Damned Good Show (3 page)

Pug was a nickname. He got it when he was five, on his first day at school, in the playground. He started a fight with a larger boy. Briefly he had the better of it, using fists, knees and feet with a rare ferocity, but he soon exhausted himself. His lip was split and his nose was streaming when a master arrived, grabbed each boy by the ear and dragged them apart. “Enough!” he roared. Duff kicked him on the shins. The master released the bigger boy, who was in tears, and cuffed Duff so hard that his nose sent a splatter of red across the asphalt. Duff tried to punch him in the stomach but his reach was a good twelve inches short. “What a pugnacious child,” the master said. After that, Duff was called Pug.

He was always short for his age, and always getting into fights; perhaps he tried to compensate for size by anger. Usually this kind of behavior gets worn smooth by the friction of the family. Pug Duff had no immediate family. His father had died ingloriously one night in 1917, sitting in a cinema in Amiens when it got hit by a bomb from a German airplane whose pilot was lost, and tired, and decided to jettison his bomb and go home. Captain Duff was in the cavalry, so his death made no difference to the war. It made a huge difference to his widow. She lost her will to live, and the influenza epidemic did the rest. By 1919, young Duff was an orphan at the age of five.

Aunts, older cousins, grandparents all took their turns at raising him, shunting him around England like a small, scruffy, wrongly addressed parcel with too much unpaid postage. He was a
foul-tempered little brat. Why not? Wherever he went, nobody wanted him and nobody loved him.

But there was enough money in his mother's will to send him to boarding school, and that was a great relief to everyone.

He went to Wellington. It was a muscular school where they prepared boys for the Army, and Pug found plenty of fights without looking for them. Being small, he usually lost. After a year or so he calmed down. Sheer physical strength, he realized, proved nothing. The way to dominate was through success. He worked hard and put his rivals in their stupid place. He didn't have a great brain but he got the most out of it. His short body expanded through ruthless exercise; when he was fifteen his chest was so wide that his shirt-sleeves reached his knuckles. Then, abruptly, the money came to an end and with it, school.

He was standing on a railway platform, waiting for a slow train to a dull job with a reluctant uncle, when he saw a poster advertising the RAF School of Apprentices at Halton.

Duff found a home in the Royal Air Force. For the first time he knew the solid reassurance of total security. He stopped worrying about his career, clothes, food, health, pay, religion, sport. Halton organized all that. In return it demanded that Duff learn what made airplanes fly.

“Forget your air commodores,” a sergeant instructor said to Duff's class of apprentices. “Forget your group captains, your wing commanders, your squadron leaders.” No light shone in their eyes. They had been in uniform only a few weeks, and anyone with rings around his sleeves was god. “Forget your drill corporals,” he said. That was different. Drill bloody corporals had been marching them up and down and across and around the parade bloody ground, cursing them, hating them, drilling all the individuality out of them. Forget drill corporals? The apprentices cheered up. “And for why?” the instructor said. “Because none of them can do what this little beauty can do.” He was standing beside an aero engine, a Rolls-Royce Kestrel, cut away to expose its workings. “Nobody, from drill corporal to air marshal, can get an airplane off the ground. Only an engine can make it fly.” He turned the propeller and they watched the slow march of the pistons. “Suck-squash-bang-shove. Make that happen a thousand times a minute, and your airplane will climb to ten thousand feet while the drill corporal's still polishing his buttons.
What is the purpose of the Royal Air Force?”
he shouted.
“Why does it exist?”

“To fly airplanes,” they chanted.

“Never forget it! If you're not helping get an airplane off the ground, you're not earning your pay. The Royal Air Force exists to fly. No other reason.”

Pug Duff did well at Halton. Later, he applied for pilot training and did well at that, too. Eventually he got his commission. The public-school background helped: the RAF liked a chap who knew how to speak and which knife and fork to use. He had strong arms and legs. The RAF made him a bomber pilot. By the time he reached 409 at RAF Kindrick he was already a flying officer: one rank ahead of Silk and Langham.

They found Pug Duff eating peanuts in the Mess anteroom.

“There must be some mistake. You can't have been posted here, Pug,” Silk said. “409 is a top squadron.”

“Clerical error, I expect,” Langham said.

“Silko owes me ten bob from two years ago,” Duff said, “and I got tired of waiting. Also, Air Ministry wants to improve the standard of flying on this squadron.”

“Oh dear.” Langham signaled for drinks. “Poor Pug has lost his mind. How sad.”

“Look under the bed,” Silk suggested. “Offer a reward.”

“Talking of losing things,” Duff said. “I hear you two were out for hours and hours last night but you still couldn't find Germany. Or was it Europe?”

“No, it was Germany we couldn't find,” Langham said. “We probably shan't find Norway tonight, and tomorrow night we're not going to find Luxembourg. Or is it Spain?”

“I think it's Ireland,” Silk said. “But it doesn't matter.”

“Good God,” Duff said. “You're a pretty useless lot, aren't you?”

“We share the work. I'm pretty, and Tony's useless.”

That ended the usual courtesies. They moved on to the eternal topics of pilots: the peculiarities of aircraft and aerodromes, the styles of leadership of COs and station commanders, the ups and downs of men they had trained with. Eventually Duff went away to freshen up before lunch.

“Pug looks awfully keen, doesn't he?” Langham said.

“To tell the truth, I could scarcely see him,” Silk said. “I think he must have shrunk in the wash.”

This was the second day of the war. The storms had cleared the North Sea and moved on to soak Scandinavia. The same Blenheim crew that had spotted a battlefleet near Wilhelmshaven was sent on another reconnaissance and, amazingly, found yet more German warships, this time at anchor in Wilhelmshaven harbor. Once again, Bomber Command went into action. 409 Squadron was not required to take part.

The attack was made in daylight. It was briefly reported by the BBC.

A couple of days later, Pixie Hunt heard all about it from a visiting wing commander called Faraday, an old pal, now on the staff at Group HQ.

“Command sent fourteen Wellingtons and fifteen Blenheims,” Faraday said. “Quite a strong force.”

“Twenty-nine bombers should make a mess of something,” Hunt said.

“The Wellington packs a punch. The Blenheim's too lightweight for this sort of job. Anyway, five Blenheims cocked up their navigation and never found the target. Low cloud.”

“Still leaves ten Blenheims.”

“True. Those ten actually found a couple of battleships and a cruiser. Cloud was so low they had to attack from five hundred feet. No good. Bombs bounced off the decks like ping-pong balls. Meanwhile, heavy flak.
Very
heavy flak. Flak knocked down five Blenheims.”

“Five out of ten,” Hunt said. “I see. And the Wellingtons?”

“Most never saw a damn thing and came home. But six Wimpys plowed on, found a battleship at Brunsbüttel, bombed it, missed it. Two kites didn't return.”

“So we sent twenty-nine and lost… seven?”

“That's one way of looking at it. Another way is to calculate our losses as a proportion of aircraft that actually attacked.” Faraday got a pencil and did the arithmetic. “Seven out of sixteen is 43.7 percent.”

Hunt could only stare.

“Don't expect to read about it in the papers,” Faraday said. “And don't be surprised if operations are a bit quiet for a while. If my guess is right, Command is having a good think.”

“Yes. Very likely.”

Faraday got up to leave. “Oh! I nearly forgot,” he said. “The Danish government has complained that a Wellington bombed the town of Esbjerg. Killed two civilians. Esbjerg is one hundred and ten miles north of Brunsbüttel.”

“Poor show.”

“Quite. And the next bomber to stray over Denmark can expect several large Danish shells up its ass.”

Faraday was right: Bomber Command had a good think about North Sea operations and losses, and whether one was worth the other.

Meanwhile 409 Squadron did nothing but train, and fly the occasional shipping-search patrol. The only ships they met were British destroyers, which fired at them. Apart from that, the crews saw no action. They soon grew bored. When war was declared everyone had been tense, eager, nervous, expecting massive air attacks and quick retaliation. All this hanging around made a mockery of courage, skill, the aggressive spirit. In mid-September, when Poland was obviously finished, Hitler agreed to the Roosevelt Rules. So now nobody was going to bomb anybody's mainland. The war was a flop.

Yet 409 was kept on stand-by. Nobody was fighting, everybody was getting cheesed off. Something had to be done. The Wingco made Pilot Officer Silk the squadron entertainments officer.

“I don't care what you do as long as you brighten them up,” Hunt said. “Give 'em something to look forward to, something to talk about except bloody Poland.”

“Yes, sir. Is money available?”

“Within reason.” The Wingco hunched his shoulders. “What's that stuffed up your left sleeve?”

“My handkerchief, sir.”

“Silk, isn't it? Some sort of clever-clever trademark, I suppose. I don't like it. Makes you look like a ponce. I don't suppose I can stop you poncing around the station, but at least you'll do it properly
dressed, without bits of haberdashery hanging off you. And listen, Silk.”

“Sir?”

“Entertainment does not include pornographic cabaret acts with naked dancers and reptiles. Understand?”

“That was Langham, sir, not me.”

“Don't argue. Get cracking. If I see you standing still I'll know you haven't got enough to do.”

Silk went in search of Tony Langham and found him soaking in a bath so hot the steam rushed out of the door. Langham had just landed after a four-hour patrol over the North Sea. “Fucking ice all over the kite,” he said. “Fucking squall line. Bounced about like a rubber fucking ball. Took her up to fifteen thousand. Fucking heating system failed. Instrument panel froze fucking solid. Icicles in the fucking oxygen tubes. Turned for home, got shot at by the Royal fucking Navy, so naturally my observer gave me the wrong fucking course, we made landfall at Berwick-upon-fucking-Tweed, and now I think I've got frostbite in the goolies.”

“Just another day in the office, then.” Silk sat on the bath stool. “What color are they?”

Langham submerged his head and blew bubbles, and came up. “One's green and one's blue,” he said.

“That's pleurisy. My aunt died of it. Look here, the Wingco's made me Entertainments Officer. What shall we do?”

“Hold a dance, of course. Best way to keep the troops happy is let them get their hands on female flesh.”

“We haven't got a band.”

“You're bloody useless, Silko. Get me a phone, I'll get you a dozen dance bands, all assorted colors. Where's your initiative?”

“My wicked stepfather cut it off when I was seven.”

“Chuck me a towel.” Langham stood up. “The trouble with your family was the wrong father got shot.”

Silk nodded. He admired Langham for his candor, his readiness to think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable. Very UnEnglish. Very refreshing. Langham was right, of course; Silk had often wished his stepfather dead and his real father alive instead. Completely irrational, he knew that. Especially when the stepfather was rich.

“If he hadn't paid my fees at Clifton,” Silk pointed out, “you and I would never have met.”

“Yeah. The old bastard's done his good deed, it's time he went.”

“A bit hard on my mother.”

“No, it's not. What do you care, anyway?”

Right again.

Silk's real father had been shot dead in an ambush in County Cork. This was back in the Twenties, after the Irish Free State was set up. There was a civil war of a peculiarly Irish kind, tangled and merciless. What in God's name was ex-Captain Silk, previously of the 2
^nd
Royal Dublin Fusiliers, doing down there? Making money, somehow. That was all his wife knew. She was in England with a four-year-old boy and, after the funeral, precious little money.

She remarried fast. The market was alive with young war widows; it was no time to be seeking Prince Charming. She accepted a widower, Beresford Cronin QC, fifty-one, specializing in patent law. Later he became a judge. At the age of ten, young Silk got taken to watch his stepfather in court. Counsel spoke at a slow dictation speed and Judge Cronin wrote down every word, using an ordinary steel-nib pen, which scratched and scratched. Silk thought the law was worse than school.

On the other hand, school was better than the gray, passionless respectability of home, especially when the boy was old enough to be sent away to Clifton College.

At first the place scared him. It was too big, too hearty, and he didn't understand the unwritten rules, so he hung back, took no risks, and was ignored. He wasn't unpopular; just ignored. Tony Langham was in the same year, and Silk envied him because he was good-looking, athletic, free-spending and popular; but Silk was too nervous to speak to him. Most of the time, Silk felt both ravenous for friendship and incapable of it. One day, halfway through his second year, he was sprawled on the grass in a gloomy corner of the school grounds, chewing a thumb, brooding, his eyes damp with tears, when Tony Langham walked up and said: “Can you give me five shillings?”