Silent War Page 6

  Chapter Four

  One o’clock jump

  Lucy was someone you could never please entirely. I suppose that was what cut her out to be a member of the boss class in the first place. It’s people like her who turn the rest of us into raving socialists. I was a better bloody operator than most of the layabouts on the station, could transmit and receive Morse faster, and at times seemed to be the only one on duty capable of chasing a signal if it leapt from band to band. The Reds were getting quite good at that sort of thing; Rob thought they were so sharp that the switch must be operating mechanically, and independently of the signaller. The only problem he couldn’t solve was how they coordinated the jump for both receiving and transmitting stations at the same time, in order not to lose part of the signal. He spent all of his time at a small ill-lit bench in the corner, fiddling with a couple of oscillators, some tuners and a couple of new-fangled electric clocks from the Mallards factory. He swore imaginatively each time the device gave him a shock.

  Lucy used to look over my shoulder, place a manicured finger on one of my log entries and tut-tut. She couldn’t fault me technically, so she homed in on my handwriting and spelling. I came on duty one afternoon to find two small dictionaries on my table – an English job, and a Polish–English equivalent. I flogged them to a schoolteacher in the pub that night and got threatened with five days’ CB and my pay docked after Lucy found out. But she told me she couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork a charge sheet would have entailed.

  ‘Get rid of me then,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here three weeks, so you must know by now whether you want me or not.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘. . . ma’am. Pass me or fail me.’

  ‘I passed you two weeks ago, Charlie. In theory you can go on to another unit, if you need more training, any time you like, but a Wing Commander Watson believes that once we let you go we’ll never see you again. So I’m stuck with you, apparently.’ Then she smiled, and said, ‘You may swear if it will make you feel any better; I did when I was told.’

  That made me smile too. I didn’t hate her. Not any more than I’ve hated any other authority figure, anyway.

  ‘My work’s still OK then?’

  ‘Of course it is. Keep it up.’ I nearly offered the Art Mistress saying that to the Gardener, but bit my tongue. I didn’t think her indulgence would stretch that far.

  Then she added, ‘They’ve laid on a bit of entertainment for you this week, anyway. It will help break the monotony. You’ve got to report to Lydd on Wednesday morning for a Course 42.’

  ‘What’s Course 42, ma’am?’

  She shrugged. ‘God only knows. But 42’s the designation they use for anything they haven’t a proper name or number for. It can mean absolutely anything. Good luck.’ She looked down at the file on her desk, just like the first time I had met her. Dismissed again. I think it was still the same file. It was only as I was walking away I remembered that she had called me Charlie. That must have counted for something.

  We drove over to Lydd airfield, which looked pretty empty before we arrived. No aircraft, no activity . . . another bleeding ghost station, although everything was being kept in pretty good order. You noticed the we of course! I wasn’t alone. Ivy was on a day’s stand-down, bored out of her brains, so I hid her under a blanket on the back seat as I went through the gate. The boy with the Stirling sub-machine gun was back. His hands and fingers looked as blue as his greatcoat. It was a still, clear, blue sky with not a puff of cloud, and as cold as nuns’ tits. I’ve never liked Decembers, even although I was born in one.

  After a hundred yards she scrambled over into the front passenger seat, and gave me a peck on the cheek. ‘Thanks, love.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Rescuing me from Lucy. She’s determined to get my knickers off before I go.’

  ‘You mean she’s . . . ?’

  She laughed at me. ‘Christ, Charlie, didn’t you know? Where have you been all of your life?’

  ‘Not around people like her, that’s for certain!’

  ‘Sure?’

  It was the way she said it that left a question in my mind: I’d known one of Lucy’s friends, remember.

  ‘What are you going to do while I’m working this morning?’

  ‘What will you be doing?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Course 42 can mean anything, apparently. They haven’t told me yet.’

  ‘Maybe it’s better you don’t know.’ She gave me another little peck on the cheek, which caused me to swerve into the path of a small Ford milk float. We left the driver with a face whiter than his bloody milk. Ivy said, ‘Sorry,’ and, ‘I’ll probably go for a walk.’

  But life’s never quite that simple is it?

  I saw two guys standing by a C-type hangar so we trundled over there. A sergeant and a corporal. Both very smartly turned out and obviously impervious to cold. This did not bode well. The corporal held the door open for Ivy; she probably gave him a bit of leg as she slid out, because I saw him grin immediately.

  The sergeant asked me, ‘Pilot Officer Bassett, is it, sir?’

  Someone had asked me that not too long ago. I’ve never had all that much bother remembering my own name, so I took the piss, ‘I think so, Sergeant. That’s exactly who I was the last time someone asked.’

  He smiled a smile I didn’t like, and handed me a sheet of paper from his big mitt. His big mitt seemed to be covered in old scars: some things count more than rank. It was a class list headed up Course 42, and the date. I was the only student listed, and in the column headed Comments, alongside the student’s name, someone had printed Comedian. Time to beat the retreat.

  I said, ‘Sorry, Sergeant. I’ve been on Civvy Street too long.’

  His big lumpy face broke into a friendly smile. The sort of smile that conceals a Mills bomb. ‘Don’t worry, sir; you’ll find a sense of humour helps a lot where you’ll be going . . .’

  ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘About five thousand feet up, sir, for the one o’clock jump – first a small-arms refresher for a couple of hours, and then we’re going to stick a ’chute on your back and fling you out of an aeroplane.’

  ‘I’ve already done that once,’ I wailed, ‘and I’m still here. I passed. I don’t want to try it again!’

  ‘Then hard luck, sir. Someone up there must think it might be useful wherever you’re going next. They want to know if you can still do it.’

  ‘What happens if I make a mess of it?’

  The corporal put on his most funereal of faces and told me, ‘Service burial, full blues and a firing party. Don’t you worry, sir; we’ll do you justice.’

  The bastards must have known that I’d baled out of a disintegrating aircraft high over France in 1947, but it wasn’t going to make any difference.

  Ivy thought it was all a bit of a hoot, and asked them, ‘Can I stick around and watch? Nothing like this ever happens to me.’

  Amos ’n’ Andy drew away for a few secs, before the sergeant replied, ‘Don’t see why not, miss. You can even come up with us if you like, as long as you signs the blood chit: there’s no one watching today.’

  Inside the hangar I learned to strip and fire the Stirling submachine gun. The bloody thing jammed twice.

  ‘Prone to jamming,’ the corporal told me, ‘usually at inconvenient moments. I prefer the good old three-o-three meself, with a fucking great bayonet on the end to make my point.’ Then he looked at Ivy and added, ‘Begging your pardon, miss.’

  She smiled, ‘No problem, Corporal. Can I have a go myself?’

  I’d seen this coming: she’d started to scuff her feet on the floor, and already looked bored. Ivy was better at it than me, of course, and it chose not to jam on her. Maybe it preferred women. Then we moved on to the .45 automatic pistol. It looked large enough in my small hands to club an elephant to death with, but I managed better with it. When Ivy took her turn, the kick of the damned thing threw her hand holding it vertically above her head and t
he explosion closed her eyes. She could still hit the target though, and I wondered if her fiancé actually wanted a girlfriend trained in small-arms firing.

  Eventually the sergeant said, ‘It’s a bit parky in here.’

  We didn’t disagree – my toes felt numb – and he led us away to a small Nissen hut which had probably been a ground-crew rest-room. It had a new electric stove, and he had the makings of our lunch: tea and bacon sarnies – no butter. It would have been nice to have had a bit of butter. Ivy flirted with the other two like it was going out of fashion, but I wasn’t up to responding to her. Once I started to think about the afternoon, my stomach started to churn. In my book anyone choosing to jump out of an aircraft must be a bit of a maniac.

  We went back to work at twelve-thirty. Sergeant Hickman – that was his name; I knew it would come back to me – and his neophyte stuffed me into a pair of grey overalls three sizes too large for me, and strapped a parachute pack around me. They made me jump off a table a couple of times, onto an old sisal exercise mat. It was supposed to cushion my fall, but had about the same amount of give as a battleship’s armoured deck. They told me all the usual scary stories about what can go wrong with parachute jumps. I was, however, particularly worried by a statement that one in ten jumps go wrong one way or another. I’d already got away with one jump safely, so I calculated that I’d shortened my odds to one in nine. But which of the nine, I wondered.

  We were waiting outside in the cold sunshine when our lift turned up. I heard it before I saw it, and thought I recognized the engine note. Twin Cheetahs that buzzed like a swarm of bees. When I saw it minutes later I even recognized the bloody aircraft as well: it was one of ours . . . an old Airspeed Oxford painted as red as a pillar box. It belonged to Halton Air, and a few weeks earlier I had been the one giving its pilot his orders. I suspected immediately that Old Man Halton’s refusal to defer my recall to the colours was tied to some sort of deal he had made with the WD to keep his fleet in the air. It led me to wonder if Elaine knew that as well.

  The pilot was Randall Claywell Junior, an American journeyman flier I’d known since 1945. He was so big that the aircraft shifted from side to side as he moved back from the office to its side door. He stepped down back first. We had all trooped out to meet him and when he turned around, he looked genuinely surprised to see me.

  ‘Hiya, Charlie, what y’ doin’ here?’

  ‘Jumping out of your fucking aeroplane I think,’ I muttered bitterly. ‘Did they send you over here to make me feel better?’

  ‘Do you know anyone who cares that much? Naw, I’m doing a coupla these stunts every week. The RAF’s short of appropriate aircraft. They’ve committed their jumpers to the Paras, and we get to pick up the small stuff. Never thought I’d see you here.’

  Appropriate was a big word for Randall: seeing me trussed up like an Egyptian mummy must have thrown him for a minute.

  The sergeant didn’t waste time with an intro – they all knew each other. He just said, ‘No point in hanging around, folks. The sooner we’re up there, sir, the sooner you’ll be back down on terra firma.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m worried about,’ I told him.

  Randall unshipped the door, which was an odd, off-centre shape and not very big, and stowed it at the back of the cabin. Then he clambered in, and moved forward to the driving seat. Hickman and the corporal followed him, and sat in the next two seats. Then Ivy climbed up, and then me. We two took the next row back; I sat nearest to the space where the door should have been. Both the regulars turned back to look at us and talk, while Randall taxied out. The corporal shouted to me, ‘When it’s time for you to go, sir, I want you to squat on the door coaming with both your hands on the door frame, but with your fingers outside.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘When I pat you on the shoulder, roll forward and dive out and down, pushing back hard with your hands. You’ve got to dive down to avoid the tail: if you hit it you’ll break your back.’

  ‘Thanks for that. What about the toggle?’ In fact the pull was a hard leather handgrip on a piece of cable: I hadn’t seen one like that before, which either meant that this was a museum piece, or something new undergoing test. I do so love the way the RAF cares for its people.

  ‘Hold it between your teeth; grab it and pull as soon as you like, once you’re outside the aircraft, sir, but don’t leave it too late.’

  ‘No. I’d thought of that as well.’

  ‘The other thing you gotta know, sir, is that once you’re in the exit position, I can’t get you back into the aircraft. If you don’t jump, I’ll have to kick you out.’

  I said, ‘Thanks.’ My voice sounded just a bit shaky.

  He grinned, and showed all his front teeth. They were improbably white. Falsies. I still couldn’t work out why he and his boss were looking back at us all the time, instead of ahead, where we were going. Randall gunned the motors and got us really rolling, cold air smashed into the cabin, and Ivy’s skirt blew over her head.

  I couldn’t make out if her shrieks were of laughter, anger, embarrassment or fear. She had pale stockings, a white suspender belt and a lovely pair of pink knickers – so she looked like a girl on a roller-coaster ride at a funfair. Every time she pushed her skirt down again the slipstream took it out of her hands. Eventually she gave up, and scrunched it down around her hips, and finally I worked out what the noise was. Ivy was laughing: this was fun. I also worked out why the regulars had turned back to look at us – they’d pulled this trick on a girl before.

  By the time we’d sorted ourselves out, Randall was airborne, and so were we. So far, so good. All I had to do now was get down in one piece.

  Piece of cake. Trouser-filling piece of cake, but a piece of cake all the same. Randall seemed to take for ever to make height in lazy circles over Lydd, but eventually we were up there, and it was time to go. I was so cold I didn’t care.

  If you ask me now why I did it, I would have to answer that it was something to do with the power of command. It’s what they teach NCOs. Once Hickman and his man had begun to boss me about, it never occurred to me to question what I was being told to do. It’s all about the way an order is framed, and how it’s delivered. Once you understand that, you’ll understand how they convinced millions of Tommies in the First Lot to get up out of their trenches, walk on to the German machine guns and commit suicide – because suicide is what it was. Power of command has a lot to fucking answer for.

  Let me tell you a bit about making a parachute jump. What it isn’t is a gentle sailing down to earth under a silken canopy wafted on the zephyrs of a peaceful sky. It’s actually a controlled bleeding fall. When I made my first jump in France I wasn’t scared, because I didn’t know what to expect. This time I knew what to expect, and the only reason I didn’t shit myself on the way down was because my buttocks were clenched so tightly with fear you couldn’t have got a whistle between them. I fell out of the Oxford without clouting it, screamed, and of course dropped the grab handle from my mouth. There followed a couple of nervy seconds with the pull drifting around in front of my face, and dodging out of the way each time I grabbed for it. Then it gave up and let me catch hold of it. I was upside-down when I pulled the ’chute. Then I screamed again, because the opening canopy wrenched both my arms from their sockets, and my man’s favourite bits were pulled north to somewhere above my belly button. You’d scream too. Believe me, you would.

  Oddly enough I touched down exactly as Hickman had shown me. Knees bent, and a single roll. It was just like jumping off a table. If the table was at five thousand feet, and moving forward at about 100 mph, that is. And I hadn’t a fucking clue where I was, either.

  I hit the deck on shingle, which, curiously, cushioned my fall, and between the largest and silliest concrete sculptures I had ever seen in my life. They were enormous. One must have been at least two hundred feet across and twenty feet high. It looked like one of those curved flat radar scanners you can see on the mast above the bridge of
a warship. That was odd: radar was the first word to pop into my mind. Concrete radar? Bloody silly.

  There were two others, both circular dishes angled slightly back from vertical – maybe twenty or thirty feet across. All three were grouped together, and faced across the Channel. Maybe they were new beam weapons focused on France; that thought cheered me up no end. I hadn’t seen them until the last minute, and somehow I’d managed to avoid the lot. I leaned back in the small depression in the shingle that my arrival had caused, popped the parachute straps, and got my breath back. The khaki silk parachute immediately rolled away on an on-shore breeze which had sprung from somewhere, and wrapped itself around one of the dishes.

  That’s when a voice said, ‘I’ll have that if tha’ don’t want it.’ An old man was sitting close to a line of scrubby gorse bushes, which is why I’d not seen him at first. One of his companions barked at me, and another baa-ed. A mangy collie dog and three sheep: a shepherd then.

  ‘I think I’ve used it all I want,’ I told him.

  He was smoking a curved pipe, and looked a very contented old shepherd. Maybe he was so old that John Clare had once written a poem about him. I turned towards him, and felt inside my breast pocket to find out if my fall had broken my own straight briar.

  It hadn’t, and my new friend said, ‘Tha’ wants a fill?’

  ‘I’ll exchange one for the parachute. OK?’

  He took his pipe from his mouth, and lit up his face with a huge toothless smile. I guessed it was going to be OK. Then Randall flew over at about a hundred feet. Ivy waved at me through the missing cabin door, and then her face was lost under her skirt again. I knew exactly where the two instructors would be looking.

  I asked the old fellow, ‘Is there an airfield near here?’ as I handed him back his tobacco pouch.

  ‘Ten minutes. Over tha’.’ He used his pipe to gesture over his shoulder. The red Oxford came round again. I was able to wave because my hands had stopped shaking. Ivy’s skirt was still over her head. I could imagine her delighted shrieks.