by Giles Foden
Eleven
As I waited outside Sir Peter’s office, once again Admiral Fitz-Roy stared down at me from his painting, this time in reproach, or so it seemed to me. There was no sign of Sir Peter’s secretary, Miss Clements, as I then knew her. Still wondering how I was to gloss my tale of catastrophe, I could find—apart from the fact that Ryman may have given us what we wanted—only one hopeful note.
Perhaps here in the high castle of Adastral House, from where the grandee of British meteorology tried to direct a flock of weather forecasters across Britain and the Empire into providing coherent, standardised, reliable information not just for specific military missions, but for the prosecution of the larger policy of the conflict, perhaps here the death of a single man might not be considered of great moment.
But I dismissed the notion immediately. I might as well sign up for the Nazi Party if I started thinking like that. Even though a single death might not count in the large scheme of the war, it nonetheless had to be accounted for in the still larger moral scheme of life. With every sparrow that falls…that sort of thing.
Eventually I was called through into the room of clocks, with its familiar smell of beeswax. The office was darker than I remembered, the overcast weather outside penetrating as if it had been piling up on the other side of the glass and only now, with my entrance, found one of its own. Little grey pearls of light—fragments of the insinuated material, fluxes of local dissipation—danced on the faces of the timepieces.
Sir Peter himself was standing by the window as I came in, looking down at the traffic in Kingsway.
“Sit down, Meadows,” said the weather magus of the war, still with his back to me. A buff-coloured folder was in his hand.
I sat in one of the big green armchairs. The fire which had warmed the room on my previous visit was unlit this time, and the sight of the empty grate heightened my anxiety. It was like a mouth with teeth, but no lips or tongue.
At last, Sir Peter turned. As if on cue, one of his clocks sounded. Then others, one after the other: a cascade of sound. Followed once more by the man-in-the-moon clock chiming on completion of its own dilatory circle.
Silhouetted in the window as he was, it was impossible to make out the exact tenor of Sir Peter’s expression, but I could see well enough that he had changed. His hair was quite white now, rather than grey, and his pale face was much more deeply lined, with eczematic patches here and there, standing out like the little red flags used to mark the positions of weather ships on charts.
The number of staff at the Met Office had doubled to nearly 7,000 since I had last been in the room. This had put a colossal strain on the director, so it was later said. With Allied successes growing at last, each new military operation to dislodge Hitler’s troops or their proxies demanded the appropriate meteorological forecast. The range of operational activities planned and executed was now enormous. Experienced forecasters were being shifted from one operation to another as missions evolved.
But of all these plans and plots the proposed landings on mainland Europe were the most important—and here was I with only shame and disgrace to contribute to them, awaiting a reprimand when I had expected triumph and honours, rightful laurels. Underneath it all was guilt, the pure, searing guilt of one who has taken a life. The kind of guilt which purples a soul for ever.
What was I going to say? I swallowed hard as Sir Peter crossed the room, carrying the manilla folder.
“It hasn’t really worked out, has it?” he said, sitting down in the other armchair. I was surprised, both at the understatement and at the almost offhand manner in which he spoke.
“It was an accident, sir.”
Now the voice acquired the hardness I had expected. “So you say. It seems to me a piece of tomfoolery on your part that went badly wrong. Others, such as Gordon Whybrow in Dunoon, are putting a much darker interpretation on your behaviour.”
He opened the folder. On a paper inside I caught a glimpse of Whybrow’s typewriting—recognisable from the dozens of instructions I’d received from him in Kilmun—but could not read the words. “I must say, he has developed a very low opinion of you. He seems to think you were more interested in chasing after women than doing any work. And he says that you are prone to drink.”
“That’s not true, sir. Well, the point is—I worked hard for you. If it were not for the business with the plane…”
My voice trailed off. I leaned forward, putting my head in my hands—and then there was silence for a while.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” said Sir Peter eventually. “It could be argued you were only doing your duty in trying to down that plane. You know you did damage it fatally?”
I shook my head.
“The crew realised they would not make it home, so fearing coming down in the sea they bailed out. They parachuted down in Ayrshire and were soon picked up.”
“I’d no idea.”
“There’s more, and it’s very interesting. It might make you feel a little less guilty for what has happened.”
I could not see any way in which that could be possible, I thought to myself as Sir Peter continued. “Among the crew was a man called Heinz Wirbel. A weatherman, an observer in the Zentral Wetterdienstgruppe. About your age and similarly overqualified, with an academic background. Anyway, Wirbel was willing to sing, and I’m more inclined to listen to what he had to say than to Whybrow or the Dunoon police. The Germans weren’t just flying meteorological reconnaissance, they were trying to establish Ryman’s whereabouts. Moreover, Wirbel was attached to Professor Weickmann’s invasion watch group, which shows they have been following the same train of thought as us.”
I sat up. “Really? I did think it was all rather odd.”
Sir Peter continued. “Well it was. The death of Ryman might have been an accident, but the appearance of the plane wasn’t. They couldn’t kidnap him, at least not easily. They might have wanted to kill him, though Wirbel says he had no orders to do that. They certainly were looking for him, I suppose to see if he really was retired or whether his revolutionary approach to forecasting was now being used by us officially. It’s all bluff and counter-bluff, nowadays, between me and my opposite number in Berlin. They try to think what we could consider a tolerable meteorological interval for a military operation, given our approach to interpreting weather, and I try conversely to do the same with them. Both always speculating on what relative analytical techniques might mean for operations. So any intelligence regarding the underlying theories being employed is useful.”
I felt a great, if bogus wave of relief on hearing all this, as if the Germans might now share my responsibility for Ryman’s death. “But how did they know about Ryman? I don’t just mean citations in papers—how did they know where he lived, what he was up to and so on?”
Sir Peter lit a cigarette, the flame of the lighter illuminating his long white face. “He was a complex man. In August 1939—you may not know this—he went to Danzig. Just before the German invasion of Poland. I believe he wanted to witness the prelude to war for himself. As part of his so-called peace studies.”
I suddenly remembered the box file, Visit to Danzig and Berlin, which I had seen in the study and never looked at.
“On the way back, he visited Berlin,” continued Vaward. “There he met the well-known Quaker Corder Catchpole. Now Catchpole is a conchie, like most of them: he served with Ryman in the Friends Ambulance Unit in the Great War. By 1939 Catchpole was Quaker ambassador in Berlin. He was trying to prevent the onset of war by keeping open some unofficial channel of communication. He was someone our agents followed as a matter of course. When he met up with Ryman, we became aware that Nazi intelligence were also on to him. They already wanted Ryman, you see, they knew about the importance of his work. Most of the great German scientists with an interest in weather, like Theodore von Karman, had fled for America in the thirties, so they were backward in this area. I suspect there was an idea that Ryman could be turned because of his pacifist convi
ctions. And when one of our people heard him bid farewell to his hotelier in Berlin with the words, “Heil Hitler and King George”—frankly, we began to worry about his allegiances, too. But the fact is, he wouldn’t have anything to do with anything military on either side.”
I told Vaward about the box file. “Yes, we have seen that,” he said. “Intelligence went through the house. It’s just a few newspaper articles about Danzig, including one by Ryman himself, describing the visit. We have also spoken to Mrs Ryman about her husband’s sympathies.”
I felt protective towards her. “I hope you were considerate.”
As I spoke, I felt again, in the very crypt of my soul, that immense longing which found its object in Gill.
He nodded, a forbearing smile passing over his moon-like face.
“Do you know what has happened—with the pregnancy?” I asked. “Is she back in Scotland?” I had a vision of her back up in that bleak house alone.
“I don’t know about the baby. Only that she has decided to stay in the Isle of Wight permanently.”
“Do you by any chance have the address, sir? I’m conscious I ought to communicate with her.”
“I am sure you are. But I am afraid I don’t.”
He lit another cigarette, the tip of his tongue showing as he put it to his lips.
“Er,” I said, feeling emotionally exhausted, “may I have one of those, sir?”
“Why yes, of course. Expect you need it.” He leaned across and lit it for me. The manilla folder slid off his lap and fell to the floor, revealing more pages from Whybrow’s typewriter. There seemed to be acres of the stuff, fanning out across the carpet.
“Damn,” said Sir Peter. “Pick up those, will you?”
He looked down at the papers as if they were things of no importance, and gathering them up I affected a similar disdain, making a show with my eyes of not being interested in their contents.
“Now, tell me, Meadows,” he said, once I’d handed the folder back to him. “Did you or didn’t you manage to find out anything more about applying the Ryman number to an invasion site?” He was looking at me not like the man holding out the lifeline, but the one who was in need of it.
I knew that now was my opportunity. “I did find out something, sir. Ryman spoke to me at length just before he died.”
A flush of excitement passed over Sir Peter’s pallid face. “About how his number might help us find the right date for the landings?”
“Yes, though I think date is the wrong way of thinking about it, at least insofar as planning an invasion goes.”
“Well, what is the right way, then?”
“When I spoke to him about the landings specifically, he said the most important thing was not the date but the data.”
A tone of crossness entered Sir Peter’s voice. “What does that mean?”
“I’m coming to it, sir. He meant that it was our observations that were most likely to wrong-foot us, that we would do better by adopting a retrospective view than a prospective one.”
“The Americans are already doing that with their analogue models. Using historical data statistically to extrapolate how current weather will develop.”
“With the greatest respect to our allies, I don’t think that is what he was talking about. He would say that you could have hundreds of years of data and still get it wrong. You might pick up some quasi-periodic phenomena but the singularities, the weather frequencies on given calendar days, could be completely against the grain.”
“Meadows, I am so much more aware of that than you can imagine. What exactly are you bringing me here? How does it relate to the range of applicability of the Ryman number for amphibious landings?”
“The connection is not yet fully formed in my mind, but…Well, because turbulence, as measured by the Ryman number, moves between one geographical area and the next, vertically as well as horizontally, the issue of adjacency is key. Ryman kept mentioning transport barriers, the layers which separate turbulent fluxes. He said that, as well as separating areas of turbulence, these barriers could also be corridors conveying it. These throughways and fences between different weather types are very important, he said. Some might be as narrow as a hundred feet.”
Sir Peter was becoming increasingly testy. “Barriers? Corridors?”
“They’re related, sir. It’s a matter of perception. Interpretation of the future depends on the medium through which one refracts the past.”
“I have no doubt it does, Meadows. Instinct tells me that probably all the things you are saying are perfectly right. But you try convincing military men of theoretical constructs like those—especially if they look at your personal record and see what a dunce you have been, practically speaking. Stagg has requested you join him on the invasion weather group and I have to say I’m really not sure about that any more. But…tell me again, about the corridor-barriers. What do they mean for a soldier, Meadows, or an airman?”
I took a deep breath. “The fact that they can be corridors as well as barriers explains some of the super-fast weather changes that have puzzled forecasters in the past. We have to alter our data gathering and our models accordingly—make sure we realise what we are looking at. Look harder, and be prepared to approximate where we cannot measure.”
His moon-white face suffused with red. “Look harder! Approximate! That is all you have learned? I send you all the way up to western Scotland and all you come back with is that things can change quickly and we need to improve our instruments and models? And, if that doesn’t work, make a guess?”
I was shocked at the sudden disappearance of Sir Peter’s customary leisurely tolerance, but I was determined to stand my ground. I knew in my bones that what Ryman had told me was important—even if all it amounted to was, ‘Be very careful what you do with your data’.
I knew I had to stand up for myself. “Sir, this is important. I think it is what you wanted. These barriers can be paths along which pass significant fluxes of their own—sometimes with mass and momentum as large or larger than the adjacent flows which they separate.”
“So you say, but what useful truth am I meant to take away from it for forecasting for the invasion?” His voice, challenging when he had previously spoken, then continued in a different tone, half plaintive, half bitter. “Current discussions between the forecasters on Stagg’s team are extremely dynamical, if you’ll excuse the pun. The end result is the meteorological equivalent of the Tower of Babel.”
One of the clocks made a whirring noise, as if resetting a spring inside itself. As the sound ended, I suddenly became aware of an altering of positions. I realised Sir Peter was tacitly pleading with me to take away from him the avalanche of anxiety about the landings which was being piled up on him by overbearing military superiors and by weather forecasters mired in deep disagreement.
Certain of the abiding Tightness of Ryman’s conception, I felt able to speak with authority, as if I were not Sir Peter’s junior but his equal. “It’s more of an approach than discrete knowledge. In music, it would be something like a fugue.”
The director gave a very deep sigh. “Meadows, have you any idea what Admiral Vian, or General Montgomery, or Air Marshal Tedder, still less Eisenhower himself, would say to me if I presented a fugue as our modus operandi? All they want is reasonable practical assurance of fine weather for a period of three to five days. What I have discovered, and the reason I sent you up to Ryman, is that we don’t actually have any methodology for prediction beyond a day or two—apart from the American system of historical statistics, which our people don’t think a safe basis. But at least it’s a system. You’ve made some clever theoretical points in the mid-ground between science and philosophy, but I can’t see how any of it can be stiffened into practicality.”
“There is one way, sir.”
“What?”
“This. We massively increase our instrumentation within a thousand-mile radius of the invasion site, taking special care to look out for the dialogic charact
eristics of these barrier-corridors. An increase in the volume and flow of positional information is the only way of taking account of the increase in complexity implied by what Ryman says.”
Giving a cry of disillusion, Sir Peter flung himself backward into the depths of the armchair. “Hah! I have got weather ships dotted between Reykjavik and New York in predetermined positions in the Atlantic. I have got daily meteorological reconnaissance flights going out under that vulgar appellation met rec from airstrips all over Britain and the Empire. You can see them for yourself on that map up there.”
He pointed at a weather map on the wall, hardly visible behind the array of clocks. “Not to mention every RAF station across Britain, from Langham in Norfolk to St David’s in Wales, from Wick in Scotland to Chivenor in Devon, doing their THUMs. I’ve got data coming in from submarines in the Mozambique Channel and the Red Sea. I’ve got daily indications of weather from the resistance fighters in France, steamship captains in the Persian Gulf and Chindits in Assam. I’ve access to the full weather forecasts of the Red Army and bits and pieces from both Chiang Kai-shek and the communists in China. I have all this and yet you say I am data sparse?”
If my security clearance had been higher he might have added what has since become public knowledge—that he also had Enigma’s decrypts of German meteorological reports from U-boats and British weather spies in the depths of Poland and Belgium, sending up from clandestine aerials quick-burst radio transmissions which were picked up by our bombers as they passed overhead.
Nonetheless, I was still surprised by the freedom with which he bandied about what must have been classified information. All over the country posters were asking “Do You Know One of These?” and showing below cartoon characters such as Mr Know-All, Miss Leaky Mouth, Mr Glumpot, Mr Secrecy Hush Hush and Mr Pride in Prophecy—“He knows what the Germans are going to do and when they are going to do it. He knows where our ships are and what Bomber Command is going to do”—yet here was a senior official talking without a care, albeit to one who had signed the Official Secrets Act.