Now the Shackleton, invisible some thirty nautical miles away to port, sent a series of code words to warn XM580 that the listeners were out in force. Rickards acknowledged and reminded Amos that their instructions in such circumstances had been not to try out Oilcan but to run a series of tests involving the usual Red Shrimp and Blue Diver jammers. They now took pleasure in swamping the Russian trawlers’ various transmissions with noise before closing to within five miles of the Shackleton. This was where Rickards could test the radar in the Vulcan’s tail that would warn of a Soviet fighter coming in stealthily from behind. The Shackleton obliged with a radar beam of the right wavelength and it plotted brilliantly on the tube in front of him.
After a further half-hour of flying patterns that included a swing northwards to the Shetlands, Rickards sent a message of thanks to the Shack and Baa Mutton gave Amos a heading for Wearsby where, forty-five minutes later, they picked up the control tower informing them that since their departure a late-afternoon mist had developed over much of the area. Mutton guided Amos down to the final approach when Wearsby’s controller, with XM580 firmly on his radar, took over.
‘Five-eight-zero, left three degrees. Resume your normal rate of descent and left three degrees, left three degrees and a mile to go. You’re clear to line up for this approach. Final check. Short finals now, your heading is good. Look ahead for the runway slightly on your port side. You’re on the glide path. You’re on the centre line now. Heading is good. Spot-on the glide path. Look ahead and land visually. Talkdown out.’ And through the murk ahead the runway’s lights and the black and white piano keys at its end suddenly swam into clarity and Amos eased back on the control grip. The Vulcan’s nose floated gracefully up and the forward view was lost as it flared, floating for an instant before the main wheels made contact with the runway with a slight jolt. He held it in this position while the speed bled off, with no view through the windscreen but of dark grey sky, keeping the line straight with an almost unconscious awareness of the speeding edge of the runway. He maintained the braking effect of this nose-up attitude for as long as possible. Not deploying the brake parachute would earn the gratitude of the team in their Land Rover who would otherwise have to retrieve it from the runway and repack it. Finally, the nose dropped and the nose wheels made contact and the brakes absorbed the kinetic energy of bringing this monster machine down to taxiing speed. The control tower cleared it to its stand where XM580 finally halted, the engines winding down. The crew were throwing off their harnesses as, at Amos’s OK, Gavin Rickards popped the hatch and cold, damp air flooded in.
First up the ladder was Baldy Hodge, who went straight to the cockpit, took the stowed safety pins and swiftly made safe the pilots’ ejector seats and the canopy. After a while the litany of shutdown checks was completed, the crew gathered up their bags and disembarked, Form 700 was duly signed and handed over, the crew bus roared off and Hodge was left with his aircraft on the pan beneath the high overhead lights. He and his lineys now went busily about, running checks and replenishing nitrogen bottles, climbing ladders and opening access panels, reading the two fatigue meters on the roof of the bomb bay (one for negative and one for positive ‘g’). And in the chill, drizzle-laden Lincolnshire wind beneath the darkening sky the jet tubes overhead ticked as they cooled, and the landing gear made soft chinking noises as the disc assemblies shrank infinitesimally, giving up their heat.
11
Most mornings these days Jo McKenna would drive to the vet’s clinic in Amos’s ratty old Hillman Minx. At first she had dutifully caught the early local bus that stopped outside Wearsby’s main gate, then had changed in Market Tewsbury to the slightly faster one to Mossop. The local bus dawdled and often broke down and even on a good day she would struggle to find a seat. There were notices painted inside its nicotine-tanned roof announcing fines for spitting, and she often stumbled over trussed hens lying on the floor, beaks agape. More and more she took to asking Amos for the loan of the car if he wasn’t using it. It was not long before she was taking it as if by right, cutting her journey time down to less than twenty minutes. If the Minx’s primitive radio was in a good mood she would find the Home Service and listen to Jack de Manio on Today, his voice coming and going amid the static and interference that Amos had told her was the result of all the military radio and radar beams criss-crossing the eastern counties. She often felt cheerful enough to sing along with the hymns that followed.
Her life, she felt, had been transformed. She could swing out of Brabazon Close and out past the guardhouse at the gate, turn right onto the Tewsbury road and become a civilian again. She left behind her the perpetual confused roaring of jet engines and a self-sufficient world dressed in light blue uniforms and obsessed with war; a world that could happily manage without her. It was a freedom she hadn’t experienced for years. And as if that were not enough she had a job that gave her real pleasure and satisfaction. She had a new purpose in life. She had realised belatedly that she had a genuine affinity for animals. Even though she was nominally a vet’s receptionist, sheer short-handedness often meant she was asked to help in the surgery. She had no formal qualifications for this but the vets assured her that, short of being able to give anaesthetics and wield a scalpel, she had the most valuable talent of all which was the ability to calm frightened creatures and make them relax. This, they assured her, materially increased their chances of recovery. Most mornings the practice’s owners, Craig Maybus and Arthur Mealing, were out and about on their own, responding to calls from farmers that might be emergencies or merely routine visits. Her two very charming employers went about the country committing skilled acts of violence such as castrations and dehornings and earning widespread gratitude. Maybus & Mealing was the only decent veterinary practice for miles around Mossop and was clearly prospering.
Today was one of those Wednesdays Jo looked forward to because there was a walk-in surgery for pets in the morning. And better still, Avril O’Shea had promised to drive over for lunch. Five minutes before the surgery opened at 9 a.m. Jo parked on the gravelled area outside the substantial Victorian town house that had been Arthur Mealing’s childhood home and still belonged to his family. These days much of the ground floor had been converted to a reception area, a waiting room, two consulting surgeries, a small operating theatre and – out at the back – what they called the ‘recovery room’. This, the former scullery, held cages for animals in various stages of recuperation or expiry, many of the patients having bald patches shaved into their fur across which ran lines of purple stitches. The entire ground floor held a faint smell reminiscent of hot mice and TCP.
By ten o’clock both vets were busy and there were eight people in the waiting room holding a variety of cardboard boxes with holes punched in their lids and done up with twine from which now and then plaintive mewings and scrabblings could be heard. Occasionally one or other of their owners might whisper a few reassuring words into a hole, but apart from that there was a dour British silence in the room. People sat staring straight ahead or kept their eyes on the Ministry of Ag and Fish’s posters illustrating Colorado beetles on potato leaves. There was also a doleful twelve-year-old boy with scratched knees who sat sucking aniseed balls and dangling a dog leash with a choke chain between his legs so that its end traced the lino’s pattern. Bored with that, he took a small mouth organ from his pocket and used a matchstick to unclog grey fluff from its holes. Jo watched him through the open door from behind her desk. Little sod, she thought, doing that to his dog. At this point Craig Maybus opened his consulting-room door wearing a rubber apron over his clothes and a concave dentist’s mirror on his forehead. He beckoned her in.
‘Do you mind, Jo?’ he said. ‘I need a brief hand here. We’ll hear if anybody rings or comes in. It’s this dog.’ He indicated a large animal of vaguely Airedale descent that was sprawled woozily amid puddles on the green American cloth that covered the table. ‘I’ve got him sedated but I’m going to have to put him under and I need you to hold his
head afterwards. The damned thing’s wedged firmer than I thought.’
She cradled the dog’s head as Maybus gave him another injection, noticing how the animal had scratched the skin around one ear bare in its attempts to remove the marble. ‘Pentothal,’ said the vet. ‘Good stuff but not very long-lasting.’ The dog’s eyes closed and she held his head and the ear flap up so Maybus could use his mirror to reflect the light from an Anglepoise lamp into the animal’s ear. ‘That’s the trouble with something like a marble: there’s damn-all to get a grip on.’ He probed around with a pair of forceps. ‘I’ve already tried washing it out but he took a dim view of that. I hoped we might get this out in a jiffy but I was wrong. If this doesn’t work we’ll have to keep him in for surgery later. No – I don’t think I’m doing much good here.’
‘How about . . .’ said Jo diffidently. ‘No – perhaps that’s silly.’
‘Go on. All ideas welcome.’
‘I was just wondering if you took one of those rubber suckers off the sign in the window and held its knob with your forceps you might get a grip that way?’
Maybus looked up at her and gave a nod. ‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Worth a try. This animal should be out for another five or ten minutes.’
Jo pulled the white notice saying ‘Veterinary Surgeon’ off the window with two brief quacks and handed one of the rubber suckers to Maybus who dabbled it in the water on the tabletop before grasping it in his forceps. ‘Too big,’ he said, straightening up after a moment. ‘It wants cutting down.’ He trimmed the sucker with a pair of surgical scissors and tried again. ‘Ah,’ he said under his breath. ‘That’s more like it. Let’s see . . . Yes! Got you!’ And he slowly withdrew a small blue marble with milky swirls.
‘You’re a genius, Jo. I always thought I wasn’t bad myself at improvising ways out of trouble in a freezing barn at 3 a.m. But here you are in my own surgery with a peach of an idea. Ah – the poor beast’s coming round. I’ll take him into recovery and you can send the boy in to keep an eye on him for half an hour or so until he’s fit to leave. I shouldn’t waste your time trying to find out how the marble got there in the first place: it no longer matters. Lesson learned, I’d say. Or it bloody soon will be when his father gets our bill.’
For the next hour or two Jo sat in a small private glow of accomplishment. The boy and his dog left, both noticeably perkier than when they had come in. Various pets were handed over in their boxes and cages to Craig and Arthur, who retired to their separate consulting rooms for a while. Arthur was rather more acerbic than his partner and, Jo had discovered, instinctively took the animals’ side rather than that of their owners. He now stopped off in Reception and said to Jo in an urgent undertone: ‘What the hell does one do with a tortoise whose owner thinks it’s “a bit under the weather”? It’s all right for a GP: he only ever has one species to deal with. I have to make an excuse and go out and look at Merck’s.’ Of all the books on the shelves in the partners’ office, the Merck Veterinary Manual was by far the most consulted.
Then at almost twelve o’clock and just when she was hoping the morning’s work was tailing off towards the lunch hour, there came the crunching and popping of car tyres on the gravel outside and two uniformed airmen entered, one of them holding a large monkey. From the rings on their sleeves Jo could see at once they were pilot officers. She recognised neither of them, although it soon emerged they were from Wearsby and had been detailed off by Group Captain Mewell to bring the station’s mascot, Ponsonby, for a check-up. It transpired that for the first time ever Ponsonby had been sick in Mewell’s car a few days earlier and since then had not been ‘back to his old form’ despite the MO’s best efforts.
Like everyone at Wearsby, Jo had heard of Ponsonby although she had never seen him since he hadn’t been in residence more than a few months and was billeted mostly with the group captain and his family in their Queen Anne house a mile away from the airfield. She was surprised by the animal’s size. He seemed well over two feet tall and might even be getting on for three. He wore a blue collar with Air Force roundels on it to which a long lead was attached. He looked about him apprehensively, his fingers gripping the pilot officer’s lapel in a way that melted Jo’s heart. At that moment Arthur Mealing came into Reception, glanced into the waiting room and said ‘Christ almighty’ under his breath. ‘What the hell’s that? Is there a circus in town or what?’
‘He’s a Barbary ape, the Wearsby station mascot. He’s called Ponsonby.’
‘Well I’ll be jiggered. We’ve never had one of those in here before. What’s the matter with him?’
‘They say he’s listless.’
‘So would I be bloody listless if I’d been snatched away from my chums in sunny Gibraltar or wherever and held captive on an airfield in freezing Lincolnshire. Whose damn silly idea was that?’
‘I don’t know. I believe the group captain takes him for rides in his car.’
‘Crikey. I’ve heard of regimental goats but this is ridiculous. I shall need ten minutes with Merck’s. Barbary apes indeed.’ He disappeared.
At that moment the front door opened and Avril walked in. ‘Hi, Jo,’ she said. ‘How lovely to see you. Am I too early?’
‘Rilly! No, not if you don’t mind waiting a bit. Have you got the kids with you?’
‘No, I’ve dumped them today. I’m footloose and fancy-free. H’m, I like your workplace.’ She looked at her friend’s desk and the filing cabinet and took in the colourful posters of wilting hens and lame horses on the wall warning of fowl pest and advertising tar-based remedies for laminitis.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to wait until our last patient’s out but he oughtn’t to be long.’ Jo nodded towards the waiting room. ‘Come to think of it, you might be the expert we’re looking for. You were reading a book about apes some months ago.’
‘Golly,’ said Avril, peering in at the solemn young officers and their nervous charge. ‘Is that an ape? Or is it a monkey? I can’t remember the difference now. It doesn’t seem to have a tail. Is that how you tell? Ahh, look at its little pink face. Just like a scared child. What’s the matter with it?’
‘We don’t know yet. But possibly nothing much worse than acute home-sickness.’
At that moment Arthur Mealing appeared and beckoned the two airmen and Ponsonby into his consulting room. The door closed.
‘Orang-utans Are not the Only Apes, that’s it,’ said Avril. ‘I remember the title now. Dr Prudence Summertown. She’s just had another one out. Something like The Passionate Body.’ She giggled. ‘The newspaper said it told us a good deal more about lady apes than we ever wanted to know. She seems to be getting quite notorious. That Lord Boothby said he’d rather be caught in bed with the Kray twins than be seen having tea with Prudence Summertown.’
‘Honestly, Rilly,’ said Jo, half scandalised and half admiringly, ‘the things you read.’
‘Oh, I haven’t read this new one and I’m not going to, either. But when you’ve got two small children you go mad if you don’t read. Thank God for newspapers and Listen with Mother on the radio. And I’ve joined Boots’ Booklovers Library. It all helps.’
At length the consulting-room door opened and the airmen emerged with Ponsonby, who seemed aware that his ordeal was over and now looked rather more relaxed. He had draped one long furry arm around the shoulders of the airman carrying him.
‘Varied diet, that’s what he needs,’ the vet was saying as he followed. ‘Just giving him leftover scraps from the kitchens isn’t good enough, not by a long chalk. Despite his name he’s a macaque monkey and not an ape, and in the wild he’d be eating leaves and fruit and roots and even the occasional insect. Go and catch some grasshoppers, the odd beetle, a moth or two. You know, give him a treat.’
The airman carrying Ponsonby looked wounded. ‘We’re trained to fly Canberras, sir. I don’t think the group captain would approve of us wasting taxpayers’ money on our hands and knees looking for grasshoppers. Especially not in November.’
‘So, gentlemen,’ Jo addressed the airmen briskly. ‘Whom do I invoice? The OC Wearsby?’
‘Excuse me, missus,’ one of them said. ‘Are you Squadron Leader McKenna’s wife?’
‘I am.’
‘Oh, we were just wondering. I thought we’d seen you around the station. What do you think, Duggie?’ he asked his companion. ‘Have the bill sent to Muffin?’
‘Why not? Perhaps mascots come under the mess? He’ll pass it on to whoever.’
Jo made some notes and then stood up and took Ponsonby’s spare hand in hers. ‘You poor old thing,’ she said. The animal stared back at her with liquid sad eyes. Then it swung its spare arm from around the airman’s shoulders and onto hers. She took him into her arms, amazed at his weight. He nuzzled her neck like an infant but she quickly averted her face. His breath was astonishingly fouler than that of any infant she’d ever met.
‘Heavens,’ said Avril, getting a waft. ‘Someone isn’t using Amplex.’
‘Yes, he’s pretty niffy, isn’t he?’ said Duggie.
‘Take him back to Wearsby,’ Jo told them. ‘But first stop off at the greengrocer by the wool shop and see if you can get him a banana. They don’t always have them but there’s nowhere else in town to try. Failing that, a nice sleepy pear. Give him a reward for having been so well behaved.’
Under the Radar Page 12