Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘I’ve seen some of them already. They’ve chopped off half of runway two-four and replaced it with an industrial estate.’

  ‘Yes, they did that ooh, three years ago now. You couldn’t get a V-bomber in or out now even if you wanted to. We were offered a Nimrod 2 last year but nobody fancied landing it and taking a chance on stopping in time. I bet in the old days you lads would have done it like a shot, but this is an elf-’n’-safety generation we’ve got now, isn’t it? So what we’re left with is just stuff that can get in and out easily: light aircraft, executive jets, gliders, the odd helicopter. It’s really sad but I suppose we all have to move with the times. Have a rock cake. I made them this morning.’

  At that moment a family party with three children came in so Amos thanked her and took his leave, munching the rock cake and heading towards the large marquee he could see bellying slightly in the light breeze. Outside stood a blackboard proclaiming ‘Cold War Reunion – Reception’. He was disgusted to feel a crawl of apprehension in his stomach. He paused at the entrance, breathing in the nostalgic military smell of sun-warmed canvas. Inside, the walls were lined with trestle tables bearing various items for display or possibly for sale: bits of old machinery, models, books and manuals, photographs. A short man wearing an RAF blazer and a badge identifying him as Chris Everett came forward to greet him.

  ‘I’m the fellow you sent your cheque to. If you’ll just sign in I’ll find you your ID.’

  ‘Amos McKenna.’

  ‘McKenna, McKenna.’ On the table inside the door were rows of ID badges, presumably in alphabetical order since Everett immediately found the right one. ‘You must excuse me,’ he said as he handed it to Amos. ‘I don’t know you, do I?’ Amos was suddenly aware that his own clothes might be a little too studiedly civilian: brownish slacks topped by an American light sports jacket with a discreet check pattern, a plain white shirt open at the collar. ‘That’s the worst of these things. We all come to feel we’re the last of the many, but there are still quite a lot of us around who were on V-bombers even though we certainly didn’t know everybody else at the time. And of course it was rather a long time ago and we all change, well, physically. Unfortunately. Which squadron were you?’

  ‘I was in 319.’ He drifted away, leaving Everett with his brow furrowed as if in an attempt to remember something until his attention was distracted by a fresh batch of newcomers to the tent. Amos wandered around looking at the models and memorabilia. He recognised several pieces of V-bomber hardware that had presumably been salvaged when the aircraft had been broken up: one of the long bladder-like pee bottles they had known as ‘rubber kippers’; a nav radar’s little joystick with its white bobble; some cardboard packets of chaff billed as ‘Window for I-Band radar’; a copy of Pilot’s Notes for a Victor Mk. 2. The people behind these stalls looked far too young ever to have used the things they were selling. Some were women, although he had a feeling they weren’t ex-WRAFS. Overhearing one of them extolling a radar altimeter to a grey-haired man, Amos realised that these were enthusiasts dedicated to the point of obsession who no doubt travelled around from one aviation event to another. They probably knew as much or even more about a navigator’s instruments of nearly half a century ago than he on the flight deck ever had. He had long since learned not to underestimate the true devotee.

  Years ago, back in the days when he was at last firmly in the left-hand seat of a BA airliner and interested passengers were still allowed to visit the cockpit in flight, a lad of about fifteen had been shown forward who appeared to be almost as familiar with a Boeing’s fuel transfer system as Amos. The boy had explained about shifting the fuel between tanks as it was gradually used up so as to maintain the aircraft’s trim, casually referring to the plane’s centre of gravity as its ‘cg’. Impressed and inwardly amused, Amos had been mischievously tempted to live up to the character wished upon him by Airplane! and ask the boy if he ever hung around gymnasiums or had been in a Turkish prison. Instead, he congratulated him on his detailed knowledge. The reply had been matter-of-fact. ‘I’m a Rafbrat,’ the boy said. ‘My dad’s a wing commander. I’m pretty much qualified on Chipmunks.’ Amos had often wondered whether he and the other precocious visitors to his cockpit had eventually taken up flying as their profession. As warmly as he had felt at the time about their obvious enthusiasm, he thought bleakly that they might have done well not to join the RAF in the last decade or two, especially after 1991 when the Soviet Union finally imploded and the world changed.

  The marquee was steadily filling up with new arrivals. It was also becoming noticeably hotter. Amos felt increasingly distinctive in his mufti. The men – old codgers, as he thought of them, even though they were largely his own age – nearly all wore the unofficial uniform of ex-service types: badged blue blazers, grey flannels, crested ties. They had the benign yet stubborn expressions of people glimpsed filing out of Sunday matins in country churches where the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible are still used and ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ still sung. These gentlemen peered myopically at each other’s lapel badges like visitors to a gallery who first check the legend beneath each painting as though unable to see it until they know who the artist is. Then they read the other’s clothes in confirmation. It was all done in an instant, quite casually, before conversation was struck up. Now and then came exclamations of surprise and pleasure. Hands were wrung, elbows grasped, long-time-no-sees exchanged. For the most part the women in their decent dresses beamed impartially.

  A burgeoning gloomy rage began to overtake Amos that he had ever allowed Ken to talk him into coming. Social events were not to his taste at the best of times and this one promised to be as grim as any. He had certainly never been to a reunion of his old school, though God knew the old school kept pestering him even now for handouts to finance their new squash courts or chemistry labs: shameless begging letters that assumed his deep sentimental attachment to a place he’d been forced to attend for five years nearly sixty years previously only because his father had paid heavily in a straightforward business transaction. It was too easy to imagine how much – or how sadly little – former friends and classmates would have changed over that great gap of time. It looked like being much the same deal here at Wearsby. Gazing across the tent, Amos was certain he recognised a former officer whom he disliked on sight before remembering why. The man had surely headed some sort of inspection – TACEVAL? Weapons Standardisation Team? – and had given him and his crew an exceptionally hard time, causing them briefly to lose their combat-ready status. Amos could no longer recall their exact offence but the sense of injustice had clearly outlived it by decades, ready on the instant to spring back to life at the mere sight of a man who now looked like a jovial bishop.

  Amos’s gloom settled like precipitate in a test tube. This whole business of trying to turn the clock back was doomed and silly. What were these bits of ancient aircraft for sale but religious relics? Fragments of machines long since defunct but still for true believers imbued with the charisma of a British aviation that no longer existed. That dull-looking round metal gadget, for instance, bristling with stubs of snipped-off wiring and labelled as a transponder from a Lightning fighter’s fuel tank. Presumably the magic these things held was reserved for people who had never flown such aircraft on a daily basis, just as fragments of a saint’s tibia would acquire value the further away they were from local folk who could actually remember the cantankerous old hermit in his smelly cave.

  Amos wandered to the marquee’s entrance for a breath of air without the nudging stink of hot canvas. Fifty yards away was an open-fronted tent he hadn’t noticed on the way in, despite its being festooned with banners and posters. Loudspeakers rigged on either side were extolling the triumphant and hugely costly resurrection of Vulcan XH558 while appealing for yet more funds to keep it flying from its new home at former RAF Finningley. In any but the shortest term it was, he thought, a doomed enterprise. Had it been in support of one of the faintly ludic
rous old crocks that Fishy liked so much puttering their way from London to Brighton each year in the veterans’ rally, it might have made sense as an exercise in harmless nostalgia. It was surely well within an averagely rich man’s pocket to keep an ancient Daimler or De Dion Bouton on the road. Even keeping wood-and-canvas biplanes in the air, as the Shuttleworth Collection heroically managed, seemed to him entirely reasonable. But to maintain a half-century-old V-bomber in airworthy condition struck Amos as an exercise in futility. He knew better than most the Vulcan’s extreme mechanical and electrical complexity. Any slight defect or malfunction in an obscure component would risk its permit to fly being withdrawn. Its fatigue life must anyway be nearly up. In any case, what was it all for? What could a flying Vulcan accomplish beyond a temporary moistening of the eye and further weight added to the burden of useless regret for an era lost and gone? It had something of the melancholy of Professor Challenger’s pterodactyl escaping from London and hopelessly winging its way back towards its prehistoric lost world in South America. Anything needing resurrection was by definition dead, and hence beyond any true revival . . . At this moment, and with relief, Amos spotted Fishy and Annie approaching the reunion tent.

  ‘Ha! Off already?’ Ken inquired.

  ‘Debating.’

  ‘Really, Pins. Imagine thinking you can come to a do like this without being rat-arsed first.’

  ‘You, I presume, are?’

  ‘Coasting, old thing. Coasting quite pleasantly. Feeling no pain.’

  ‘He insisted,’ explained Annie, ‘in celebration of having found a fuse for the car. Medicinal purposes only, of course. And I’m doing the driving.’

  ‘You’d better get your ID, Fishy.’

  ‘Right. Quick look-round and then I suggest we bugger off and get some lunch. The fat woman in Reception told us there’s a buffet at the local golf club. Why don’t we wander up there and get stuck in. Then when we’re suitably primed, we can start meeting and greeting. Trouble is, I suspect most of the chaps we wouldn’t mind seeing again are either dead or in a sunset home for the terminally confused.’

  ‘If you remember, that was precisely my point when I tried to resist coming here. It was you who talked me into this whole thing.’

  ‘Did I? Oh well, it’ll do you good. Sharpen up your people skills. You’ve spent too much of your life sitting in cockpits, cut off from the rest of us ordinary punters, taking refuge behind locked doors and gold braid. This –’ Ken paused at the entrance to the tent and cheerfully surveyed the chatting men in blazers as though they might be potential customers for one of his monstrously expensive cars – ‘this is the real world.’

  ‘I feared as much,’ said Amos.

  Now that he was with Ken and Annie he felt a little less vulnerable. This was as well, since on the stroll back to their Lexus in the car park it proved impossible not to pause now and then, looking at the wartime brick buildings and the ‘C’ type hangars and being slightly dazed by the memories they insistently brought back: lapel-graspers each determined to tell its tale. Yet for some reason it was the sight of Market Tewsbury church tower a few miles off across the airfield’s expanse that most vividly brought the past back. Amos was aghast at a sudden conviction that maybe he had never really left Wearsby; that it was the rest of his life which had, after all, been purely vaporous. The intervening forty years he had spent flying the aerial corridors that latticed the planet now felt to have left not a trace behind them: mere contrails that high-altitude jet streams had dissolved to the thinnest of thin air.

  25

  After lunch Amos and Ken returned to Wearsby Air Museum. They had left Annie with some old nursing cronies she had bumped into with the promise that they would all meet up again at the buffet supper that evening. By now Amos was feeling less apprehensive, partly mellower for a few drinks and partly because neither he nor Ken had yet found any of their contemporaries from 319 Squadron. He was beginning to hope they were the only ones present at this reunion.

  They had been told that the Vulcan and Victor on display were closed to the general public this afternoon but would be available to any of the reunion guests to visit at will. Amos and Ken strolled towards them through a graveyard of monuments to the post-war British aviation industry. Many of the aircraft on permanent display were beginning to show their age. In some of the older ones black or green spots of algae had begun to invade the cellulose paintwork, especially on the underside of fuselages and wings. Here and there acrylic windows and cockpit canopies had acquired a yellowish crazing of microscopic cracks or else a milky opacity. Tyres were flattening, the rubber cracking along the folds. However, it was apparent that the two V-bombers on display spent much of their time inside the nearby hangar. They had a far more cosseted and spruced-up look even if, as Amos had learned over lunch, neither aircraft had any engines and had to be towed in and out of its shelter. They reached the Vulcan and Amos stood for a moment looking at it like someone meeting an ex-lover and discovering, with a mixture of awe and chagrin, that they hadn’t aged at all.

  ‘By God, it was a beautiful aeroplane,’ Amos said at length. ‘I wonder what this old girl’s history was.’

  ‘XM592,’ said Ken. ‘Ring any bells?’

  ‘None. On the other hand, without digging my old log books out of the loft I doubt I would recognise the serial number of a single aircraft I flew in the RAF. Would you?’

  ‘I doubt it. But can’t you even remember the one you had to jump out of in Libya? It was called Yogi 1.’

  ‘Yes, and yours was Yogi 2. I can recall that incident all right, no problem. The only time in my entire career I ever had to eject. A bad day, that.’

  ‘You’re telling me. I still remember us going round in circles as Terry Meeres told us he could see five chutes and then one of them going into the fire but of course none of us knew who it was. All we could do was bugger off back to Malta and wait for news. That was no fun, either.’

  ‘No.’ Amos was appraising the Vulcan. ‘You know, Fishy, they really were magnificent beasts.’ He noted the red covers blanking off the intakes, the shining sleeves of the landing gear, the fully inflated tyres and the gleaming paintwork that suggested someone had gone to the expense of giving it a re-spray.

  ‘That they were. Works of art in their way.’ Ken’s was a professional car restorer’s eye. ‘It’s hard to believe we could design and build these things over half a century ago when these days we can barely put a bloody glider together. Shall we go inside? You first, Captain.’

  It was more than strange taking that first high step up to the bottom rung of the yellow ladder. It required a slight effort that Amos couldn’t recall having to make in the old days. Going up into the aircraft was like revisiting a childhood home and finding it at the same time intimately familiar yet curiously miniaturised. It seemed incredible that this, his long-ago workplace, should have shrunk to such tiny dimensions. Had the pilots been able to revolve their seats like the crews’, all five men would have been little further apart than if facing each other around a small table in a hotel lounge, albeit on different levels. And the smell . . . Despite its years of public exhibition the aircraft had retained more than a ghost of that military smell he remembered at once: Avro’s black paint, perishing rubber, webbing, kerosene, oxidising grease, wiring harness.

  ‘Christ almighty, Fishy,’ he exclaimed. ‘I can’t believe it was ever this small.’ Decades of flying big Boeings had accustomed Amos to flight decks that were like ballrooms by comparison, where one didn’t have to be a contortionist merely to sit down. An atavistic prompting made him choose the left-hand seat, into which he sank after manoeuvres that made his ageing joints creak. With much groaning and cursing Ken squeezed beside him into the co-pilot’s seat which gave out a huff of expelled air.

  ‘You know the awful truth?’

  ‘What’s that, Fishy?’

  ‘It’s definitely a young man’s aircraft. I remember on long flights we sometimes used to swap around if one of th
e drivers wanted to stretch his legs. He’d take my seat and nick my Spangles and I would sit here and pretend to fly the thing for twenty minutes. It was on autopilot, of course. But I don’t remember it being this difficult to get in and out of the seat. You realise our shoulders are actually touching? Anyone would think I’d got fat.’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘Don’t you start, Pins. It’s quite bad enough hearing Annie on the subject . . . Crikey, you really couldn’t see much out of these things, could you? You’re sort of sunk down.’

  ‘I know. The side window was more useful most of the time.’ Amos’s left hand was on the control stick, his right on the throttle levers, feet on the pedals. Without thinking, he found the knurled knob to the right of the control column that adjusted the pedals and turned it to accommodate his long legs.

  ‘Do you reckon you could still fly this thing, Pins?’

  Amos gave a wistful smile. ‘Like a shot. No problem. It would all come back as soon as we started doing the checks, I know it would. All that training, all that practice: it’s indelible. The only thing is, I might not be able to lay my hands on everything quickly enough. This layout’s a pretty clutter compared with what I was used to in 747s. Different instruments, too. Out of the Ark, some of these. You certainly couldn’t call this a glass cockpit. Even so, it’s still a bloody miracle when you think this was designed well over sixty years ago. But yes. I could fly it and land it. No question. You know those smartphones that have inductive charging? That’s what it feels like sitting here. This seat’s a sort of wireless power source, and the longer I sit in it the more I shall get recharged.’

  ‘So do you still regret Annie and I talked you into coming?’

  ‘Well . . . not so far, I suppose. But then, I’ve yet to run into someone who knows me as the station’s black sheep.’