Damned Good Show (20 page)

“Good type, Tubby.”

He chopped up a tin of corned beef with a handful of broken biscuits. Handyman wolfed it down and fell asleep. Now there was no reason to stay, so reluctantly he drove back to camp. His front wheels carved up the puddles and flung them aside.

Silk was, at first, astonished. “Three hours?” he said. Then he was skeptical. “I don't see how that's physically possible,” he said. Finally
he offered his congratulations. “It makes a nice change to hear some good news,”

“And she's bought a puppy to play with when I'm not there. Bliss reigns.”

“Damn good show.” Silk nodded and smiled, and kept nodding. “Yes. I suppose this means your … um … offer, proposition, solution, you know what I mean, is now …”

“Stone dead.”

“I would never have gone ahead with it, anyway.”

“Yes, you would, you liar.”

“Well, only for your sake.”

“Have you no shame?”

“Three hours,” Silk said. “It makes you think, doesn't it?”

That afternoon the rain cleared and Silk went up for a night-flying test. His Hampden flew perfectly until he came to enter the landing circuit and the undercarriage refused to go down. The hydraulic system had a fault, obviously. The back-up system was a bottle of compressed air. It didn't work either. The pilot could pump the undercarriage down, by hand. The pump handle was locked solid.

Silk flew out to sea, burned up some fuel, came back and used up most of the rest. The control tower cleared the circuit. He got the crew into their crash positions. He made his final approach as slowly as possible. Everything felt normal; he found it hard to believe there were no wheels waiting to take the bomber's weight. Then he was skimming the ground, and the belly plowed into the turf, he heard the scream of tearing metal, the propellers sent up a green blizzard that turned brown, and Silk's head got flung violently, savagely, from side to side.

Everybody escaped. The next thing Silk knew, he was in the MO's office, talking to both of them. If he looked at only one MO, that man drifted away and there were two again. It went on for hours. The MO thought he might have concussion. Double vision could be a symptom. Silk got packed off to a hospital in Cambridge. They specialized in this stuff.

His eyesight cleared up after two days but they kept him for a week. When he got back to Kindrick he reported to his Flight Commander, who was not Tom Stuart but a new squadron leader called Frank Fender. “I've just taken over,” he said. “Stuart caught a packet coming back from Hanover, night fighter probably, badly
wounded. I believe he made a forced landing on a fighter field in Kent. We shan't see him in a hurry.”

“Good God,” Silk said. “Fancy old Tom … Anybody else?”

Fender opened a file. “As I said, I've just arrived. Let's see … Tony Langham bought it over Osnabruck. Flak. That's all.”

Silk went to the adjutant's office. His legs felt like stilts. “Why didn't anyone tell me, Uncle?” he said.

“Don't be bloody silly, Silko,” the adjutant said, gently. He reached for the whisky bottle he kept in a desk drawer for occasions like this. There was always one chap that you thought would never get the chop. It had been the same in the First War. One chap would always come back, and when he didn't, it was worse than dying. Uncle had seen it a dozen times. Silk looked stunned, like a boy who had walked slap-bang into a telegraph pole.

409 Squadron's death toll was typical. During the summer and autumn of 1940, more aircrew were killed in Bomber Command than in Fighter Command. But it was Fighter Command that gripped the attention of the British people, because summer 1940 was the time of the Battle of Britain. When it came to newspaper space, Hampdens bombing Germany could not compete with Spitfires and Hurricanes clashing with the Luftwaffe over England.

At the height of the Battle of Britain, a bus came down from London to RAF Bodkin Hazel, a fighter aerodrome in Kent.

The bus brought Air Vice-Marshal Thurgood and an aide, Squadron Leader Perry, plus foreign correspondents from the United States, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Spain. They were there because, increasingly, foreign newspapers and magazines were skeptical of British claims that Fighter Command was defeating the Luftwaffe. Some said that Air Ministry press releases were pure propaganda, written to boost morale, not to be taken seriously, especially when it came to claims of enemy aircraft destroyed.

Well, Bodkin Hazel was at the sharpest end of the fighting, and Thurgood introduced the journalists to squadron and flight commanders. Fortunately, there was a scramble to intercept raiders and the visitors saw a mass takeoff. Not all the fighters returned. “They probably landed elsewhere to refuel,” Thurgood said. “Happens all the time.”

When he had debriefed the pilots, the Intelligence Officer joined the journalists. Flight Lieutenant Skelton was in his thirties, tall, with
a beaky nose supporting horn-rim glasses. His forehead was domed, his cheekbones were wide, his jaws narrow. His nickname was Skull. “Any luck?” someone asked.

“One Heinkel 111 definitely destroyed,” Skelton said. “One possible.”

The journalists made notes, but they were disappointed. Twelve Hurricanes took off. All they got was one lousy Heinkel.

“To reach the bombers, our chaps often have to smash through the German fighter screen,” Thurgood pointed out.

“Any losses?” an American asked.

“One Hurricane,” Skelton said. “The pilot baled out.”

“Even Steven, then.”

For a final question-and-answer session, the correspondents assembled in a lecture room. Thurgood brought Skelton along for good measure.

Everyone had been impressed by what they saw; nevertheless, their questions were still very pointed. What Was the proof that the Air Ministry's scores were right? If so many German planes had been shot down, where were all the wrecks? According to the RAF, most of the Luftwaffe had been destroyed, but the raids seemed to be getting bigger, didn't they? Thurgood did his best but the longer it went on the more his answers sounded like excuses, which annoyed him. He resented having to deny allegations of false accounting at a time when the very survival of his country was under threat from a foreign dictator who had made a trade of dishonesty.

The meeting dragged to an end. He knew he had not convinced them. The room emptied until only a couple of the correspondents remained, asking the same old questions in different words. Thurgood forced a smile. “If you think so little of our claims,” he said, “why not go to Berlin and check theirs? The Lufwaffe's scores are absolutely preposterous!”

One of the journalists looked at Skelton. “D'you have an opinion?” he asked.

“Undoubtedly the Luftwaffe's claims are inflated,” Skelton said. “It's a natural phenomenon. High-speed combat invariably has that effect. Airmen are not ideal witnesses. Risk creates optimism, and optimism creates—”

“Wait outside, Skelton,” Thurgood said stonily. When the journalists had gone, he recalled Skelton and blasted him for his interfering stupidity. The Intelligence Officer was unmoved. “I'm sorry if I
embarrassed you, sir,” he said. “But what the Luftwaffe claims is beside the point. Proving them wrong doesn't prove us right. If we believe our own lies we merely deceive ourselves and, by so doing, we aid the enemy. Surely that's self-evident.”

“Don't preach to me, flight lieutenant.”

Skull twitched his nose and made his spectacles bounce. “Preaching assumes moral alternatives, sir. War allows us no such choice. We cannot award a fighter pilot his kill just because we feel he
deserves
it. The truth—”

“Get out.” Thurgood sounded sick, and looked even sicker. Skelton hesitated. The air vice-marshal grabbed the nearest weapon and hurled it at Skelton's head. It was a half-pint bottle of ink, government issue, short and chunky, and it should have cracked his skull. It missed by an inch and smashed a framed portrait of the King in RAF uniform. Ink drenched the wall. Squadron Leader Perry seized Skelton and hustled him out and kicked the door shut behind them. “You maniac,” he said. “Bugger off and hide! Understand?
Hide.”

Skelton could not move. “Luther,” he said. “Martin Luther chucked his ink-horn at the devil and missed.” He saw the look in Perry's eyes and he turned and trotted off.

Next day the air vice-marshal picked up the telephone and had an amiable chat with an old friend in Air Ministry.

“Chap doesn't strike me as Fighter Command material,” Thurgood said. “Too long-winded. Beats about the bush. Full of waffle.”

Skelton was posted as an instructor in Intelligence to a Flying Training School in Aberdeenshire. It was called RAF Feck. “What's it near?” the adjutant asked him.

“Absolutely nothing.” Skelton was examining a map. “Unless you count a village called Nether Feck.”

“Come on, Skull. It's got to be near somewhere exciting.”

“Germany seems closest.”

The adjutant came over and looked. “Mmm,” he said. “Slightly off the beaten track.”

“It's Siberia, Uncle. I'll die up there.”

“Nonsense. The Scots are great fun. You wait and see.”

Skull went off to pack. The adjutant telephoned his opposite number at Feck, supposedly to confirm Skull's posting but actually to find out something about the place. “What can I tell you?” the
other man said. “Nine months of fog and three months of snow. That's Feck.”

“Doesn't sound very thrilling.”

“We make our own entertainment. Ping-pong and funerals, mainly.”

RAF Feck trained pilots to fly twin-engined aircraft. Mostly these were Blenheims.

In the fighting over France, Blenheims got shot down by the score. Clearly, something better was needed. Large numbers of Blenheims were made available for training units. This was just as well. At Feck, a day without a crash was cause for mild surprise.

At first, the scale of these losses shocked Skull. After a while he got to know a senior instructor, and he asked what caused them.

“Usually we never know,” the man said. He looked tired. “I have a few theories. For instance, power is intoxicating. We give these boys an airplane. Last year they were riding a bike. Now they've got fifteen hundred horsepower at their fingertips. They go solo, they can't resist flying too fast or too low, or banking too hard. Power seduces them, you see. But one tiny mistake gets magnified by all that power. It only takes a second to lose control.”

“Can't you weed out the dare-devil types?” Skull asked.

“All pilots have a streak of dare-devil. Otherwise they wouldn't be pilots, would they?”

Skull remembered the sober and experienced pilots he had known who had chosen to fly underneath bridges for no sane reason that anyone could identify. Some had died. “It seems such an idiotic waste,” he said.

“Well, there are other reasons for crashes,” the senior instructor said. “Some pilots lack faith. They don't trust their instruments. They fly by the seat of their pants, and the physical sensations they feel, or think they feel, tell them they're climbing when the instruments show they're diving. Or they're convinced the airplane is turning when the instruments show otherwise. And so they kill themselves.”

Skull was beginning to be sorry he'd asked.

“Flying is a very unnatural affair,” the senior instructor said.

Skull could not blot out the dull thump of a distant explosion, the klaxon summoning the crash crew, the hammering bell of the blood
wagon; but he did his best to ignore them. They weren't his business. His business was in the lecture room, explaining the why and how of Intelligence. The trainees were not especially interested. They were eager to fly, to qualify, to get to an operational squadron before something went horribly wrong and the war ended. So he lectured them as he used to do at Cambridge, speaking to a crowd of bored undergraduates who were as relieved as he was when they were free to go off and play games.

In his spare time he went bird-watching, as far as possible from Feck. He took his leave allowance one day at a time, drove to St. Andrews, browsed the university library and indulged in an orgy of reading. When spring came, he went into the hills and did some trout fishing. It was an odd life. The newspapers told him about the Blitz. Heavy bombing had reached as far north as Glasgow. But Skull's war was confined to RAF Feck, and there seemed no reason why Air Ministry should find a need for his services anywhere else; until one day a signal curtly ordered him to proceed to London. No explanation.

“They've bombed the Sheldrake,” Champion said. “The
bastards.”
For a moment the shock left him breathless.

“I'm surprised that you're surprised,” Skelton said. “The rest of London's been blitzed. Why not your club?”

Champion recovered and strode forward. ARP barriers shut off Pall Mall but his wing commander's rings got him through. Skelton, only a flight lieutenant, followed.

“Just look,” Champion said. “Some idiot Kraut pilot hasn't the wit to find the docks, so he drops his stupid bomb on the Sheldrake. I mean, just look. I'm on the wine committee.”

“Past tense, surely.”

“Bastards. Absolute bastards.”

A man approached them, an elderly man made to seem older by a covering of dust and a smear of dried blood on his temple. He had a soldierly bearing. “Mr. Champion, sir,” he said.

“Good Lord, it's Tizard. Are you hurt, man?” To Skelton he said: “One of the club servants … This is a sad sight, Tizard.”

“Indeed it is, sir. But we've saved the club silver. And two can play at this game, sir. I served in the last show, and take it from me, sir, the Huns haven't got our backbone. You know me, sir, I'm not a vindictive man, but I hope the RAF blows Berlin to smithereens.”