Damned Good Show (16 page)

“Chard-Cox,” he said. “That's a joke, surely.”

“Guy can't help his name. He doesn't mind if people laugh, as long as he helps make babies.”

“You didn't tell me you were going to London.”

“I didn't expect to stay overnight, only I met some chums and anyway what does it matter? The important thing is to get me preggers. I know you're trying, but…”

“This is your bloody mother's idea, isn't it?”

“My bloody mother's in New bloody York. Now
listen
, darling. Guy's had a look at me, nothing wrong he says, might be a good idea to cut down on the gin, but when I told him you were a Spitfire pilot he said stress is a funny thing, like shell-shock in the last war, once a man gets anxious then his octane rating goes down and he stops firing on all cylinders. That's how Guy explained it.”

By now he was pale with anger. He went outside and got logs and came in and hurled them on the fire. Sparks exploded.

“I am
not
under stress,” he said, too quietly.

She poured a very small gin with a huge amount of tonic, and looked at him over the rim. “You
sound
under stress,” she said.

“I'm monumentally pissed off with your Harley Street quack. There's a difference. And I'm
not
a Spitfire pilot.”

“Darling, I couldn't tell Guy I was married to a man who flies Hampden bombers. He'd think you were a bus-driver.”

It was a joke. He thumped the table so hard that the gin bottle bounced. “I need that drink more than you do,” he growled, and tried to grab it, which led to a friendly fight with inevitable physical contact, so they forgot the drink and went to bed. Later he ate six oysters.
Couldn't do any harm
, he thought.

Silk was a frequent visitor, and that helped. He sometimes brought along one of the Waafs from the station, but rarely the same girl twice. They had all been lectured by the senior Waaf Officer on the folly of falling in love with aircrew. “You will be pregnant and he will be dead,” she said. They were not stupid. They noted the crashes, and they kept their distance. Zoë liked Silk because he made her laugh and if he offended anyone, hard cheese. One night, at supper, he boasted that he had designed Waaf's knickers for the Air Ministry. “We called it Operation Passion-killer,” he said. “My design won because it had triple-strength elastic and extra gussets. You don't know what gussets are,” he told Langham, “but we tested my knickers on one hundred randy Canadian aircrew and they couldn't make a hole in them even when they worked in shifts.”

“Canadians in shifts,” Zoë said. “Pure cotton, I hope. Perhaps a little
appliqué
around the neckline. One bare shoulder. No jewelry, of course.”

“Gusset …” Langham had a dictionary. “Interesting. It comes between ‘gush' and ‘gusto.'”

“Don't we all?” she said.

Silk had brought a Waaf sergeant, very pretty, very tough. “Men are just jealous,” she told Zoë. “Half the squadron wear silk stockings when they fly.”

“What do the other half wear?”

“A look of grim determination,” Langham said. He clenched his teeth and thrust his jaw.

“That looks like constipation, darling.”

“Quite impossible,” Silk said. “At Clifton, constipaggers was a worse crime than buggery. We got dosed with syrup of figs quite ruthlessly.”

“I grew to quite like the taste,” Langham said.

“You just split an infinitive, darling.”

“Did I? The stuff's still working, then.”

When their guests had gone, Zoë said: “Silk's awfully funny, isn't he? And sexy, too. I find bad taste very provocative, don't you? I wish you were less respectable, my love. Why can't you talk dirty and galvanize me into dancing naked in the snow?”

“Do my best.” He frowned and thought hard. “All right. Here goes. Um … Nipples. Wet bathing-suits. Contraceptive devices.” She shook
her head. “More nipples. Blue-assed baboons.” Still no success. “Reinforced gussets?” he suggested. “Rumpty-tumpty?”

“You're hopeless.”

“Personally, I find the phrase ‘rumpty-tumpty' very stimulating,” he said. “Also hanky-panky and tutti-frutti.” He wasn't going to galvanize his wife. She galvanized herself without help, twice nightly.

The snow stopped in January, thawed, and fell again more heavily than ever. By mid-February it had vanished for good. The Wingco was eager to get 409 back in action, and Tom Stuart wanted to make it clear to everyone that married men got no special treatment. For days, Langham was too busy to go home. Zoë hated being left alone in boring Lincolnshire and when he turned up she nagged him to get a posting nearer London. “No can do, old girl,” he said. “Haven't you heard? There's a Phoney War on.”

“That's not funny. I'm going to cancel the oysters. You're never here.”

However, the war was becoming slightly less phony. Experts at Bomber Command had analyzed the heavy losses suffered in those attempts to attack enemy shipping near Wilhelmshaven, long ago in September, and they had decided that flak did all the damage. Obviously the aircraft went in too low. So, one week before Christmas 1939, on a fine, cloudless day, twenty-two Wellington bombers flew to Wilhelmshaven. They kept close formation, still supposedly the best defense against fighters. They attacked at thirteen thousand feet, supposedly too high for German flak to reach. Both beliefs were wrong. Flak split the formations, and Messerschmitt fighters ripped into their flanks. Twelve Wellingtons were shot down, most of them in the flames of their own petrol. Three limped home and made crash-landings. Of twenty-two bombers, only seven landed safely.

A loss of 68 percent: that was the bad news. The good news, for 409 Squadron, was that daylight ops by Hampdens near the enemy coast were now definitely out; and self-sealing fuel tanks could be expected soon. Meanwhile, there were raids by night to drop leaflets.
These ops were codenamed Nickels. For the first time, Hampden crews flew over Germany, sometimes as far as Hanover, Osnabrück, Cologne, even the industrial thickets of the Ruhr. Everyone in 409 flew Nickels. The leaflets were a farce, they all knew that, but the trips were real enough: four hundred miles or more over a total blackout to a dot on the map, dump the bumf, turn round and fly back to the dot you left seven or eight hours ago: no picnic. Especially when people you couldn't see were trying hard to kill you. It wasn't like a cross-country navigation test around England, where every aerodrome had a beacon flashing its code letter, and you could ask for a fix if you got lost, and land at a friendly field if you got hopelessly lost. Silk's navigator was a new boy called Trevor Nimble, not yet twenty, a mathematician who had gone up to Oxford and quit after a year in order to join the RAF. He'd done a dozen cross-countries by night and never got even slightly lost. He could take star shots from the astrodome faster than any man Silk knew. The crew liked him because he played jazz on the violin and because his father was Sir Stamford Nimble, governor of Fiji. Trevor brought a touch of class to their kite, S-Sugar.

Their first Nickel was to Bremen.

This was an easy introduction to enemy territory. The River Weser flowed through Bremen, turned right and broadened into a long estuary. Find the estuary and you had a signpost to the city.

Silk took off at one a.m. and began the grind across the North Sea.

He climbed to eight thousand feet and ice began to form on the wings. Soon it was on the propellers and they were flinging splinters of ice at the cockpit. He went lower, found warm air at two thousand and stayed there. The hours passed peacefully. A half-moon shone through scattered cloud and showed a sea that looked like wrinkled black leather, as usual. His navigator gave him course corrections from time to time, nothing major, just the odd degree, until eventually Nimble navigated S-Sugar to within a mile of Heligoland, a rocky island fifty miles from the German coast, stuffed with flak batteries and heavy machine guns.

The barrage was so violent, like being caught in a firework display, that Silk took a couple of seconds to react. Then he banked steeply, dived to sea level and opened the throttles wide. Red and yellow tracer chased him.

Well, at least Nimble now knew exactly where they were. He gave
Silk the wrong course for Bremen. They never found the Weser, never found Bremen. Silk flew in circles, got hounded by searchlights and harassed by flak, and finally he dropped the leaflets on Rotenburg or Lüneburg or maybe Cloppenburg, who could tell, and turned for home. Nimble sent him across the north of Holland. The Dutch shelled S-Sugar all the way to the coast. It was dawn, and Nimble identified another definite landmark. The course he gave Silk was so wrong that Silk ignored it and steered himself back to England, to Lincoln, to RAF Kindrick.

Later, Tom Stuart interviewed Nimble, and sent him to the Wingco.

“If it's any consolation,” Hunt said, “you're not the first, nor the last.”

“I was all right until Heligoland, until the flak, sir.” Nimble was still too bewildered to be miserable. “After the flak I couldn't make my brain work. Each time I asked it to do something, it backed away. It was like …” The comparison was foolish, but it was all he had. “Like trying to see something through frosted glass.”

Hunt looked at the navigator's maps and records and calculations: shambles. “You should have told your skipper.”

Nimble just shook his head, totally defeated. “Nothing worked, sir.”

His bags were packed and he was off the camp by noon. Silk said goodbye for the crew. “Not your fault,” he told him. “Just one of those things.” Nimble nodded. It was all he could do to nod. Not yet twenty, and an utter failure. Thank God father was in Fiji.

“As it's your birthday,” Tom Stuart said, “we've decided to let you bomb Germany.”

“It's not my birthday, sir,” Langham said.

“Oh dear. Air Chief-Marshal Ludlow-Hewitt, C-in-C Bomber Command, has blundered again. Whatever shall we do?”

“My mistake, sir. Of course it's my birthday.”

“Hallelujah. The Hun has had the gall to bomb British soil. You may have read about it while you were looking for Jane in the
Daily Mirror.
Attacked our ships in Scapa Flow, missed, blew holes in the Orkney Islands. Also, unfortunately, in one civilian, now dead. The
Roosevelt Rules are suspended while we visit the island of Sylt, which is the closest German equivalent to Scapa, and destroy the seaplane base at Hornum, which has no civilians. This will teach the Hun a lesson while showing the Yanks what decent chaps we are. Full bombload—incendiaries and HE—and before you ask, the answer is no, there will be no Long Delay pistols on the HE.”

Langham nodded gratefully. “I know he's gone to wherever it is that armorers go,” he said, “but I miss the bastard. Silly, isn't it?”

Stuart led a mixed formation from “A” and “B” Flights. They couldn't fail to find Sylt: it was the last German island before Denmark. No blackout in Denmark. In any case, thirty Whitley bombers had been given first crack at Hornum, followed by twenty Hampdens, so the place was very excited. A score of searchlights carved up the night, flak erupted all around, colored tracer spiraled and bent, incendiaries twinkled on the ground, HE went off like little flashbulbs. Yet, apart from an occasional dull
bok-bok
, the only sound was the engines. Interesting.

The Air Ministry told the BBC and the BBC told the world that, in the biggest operation of the war so far, Bomber Command had knocked seven bells out of Hornum. The following day, Germany's Propaganda Ministry flew a bunch of American journalists to Sylt, and they reported that Hornum was largely intact.
Germany Calling
, the English-language radio channel, made the most of this.

“Showed the Yanks the wrong island!” Rafferty scoffed. “That neck of the woods is stiff with Hun islands. Damn-fool reporters got bamboozled.”

“We dropped twenty tons of high explosive and twelve hundred incendiaries,” Bins said. “They can't
all
have missed.”

“Pity it wasn't Berlin,” the Wingco said, “I'd like to see Mr. Goebbels get out of
that.”

“At least he knows the eagle has teeth,” Rafferty growled.

The MO opened his mouth and then closed it. The group captain noticed. “Yes?” he said.

“Oh … I just wanted to mention the gunner in P-Peter, sir. LAC Davis. He took some shrapnel in the face. Lost an eye, I'm afraid.”

For a long moment Rafferty didn't move, didn't blink, stared at the MO but pictured instead the gunner searching the night sky over Sylt until the last image one eye would ever see was the shellburst that destroyed it. How horrible. What courage. “Take me to him,” he said.

Immediately after the Hornum raid, 409 was again placed on standby, with all aircraft fueled and bombed up. This kind of flap was becoming very common. “It's spring,” Bins explained to Jonty Brown. “Lambs gambol and warriors gamble. That's a play on words. You wouldn't understand, being a Rhodesian.”

“It's not spring in Rhodesia. It's autumn. You wouldn't understand, being a penguin.” A penguin was anyone with wings who didn't fly.

The flap lasted twenty-four hours. It was afternoon when 409 was stood down and Langham drove home. Zoë had read what the newspapers said about Hornum. “Did you go on this beano?” she asked. “How thrilling. What was it really like?”

“Hard to say, dear. Couldn't see much, because the searchlights were rather blinding. Then we dropped some parachute flares and they made it even worse. Dazzling.”

“The
Daily Express
says you delivered a knockout blow.”

“Do they? Awfully sweet of them.” He yawned. “Sorry. I've been up all night. Can we go to bed, d'you think?”