The Forgotten War Read online

  ‘Thought so: minx. What point is there in my looking like Captain Kidd when children like her only find it endearing?’ He ploughed on: ‘Would you mind getting kitted up sharpish? I’ll see you out at the kite, old lad.’ It was good to hear that the peacetime service spoke the same lingo as its wartime counterpart. He hefted one of the ammo pouches over his shoulder with his crude metal paw, and grinned. ‘Coffee and rock buns; in case we get peckish up there.’

  The white one-piece was large enough to wear over all of my clothes except my leather flying jacket, which I reluctantly left in the office. It was also padded. That meant that these people flew high, to where the cold things were.

  I’ve got to tell you about the Lancaster bomber that stood on a pan near the office, because I’d seen prettier. For a start it was silver all over, like a big gleaming sea trout fresh from the water. It had a clear rear gun turret – where my mate Pete used to skulk – but no guns. It had no mid-upper turret, and the front turret and bomb aimer’s fishbowl had been faired and painted over. Above and between her shoulders, where the mid-upper should have been, was an elongated bulbous pod, with open ends fore and aft. I’ve saved the best for last. Sticking out from her nose was a gigantic spike about fifteen feet long. It tapered to a point on which was fitted a sphere the size of a football, like the safety button on the end of a fencing foil. She looked like a Lancaster modified for aerial jousting. Rees or his crew must have had a ghoulish sense of humour, because the name painted in black on her unlovely snout was Golgotha.

  A tall thin erk, also dressed for flying, walked over to her with me. He also offered me a hand to shake, and said, ‘Welcome home, sir; we’ve heard a bit about you.’ I was prepared this time, muttered my thanks, but turned my head away. ‘I’m Ernie Ells. The kite-keeper.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home, Ernie? And don’t call me sir, it gives me the willies. I’m a sergeant again, anyway.’

  Ells frowned. ‘Oh no; I don’t think so, sir. You’re definitely an officer. The kite-keeper looks after the aircraft. I get flying pay, but I also run the ground crew . . . an’ I’m a civvy, so I get a proper pension at the end of this lot.’

  ‘What is she?’

  ‘Mark ten Lancaster, Mr Bassett. Canadian built.’ We were nearly at that small square door in the rear fuselage now.

  ‘I can see that, Ernie. I lived in one like this. I mean, what the hell do you do with her?’

  ‘Testing, sir. Research and development. That’s a stretched Rolls-Royce jet engine on her back.’

  ‘What about the awful thing sticking out the front?’

  ‘Counterbalance sir. Stops her from dropping her tail.’ Ernie said that with an absolutely straight face, but when he saw my alarmed look and faltering step he added, ‘Nah. It’s the radar rig. We’re testing a forward-looking radar for rockets. We also do some big weather flights: we had over thirty-three thou on her clock once, but the skipper said that she was probably only kidding us on.’

  ‘What are we doing today?’

  It was his turn to look startled. ‘Radios, sir; isn’t that why you’re with us?’

  I had been right about the black sense of humour. The RAF had always had a penchant for painting instructions on airframes, like Step here, or Don’t walk, or Rescue here. Some wag had seen fit to use the same stencil to paint a message over Golgotha’s crew door. It read Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. As I climbed in and dogged the door shut behind me I couldn’t help reflecting that one of my last flights in a four-engined bomber had taken precisely three minutes, and had ended in a spectacular crash from which I’d emerged the only survivor. Great.

  There were some differences inside. Metal poles dropped vertically through the old mid-upper’s space to support the jet pod, and some of the bomb-bay panels had been lifted to reveal new tanks, gauges and pipework. I had to wriggle between the poles to get to the radio and nav stations. There would be no getting out of Golgotha in a hurry if things got out of hand. The W/Op’s station had grown a bit since my last Lancaster trip. There were the rear-facing sets I knew and loved, on a bulkhead over a narrow table, and my forward-facing chair. What was new was another seat behind that, facing aft, and a bank of electronic equipment big enough to run a squadron on behind that.

  The chair was occupied by a slim fair-haired boy; he had a shy smile, and freckles, and looked as if he had stepped from the pages of the Beano. ‘Welcome home, sir . . . and well done.’

  What the fuck was going on here? Ever since the provost on the gate had waved us through without looking for an identity, perfect strangers had been treating me as if they knew me. I nodded as if I knew what they were talking about, and slid into my old seat. It was a tight squeeze. I noticed that both seats had lap straps. That was an improvement on wartime conditions – although there had been straps in my old Lanc, Tuesday’s Child; but we had filched them from a smashed-up Mosquito.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘Carrington. Percy. Perce,’ We were back-to-back. He had drawn makeshift stripes on the sleeves of his white overall with indelible ink. If he wasn’t excessively rank-conscious, it could be that he was the joker in the crew. Come to think of it, apart from the odd ‘sir’, none of the bods I’d met so far looked all that rank-conscious. That suited me.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Perce.’

  ‘Likewise, sir.’

  He had left my radios dead for me. That was a nice touch, unless he had been told to. They came alive under my hands. It was like undressing an old girlfriend: I didn’t even have to think about it. I had this self-image of the great cynic to hold on to, but it didn’t do any good: when I heard the static buzz, a lump came to my throat. Perce had rotated his chair so that he was looking over my shoulder: that was neat. He had a pad strapped to one knee that had some kind of form on it. He made a note on it as I finished my checks. It felt as if I was doing my training finals all over again, and the stupid thing was that I suddenly cared. I wanted to show the buggers what I could do. Perce nodded.

  ‘Very smart, sir. Very economical. They said that you weren’t flashy.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘Your original trainers. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Probably didn’t want to blow you up too much.’

  ‘No, they left that to me, didn’t they? We blew up a lot of things all over Germany.’

  Perce looked away. He said, ‘I was too late for all that. It was all over by the time I reached a squadron.’

  ‘Then go to church on Sunday, and say thank you,’ I told him truthfully. ‘I can’t think of a better war to be too late for.’

  He had a soft laugh; like a girl’s . . . and it didn’t go on. ‘You don’t mean that, sir.’

  I was suddenly irritated by him. I remembered that I had felt like that when I met the new guys coming on the squadron when we were finishing our tour. They seemed clean, untainted, and I hated them for it. Perce coughed, and hid it behind his hand.

  ‘What was it really like, sir?’

  ‘We drank a lot. I remember that. War’s very good for drinking.’

  ‘What about the rest?’

  ‘The rest is what I try not to remember. OK?’ I said gently.

  I hung my earphones around my neck, and banked sharp and low starboard to look forward. Ells was in the navigator’s chair but he didn’t seem to be doing any navigating. He saw me looking, and nodded. Beyond him I could see the back of someone on the flight engineer’s jump seat alongside the pilot. Was that Rees? He was some sort of academic for certain. I could hear the murmur of conversation between pilot and engineer as they pre-flighted her. For a moment they sounded like Grease, my skipper, and Fergal . . . but Grease had gone back to Canada, and Fergal was looking for a different set of wings in his Liverpool church.

  I was OK until Rees called to me. Golgotha was singing very gently to herself by then; the airframe around us shook almost imperceptibly, like someone in the warm-up
stages of an epileptic fit. I always liked that. It was as if the aircraft was actually alive, and talking to you – which was all right as long as she wasn’t saying ‘I am about to crash and burn.’ Rees clicked back to me. ‘OK, Charlie?’

  ‘OK, sir.’

  ‘Call through, please.’

  Everyone checked in. Quite like old times. Percy was behind me. He said, ‘Powered-up. OK.’ When I turned to look at him he mouthed ‘Radar.’ It’s an easy word to lip-read. I nodded. Ells called over, and waved to me. The engineer called over – but I didn’t recognize his voice. Then that left Rees; and that was us. It meant that Rees was flying the bloody thing, of course. That was Rees without an eye: Rees without a hand. I glanced at Ells again. He smiled, and looked unconcerned. I gripped the edge of the small table so that no one could see my hands shaking. That had happened before, too.

  Rees saved my blushes. He held Golgotha back on the end of the runway, and called me forward. ‘Do you want to come up to the office, Charlie? There won’t be anything for you to do for a while, and Percy can mind the shop for you.’

  As I passed Ells he patted my arm as if I was a good-luck charm, and smiled again. There was something seriously wrong with these people. Once I was standing behind Rees’s seat I touched his shoulder to let him know that I was there. I did that out of instinct – it was how I always used to tell Grease. It can’t have been that uncommon; Rees didn’t even turn his head. He’d had a ring welded to the control-column spade grips – for his fat metal thumb to fit through. That bloody great spar on the aircraft’s nose spoiled the view; I could actually see the damned thing bouncing up and down while we waited for clearance from Flying Control. We had to wait for an incoming Halton wearing a curious royal blue and silver civilian livery.

  Those people who told you that a Lancaster bomber could be lifted into the air like a sport plane were definitely exaggerating. In truth Lancs were always like ageing long-jumpers with bad knees. They needed a very long run. Rees had her up without a fuss. I liked that. Even the staggered thumps of her undercart pulling into their nacelles behind the inner engines didn’t seem as violent as those in my memory.

  Golgotha was like Rees: an old smoothie. Like the rest of us he had an old-fashioned cloth helmet, and as soon as he’d pulled us through six thousand feet, switched on the automatic pilot, and dropped his earphones around his neck, he asked me again: ‘OK, Charlie?’

  ‘Fine, skipper. Where are we going?’

  ‘Out over Anglesey; off the Bristol Channel. There’s a listening station there. You been there before?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘First visit for you, then: they say that travel broadens the mind.’

  ‘When do you want me to get down to work?’

  ‘When we get there. I’ll tell you. Go and watch Ernie; you’ll find it interesting.’

  I went back down the step and stood alongside Ells. I had been right the first time. He wasn’t navigating: at least, not in any way I’d seen before. There was what looked like another big bank of radios above the old nav table. The most obvious differences from standard receivers were two ally spools, and a thin strip of punched paper rolling from one to the other. It was always noisy down here. I shouted, ‘What’s that do?’

  ‘Navigate: it tells George where to go.’ ‘George’ was the automatic pilot. Golgotha climbed gently to port: she seemed to be looking for a further few hundred feet. I had to hang on to the back of Ells’s chair.

  Ells shouted, ‘We punch the route up on ticker tape while we’re at the briefing, still on the ground. Once the skipper passes over an agreed way point at an agreed height, he just flicks on George, and these boxes do the rest.’

  ‘What about the variables? Winds, cloud layers, temperatures and inversions?’

  ‘That’s the clever bit. Perce’s gizmos are constantly repeating to three remote ground stations, so by triangulating with them we know where we actually are all of the time, as against where we’re supposed to be. That means that, as well as the predicted route from the paper strip, small adjustments are being fed into George all the time; that’s why her flying is a bit twitchy. Don’t worry; you’ll get used to it.’

  ‘If the kite has a mind of its own, what do they need us for?’

  ‘To catch her when she drops it.’

  Golgotha must have been listening to him: she dropped it immediately. The nose went down, and we lost a couple of hundred feet before Rees hauled it back. The dive threw me to my knees, hanging on to the back of Ells’s seat. I gasped, ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘Something to do with one of the signals from the ground. We haven’t got it fully ironed out yet. Did she scare you?’

  ‘Everything about her scares me.’

  Golgotha eventually put us into a broad circuit above Filton airfield, and waited for Rees to get his hands back on her. She’d only tried to kill us another two times. Perce said that she was having a particularly benign day: I’m glad that I hadn’t met her on a bad one. As Rees set out over the Bristol Channel he ordered me back to my seat and put me to work. Perce looked over my shoulder the whole time, and scored my performance on that pad strapped to his knee. There was a female ground operator at Filton who sounded sweet but browned off, and a keen young RN W/Op in the back of a Yeovilton Firefly that climbed into formation alongside us. He used fourteen words whenever he needed four. He sent fast, clean Morse, though: had I been like that once? I didn’t miss a letter. Perce lifted one of my earphones and asked, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Wanker,’ I replied gruffly.

  Perce nodded and smiled. ‘Fleet Air Arm,’ he said, as if that explained it. Then he said, ‘Full marks so far, sir. You haven’t lost your touch, have you?’ Patronizing little git.

  Rees turned west, and started boring out to sea. A few miles beyond Anglesey, which was greener than I’d imagined, over a sea which was bluer than I’d imagined, he started to fly square searches, as if he was looking for something. I was back up with him by then. There was a spare set of headphones with a jack point behind me. One of the odd things about Golgotha was the number of jacks – they seemed to appear every few feet. Rees was searching for a signal, it turned out. I listened with him. Eventually I heard it; or them, rather. Two Morse operators hammering away at each other out at the edge of our range. The signal drifted a bit. They weren’t all that fast; just good and solid. A couple of men who weren’t willing to sacrifice accuracy for speed. Not that it meant much to me: it was all encrypted stuff. Rees turned briefly to look at me, and put his thumb up. We trailed up and down for a few minutes, eavesdropping on absolute rubbish, and then Rees pointed the plane’s lance at land again and let Golgotha take over. He asked, ‘What did you make of that?’

  ‘Old stuff. Some of the signalling protocol was, well . . . anachronistic, I suppose you’d say, sir. Who was that, sir? Who were we listening to?’

  ‘Couple of Jedburghs; maybe even yours. They were either in the South of France, or Germany. You realized they were right on the edge of our range?’

  ‘Who’s Jedburgh?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you yet?’

  ‘No, they bloody didn’t . . . sir.’

  ‘Then neither shall I.’

  I tried him a couple more times during the remainder of the trip, but he wouldn’t budge. Thought it was funny, too. Bastard. There was nothing for me to do on the return trip except feel a bit airsick. I had imagined that I had got over that during my early aircrew training in 1943, but there was something about the way Golgotha flew herself that disagreed with my stomach. I think that it was all of those niggling little changes of height and direction she made, in response to messages from Perce’s magic boxes. All in all I preferred a human being to be doing the flying; even those who weren’t much good at it, although my flying career so far had included far too many of them. I had a mug of coffee, which was its usual awful self, and sucked one of my rock buns. I reckoned that they were probably issued to airmen for use as we
apons if they survived being shot down. We broke from cloud about ten miles west of London, and flew into hard sunlight. That was almost like a metaphor for the times: the war had finished, but some of the things that peace could do were enough to make your eyes water.

  As I walked away from the Lancaster I noticed for the first time that on the other side of her nose from her name there was a row of mission credits painted up, also in black. Golgotha was an old lady. I counted twelve small bombs and a small aircraft silhouette. Twelve bombing missions and an enemy aircraft claimed. Underneath them was a longer row of smaller symbols. I stood on tiptoe to make them out. They were tiny black crucifixes, shaped like those handed out in Sunday school on Palm Sunday. There must have been more than thirty of them. I suppose they went with her name.

  I pointed them out to Ells. ‘What are they? The number of church parades she attended?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Mr Bassett. Her previous pilot, Mr Whittaker, took a very religious turn after the war. He named her, of course, and every testing flight she made earned her another cross. It was a bit creepy.’

  ‘I’ll say. What happened to him? Funny farm?’

  ‘Nah. He walked into her propellers one morning, when we were ground running the engines. I still think that it was deliberate. We found his head half a mile away.’

  ‘Good head, was it?’

  ‘As far as heads go, yes, sir, I’d say it was a good head. We buried it with his legs. Most of the rest of him had blown away on the wind. ’S funny – if you thinks about it, there’s still loads of him around here somewhere; probably fertilizing the grass.’

  ‘Would he have minded that?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. He was very High Church; very. We stopped painting the crosses after that. Enough was enough.’

  It was a good Easter story. I wasn’t sure that Ells wasn’t having me on. I had known a Whittaker once. He’d been shot down over Holland, and had successfully baled out. That was what I called a miracle. He was one of the good guys: he couldn’t have been the same man.

  Perce sidled up. I didn’t know that men as tall as that could sidle. He was just as shy on the ground as in the air, but he asked, ‘Would you care to join us for a drink before you go back to London, sir? Because we are partly a civvy establishment there’s a super mixed bar that opens when flying is over for the day. Everybody’s keen to meet you.’