‘Tomorrow never comes,’ Ginger had said cheerfully that afternoon when, after discussing the alarming fact that operations were imminent, Horner had cheered them by saying that at least they couldn’t be on the first operational Detail because they hadn’t done their fighter affiliation yet.
They were both wrong. Tomorrow came and they were on the Detail.
They had just pushed through the swing door of the Sergeants’ Mess when there, pinned on the noticeboard, they saw tomorrow’s Detail with a list of crews on stand-by for 13 Squadron’s first operation.
Fifth down was P/O Maddox and crew.
Horner stared dumbly at the noticeboard as if pole-axed.
Finally Ginger burrowed his way through the crowd, read the notice and burrowed back, his hair standing on end.
‘We’ve got to do something, Ginger, and we’ve got to do it quickly.’
‘But what, Jack? What?’
‘We’ve got to see Cavendish. First thing tomorrow. We’ve got to thump on the table. Tell him we’re not fully trained and we’re not bloody well going till we are!’
‘Hang on a minute, Jack!’
‘Otherwise, Ginger, we’re goners.’ Horner drew his finger across his throat.
Ginger shuddered.
‘We’ve got to go in together, and tell the bugger the RAF can’t send half-trained crews against the enemy.’
‘But they can, can’t they? They can do anything they like with us.’
‘No, they can’t. Sure, we’ll fly. Sure, we’ll fight. We’ve shown that, haven’t we? We’ve shown that in France, haven’t we? But this lark works two ways. The RAF’s got to give us proper aircraft and training.’
‘Cavendish will say they have.’
‘How can he? They’ve given us ex-commercial airline kites tarted up with pea-shooters. And we haven’t had our fighter affiliation. And Maddox is no bloody good.’
‘Cavendish will say he is.’
‘Jesus! Will you stop being Cavendish’s mouthpiece? What d’you say we should do?’
‘We’ll just have to trust to…’
‘To what?’
Ginger paused.
‘If you say God, Ginger, I’ll throw up.’
‘Luck, I was going to say. Trust to our luck. And Maddox’s.’
But trusting to luck or not, Ginger unwillingly allowed Horner to drag him into Cavendish’s office at nine o’clock the next morning.
Angus MacGregor watched them go in. He didn’t need a crystal ball or even his Highland intuition to know exactly what they were going in about or how they would fare.
He himself was champing at the bit, raring to go on this first operation which showed his nerve was as steady as ever. But Cavendish had insisted that he remained on the ground, only one seasoned pilot – Slade – being sent.
But that wasn’t the only thing that had fazed him. He had wakened early while it was still dark, and he had heard the bloody dog howling.
On and off this time, it went on for about half an hour, and this time Bronwen, his batwoman, heard it.
‘Oh, sir!’ she exclaimed. ‘I don’t like it! Not one little bit. What d’you think it means?’
‘It means you’ve slopped my tea all over the saucer.’
‘Oh, sorry, sir! My hand was shaking. What d’you think the howling dog means?’
‘It means there’s some hungry animal out there. Probably the owner’s abandoned it.’
‘D’you really think that’s all it is, sir?’
‘Och aye, that’s what I think.’
‘Then I’ll put out some scraps.’
‘You do that, lassie.’
‘But,’ she had added, turning as she left his room, ‘I’m ever so glad you’re not flying, sir.’
Now he saw the two flight sergeants who would prefer not to be flying emerge from their bout with Cavendish, not with their tails between their legs exactly but nearing that quarter.
‘So how was the Wingco this morning?’ MacGregor asked them cheerfully.
‘As reasonable as ever,’ Horner replied shortly.
‘Oh, my! As bad as that?’
‘Worse! We told him we hadn’t done our fighter affiliation. But did it make any difference?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t, laddies, would it? You’re away to do your fighter affiliation in half an hour. There’ll be a Hurricane from Manston in the circuit shortly to put you through your paces. I could have told you that before you went in.’
And should he also, he wondered, have told them he’d heard that damned dog howl again? But that thought was so stupid and irrational that he felt antagonistic to himself for even thinking it. And yet he did continue to ask himself if he should have told the others, just as he’d wondered for months if he should have told those chaps in France about the dark haloes round their heads.
‘Maddox,’ Horner said quietly and without malice, ‘is a ham-handed clot. He’ll kill the lot of us. He shouldn’t have been passed out as a pilot.’
‘Och, the laddie has his good points,’ MacGregor murmured.
‘Name me one.’
MacGregor was hard put to it. ‘He’s lucky. Most important that. Remember Napoleon. Chose his generals for their luck.’
‘And look where that bloody well landed him! So what’s all this about doing our fighter affiliation now?’
‘That is so, laddies. I’ve organised it. Rendezvous is over the airfield at ten.’
‘And the best of North British luck to you, MacGregor!’
The lucky lad, Maddox was waiting beside S-Sugar. The aircraft was spanking clean. Pip was standing with them looking as proud as a diminutive mother sparrow with two cuckoos – one enormous, spick and span, engines humming, the other with two left feet and still covered in egg.
‘Good luck!’ she bade them, checking young Maddox’s straps, and then suddenly squeezing Jack’s hand as she eased herself past.
This time, Maddox didn’t swing out on take-off. And pleased as punch with himself, he immediately addressed the two flight sergeants. ‘Keep you eyes skinned for the enemy.’
‘The Hurricane, d’you mean?’ Horner asked.
‘The Hurricane is the enemy. We’ve got to fight this as for real. He’s going to wish he hadn’t strayed into our airspace!’
Maddox himself was looking around all the time with his mouth as wide open as his eyes. Then, up at five thousand feet, a Hurricane swooped out of a cumulus cloud on top of them. The game was on.
Maddox was in his element. A kid with a new and lethal toy. He didn’t exactly loop the Blenheim as he said he had done, but he did everything else – he put the aircraft up on the port wing, then vertically on the starboard, raced up to the clouds at full throttle, dived to the ground almost vertically. He seemed to snatch the fighter role away from the Hurricane.
After an hour of this jousting, their playmate waggled his wings and made for home.
With a triumphant smile, Maddox called for a course back to Marshfield. He looked from Johnson to Horner as if awaiting their congratulations.
Suddenly, his expression changed. The pleased smile was wiped off his face. He turned green, leaned over the throttlebox and was sick.
Violently, noisily, horribly sick! All over the cockpit, all over himself, all over Horner.
Somehow he managed to land, clumsily, but not all that much worse than usual. Pip had heard something was amiss from the R/T in Flights. All concerned, she clambered up and helped him out of the aircraft, still heaving, choking and spluttering.
Horner wiped the sick off his jacket and felt a sudden leap of hope.
‘Poor chap’s airsick,’ he told her with false concern. ‘Must suffer from chronic airsickness. Shouldn’t ever have been allowed to fly, should he, Ginger?’ He winked.
Ginger winked back.
But all Pip said was, ‘I’ll take him to Sick Quarters.’
Then she put her arms round him, getting covered with yellow vomit at the same time.
She stopped the armourer’s van, bundled Maddox inside and was away.
‘There he goes,’ Horner told Ginger as they watched. ‘This is it! Someone up there’s looking after us. We’ve been saved! Luscious Lesley won’t send him off this afternoon. Not in that condition. She’ll ground him. Can’t do anything else.’
Cheerfully the two flight sergeants got buckets of soapy water and disinfectant and some rags from the hangar and started to clean up the cockpit of S-Sugar. Then they legged it up to Sick Quarters.
Pip was just coming out as they arrived.
‘What did she say?’
Pip shrugged. ‘The MO? He’s still in there with her. He’s scared she’ll make him scrub for today.’
‘Scrub for today? Scrub for good, more like!’ Horner said under his breath.
‘He seemed to think it was the smell made him sick.’
‘Smell? What smell?’
‘You know, S-Sugar having had a refit. I smelled it a bit myself.’
‘You would say that,’ Horner muttered.
‘Not unless I did smell it.’
‘Well… maybe we could fill her in a bit,’ Horner murmured, striding down the corridor and opening the MO’s door after the most perfunctory of knocks.
‘We’re P/O Maddox’s crew,’ Horner announced. ‘We wondered if we could help? Explain what happened.’
‘If you’d wait outside, I’ll ring if I need you,’ she told him sharply, and out he went.
She returned to Maddox.
Although his skin was pale and clammy and his pulse still racing, he was desperate to be given the all clear. He seemed genuinely to want to fly, loved it, he said.
He screwed up his eyes when she pressed his abdomen. ‘Am I hurting you?’
‘No, no! Not at all!’
She decided it was embarrassment more than pain that made him close his eyes. Nevertheless, a raised temperature, violent sickness and some abdominal tension. His breath too smelled strange, but she couldn’t identify the smell.
‘Have you eaten anything unusual? Been out for a meal? Down to the pub?’
‘No, really, doc. It wasn’t anything I ate. It was that awful smell.’
‘But it hasn’t made the other two ill. They’re hale and hearty. So to be on the safe side, I’m going to admit you to Sick Quarters. At least for tonight.’
‘You can’t do that, doc! I’m on ops this afternoon.’
‘I’m sorry. You were on ops this afternoon. As of now you’re not!’
‘Please, doc! Have another think.’ He put a grubby hand on her arm. ‘It’s not just me. It’s my crew! They’re terrific chaps. Frightfully keen. They’ll be furious!’
‘They’ll live with it.’ Flying Officer Stamford rang her bell. ‘Let’s get them in now and tell them.’
She might well have added ‘the good news’.
Rarely had she seen such spontaneous relief so quickly suppressed.
‘Scrub?’ the navigator managed to ask in a theatrically horrified voice.
‘Scrub the op?’ the gunner echoed in a similarly mendacious tone.
Poor young Maddox hadn’t noticed the relief. All he saw was their faces made lugubriously long.
‘I’m so sorry, men.’
Flying Officer Stamford eyed the trio curiously, wondering how on earth Peter Maddox could be so gullible, as she lifted the telephone to inform the Squadron office of her decision.
‘I keep telling the doc it was just that awful smell.’
‘What awful smell?’ the other two asked in unison.
‘I told you! Like hot castor oil.’
‘Nah!’ They laughed derisively, Horner adding, ‘No castor oil on board to smell. It’s never used these days.’
‘Haven’t smelt hot castor since working on the old DH 4s,’ the ginger-haired gunner laughed. ‘And they were obsolete years ago.’
But oddly enough, she suddenly remembered that smell of hot castor oil from an early model aircraft her brother had built. And strangely, that was what Peter Maddox’s breath had smelled of.
But after that, she didn’t give it another thought, because a few minutes later there was a quick knock on her door and in came Wing Commander Cavendish, hell-bent on reducing her to rubble.
First he tersely dismissed the two flight sergeants as if it were all their fault, and then he asked her what in God’s name she was playing at.
‘I’m playing at nothing, sir. I assume you’re referring to P/O Maddox and his sickness?’
‘Sickness my bloody foot! He needs to take a shower, change his uniform and get down to Flights.’ He turned and glowered at Maddox as if he had a mind to order him to do exactly that.
‘I am admitting him to Sick Quarters,’ Flying Officer Stamford said as steadily as she could. ‘And there he will stay.’
Alarmed by the raised voices, the chief medical orderly, Sergeant Tillotson, put his head round the door.
‘Come in, Sergeant.’ Flying Officer Stamford smiled slightly. ‘I was just about to ring for you. We have an in-patient. Would you take P/O Maddox along to the ward, please. He’s being admitted.’
Maddox gave his squadron commander an agonised apologetic glance as he shambled out like a whipped dog dragged off from his master.
As the door closed behind them, Cavendish was about to continue furiously when she held up her hand. ‘I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of one of your squadron, but let me make something clear from the outset. I will not have my medical opinion questioned by a layman. And certainly never in front of junior officers. Do you understand, sir?’
For a moment, Wing Commander Cavendish looked at her with total disbelief. Then he recovered and countered sharply, ‘And do you understand the trouble involved in sending a replacement crew at this late stage?’
‘I do. But it’s irrelevant. In my medical opinion, Maddox shouldn’t go. The rest is expediency.’
‘Good grief, woman! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! Haven’t I explained to you about morale?’
‘The word is scarcely off your lips, sir.’
Suddenly she began to enjoy herself. All her young life she had had to put up with the overbearing, woman-despising attitude of her father. All her life she had wanted to unburden herself of her antagonism to him and all he stood for, had fantasised about exactly what she would say to him given the opportunity and the courage.
Well, now she had the opportunity and the courage. She was well rehearsed. She knew exactly what to say.
The Wing Commander listened. Then he said quite calmly, ‘Now you’ve got till that off your chest, listen to me. Squadron morale is Number One priority.’
‘Station health is mine.’
‘They go together. But morale is Number One.’
‘That could be argued.’
‘Not with me. I don’t argue. I say what is and what has to be done.’ Then, holding up his hand at her indignant exclamation, he continued. ‘If it gets around that any little bellyache or cut finger can get you off ops, we’ll have half the squadron reporting sick.’
‘That doesn’t say much for your morale,’ and while he was reeling furiously from that, she administered the coup de grace. ‘For all I know, Maddox may have something infectious, some gastro-enteritis bug. Neglect that, sir, and we may have to ground the whole squadron.’
‘I’m duty crew, so the logical one to go if wee Maddox is sick,’ MacGregor told the still angry Wing Commander fifteen minutes later.
‘The logical one not to go,’ Cavendish replied irritably. ‘I’ve got too few seasoned pilots as it is. And anyway, it wouldn’t be fair on the new chaps. They’re raring to go.’
MacGregor raised a cynical eyebrow, but said nothing. For the first time in his flying career he felt relief at not being allowed to go on an op.
‘But, sir—’ he felt impelled nevertheless to protest.
‘But nothing, Angus! Shut up and get cracking!’
Again he felt relief. Why? Suddenly he remembered his batwoman’s worried face and then her smile and her remark, ‘I’m glad you’re not flying today.’
Ye Gods, what was it coming to when a howling dog and a superstitious young girl could rob a MacGregor of his famous nerve?
Cavendish and he briefly debated who should go in Maddox’s place, and in the end F/Sergeant Nash got the short straw.
Now again, why should he think of it as that? When he was selected for his first op, sure he was terrified, but he was also greatly honoured and, as Cavendish had said, raring to go.
MacGregor had a quick word with Nash and his crew and if they weren’t raring, they gave a good imitation of it.
‘Poor Peter,’ Nash said, pale-faced but smiling. ‘If you see him, give him our commiserations. Tell him there’s always another one!’
From Flying Control, MacGregor watched them take off into a light blue sky streaked with thin grey cumulo-stratus. Slade first. Beautiful take-off as usual. Then one after the other – P/O Fox, P/O Knight, Sergeant Jessel and, finally, F/Sergeant Nash.
MacGregor said their names aloud for some reason, like an incantation. He watched them form up, neatly and competently, the cold sun, the colour of egg-white, winking on their windscreens.
His own spirits began to rise. The operation was a comparatively easy one – an attack on the barges lying waiting for the invasion in the Scheldt estuary. Slade would take good care of them. They’d be home again within a few hours with that vital first op tucked under their belts. And squadron morale would begin to rise thereafter.
If it hadn’t been for that damned dog and that slight worry about his own nerve, he’d have been fine.
So after he’d seen their departures chalked up in the appropriate boxes on the big blackboard, he left Flying Control and allowed himself the indulgence of a brisk walk which took him in the direction from which the howling seemed to have come.
In his own mind he was sure it was a live dog and, poor sod, that it might well be in some sort of trouble. He knew a fair amount about dogs, had always had one at his heels, and from that howl he reckoned it was a retriever of some sort. Oddly enough, as he thought about it, he had a clear vision of what it looked like. A brown retriever, he felt sure of that, though how one could be sure of an animal’s colour from a howl, God alone knew.
He whistled to himself as he walked along, circling Flights in a southerly direction and avoiding the wet grass by continuing along the perimeter track till he came to the barbed wire that separated the Station from the turnip and potato fields of the nearest farm. Here the straggling village began and there was a cluster of cottages, a haybarn and cattle shelter.
Reaching it, MacGregor stepped over the barbed wire and began to whistle for the dog – the low insistent whistle that a dog could hear for miles. Then he found himself calling its name. The name, like the colour, sprang into his mind without him thinking about it.
‘Sam,’ he called. ‘Sam!’
A man working in the potato field paused a moment, glanced towards him and continued.
No one and nothing else stirred. He could hear a rooster somewhere, and the cry of gulls – but no dog barked, and no dog appeared.
And yet, as he turned away, he had the sudden certainty that a dog followed at his heels. Twice he turned.
But there was nothing there.
MacGregor was in Flying Control again twenty minutes before the Blenheims’ estimated time of arrival back at base.
The minutes ticked by as they all stared at those empty boxes on the blackboard in the column headed ‘Actual Time of Arrival’.
‘Should be in the circuit any minute now,’ the Flying Control Officer said, and glancing questioningly at the airmen on the W/T consoles, then the two Waafs on the R/T, ‘Anything?’
The airmen shook their heads.
‘Nothing, sir,’ said the Corporal Waaf.
‘Try them again.’
‘Bunter Zebra… this is Marigold Control. Are you receiving me?’
The loudspeaker was switched on, but all that came over, magnified and eerie, was the static. A static that howled and chattered as if about to start up a human call.
After twenty minutes MacGregor could stand it no longer. He walked out onto the balcony. He lit a cigarette. Twice he thought he heard the throb of distant engines in the east, but they came no nearer, turned into the desynchronised beat of German aircraft, several of them by the sound, making for London.
He went back inside.
Wing Commander Cavendish and Group Captain Hurst had now arrived, huddled inside their greatcoats. They waved away the mugs of coffee the W/T operator offered them, stood with their arms folded, their eyes flicking from the blackboard to the clock creaking away the minutes on the wall.
Overdue. By five minutes, by ten, by fifteen.
‘Try calling them up again.’ The Flying Control Officer told the R/T Waaf.
‘Hello, Bunter… Zebra… Bunter Dog… Bunter Orange…’
Still nothing.
The Waaf on the telephone had been ringing around other RAF stations in the hope that the aircraft had diverted.
None of them had been contacted. No messages had been heard on Darkie, the emergency message receiver.
An hour later, a tight-lipped Cavendish rang Group and reported all five Blenheims missing.