Damned Good Show (8 page)

“Well, sir, Gaunt makes such a fuss about ‘this sceptered isle' in order to contrast its past with its present, which he says is rotten and
he leaves no doubt who's to blame: the King! Richard has pawned the country. England, Gaunt says, ‘is now bound in with shame, with inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds: that England, that was wont to conquer others, hath made a shameful conquest of itself.'”

“Interesting,” Rafferty said.

“Smashing speech,” the pilot said. “But I wouldn't describe it as a ringing endorsement of the Crown.”

“You were an actor, I take it.”

“Briefly, sir.”

“And your name is …”

“Gilchrist, sir.”

“Are you as good a pilot as you were an actor?”

“I was a lousy actor, sir. That's why I became a pilot.” It made them laugh. Rafferty smiled, and dismissed them. He had recovered his poise, but he still blamed Gilchrist for spoiling his talk. He blamed Shakespeare, too. The Bard had let him down.

Rafferty told the Wingco that the new boys seemed a reasonable lot, although one, a chap called Gilchrist, was rather full of himself. A bit cocky.

“Good,” Hunt said. “I'm laying on some cross-country flights and bombing practice for ‘A' Flight. This Gilchrist can navigate for Flying Officer Duff. That should keep him quiet.”

When he was listed as Duff's observer, Gilchrist went to see his flight commander, an Australian squadron leader called Tom Stuart. In his youth Stuart had fallen off several horses, which was why his nose was bent. His hair was silver-gray because everyone in his family had silver-gray hair. He was twenty-six. Gilchrist thought he was forty.

“Sir, I think you should know,” Gilchrist said. “I'm not too hot at navigating.”

“It's bloody difficult. Last week my observer got lost in Lincoln. Said he'd meet me in the saloon bar of the Turk's Head. Never turned
up. Doesn't know left from right. Raise your right arm.” Gilchrist did. “You're halfway home already,” Stuart said. “I'm very impressed.”

“This may be a silly question, sir, but… am I here as a pilot?”

“Maybe. You're certainly not going to be allowed to drive a Hampden, not yet. It's too valuable, you might scratch the paint.”

Gilchrist tracked down Duff and warned him that he wasn't a very good navigator. “You can't be any worse than me,” Duff said. He was playing chess with Langham. “I can never remember how to plot a course. To calculate distance, d'you divide time by speed? Or do you multiply?” He moved his bishop straight up the board. Langham put it back. “Bishop moves
diagonally,”
he said. Duff made a face. “See what I mean?” he said to Gilchrist. “Nothing's easy.”

The cross-country exercise was a triangular flight: base to Carlisle, to the bombing range near Porthcawl in south Wales, back to base. Gilchrist worked out the routes with some help from a friendly observer called King.

“Avoid flying over towns,” King said. “Leeds, York, Sheffield, Liverpool, they're liable to have a balloon barrage up.” Gilchrist made a note. “Don't trust your compass,” King said. “One degree out, and you're fifty miles off track. Get pinpoints if you can.” Gilchrist wrote that down, and asked: “What are the best pinpoints to look for? Rivers? Bridges? Crossroads?” King shrugged. “All rivers look alike to me,” he said. “Towns are the best landmarks. You know where you are with a whacking great cathedral.” Gilchrist scratched his head with the blunt end of his pencil. “Big enough for a cathedral,” he said, “won't it be big enough for a balloon barrage?”

King nodded. “It's a bastard, isn't it?”

At least the weather was good: bright and dry, with high white cloud. Gilchrist was not fooled. He had flown clapped-out Hampdens at his OTU, he knew how cold a leaky cockpit could be, he was well wrapped up beneath his Sidcot suit and fleece-lined boots, and already he was sweating as he followed Duff. They went up the narrow ladder that was hooked to the walkway on the port wing. The walkway led to the cockpit canopy, and the sliding hood on the canopy roof would be open, waiting. Duff turned and flapped his gloves, waving Gilchrist away. “This entry is for the gentry,” he said. “Tradesmen use the back door.”

“Sorry.” Gilchrist had to turn and shuffle back down. The ground crew and a corporal wireless operator watched, boot-faced.
Sprog
pilot puts up a black.
That's what they'd be thinking.
Can't find his way to the nav position. Jesus wept.
The walkway was narrow. Suppose he slipped now and trod on the port flap. It was only canvas-covered, he'd put a boot through it, the kite would be unserviceable. What a colossal black … He reached the end and the ladder was waiting. They'd known he'd be coming back.

He ducked below the wing and clambered in through a door at the side of the under gunner's compartment. There was no powered turret; just a cell where the fuselage ended and the tail-boom began. Fancy being alone in here for umpteen hours, sealed in by a bulkhead. Not a cheery prospect. He squeezed sideways through a door in the bulkhead and walked uphill, slowly and clumsily. At its maximum, the Hampden's interior was three feet wide. So was Gilchrist, carrying a parachute pack and a navigator's bag; and obstructions narrowed his path: oxygen bottles, fire extinguishers, cables, hydraulic pipes, parachute stowages and awkward-shaped chunks of unidentified equipment.

He struggled over the main spar, a massive alloy girder that linked the wings to the fuselage. Now he was standing behind the pilot's seat. Directly above it was the sliding hood. If he had followed Duff through that space, he would have ended up sitting in Duff's lap, with nowhere to go except back out through the hood. What an idiot he'd been, worrying so much about navigating that he forgot he wasn't the pilot. Failed before he began.

A crawl-space under the pilot's seat led down to the nose cockpit. Gilchrist slid through it feet-first. The nose was roomy; he had a swivel-seat, a folding table, plenty of light. He took out his maps and studied the route again. Almost immediately he knew something was wrong. Panic nibbled at his guts. Once, on stage during a first night, he'd forgotten his lines. Now he felt the same rebellion in his stomach: not butterflies but bats, bloody great bloodsucking bats. The port engine fired and grew to a thunder that made the bomber shake. Gilchrist put on his helmet. Then he remembered. He plugged in the intercom.

“Ah,” Duff said. “So glad you could join us.”

“Sorry, skipper.”

“Sorry isn't the word. Pathetic is better.”

At takeoff the navigator's position was behind the pilot. Gilchrist went up the crawl-space on his hands and knees and sat on the main
spar. Takeoff was exhilarating. Duff built the engine revs higher than Gilchrist would have dared, got the Hampden bounding across the grass faster and into the air sooner than he thought possible. At a thousand feet Gilchrist slid back to the nose cockpit. Plugged in the intercom. A dull roar filled his ears.

“Navigator to pilot. Steer three one zero degrees.”

No answer.

He said it again. No answer. His repeater compass showed they were flying on zero eight zero degrees: almost due east, instead of northwest. “Navigator to pilot,” he said, and the Hampden dropped its left wing so steeply that he had to grab the table. Maps, pencils, papers, calculators were scattered. The left wing came up slowly. He relaxed his grip. At once the right wing dropped steeply and he fell out of his seat.

This went on for some minutes. Then the bomber stopped rolling and began pitching: diving and climbing, plunging and rearing. Gilchrist tasted the wretched memory of his last meal. The pitching ended. He was on the floor, collecting maps, when Duff asked: “Where are we, navigator?” Gilchrist looked out and saw nothing but sea. “Up the creek,” he said.

“The course we're on will take us to Norway, if that's any help.”

“Turn back,” Gilchrist said feebly. “Fly west.”

“Too vague, old son. I need an exact course.”

“If it's any help,” the wireless operator said, “we're twenty miles southeast of Spurn Head.”

Gilchrist found a map and made a wild guess. “New course two eight zero, repeat
two eight zero.
Please confirm.”

“No need to shout,” Duff said. “I heard you the first time.”

The Hampden turned and flew sedately for the next half-hour. Gilchrist recognized landmarks—the great gash of the Humber estuary, the four-square mass of York Minster—and he recalculated the route to Carlisle.

“I'm losing power in the starboard engine, navigator,” Duff said. “I'm not going to risk crossing the Pennines. Give me a course to Newcastle and then I'll fly up the Tyne Valley.”

Gilchrist did it. Ten minutes later Duff said the engine had recovered and he'd decided to risk the Pennines after all. Gilchrist scrapped his calculations and began all over again. He gave Duff the new course. Duff said it would take them over an army gunnery
range: not wise. Gilchrist worked out a large dog-leg to avoid this. Duff then became worried about a nearby Spitfire squadron, notoriously trigger-happy. Gilchrist worked out another big dog-leg to avoid
that.
His map was a mess.

They missed Carlisle by about forty miles. “That's Lake Windermere down there, skipper,” the wireless operator said. “I had a jigsaw puzzle of it when I was a kid. Know it anywhere.”

“Forget Carlisle, navigator,” Duff said. “Give me a course for Porthcawl.”

He climbed to twelve thousand feet, above the cloud. Now they were breathing oxygen. Gilchrist could see no landmarks. After two hours of dead reckoning he decided they were four miles north of Porthcawl. “Navigator to pilot,” he said. “ETA Porthcawl two minutes from now.”

Duff dived through the cloud. To Gilchrist the land was a vast map of a foreign country. “Any guesses?” Duff said. He kept diving. Gilchrist had lost all faith in himself. He saw water but it looked wrong so he stayed silent. Still Duff lost height.

“Cardiff,” the wireless operator said. “There's the Arms Park, where the Welsh play the rugby internationals. By the river.”

Gilchrist stared at his map, at the thirty-mile gap between Porthcawl and Cardiff. “I don't understand,” he said. “I double-checked everything. Twice.”

“Forget Porthcawl. Forget the bombing range. Have a cup of coffee and a nice piece of cake. I know the way home. Watch out for factory chimneys.”

Gilchrist drank coffee and looked at factory chimneys. Their smoke was streaming toward Lincolnshire, so the wind was from the southwest. But the meteorological officer had told him the predicted winds were southeast. He had made his course-corrections on the assumption that the airplane was being blown west, when all the time it was being blown east. So his corrections had pushed it even further east.

That night, in the Mess, he bought Duff a beer. “I made a pig's ear of that, didn't I?” he said.

“Things always go wrong. That's the first rule of flying.”

“Everything
went wrong. You made sure of that.”

“I get bored easily,” Duff said. “It's my fatal flaw.”

Word of Gilchrist's unhappy afternoon soon spread around the
squadron. Pug Duff's flight commander, Tom Stuart, sent for him. “That wasn't a very nice thing to do, Pug,” he said.

“I agree, sir. I'm not a very nice person.”

“You may well have destroyed Gilchrist's self-confidence.”

“Good. If he's so fragile, he deserves the chop.”

“No, I'm not going to recommend that.” Stuart cleaned his fingernails with a paperknife. “When you came here, I took you to be a fairly decent sort. Now you're developing a thoroughly vicious streak. Keep it up, Pug, and you'll be a flight lieutenant in no time.”

“Good show,” Duff said.

Flight Lieutenant McHarg got into his Bentley and had a severe shock. The driver's seat had been adjusted to suit someone with shorter legs.

Of course that could have been done by Sergeant Trimbull, or one of his mechanics. No it couldn't. McHarg had a deal with Trimbull. From time to time the sergeant was allowed to fire a machine gun in the butts, which were in a distant corner of the airfield. In return he kept the Bentley clean and polished, its oil, radiator and battery topped up, its tires properly inflated. None of that involved moving the driver's seat.

McHarg restored it to its correct position and began looking for other irregularities. He found bits of gravel trapped in the tire treads, a couple of dead bugs on the headlamps. There was some unfamiliar mud on the underside of the rear springs. Now he was profoundly disturbed. He felt attacked, invaded, almost raped. Reaction set in at once. “Calm down, calm down,” he said aloud. Maybe, while he had the measles, some idiot mechanic had driven the Bentley around the aerodrome, maybe the car itself had not suffered. But he had to be sure. His hand trembled slightly as he turned the key in the ignition.

He drove out by the Main Gate and nursed the old girl up to fifty, went back down through the gears to walking pace, then accelerated
again, keeping a check on the revs and the juice and the temperature. All went well. He relaxed, cruised around the lanes, came back to the base, reversed his lovely lady into her garage, gave the throttle a final burst as a sort of nightcap, and switched her off. He was hugely reassured, but not for long. The worst was saved for last.

McHarg always drove his Bentley sparingly. He kept a notebook in the car. After every trip, he recorded the distance covered. He took the notebook from the glove compartment and glanced at the mileometer reading. His heart lurched. Between his last listing in the book and the mileage on the dashboard, there was a difference of four hundred and seven miles. Deduct three miles for today's road test. Some stinking bastard had stolen his Bentley and driven it more than four hundred miles.