Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Such thoughts came habitually to Hodge when he was by himself: evidence of a narrow but steely determination of purpose. Family came first, end of story. He knew perfectly well that his fantasies about splurging on an E-Type were just that. He would dearly have loved one but there was no way he would spend a penny on self-indulgence before he’d rescued Dad from the mildewed dump which was plainly making his chest worse by the month. It was gall to him that his father was so proud of the clock that BR Western Region had presented to him when he left. Baldy had instantly recognised that, though quite good, it was still very much an other ranks’ clock and would have cost British Rail hardly anything. Yet his father could see only a great honour in recognition of great service. It had pride of place on the cream-painted mantelpiece in their tiny parlour which had a clinking brick floor laid straight onto bare earth across which slugs left silvery trails overnight. Upstairs the bed linen was always limp with damp and there were sponge-like growths near the ceiling in the spare room. That was what came of heating with paraffin, Baldy had told them. He’d heard those Valor stoves chucked out a gallon of water for every gallon of Esso Blue they burned. He never visited his parents without loading the car’s boot with bags of coal for their minuscule grate. He had already paid to have the cottage’s outside privy brought inside: the first house in the row to enjoy this luxury.

  All in all, Baldy reckoned (usually loudly and publicly) that his native land had got its priorities arse-about-face. Instead of spending untold millions each year on joining America’s panicky nuclear crusade, Britain’s first duty – like that of any self-respecting country – should be to ensure decent basic living conditions for its own people. Quite why certain of his colleagues thought this the raving of a dangerous radical was beyond him. It certainly didn’t in any way hinder his equally vigorous contempt for CND activists and long-haired peace protesters. A dose of National Service would soon have sorted out those layabouts, so what had the prats in Westminster done? They’d only abolished it to save money, that was all. Hodge had heard of false economies but this was ridiculous.

  Having reached Lincoln in a blaze of interior rhetoric he parked the car outside the Cornhill Market and made his way to the Post Office where he dispatched the packet to Liverpool. Then he went to the National Provincial Bank where he deposited £90 in fivers. With rudimentary cunning, Hodge had realised that it might attract the attention of tax snoops if he kept on putting large sums of money into his Post Office savings account, so he had opened accounts in several different banks at branches within reasonable driving distance of Wearsby. Next time it would be the turn of Martins Bank in Grantham. A similar primitive caution made him ring the changes on the post offices he used for sending the occasional packet to Catherine Smithers in Liverpool, to Brian Sumption in Doncaster and to Ivy Trousdale at the Dippy Doughnut in Ipswich. He received his instructions by phone from a public box by ringing a Barnsley number, which you could now do by STD. This number seemed to belong to a betting shop. He would ask if Cardew’s Reward was running in the two-thirty at Gatwick, whereupon he was abruptly asked to wait and a man’s voice speaking an absurd plummy English would tell him in a very few words what was required.

  Baldy had often thought this a pretty laboured form of identification since he was sure Gatwick racecourse hadn’t outlived the war and these days most of its hallowed turf lay beneath the new airport. Still, the whole system by which he passed on information and received instructions and payment seemed to him reasonably foolproof. By means of ordinary letters and public phones he avoided all that over-intricate tradecraft so beloved of spy story writers: all those ‘cut-outs’ and ‘dead drops’ and ‘brush passes’, not to mention invisible inks. It was all simple and straightforward and obviously planned so that he need never step out of his role as a chief technician. Until now he had not been asked to supply information that he couldn’t gather without arousing suspicion in the normal course of his work. Indeed, this was the basis of his firm opinion that he was doing nothing that could remotely endanger either his colleagues or his country. He had never kidded himself about the cash ‘John Parsons’ periodically received from France. It was, he knew, ultimately Moscow’s money. But he was surely fooling rather than helping these idiot Commies. He didn’t see how such mundane information as the names of people who came to lecture or the layout of the station’s kitchens could conceivably be of the remotest value to an enemy.

  That being said, Hodge recognised that this taking pictures of the Vulcans’ new equipment had definitely pushed the stakes up a notch. It was by far the riskiest assignment he’d yet been given. Yet such was his self-confidence after nearly two years of easy money that he felt no nervousness. The important thing was that at last he was closing in on the £5,000 goal he had set himself as the sum needed to buy his parents a really decent home. Somewhere in Devon would suit them, he thought. He had heard it was a warmer climate down there.

  Feeling that the cold, grey weather and a successful trip had entitled him to a small luxury, Baldy, whose sweet tooth was as notorious as his bitter pronouncements, went into a confectioner’s and lashed out 1/6d on three bars of Fry’s Five Boys chocolate: a favourite of his since childhood. Then, placidly munching, he steered the Jowett one-handedly back down the Lincolnshire byroads to Wearsby.

  In the city he had just left a man wearing a rat-coloured trench coat and a trilby went into the National Provincial Bank, showed a small wallet to a cashier and asked to speak to the manager.

  17

  The great morale-boosting Christmas Dining-In Party was now imminent. As initiators of the plan, Group Captains Mewell and Tolbrooke had tossed to see which station would host it and Mewell, to his perfectly concealed dismay, had won. It would take place at Wearsby on 12 December. He and Tolbrooke had decided after all not to invite Waddington and Coningsby stations: Waddington because of Wearsby’s recent trouncing of them in the rugger, which would have guaranteed mayhem; and Coningsby because their Vulcans had just been transferred to Cottesmore, leaving them temporarily bereft of bombers and wide open to the sort of mockery that would equally provoke unrest. Instead they had judiciously invited their nearest neighbours to the north: RAF Blackstock and RAF Tapsley, who flew Vulcans and Victors respectively. Both stations’ commanding officers had enthusiastically accepted, agreeing that a bit of seasonal cheer was just what their QRA-weary crews needed.

  At Wearsby preparations had long been in hand. Two immense marquees had been erected on the lawn behind the officers’ mess, each joined to the other and connected to the main building by a canvas tunnel. The enclosed space was floored with varnished deal panels. Heavy-duty fan heaters, normally used in the hangars, had been wheeled over and installed in the marquees while electricians improvised lighting gantries. On a raised dais at the end nearest the mess was the top table for the stations’ commanders and their guest of honour, Air Vice-Marshal Vernon Catterpox. The AVM was the highest-ranking officer in Bomber Command whom Mewell and Tolbrooke had been able to get at short notice and, truth be told, neither was overjoyed that he had accepted. Their invitation was motivated more by tact and courtesy than by any real desire for the man’s company. They had been hoping to get another brass hat entirely, a man who was still very much one of the lads despite his age and rank: a man who in 1945, under the influence of a punch made up of equal parts of brandy, sherry and Mackeson’s stout, had ridden his AJS motorcycle up the main staircase of an officers’ mess in a bomber squadron being visited by Winston Churchill and, unable to stop, had smashed through a door on the landing, revealing the great man himself dressing for dinner. The motorbike, embedded in the wardrobe, had stalled in a dense blue cloud of fumes. Churchill, joined by his aide, went into a dignified ‘To-what-are-we-indebted’ speech while the airman picked himself up, looked blearily about him and became aware that he was being addressed by a fat man in his underwear. ‘Oh do fuck off, there’s a good fellow,’ he said and collapsed unconscious to the Ministry of Supply’s
carpeting. ‘If you insist,’ was Churchill’s mild rejoinder. As a result the airman had achieved undying fame as the man who’d told Winston Churchill to eff off and whose subsequent career had obviously been undamaged since he now wore an Air Marshal’s rings. At the time it had probably done him no harm that he was a pilot with two DFCs and a DSO and a national reputation as a fearless bomber captain.

  ‘Catterpox,’ said Tolbrooke with a sigh. ‘You know, Spotty, I’ve never rated the man. He wants to be popular, that’s his trouble. Did you ever in your life know anyone who badly wanted to be liked and who actually was?’

  ‘Can’t say I did, Pugs, no. But we’re stuck with him now. They say he’s an amateur conjuror.’

  ‘Oh God, I hadn’t heard that. I only hope . . . well, just think how it might backfire.’

  Both men lapsed into brief introspection, imagining the awful spectacle of an Air Vice-Marshal trying to do conjuring tricks for a hundred and eighty-eight unsober bomber crews.

  ‘No, he’ll have more sense,’ said Mewell. ‘Surely?’ he added.

  Mewell had given orders that Wearsby’s chefs should push the boat out when it came to the dinner menu. Thirty-five stout turkeys had been ordered from a local farmer and, dispatched and dressed, now waited on racks in a walk-in freezer behind the kitchens. Forty Christmas puddings from Joe Lyons in Lincoln were similarly in readiness. The question of drink arose.

  ‘Plentiful,’ Mewell said decisively.

  ‘Naturally, sir,’ said the mess steward. ‘I really meant what kind of drink?’

  ‘Beer, just so long as it’s not Watney’s Red Barrel, which is frankly gnat’s piss.’

  ‘We don’t stock that in the bar, sir. I suggest Tolly light. That’s the most popular we have and it’s local. I’ll lay in some extra barrels from Cobbolds.’

  ‘Good man. Also wine, we’ll need. Nothing too extravagant. They may not be stone-cold sober to start with and the Accounts department won’t wear shameless expenditure. Most of the men aren’t really wine-drinkers anyway, are they?’

  In the mess steward’s experience most of the men would drink anything and cheerfully finish an evening on methylated spirits if offered it, but he didn’t say so. ‘It’s true we don’t serve that much wine in the mess, sir, except on dining-in nights. I would suggest white rather than red. It tends to be cheaper.’

  ‘Well, see what the NAAFI can get us. I’ve heard the Algerians have started exporting the stuff in cardboard boxes.’ Group captain and steward looked at each other and shuddered. ‘All right for you,’ said Mewell. ‘Just remember, whatever the men get I shall have to drink, too. It would hardly do to give them North African battery acid while we at the top table indulge ourselves with a choice Burgundy. Not on, I’m afraid. There’d be a riot. If the NAAFI can’t do it you’ll have to get it locally. There’ll be a bonded warehouse somewhere. And isn’t there a Lovibonds in Mossop? They could probably do us a couple of dozen cases of Blue Nun. Think on your feet.’

  The hardest part of the arrangements had been getting High Wycombe to agree to losing four V-bomber stations for forty-eight hours. This naturally involved loading other stations with extra duty. Mewell had had a terse phone conversation with a voice of authority in a command bunker somewhere under Buckinghamshire who had tried to cut down the crews’ absence from duty to twenty-four hours. The group captain patiently explained that it was against all regulations to drink on the day before flying, and these men were definitely not going to be in a fit state to man the nation’s nuclear deterrent a mere twelve hours after a binge as majestic as this was intended to be. Eventually the point had been conceded and the party was officially on.

  Mewell’s order to push the boat out was not confined merely to food and drink. In his view Wearsby’s honour was at stake as the host station, and the Christmas-themed decorations were lavish. The walls of both marquees were hung with purple nylon drapery stuck with yellow stars which the station’s wives and WRAFs had spent hours cutting out of heavy art paper. The drapery was also liberally hung with silver balls. At the end of the marquees furthest from the top table was a large Christmas tree whose tip reached the canvas roof. A team hand-picked from the rugger XV had liberated it by night from a plantation near Market Tewsbury. Its branches were hung with tinsel, coloured lights and more silver balls. A line of tables pushed end-to-end stretched along each side of the tented space, facing each other across a clear area in the middle that formed a corridor between the dais at one end and the tree at the other. Gaily coloured streamers criss-crossed overhead. A sound system had been rigged with tannoys attached to the lighting gantries. This was partly for the benefit of after-dinner speeches but mostly for the music. A group had been hired from London by a pilot officer alleged to have connections with what he called the ‘pop’ world. The Beatles, the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five having pleaded prior engagements, a quartet calling itself Heavy Sausage had agreed to come and play for after-dinner dancing. They claimed to be exponents of ‘the Tottenham sound’. This, the airman assured them, translated as ‘loud’.

  Even afterwards it was conceded that the event’s logistics had been well planned. A fleet of coaches was laid on for the guests, impeccably timed so that irrespective of the distance they had to travel they would all arrive together at Wearsby on the dot at 19:00. Mess Dress 5B was specified on the invitation so that everyone would in theory be neatly dressed with a black bow tie and a white waistcoat. In the event not every airman who disembarked at Wearsby that evening could any longer be described as neat. It was obvious that many of the guests had come prepared for an alcohol famine and had brought their own supplies. In many cases ties were already awry and waistcoats not as pristine as they had been at the start of the journey. At least the occasion had been blessed with fine weather: a chilly night with the odd patch of fine mist. The fleet of Bedford coaches drew up and parked in a neat row. Before their drivers went off to the warmth and hospitality of the sergeants’ mess they each placed a large painted sign in front of their coach with the name of the station to which they would be returning.

  Even so, early portents suggested that not every contingency had been planned for. Amos began to get an inkling of this when he discovered that for no reason he could fathom the guests had been seated according to function rather than squadron. Thus all captains were together, all co-pilots, all navrads, and so on. The result was that virtually everyone at table was a stranger to everybody else. Worse still, they had been grouped in what looked suspiciously like a descending order of status, with the pilots nearest the top table and the rest filling the remainder of the marquees with the AEOs down at the end next to the Christmas tree. Possibly this arrangement contributed to a helpful stiffness at first, a degree of formality that allowed everyone to find his place and be standing vaguely to attention as the four station commanders and their guest of honour filed in and took their seats. But shortly after everyone had sat down and the waitresses began circulating it became evident to Amos that this decorum was not set to last. From down by the tree there came a muffled detonation and a bread roll shot the length of the tents and smacked against the linen cloth draping the top table and concealing the superior officers’ eminent legs. A cheer went up. A second explosion sent another roll humming through the air to ricochet off a corner of the lighting tower and smack into the back of a co-pilot’s head. He flung down his napkin and lurched unsteadily to his feet. From the back of the marquee came a chorus of ‘Ahh, diddums!’ and a third explosion. The roll-gunner had found his range by now and the missile took the co-pilot squarely in the fly buttons. Having identified his assailant by the tin tennis ball tube and the can of lighter fuel he was holding, the incensed victim ran the length of the tent towards him, scattering alarmed waitresses, and launched himself across the table. With a crash of glass and silver the two men disappeared amid fresh cheers, the silver balls tacked to the nylon drapery jiggling violently as they grappled.

  With some presence of mind Group Cap
tain Mewell pulled the microphone stand towards him and his voice filled the marquee.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, admirably managing not to sound reproving. ‘I should hate to think that all these turkeys had died in vain. At least let us do them justice before open warfare breaks out.’

  This provoked another cheer, this time one of assent rather than ribaldry. The silver balls stopped jiggling and the two combatants separated. The co-pilot returned somewhat unsteadily to his seat, smoothing his hair and brushing pine needles off his mess jacket.

  ‘I mean,’ he addressed his fellows as he sat down, ‘someone had to sort him out, don’t you think? A godforsaken runt of an AEO from East Witto?’

  ‘Oy,’ came a voice of protest. ‘I’m from East Wittenham. Not got anything against us, have you?’

  ‘Not unless you fire bread rolls at my balls. Come on – we both fly Victors. That means – ’ he belched glassily – ‘that means we must have balls in common.’