The Adjacent (15 page)

More can be done with half-silvered mirrors, and even more with plain glass. This, lit appropriately with a dark space behind, will make a completely convincing mirror when the lights are shining from one direction, and become transparent if the lights are suddenly, or even gradually, made to shine from another.

It was difficult to imagine how mirrors might be used to hide an aircraft, though. The problems appeared insurmountable. Glass is
heavy and to try to conceal an airplane with a mirror would require one as big as the craft itself. I had no idea of the lifting strength of modern warplanes, but I seriously doubted if Lieutenant Bartlett and his fellow airmen would want to go to war lugging a huge mirror beneath them, even if they were able in the first place to take off with one.

And of course this did nothing to address the essential question of the disguising angle, how to calculate it and how to achieve the desired effect. A mirror carried horizontally beneath the aircraft, assuming it could be done at all, would merely reflect the ground back to itself.

I wondered briefly if there were some other reflective material available, a lightweight fabric perhaps, the sort of thin outer skin used on gas-filled dirigibles. If something like that could be coated with a silver reflecting paint, then held tautly enough to create a true and steady reflection…?

Perhaps if two airplanes were to fly side by side, navigating carefully to maintain a steady distance between them, and stretching the silvered cloth between them. How might that disguise their presence?

I tossed. I turned. I was getting nowhere.

I looked towards the small, unwashed window, where the faint glow of pre-dawn showed. I desperately wanted this long and painful night to end. Lying still, trying to control my breathing, I listened for the dreadful but strangely hypnotic sound of the distant war, but either I was now too far away or the guns had at last fallen silent. It was a moment of peace, or at least of a temporary cessation of violence. I could imagine those wretched men in the front line, huddling in their earth trenches, deep in mud and filth, able at last to snatch a little sleep.

I knew that this small sign of quietude meant I should try to catch a couple more hours of sleep before having to rise, but there was another thought nagging at me.

There is one more method magicians use to make something seem to disappear. It is in fact one of the main techniques of stage magic and is employed in almost every trick you ever see performed. It is the art of misdirecting the audience.

Misdirection can take two forms. The first is to manipulate the audience’s expectations, to allow them to recognize their own knowledge of the world of normality, and from there allow them to assume that those rules will still apply to what they are watching when a trick is in progress.

Let us say that the magician begins to do something with a hen’s egg. Most people will assume that the egg they are seeing is entirely normal, not ‘prepared’ in any special way. A good magician will reinforce the assumption by, for example, handling the egg gently so as not to crack or break it, or will make a little joke about what would happen if he were clumsy enough to drop it. This helps allay private suspicions about any possible preparation, and will increase the audience’s instinctive belief in the normality of what they are seeing. The illusionist does not have to state explicitly what he is doing, nor should he try to tell the audience anything about the egg. The simple, familiar appearance of it is his subterfuge. Having established and reinforced the assumption he may then proceed to do something unexpected with the object he is holding. It
looks
like an egg, it is
shaped
like an egg, everyone
thinks
it is an egg, but then he makes the seeming egg perform in some way that would be impossible.

No doubt at the end of the trick he will deftly make a quick substitution and crack a genuine egg into a bowl, to suggest to the audience they were right all along. It really was a normal egg! The trick he just performed looks even more mysterious.

The other way to misdirect is to play against the audience’s expectations. In other words, to distract them momentarily, to disarm them with an unexpected pleasantry, to make them look at the wrong object on a table, or to watch an unimportant movement of a hand, or to look in the wrong direction – all of these create brief instances when the illusionist may quickly do something to another object, or move his other hand, or place something in view that won’t be noticed immediately.

Audiences who go to magic shows often see themselves as engaging in a kind of undeclared contest with the performer, constantly seeking to spot what he is ‘really’ doing. These audiences are, paradoxically, amongst the easiest to misdirect because in their eagerness to catch the magician out they concentrate on all the wrong actions.

Distraction can be achieved in many ways. A surprising costume change, a sudden bang or a flash of light, an alteration to the lighting or the backdrop, a witty remark, something that buzzes or vibrates unexpectedly, an apparent mistake by the conjuror. All of these are in the standard repertoire of magic.

I realized that there was potential in this, as an approach to Lieutenant Bartlett’s problem. When I had a little more experience of how the aircraft operated from this base, what they looked like and what size they were, and if I was able to find out exactly what
they do and how they fly when on an operation, then I might well be able to think up some misdirection that would be useful in the heat of battle.

Another kind of misdirection is in the use of adjacency. The magician places two objects close together, or connects them in some way, but one is made to be more interesting (or intriguing, or amusing) to the audience. It might have an odd or suggestive shape, or it appears to have something inside it, or it suddenly starts doing something the magician seems not to have noticed. The actual set-up is unimportant – what matters is that the audience, however briefly, should become interested and look away in the wrong direction.

An adept conjuror knows exactly how to create an adjacent distraction, and also knows when to make use of the invisibility it temporarily creates. An old colleague of mine used to perform a routine in which he spun a china plate on the end of a cane, then mounted the cane upright on his table and left the plate to spin there. As it slowed down and began to wobble increasingly, threatening to fall off and smash at any moment, hardly anyone in the audience was looking at anything else. For several seconds my friend was in effect invisible on the stage and he made good use of those seconds.

Then I had it! Simeon Bartlett’s problem, and potentially a solution to it, fell into place.

One aircraft, two aircraft. One adjacent to the other. Or maybe a third: two aircraft, apparently in formation together, while the third is adjacent to the other two. If I could make the extra aircraft interesting in some unexpected way the Germans would be distracted by it – they would fire their guns in the wrong direction. If the distraction were somehow illusory they would be shooting at something that did not matter, or at something that only looked as if it were there. It would be the wrong aircraft, or even not an aircraft at all. They would not be able tear their gaze away from it, but at the same time they would not be able to see it properly.

It was not going to be easy arranging that sort of misdirection, but it was in fact just a larger version of the kind of thing I did every time I went on stage. I could make it work, but I realized that Lieutenant Bartlett and his fellow pilots would have to put in training. That was something I would have no say about. Would the Royal Navy be willing to divert warplane pilots to extra training in the middle of a war?

Well, the best I could do would be to present my solution, and it would be up to them to implement it. In the meantime, I felt I
needed to learn more about the actual aircraft and try to find out what resources would be available to me to build the necessary kit.

I was excited by these thoughts, but I was no longer churning mentally. I felt calm because I believed I had thought up an effective way of deceiving the German enemy, saving British lives and helping the progress of the war.

I turned over, punched the hard and horrible pillow a few times, and moments later I drifted back to sleep.

I AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF AN ENGINE, REPEATEDLY SPEEDING
up and slowing down, something that I had learned from Lieutenant Bartlett the night before was called revving. I had heard it several times in the streets of London, made by automobiles. I often felt annoyed by it, but had never known what it was called. This particular revving engine sounded to me unhealthy, because it was coughing and stuttering and the noise it made was erratic. When a second motor started up a minute or two later, closer to my window, I pulled myself from the bed and went to have a look.

It was a bright, sunny morning, the sky white and dazzling with a high layer of light cloud. At first I had to narrow my eyes protectively against the glare. There was a large area of grass spreading out and away from my window, a whole field, leading to some leafless trees so distant they looked tiny and half shrouded in the early haze. Five aircraft were parked directly in my view. They must have stood there all night as I slept, but now there were many men in service fatigues working around the little craft. A miasma of smoke drifted in front of my window but the blast of air from the speeding propeller of one of the machines soon swept it away.

I stared in fascination at these small but deadly-looking craft so close to me. I had seen Monsieur Blériot’s frail little plane as it flew over, and pictures of others in magazines and newspapers. Once, at my local picture house, I had seen moving film of an airplane flying along a stretch of coastline. But suddenly to be so close to these warplanes, with five of them immediately in front of me, was an astonishing experience. I felt I was being allowed a glimpse into some terrible future, the sort of thing H.G. Wells wrote about, in which everyone would be flying in all directions, in constant peril of falling, being held aloft by these assemblages of wire and canvas
and wood. It was a frightening thought, but to be candid it was one I also found enthralling.

In the closer of the two planes which had their engines running, the man I knew would be the pilot was already sitting in the forward of the two cockpits. Most of his body was out of sight inside the plane, but his head and shoulders were above the rim. He was wearing a leather helmet with glass goggles resting on his brow. In the cockpit behind him was an enormous box device, unfamiliar to me.

The other aircraft had a man in each seat, with the second crewman lowering himself into his cockpit. While the engine roared with increasing energy, and at last started to sound smoother and more powerful, two of the men in fatigues carried over and mounted a large gun on a rack at his side. When they had backed away the observer practised rotating the gun, up and down and from side to side. He sighted it through a cross-hatched circle made of wire, mounted vertically above the barrel.

Wanting to watch these two warplanes take off on their mission, I dressed hurriedly and went outside. As soon as I appeared several of the men stood up from their tasks and saluted me. I was still not sure of my status on this operational base so I smiled and nodded, half raising my hand to my brow in an awkward response. The two aircraft were already moving away towards the centre of the field, their wings dipping and rocking alarmingly as they traversed the uneven grass.

One of the pilots signalled to the other plane with a wave of his gloved hand. All three of the men now pulled their goggles down to protect their eyes, and hunched themselves inside the cockpits. The two aircraft, running abreast of each other, accelerated away in the direction of the still-low sun. After a remarkably short run on the grass they lifted away. With their wings still rocking uncertainly they climbed slowly, leaving two faint trails of grey-blue exhaust smoke in the clear air behind them.

The ground crew had already moved away towards the other standing aircraft, but I remained where I was, wanting to watch the two aircraft until they were out of sight. I heard someone walking up behind me. It was Lieutenant Bartlett, with a leather helmet and darkened goggles dangling from his hand.

He greeted me with a salute, which I returned.

‘Good morning, sir. I haven’t had breakfast yet. I was wondering if you would care to join me? Breakfast here isn’t quite the same as dinner, but it’s still not too bad.’

We walked together to the wardroom – in reality it was a partitioned area of the aircraft shed, with a handwritten sign on the door:
Officers Only
– where a welcome breakfast was available. It was scrambled eggs (‘yet again,’ said Simeon Bartlett with a groan, but they tasted good to me) and unlimited supplies of toast, with a large mug of tea. He asked me what I thought of
la rue des bêtes
, but I said I had only been up a few minutes before he found me and had not yet had a look around the airfield.

‘I’ll give you a tour later,’ he said. ‘There are some good people here you will be working with.’

As we finished our tea, Simeon Bartlett told me a little about himself. He had joined the Royal Navy before the war began – it was a manly family tradition, and love of the sea and sailing were part of his nature. He served on a minesweeper as a junior officer, then a destroyer, but after that he had been posted to a land-based establishment in Portsmouth. When the war broke out in the summer of 1914 he was still there. It soon became clear that the Germans were using airplanes to threaten our army. A naval air wing was promptly set up. Frustrated by not being at sea and not receiving a posting to a ship of the line, Bartlett volunteered for the new service, learnt to fly and after a few adventures he did not describe in detail ended up here on the Western Front, keen to shoot down as many Huns as possible. He said he had been married for a year and that his wife had recently given birth to twin baby girls. He told me how fearful he was of being killed or seriously injured, but that because of his young family he was now ever more committed to the struggle. He found the consequences of a possible German victory unimaginable.