in the late fifties it had acquired enough notoriety to become a source of mild dread, requiring as it did a six-week fitness course in preparation.
Once at Flint Kaserne Amos began five days of classes starting at seven in the morning, many of them given by men who had done it for real in Korea. There were maybe a hundred others on the course with him, mostly Americans from all three services but with a fair sprinkling of fellow-Brits including several Royal Marines. He gathered that each year the course was slightly different, being modified in the light of previous experience. Thus it was hoped that the three deaths from hypothermia in last year’s course might be avoided this year by magnanimously allowing ‘escapees’ to take the remnants of silk parachutes with them to wrap themselves in at night. They also had instruction from an East German border guard who had recently defected by swimming across a canal and who knew a good deal about the latest deployment of the GDR’s Grenztruppen. Other instruction included lock-picking, given by an articulate American villain who had recently been released from a jail in Kansas City after completing his third sentence for house-breaking. This was a skill Amos had been happy to acquire and which later was to come in useful for dealing with the Yale lock on his own front door when he lost his key.
But the demonstration that made the most impression on him was that of interrogation. The trainees were seated in a darkened hall in front of which a huge sheet of perspex had been erected, sealing it off from the stage. They were ordered to watch in strict silence: not a cough, not a sneeze, not a movement. Onto the stage was led a man who had been taken ‘prisoner’ in a previous exercise. Ever since then, according to the instructor, he had been kept incommunicado in a bare concrete cell on a bread-and-water diet. Already exhausted from five days and nights spent living rough in the Bavarian countryside before being captured, he was evidently so bemused and demoralised that he believed in the absolute reality of the play that had been so carefully scripted around him. Handcuffed to a wooden chair in the glare of high-powered lamps, he was repeatedly questioned by his ‘Russian’ tormentors, who did indeed speak fluent Russian and only heavily accented English.
Not a man in the invisible audience but saw himself in the victim’s position, most especially when the chief interroga
tor gave an order and a box with a dial and a crank was brought in and placed on the table in front of the prisoner, together with two crocodile-clip electrodes connected to the box by yellow insulated cables. Again the man was questioned, now with repeated face-slapping, and once more he would give only his name and number in a weak voice, tears glistening on his cheeks. He sounded like an American. The voltage generator was never used but sat there radiating menace. After forty-five minutes of shouting and brow-beating the prisoner was led off, presumably to be swiftly ‘freed’, congratulated and fed, while Amos and the rest of the course surreptitiously wiped the sweat from their palms on their trousers. Was that what awaited them if they were caught? Would they, too, lose touch with reality and become tearful in front of an invisible audience?
The next day, dressed in civilian clothes and issued with a small pack containing minimal survival gear such as a downed pilot might carry (compass, map, knife, matches, parachute silk), a group of ‘escapers’ including Amos and Homa was trucked to a snow-streaked clearing in the forest and given the co-ordinates of a position many miles away where a tent would represent safety on the far side of a ring of defences. They were given up to five days to reach it, after which some very irritated search parties would be sent out. From boxes at the back of the truck various animals were taken and one given to each pair: a rabbit, a chicken, a tiny piglet. Amos and Homa were handed a small mongrel dog trembling with bewilderment. The truck drove away.
Under the Radar Page 6