‘Oh come on, Pins. We’ve been over this a dozen times. Nobody will remember all that. It was a hell of a long time ago. Water under several bridges.’
‘So you say. But only this morning that fat woman in Reception asked me if I’d been here at the time of the spy scandal. She knew about it. It’s OK for you, Ken, even though you were on the same exercise. But I was the captain. Just so many things stacked up I felt jinxed. I mean, why did it have to be my chiefie selling stuff to the Russians? And then getting shot dead in Luqa? And why did some bloody vulture have to pick on my aircraft in the middle of that wilderness? And why did that wretched Buff have to fly slap into my three bombs? And why did poor old Vic get out safely only to drift into our bonfire? Plus, of course, there was all that gossip about my marriage break-up and, well, you know.’
‘It was just happenstance, the whole lot of it, Pins. Everybody recognised that.’
‘Of course it was, but I was still tainted. I’ve often thought if we’d all been a bit more on the ball we might have noticed in time what our chiefie was up to – what was his name? Hodge, Baldy Hodge. But we had a mass of our own stuff to concentrate on, didn’t we? There simply wasn’t time to wonder whether every erk who laid a hand on the aircraft might have been in the pay of Moscow. That’s why we had security and MPs everywhere. But no. Shit sticks, Fishy. And in the military that’s fatal.’
‘Mm. Do you remember the rumour that Hodge might actually have been spying for the Yanks? It was probably a lot murkier than we imagined. Anyway, the important thing is your crew stuck up for you, don’t forget that.’
‘You all did, for which I’m eternally grateful. Old Mewell turned up trumps, too, although he could just as easily have thrown me to the wolves. Poor old Muffin. Coming on top of that incredible Christmas party and those black-marketeer commissaries, a spy scandal affecting his station must have been the kiss of death to his career. But good on him, he supported us all to the hilt. I often wonder what became of him. As you know, I lost touch with just about everyone when I left the RAF, even with you and Annie. There was a huge gap.’
‘Of course I stayed on quite a bit longer than you did,’ Ken said. ‘But we all got a bit out of touch once they stood down that special flight of ours and we were split up and posted. It was just the Air Ministry’s knee-jerk way of dealing with practically any scandal, from chaps going to bed with each other to high treason . . . Doesn’t it all seem silly now?’
Amos was clicking switches and twirling trim wheels reminiscently. ‘I hardly ever see you and Annie these days, Fishy. Do you know what happened to any of our lot?’
‘The odd rumour, mainly. Oh no, wait – do you remember Jim Ledbetter? He was in 319 with us.’
‘Ledbetter. Ledbetter. Sort of familiar but I can’t put a face to him.’
‘He was a co-pilot who was eventually sent off to 230 OCU.’
‘Christ, Fishy, your memory’s amazing.’
‘Not really. He turned up about eighteen months ago as a potential customer for a classic car. I thought I’d told you but I suppose I can’t have done. So we had a few drinks and refreshed a lot of memories. I liked him a lot. Wasn’t he a neighbour of yours during your short stay in married quarters here? He told me he was the one who originally thought up the plan to put the padre’s car on the chapel roof. You remember that, of course.’
‘Do I ever. Indirectly, it was the immediate cause of my marriage’s collapse. Old . . . what was his name? Wheezing Jesus, that’s it.’ Amos and Ken laughed, staring through the Vulcan’s windscreen and seeing nothing that was outside in the afternoon light.
‘Jim said he’d heard that Terry Meeres is still flying in Canada somewhere as a veteran private pilot. He was a good egg, was Terry. Best captain I ever flew with. But Jim wasn’t in touch with anyone on a regular basis . . . Do you suppose Jo’s still around here?’
‘Jo my ex? Who knows? Last I heard she was going to marry a local vet after our divorce had come through. She’d be over seventy now,’ Amos heard himself say in some astonishment. ‘Probably a grandmother several times over. I hope she’s been happy. She can’t have failed to be happier than she would have been if she’d stuck with me. I was the world’s worst husband . . . Fishy,’ he suddenly broke off, ‘do you reckon we did any good?’
‘What? Oh, you mean with this – ?’ Ken waved a hand at the cockpit.
‘Yes. The Great White Detergent. The whole nuclear standoff bit.’
‘Well, there never was a nuclear war so I guess you could say it worked. Hundred per cent success. That’s if you believe the Soviets ever really intended to attack us.’
‘But we did believe that, Fishy. Just about everybody did at the time. It was deadly serious, wasn’t it? That’s what people forget. Or else they’re too young to know what it was like. We all of us lived for – what, about thirty years? – with the constant possibility of being annihilated in the next fifteen minutes. Politics have never been so serious since.’
‘Al-Qaida?’
‘Dangerous arseholes but not nuclear arseholes. At least, not yet. No, that Cold War period was scarier for longer than anything in the history of this planet simply because we could all of us have been wiped out. But we’ve got such short memories that the whole era has faded for everyone except old farts like us who remember what it was like and maybe – just maybe – helped to keep the balance. Amazing to think you and I knew more about dozens of towns in Russia, and in far greater detail, than we ever did about places like Market Tewsbury and Mossop and Lincoln. Remember those hundreds of hours of target study day after day, month after month, year after year? And nowadays, Fishy, I often ask myself: was it worth it? By the time you and I were flying, both the Soviets and the Americans had their ICBMs hunkered down in silos in Ukraine and Kansas, and thanks to NORAD and our early warning at Fylingdales total retaliation was guaranteed anyway. End of planet. So what were guys like us doing pottering about the sky at a few hundred knots in our ageing Vulcans and B-52s and Tupolev-95s, telling each other we were keeping the peace?’
‘Earning a living,’ said Ken firmly. ‘Having fun. And by golly it was fun a lot of the time.’
‘Can’t deny that,’ Amos admitted. ‘Lots of great flying, lots of great people. Only young once, and all that. But when I look back it sometimes seems like just one more shining, multi-trillion-dollar cause that somehow turns out to have been utterly pointless. Like Vietnam, come to that. Millions dead all over Indo-China, and to what end? None whatever. Good old godless communism was going to implode anyway. We’re fools to go on getting caught up in these things. We just repeat the same mistakes endlessly, and always will. It’s in our genes.’
‘I . . .’ Ken began, but at that moment there were loud voices from below and behind them and the sounds of elderly men heaving themselves aboard.
‘Do you think they’ll have kept the rubber kippers?’ someone asked, nearing, then ‘Ah, the office is occupied.’
‘No, no,’ said Amos, trying stiffly to clamber out of his seat. ‘We’ve been here quite long enough. Risk of becoming maudlin and philosophical, you know. I’m afraid you’ll have to back up a bit. We’re not as flexible as we were . . . Were you in 319?’
‘No, 552. Victors. Mostly at East Wittenham; 1967.’ The stranger on the steps was a portly cove in a blazer.
‘After my time, I’m afraid. Ken and I will leave you to it but you’ll have to squeeze into the coal-hole to let us out. I’d forgotten how bloody small these things were even though I flew one for years.’
‘Could it be that we’ve all got bigger?’ said the man as he and his companion perched in the crew’s seats to allow Amos and Ken past and back down the ladder to the ground.
More elderly men in blazers were gathering around the two V-bombers, passing lunchtime gas and rehearsing old times.
‘You remember when they invented snatch plugs for still faster scrambles?’ one was saying. ‘As you moved forward things like the cable from the ground power
unit automatically pulled out so no time was wasted with lineys having to disconnect manually. And do you remember the Vulcan that towed a ground power unit when the snatch plug failed to disconnect? Poor bloody captain had no idea he was starting his take-off run with a damn great generator on wheels still plugged in behind him. Luckily someone in the control tower wasn’t asleep and radioed him to abort. Problem was, the Vulcan had brakes but the GPU didn’t, and it was obvious the thing was simply going to catch up and smash into the undercarriage and do God knows how much damage. But the ground crew piled into a van and rushed along to stop the unit rolling and damage was averted . . .’
Tales from back when. Suddenly, neither Amos nor Ken felt like mixing and mingling, so they set off behind the old officers’ mess (now reincarnated as ‘Wearsby Resources Centre’, whatever that meant) on the road that led eventually to the network of streets where the old married quarters had been. It was strangely unsettling how much of the airfield was unchanged, and how much different. Certain buildings seemed passably maintained and looked as they always had; others were on the edge of dereliction. It was like wandering among the ruins of some great monastery destroyed under Henry VIII, and they the bewildered shades of monks recognising exactly where their cells had been but appalled by littered turf and obliterated holy places; seeing with pangs the still-standing arched door they had built to the chapter house but which now gave onto a gravelled car park with disabled toilet facilities. What now of all the precision, the devotion, the constant ritual? The whitewashed kerbs and shaved grass? What now of the tannoys once bolted everywhere whose whooping klaxons had preceded the clipped and urgent tones of somebody at High Wycombe, the Voice of God summoning them day or night to a no-notice mass generation of aircraft, a Micky or a Micky Finn or just another QRA?
Amos found the houses in Brabazon Close nearly unchanged except cosmetically. The windows and front door of his old quarters had been painted a pale mauve and it now had a satellite dish screwed to the chimney. He guessed all these houses had been sold off by the MoD in the early 1980s, offered at knockdown prices to serving personnel who later sold them on at a pretty profit to civilians when the RAF left Wearsby for good. There were plenty of cars parked in the street which in his day had been practically empty. Well, it was a Saturday after all. He supposed that on weekdays the people who lived here now commuted to nearby towns like Mossop and probably as far afield as Grantham or Lincoln. The whole estate had a very civilian feel and held nothing of interest, not even many memories.
The nearby building to which he did feel drawn was shuttered and had a derelict air to it. He and Ken stood in front of the chapel and took in the boarded-up windows, the groundsel growing between the stones of the shallow steps in front, the padlocked chain threaded through holes bored in the main doors.
‘Hideous, wasn’t it?’ said Ken admiringly. ‘That flat roof, the pseudo-Gothic arch, the whole air of religion catered for on the cheap. “Fall out Roman Catholics and Jews!” – remember those parades from training days?’
‘I certainly do. I just want to walk around the outside if you don’t mind, Fishy. You remember my AEO, Gavin Rickards? He wrote to me after I’d left to tell me they’d put in a special stone or something.’
They made their way along the wall. Somebody with savage machinery had recently cut back what looked like thickets of hydrangeas and buddleias and other shrubs that had sprouted in the abandoned flower beds. Here and there were stones embedded in the ground still bearing a few traces of paint as though they had once demarcated a parking area. When they reached the rear of the chapel Amos was pleased to see that the station’s sports field his former garden had overlooked was still unchanged. Some children were shooting footballs at a goal down at the far end. Their shrill voices came sadly on the breeze.
‘Is this it?’ called Ken.
Amos joined him and found a pale memorial stone let into the base of the chapel wall. It was criss-crossed with snails’ mucus, but the engraved legend was perfectly legible:
IN FOND MEMORY OF
AIR CDRE B. A. PONSONBY
THIS TABLET WAS PLACED
BY HIS FRIEND GP CAPT N. MEWELL
‘FAITHFUL TO THE END’
‘Good Lord,’ said Amos after a silence, more touched than he could have imagined. ‘What do you think the “B. A.” stood for?’
‘Barbary Ape?’ Ken hazarded. ‘Old Muffin must have been awfully fond of the animal, anyhow.’
‘I’m afraid “Faithful to the end” is a bit wishful. I actually witnessed the wretched Ponsonby’s demise, and I think you’d say he was terrified to the end. Possibly still pissed as well.’ But even as he spoke the thought came to him that Mewell might have been referring not to his pet’s faithfulness but to his own. ‘Poor Jo. She completely lost her rag over it. In fact I owe these last forty-odd years of regained bachelorhood largely to the wretched, exiled Ponsonby.’ Amos paused and for an instant his face fell into lines of extraordinary sadness. ‘That fellow who came to buy a car off you, Jim Ledbetter, the one who engineered this whole episode – I . . . I don’t suppose he mentioned Gavin, did he?’
His friend glanced at him sympathetically. ‘As a matter of fact he did, Pins, but only to say he thought he’d heard on the grapevine that he’d got married, had some children and had split up. I didn’t want to tell you because Jim was a bit vague, and who knows what drivel the grapevine distils?’
And that was the only mention of the matter either of the two old friends made that day. In due course they drove in their separate cars to the nearby golf club for the buffet dinner. At first Amos was daunted almost to the point of fleeing by the great throng of scrawny or portly ex-nuclear warriors wearing crested ties, but Annie deftly headed him off and distracted him to the point where both were impressed and amused by the spectacle of septuagenarians heaping and re-heaping their plates. The phrase ‘Eating Command’ followed by guffaws was frequently heard, just as jokes about prostates and piss tubes were made in the Gents. Amos, finally, was reassured to be recognised and greeted warmly by one or two other members of 319 Squadron who plainly held nothing whatever against him and were quite simply happy that he had given oblivion the slip and had returned after so long.
Yet among the ghosts haunting the long tables was one as much of valediction as of nostalgia. A half-forgotten array of names and faces was inevitably fading, linked with touched-up anecdote and reminiscence. But what had definitively passed was an era, taking with it the skills and machines that had been underwritten by an entirely different world and way of looking at it.
‘I suppose,’ mused a bald gentleman who had once looped a Victor bomber in a moment of exuberant irresponsibility, ‘I suppose in terms of sheer professionalism, striking power and global presence, the RAF we knew was at its zenith.’
‘But the writing was on the wall.’
‘But the writing was on the wall. Polaris and all that.’
‘I meant more for Britain. No more empire, general pulling-in of horns, downward spiral.’
‘Ah, that. Yes, well, by God we were lucky chappies, weren’t we? Blasting around the sky all over the world? I could never believe they were paying me to do it. It’s odd. Mention the sixties to people today and they think of drugs and hippies and rock-and-roll. Our sixties were rather different, weren’t they, but quite as wild if not more so, and all paid for by the taxpayer. Just unbelievable. Fantastic fun. Nail-biting fun. The best kind.’
At last Amos, Ken and Annie made their separate ways back to their B&B with farewells and mutual hopes for future meetings ringing in their ears. Amos insisted to Annie that he was perfectly able to drive and promised to see them both at breakfast. The night was moonless and sparklingly clear. On impulse he stopped in a lay-by about five miles from Wearsby and turned out all his lights, the better to see the sky. It was a pilot’s sky as he had so often seen it from a cockpit on his lonely journeys: the wraparound black sheet of the firmament and its printed stars. Suddenly he w
as ambushed by an immense grief. At that moment he would have given his life just to be able to thumb a switch and hear Gavin’s voice from behind: ‘That you, Boss? What kept you? I’ve been waiting so long.’ Resting his head on the steering wheel, Amos had to delay the resumption of his journey because for a long moment he couldn’t see for the exasperating tears which at length he blamed on alcohol.
*
Some three weeks after the reunion, the local newspaper carried a front-page headline that read GRUESOME FIND IN TREE. The story was of an old poplar in a field near Market Tewsbury that had been felled because it was a danger. It was only when the farmer returned next day to cut it up that he discovered, wedged in a fork between two branches that had grown to encase it, a hard white helmet full of ancient bird’s nests. When these were removed the farmer found the helmet also contained most of a human skull. Someone suggested that it might have a connection with the old airfield at Wearsby; but as of going to press, the paper said, police were baffled.
Appendix 1
Skyshield II
To this day, several mysteries still surround Skyshield II (pages 24). Perhaps the most notable is why, after over half a century, the USAF’s final report on the exercise should still be officially classified as secret. British conspiracy theorists, in particular, might be interested to learn that eight years after the exercise the Ministry of Defence in London, in a response labelled ‘top secret’ to a query from their man in the British Defence Secretariat in Washington, made it clear that British documentation was missing: ‘We have been unable to trace official records of Exercise Skyshield II.’ In a further cable on 8 April 1969 they were more specific. ‘Unfortunately all records have been destroyed. We have however established that the Bomber Command Research Branch did not report on the Exercise, which suggests that the USAF kept the overall results very much to themselves.’
This is strange indeed. The British military, like their civilian counterparts in Whitehall, are not in the habit of destroying records. Besides, there is no need. Documents that might prove embarrassing are simply filed away, Sir Humphrey Appleby-style, in some obscure annex where they might possibly be stumbled upon a century later. It seems equally unlikely that Bomber Command’s Research Branch never reported on the exercise. We know from an MoD cable that the Research Branch had British observers on the ground at several US radar installations during Exercise Big Photo, if not for Skyshield II itself. It would have been of the utmost concern to them to learn how the Vulcans’ ECM fit performed against the mock-ups of Soviet SAM radars since this was crucial to the entire deterrence strategy. We can only conjecture that the USAF and/or NORAD refused to allow them access to the relevant data afterwards.
Under the Radar Page 26