The Forgotten War Read online

  ‘Yeah. We all have them these days.’

  ‘Monica’ wasn’t some sweet girl carried to entertain the airmen: Monica was a crude radar beam-detecting device. She detected the buggers that were using their radar to track you. Her problem was that she emitted a beam of her own in order to do so. Once Jerry cracked that, he just recalibrated his sets to follow her beam back and look up her skirts. When you switched on Monica in the wild night skies it was like saying ‘Come and get me’ to a night fighter. Not many folk knew that.

  ‘Switch her off as soon as you can.’

  ‘Why, Charlie?’

  ‘Just trust me, boss: she’s bad news. Just switch her off. I’ve been there before.’

  He gave me a long look before saying ‘OK’ and turning away.

  The navs and radar guys were coming from the briefing hut now. There was none of the noisy banter I remembered from the squadron. Each group whispered, like mourners at a funeral. Mind you, I’d already worked that out. If this work was as dubious as the Wingco had suggested, they’d want to brief as few airmen as they could. If they had just briefed two new crews, it was odds-on that they’d lost the previous two. Somewhere out in the cold air over Vodkaland. Bastards.

  The first time I saw a Lincoln was in that twilight. She was a beast. She couldn’t have been that much larger than a Lanc, but she looked huge, and black and serious. Every time I climbed into a black aircraft I got into trouble. I stepped up into her from my old place: second from the end of the line – the rear gunner was behind me. I remember now that his name was Neil . . . someone called him Nutty Neil. Like the others, he looked a bit on the young side to me. He dogged down the small fuselage door behind us. I checked that he’d done it properly. He wasn’t offended. He just nodded and said, ‘See you later, Charlie.’

  ‘Sure. For breakfast.’

  I’d said something similar to the Pink Pole on his last trip: then our own fools blew him out into the blue with an antiaircraft shell.

  The Lincoln moved around on her legs the way a big aircraft was supposed to, as we found our places and buckled in. I was back-to-back with Perce again. The bastards at Hendon had put me through a dress rehearsal without telling me. If I had shut my eyes and excluded the noises that Perce made, I could have been in Tuesday’s Child again. I reminded myself that I wasn’t; Tuesday had burned. It was the wrong time to admit to myself that I missed her. Another thing that I could have done with my eyes closed was fire the radios up. The soft hiss of the static was like the return of a badly missed old friend.

  When I was satisfied, I dropped the phones around my neck and looked forward. As in the Lanc, by leaning to one side I could see up into the cockpit. It was another clear sunset, and up there the men were bathed in a pink orange light that dissolved into a faint rainbow before it reached me but painted the nav into a coat of many colours. Their murmured cockpit drill was almost identical to that in my memory. Then they ran up the starboard outer engine twice, because they failed to get a decent mag drop first time round – and my ring twitched. When the Stirling I’d been in had done that we’d left her in bits all around Tempsford.

  Perce tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned round he said, ‘I’m scared and excited; both at the same time.’

  ‘Don’t worry; you’ll be OK. I’ve done dozens like this.’ Sometimes I told lies. I realized then that I hadn’t been told whether we were the hare or the hound. I suppose it didn’t matter; my job would be the same either way. I pulled the headphones up again, and on cue the pilot clicked and came in with, ‘Call through, please, radios.’

  I responded with ‘Charlie, Skipper . . .’ and ran the rest of his call-through for him. The voices rang very loud and clear in the headphones. The engine revs rose, and the bird began to tremble. The nav said, ‘There’s the light; that’s a go, Skip,’ and she began to rumble forward on Waddington’s long runway. It would have been nice if someone had asked me if I actually wanted to go back to Germany.

  We flew half a dozen big squares around Lincolnshire to let the other aircraft draw well ahead of us. That probably annoyed a few farmers because we did it at about a hundred and fifty feet. Low enough to make the tiles rattle and the church bells sing with resonance. It did occur to me that we could have just stayed on the ground for another twenty minutes and not upset anyone. Tim called me up to the office for the outward flight. Looking back, I saw the last of the sunlight sinking beyond our spindly rudders, somewhere out over the Atlantic. Standing behind the pilot as we pulled out over the Wash I felt as if I’d been there half my life. It was probably where I’d be when we landed . . . assuming a positive outcome. The sea streamed away in front of us, dark grey with whitecaps that winked on and off like fireflies. The Linc smelled new inside, and trembled like a thoroughbred greyhound before the off. Tim was right: I liked her.

  We were halfway to Denmark before I went back down to my station. Perce got out a spare map case and spelled out our intentions to me. The other Lincoln was overflying Denmark – without official sanction, of course – to pop up onto the Reds’ radar screens somewhere south of Hamburg. Then it was going to play hide-and-seek all the way down the demarcation-zone border, and fart in their faces. The Reds didn’t have the same wartime experience that the Germans had at intercepting incoming raids – maybe they’d commit their fighter resources to it and have none left over for us. That was the theory. We were to insert low over the North Sea and climb through an alleged radar gap above Szczecin to our maximum operational height. After that we were to cruise over Rostok, Riga and Tallinn – all Russian fleet ports – mapping ground profiles as we did so, and eventually escape to violate the airspace of neutral Sweden by closing up to a Swedish airliner homeward-bound for Stockholm, and hiding in her radar shadow. I don’t want you to get the idea that we were supposed to completely hide from the Ivans. They were supposed to be able to see some of what we were doing but feel impotent to prevent it. It sort of sent them the message that we could be back any time we wanted, with a full load of bombs.

  ‘What if the ground controller down there is German?’ I shouted at Perce. ‘Some character who spent the last six years learning our ways?’

  ‘Then we’ll get company, sir. I expect that that’s what happened to the last bods.’

  I was glad that he’d worked it out as well.

  I had never been more scared. That was something to do with not being in the right of it. I hadn’t really doubted that the scrap with Jerry had been necessary, or proportional: there wasn’t much I wouldn’t have done to help defeat the Krauts. This was different. The Reds hadn’t done anything to us yet – except mouth off a bit. I couldn’t see that that was a good reason to go flinging bombs at them, or even to threaten it. What I mean is that somewhere in my head a little voice was squeaking out that if one of their fancy jet fighters pumped a dozen cannon shells up our jacksie, then it would only serve us right.

  The other Lincoln must have done us proud: the airwaves were as full as the fair on the downs on Derby Day. I got some of the transmissions in bits and pieces: mostly in German, or coded traffic that I instinctively took to be so. Some poor sod could puzzle them out if I made it back. It was stirring up a hornets’ nest from the Baltic to the Austrian border: there were aircraft everywhere, either scrambling from their airfields or returning to them empty of gas. You could almost smell the frustration in the air out there.

  It got tricky near Kaliningrad, which is what the Russkis call Konigsberg in old East Prussia. There was a short series of exchanges in what I took to be Russian – between what sounded like a couple of pilots, and then between them and the ground. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I clicked immediately: ‘Skipper, Charlie. They got us.’

  Click: ‘Charlie – are you sure?’

  My old skipper, Grease, would never have asked the question. He would have had Tuesday on her side by now and skidding downwards.

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’

  ‘OK, Charlie, don’t pan
ic – I’ve got her.’

  Yes, prat, but for how long? Perce jumped in, click: ‘I’ve got them, Skipper: I’ll follow them in.’

  The foreign voices in my earphones were hoarse now, urgent: hounds off the leash. I said, ‘They’re close; they’re—’

  ‘Shut up, sir, we’ve got ’em . . .’ That was Perce.

  As he spoke I glanced outside through my small window to the left. A small tubby silver jet aircraft was climbing past us at an impossible attitude; there was a faintly phosphorescent blue glow over the leading edges of its wings and forward fuselage. It couldn’t hang in that thin air for ever.

  It didn’t. Tim rolled our beast gently away from it to starboard; the MiG tried to stay with us in the turn, and couldn’t. Its wing broke off: just like that. The thin silver wing, with its red star, fluttered down like a falling leaf. The unbalanced fighter span amazingly along its own axis, following a shallow parabola. I saw the canopy break away – then nothing. They were gone. Perce clicked. He sounded cool; almost laconic.

  ‘This is Perce, Skipper. It broke up. The other one’s not even trying.’

  Someone’s breath was rasping over the intercom. I realized that it was mine. There was another click, and Nutty Neil said, ‘Aaw . . . didn’t lay a hand on him.’ It was a joke we used sometimes.

  The top gunner spoke for the first time since the call-over. ‘That must be the tenth MiG that’s broken up in a climbing turn this year; don’t they ever fucking learn?’ He sounded worldly-wise, but his breath was rasping too. I was sure that this was also the first time he’d met the Reds; like me. Even so – someone could have bloody told me.

  Just short of Tallinn the Reds threw up to our height a curtain of heavy flak that was thick enough to walk on. Probably they were using old German guns. The sirens must be wailing down there, I thought, just like in the war. Maybe people were dashing for the shelters. We blinked first. Tim rolled the Lincoln indecorously to port and headed out to sea. Privately I thought that he had made the right decision; we should get back with the material we already had. It still felt like funk, and Grease wouldn’t have done it, no matter what the rest of us told him to do.

  Tim let us down slowly towards the ETA with the Swede over the Baltic. I was still scared. If the Reds got a couple of fighters up to us now it could get interesting. As it was we slid in beside the Swedish C47 without further interference.

  The Swedish pilot flashed his lights at us in a friendly sort of way, and Tim just slotted under his port wing until the civvy peeled off for Stockholm. That left us illegally overflying Sweden in the dash for home. From the reaction of the airliner I was left in no doubt that any diplomatic protest would be half-hearted. Maybe they thought the Russians were about to declare war on the rest of us as well. I had ten minutes up in the office over the North Sea. We were down to a hundred and fifty feet again as we went back in. The sea should have been black or dark grey, but it wasn’t: it was silver. A huge low moon polished the world the colour of old pewter. The sea swell looked greasy and long.

  Coming in over the Wash two Meteor jet fighters dropped down on each of our wing-tips. I saw one of them through my small port, but I was back at work by then. They took us back to Waddington, where we landed at about six in the morning. Just as we were turning in for finals I heard a brief burst of Morse, and a reply. I could swear that they were the hands I had heard out over the Bristol Channel days before. I managed to scribble the exchange onto my spare pad, tore off the page and stuffed it deep inside my uniform. I don’t know why I did that. I shut down the radios before the Skipper asked, whilst we waddled around the peri-track to the beast’s hard standing. Then I sat exhausted, with my head in my hands, until we came to a stop and the propellers slowed one after the other. All that was left were the mechanical clicks and wheezes as everyone shut down their equipment and began to move around.

  I understood something about myself for the first time: fear made me tired. I turned to face Perce. He still looked excited, but there was something else there as well; he wouldn’t be so keen to go out a second time. He looked suddenly older. ‘Is it always like that, Charlie?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I told him shortly. ‘Usually it’s worse. That was a milk run. Do you know if you got what you were supposed to?’

  ‘Yes, I mapped the whole route, up to the suburbs of Tallinn. Did you see that flak?’

  ‘No. I had my head down.’

  ‘We could have been killed up there!’

  I looked at him as if he was a newborn, and I was a million years old. ‘Of course we could: that’s the point.’

  Perce dropped his gaze before I did. He hadn’t really got what it took, and we both knew it. There again, neither had Turnaway Tim – I had started to call him that in my head – so perhaps Perce would fit into the crew just fine. I just wanted to get away from them.

  The other Lincoln wasn’t back yet, and a load of shifty eyes at the debriefing table told me that it was probably overdue. I gave them my pad with the scraps of foreign signal scribbled on it, and my radio log. They asked me twice to describe how the Mig’s wing folded back, and sounded disappointed to learn that the canopy had gone as well, because that meant that the pilot just might have got out. Then they left me alone.

  The debrief of the other trades was more detailed. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes again. The officer who gave me a mug of coffee stiffened with rum looked familiar; then I remembered that he had conducted the met briefing twelve hours earlier. We talked in low voices for about twenty minutes: he wanted to know how accurate his forecast had been – where he’d got it right, and where he’d got it wrong. He was a really decent one; the only one of the whole damned bunch worth bothering with.

  We were given the warning again as we dismissed – and were told that we could record the flight in our personal log books, but as ‘CSACZ’ – Central and South Allied Control Zone – and ‘weather flight’. There you are. Fucking weather flights; it was the first time that the weather had shot back at me.

  7. Down-home Rag

  Someone had been kind. They had realized that it might rain during the night and had thrown a tarpaulin over my open car. Either that or they hadn’t expected me back, and were hiding the evidence.

  Coming back on the Hudson with Joe Humm I discovered Miller’s sandwiches buttoned into my battledress-blouse pocket. I had forgotten about them. The circumstances conspired to make the first bite convince me that they were the best sandwiches I had ever tasted. The SP who drove me out to Humm’s aircraft handed me back my small clothes in a new RAF blue canvas holdall with leather straps: he’d stencilled my name and number on it. When I looked inside, even the paper carrier bag was there, neatly folded – it might even have been ironed. I dozed in the seats behind Joe and his nav, and again on the crew bus from Little Riss. I got as far as the guardhouse at Benhall before Ming intercepted me at the door. He had a grin on his face. ‘All right for some, sir – that’s you finished for the day, I expect.’

  I had expected to go on to Hut 7 to be frozen out by Mrs Boulder and sign whatever nonsense Miller shoved my way. I was obviously going to be no good at this job. Ming must have already made a call, because Miller drove up in a rather smart new jeep. She showed a bit of leg when she stepped down, noticed me noticing and didn’t scowl.

  ‘How were the sandwiches, sir?’

  ‘Wonderful. The best. Salty.’

  ‘My mother taught me to always roll pork lightly in salt before you roast it: that brings out the flavour.’

  ‘Your mum sounds all right.’

  When she asked, ‘Was it OK last night?’ she spoke almost shyly.

  ‘If I told you, then I’d have to kill you.’ It was a line I’d heard before. Then I told her the truth. ‘I’m dog-tired. Finished . . . but still smiling.’ We both were: she gave me a tired smile in return.

  ‘That’s all right. Go home and get a few hours’ sleep. The Commander won’t expect you in today,’ she said.

&
nbsp; ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir. Nor Saturday or Sunday. This is our weekend off.’

  I drove along the track to the brick farmhouse between two of the fields overrun by hens. Bella Abbott was in one field, moving hens around with her dogs. Their tongues lolled out. She came over to the fence. She smelled of hens.

  ‘If you’re hungry, you can boil yourself a couple of eggs,’ she told me. ‘There’s bread, and the butter’s in the cold safe.’

  ‘Thanks, Bella. I’m just tired. Bushed. I’ll turn in, if that’s all right.’

  ‘When you wake up, then. Alison will show you where everything is. I’ve got to go to Oxford, and I won’t be back before evening. She’s back from school at about four. I’m glad everything went all right last night.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  She glanced away, and then back at me. ‘Well, you’re back – aren’t you?’

  When I awoke I could hear music That wasn’t unusual: since my accident I’ve woken up each morning with different pieces of music in my mind. They stick around for most of the day. What was different this time was that the music was real, coming from a radio downstairs somewhere. Dorothy Squires was singing ‘There’s Danger Ahead’. She didn’t know the half of it. I was lying on my side, facing the door. The first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes were my clothes lying on the floor, where I had stepped out of them. Untidy, Charlie. The second thing that I noticed was that the bedroom door was open. I was sure that I had closed it. The third thing I noticed was the girl leaning against the door jamb. She was probably in her mid-teens; still wearing a rough blue school skirt and a white shirt. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and the hair that hung to her shoulders was a deep golden brown, like newly polished oak. A couple of freckles on either side of a wide smiling mouth. Brown eyes. She said, ‘Hello, I’m Alison.’

  I yawned. ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Hello, Charlie. Have you been out being brave?’