The bad weather held its grip on Marshfield. A seemingly immovable low pressure area sat over the Western approaches, blanketing the south coast in mizzly rain and mist.
Flying Officer Simon Wetherby, the Station padre, looked out of his office window and was glad of it. Thirteen Squadron had made such a miserable start to its operations that any respite in them was a mercy. Hamstrung too by their lack of aircraft, it was bound to be a while before he would have to watch those Blenheims taking off, reassure some young girl who had formed an attachment with one or other of the crews, refuse as politely as possible Wing Commander Cavendish’s request that he wave off the bombers with a hand raised in blessing, and then wait like the rest of the Station to hear how many returned.
Worst of all, of course, was when they didn’t return. Already only a few weeks into his sojourn on an operational station, he was finding it hard to reconcile patriotism and the prosecution of all-out war with even his rather watered-down brand of Christianity.
Mercifully he had not had to conduct the funeral service over Bates and his crew. At their relatives’ requests, their coffins had been sent back to their homes for burial, with strict instructions to the local undertakers that they must, for security reasons, remain closed, filled as they were with sand and burned bones. But the padre had had to talk to the relatives on the telephone and those calls had tested his nerve and his conscience.
It was after them that he began to suspect he had made a mistake in joining up.
‘Why did you?’ His new-found friend, the Intelligence Officer Mark Pringle, asked him that same evening as they sat in the bar of the Stars and Stripes, the shabby thatched pub on the edge of the village. ‘Why did you join up in the first place?’
Simon Wetherby had been drawn to Mark by his air of quiet competence, and their friendship had progressed through a shared loneliness. Neither of them was a hard-drinking, press-on type. They drank the occasional half pint of beer together in a corner of the Mess bar while the hard drinkers and the young boys chug-a-lugged endless tankards, or walked upside down on the ceiling with blackened feet.
Mark, as Intelligence Officer, knew the crews well and was highly respected, but Simon Wetherby, with his flat feet, shambling gait and owlish spectacles, was not. Nevertheless, under Mark’s wing, he was tolerated.
‘Why did I join up?’ Simon Wetherby held his half-pint glass in both his hands and stared into it. ‘Munich, I suppose. I felt guilty about Munich. We had a treaty, we should have honoured it. Chamberlain was wrong. It wasn’t Peace with Honour. It was Peace with Dishonour. Besides,’ he shot his friend a naive, apologetic glance, ‘I didn’t like the parish I was in. And they didn’t like me!’
Mark Pringle laughed, and then his rather ascetic face clouded over. ‘I joined for less noble reasons.’
He sat back in his chair, a hard polished Windsor chair, and glanced around at the shabby brown Lincrusta walls, the dartboard set askew, the wooden bar in which was set a demijohn of pickled eggs, and behind which stood a mournful-looking bartender with a drooping walrus moustache. There was only one other drinker besides themselves, a man with a great beer belly sitting on a bar stool talking in whispers to the bartender.
‘I joined up,’ Mark Pringle said, ‘primarily because my wife left me.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The padre avoided looking at him. He himself had no experience of women and no way with them at all. He liked them all right, but like someone who couldn’t eat rich foods, they didn’t like him.
‘She left me for someone else. One of my Cambridge colleagues, no less. Working on the same project.’
‘Very hard to forgive.’
‘Impossible. I don’t even try. Nor did I try to live with it. I left Cambridge.’
‘But you could have been reserved.’
‘So could you. So could a number of the boys on the squadron.’ He smiled. ‘And it wasn’t a very important project. I was in the foothills of nuclear physics. Not up there with the Powells and the Rutherfords. I reckon I’m more use here.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You’re good for morale.’ But he said it without conviction.
‘Not according to the Wingco.’
‘The Wingco’s a hard man to please.’
‘Too press-on regardless,’ Simon Wetherby agreed.
‘Yes, well, don’t let’s talk about him in a public bar.’ Mark Pringle suddenly became careless talk conscious, not because either of the two locals in the bar was liable to be an enemy agent, but because, with encouragement from Simon, he might have said too much about a subject that vexed his conscience – insufficiently trained youngsters being sent to their deaths.
He drained his glass, reached over and picked up the padre’s. ‘Same again? My shout this.’
Wetherby nodded. As always the unaccustomed drink made him feel light-headed, made him forget his own feelings of inadequacy for the job, made him forget Cavendish’s hostility. Owlishly he smiled across at the man with the beer belly, who raised his glass and said, ‘Your good health, Rev.’
‘And yours, good sir!’
‘Bloody awful weather if you’ll pardon my French, Rev.’
‘It is indeed.’
So they had just got on speaking terms when the bar door opened and in came F/Lt MacGregor, a tall brawny Scot with, in the padre’s opinion, a strangely divided personality.
‘Why halloo!’ MacGregor assumed a shocked expression along with his false Glasgow accent. ‘So this is where you hide yourself, padre! And you, Mark!’ He put his hand on Pringle’s shoulder as he stood at the bar. ‘Away with you, man!’ He thumped his other hand down on the counter. ‘Put that wallet back where it belongs, the drinks are on me.’
The man with the beer belly and the bartender brightened. But then MacGregor, at his best, had that effect.
‘Bring your chairs closer up to the fire,’ invited the man with the beer belly,
‘Aye,’ said MacGregor, ‘into the body of the kirk.’
And immediately they were forming a cosy circle round the small wood fire.
‘Deoch slainte!’ MacGregor raised his glass. ‘Your good health!’
‘Good health and good luck to you!’ said the man with the beer belly.
‘So what d’you reckon to Marshfield?’ the bartender asked, wiping the beer foam off his walrus moustache.
‘Och, I’m glad you asked, squire. I like it fine. Next best place to bonny Scotland. Scotch mist, you’ve heard of that. Home from home.’
They all laughed.
The man with the beer belly said, ‘The lads before you liked it.’
MacGregor opened his eyes wide and questioningly. ‘And who might they be, squire?’
‘The Yanks.’
‘That’s going back a wee bit isn’t it, squire?’
‘Last war. The Great War. A fine memorial to them in the churchyard. Well worth looking at, Rev.’
‘And were you around then, squire?’ MacGregor enquired.
‘I were a lad. But around. I’ll tell you something else. I built some of them hedges round the field.’
‘They’re still going strong.’
‘I knew my trade.’
‘Tell me,’ Mark asked, ‘what did the Yanks fly?’
‘Why, DH 4s. Biplanes. Saw them fly in from that window. Smelled ’em, too! The castor oil, you know.’
‘Castor oil?’ MacGregor queried.
‘To grease the pistons. D’you remember that, Wilf?’ he turned to the bartender.
‘Don’t remember the castor oil. But I remember the Yanks.’
‘Did you work here then?’ Simon asked the bartender.
‘Oh, aye. Sweeper and washer-up. I got the lease ten years back.’
‘Wilf’s risen in the world!’ The man with the beer belly winked. ‘From pot-boy to landlord.’
‘The Yanks were OK,’ Wilf went on. ‘Open-handed. Democratic. The CO used to sit in that very chair you’re sitting in now, Rev. The young lad, the last one to come and the last one to go, Robinson his name. He sat on that stool just under there, where we’ve got the dartboard now.’
‘I remember him,’ the man with the beer belly said. ‘A funny little lad with fair hair. Captain Shea, the CO, took him under his wing, looked after him like a dad. The lad was supposed to be eighteen, but we wondered, didn’t we?’
‘That’s right. An’ they always brought their dog. Lay in front of the fire. Never moved till they moved.’
‘What sort of dog?’ MacGregor asked, frowning.
‘Retriever, I reckon. Wouldn’t you say, Wilf? A retriever.’
‘Aye.’
‘Have any of them ever been back?’ Mark asked.
‘Back?’ Wilf and the hedger laughed sardonically.
‘No, mate. Never,’ said the hedger. ‘Couldn’t. All killed. In some famous attack. Right at the end of the war. Made all the difference, that attack, they say. But they were all shot down. Not one of them was left. And the dog just disappeared.’
A silence followed, broken only by the sizzling of the logs. Wilf and the hedger drained their glasses and set them down noisily and hopefully.
‘I know,’ said the hedger determined to prolong the encounter. ‘You got a photo somewhere of the Yanks, Wilf? Used to be up there over the bar where you’ve got them paper hop-bines. Where did you put it?’
‘At the back somewhere.’
‘Well, get it, Wilf! Get off your backside! The RAF gents’d like to see it.’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’ MacGregor got out his wallet. ‘And let’s have another round. No, I’m in the chair still! And who’s for pickled eggs?’
The hedger was. ‘He’s a right slackarse is Wilf,’ he said through mouthfuls of egg as the licensee disappeared behind to do his bidding and there came the sound of drawers being opened and papers riffled through. ‘But he never throws anything out, so it’s bound to turn up.’
A moment later Wilf returned carrying an old and fading photograph, torn at the corners where it had been pinned to the wall.
‘There they are! All of them, God rest their souls, as you might say, Rev! In front of a DH 4. Signed their names for us. Nice-looking bunch.’
He handed over the photograph. MacGregor, Simon and Mark pored over it.
They saw fourteen airmen, all but two looking disconcertingly young. They could just as easily have been 13 Squadron, only they wore the brown drab of the US Air Force.
MacGregor read the names aloud: ‘Captain Shea, Kingsland, Rex, Gallagher, Mitchell, Bateman, Womack, Hollingsworth, Grodecki, Virgin, Mackay, Hartman, Martin and Robinson.’
In front of them was a retriever. He knew instinctively that it was brown.
‘A Chesapeake retriever,’ Angus MacGregor said softly.
‘Now that’s right. Fancy you knowing that! Now I remember!’ the hedger exclaimed, ‘That’s what the Yanks said it was.’
‘You’ll be telling us next you know its name,’ Wilf said, drawing deeply on his tankard.
‘Sam,’ MacGregor said. ‘His name was Sam.’
Wilf laughed and wiped his moustache and said, ‘You’ve been having us on. You knew all along. Someone told you.’
‘I also know,’ MacGregor said, ‘there’s a dog hangs round the airfield now. I’ve heard it myself.’
And that wiped the smile off their faces.
Two days later, the smile was wiped off Mark Pringle’s face. Not unduly suspicious by nature, for if he had been, how could his wife have so successfully deceived him, he was becoming increasingly suspicious of Group and the role for which they had earmarked Marshfield and 13 Squadron. Now he held in his hand a signal from Group which had just been decoded. A copy of the decoded signal was to be forwarded to the Wing Commander Engineering and to the Squadron Leader Armament Officer.
If one didn’t ask the question why, on the face of it this was good news, indeed an answer to Cavendish’s prayers or rather his expostulations, and would cause the Wing Commander and the Group Captain considerable rejoicing.
The signal stated that the first two of the six replacement Blenheims would arrive at Marshfield in three days’ time and that, weather permitting, a special training programme was to be embarked upon immediately, while at the same time the squadron would remain on the Battle Order.
Big stuff. But why? Mark Pringle wondered. Why?
The aircraft, it seemed, were to be new ones fresh from the Bristol factory. These had been fitted with extra fuel tanks to increase range, and with the newest Fraser-Nash turret as well as the usual .303 Brownings.
Why? Mark Pringle wondered again.
He had another, very important ‘why’ to add to those. One that surely must have engaged the minds of his superiors at Group and Command: why had all five Blenheims perished on that first operation? On what should have been a fairly routine stooge job attacking the invasion barges. Pringle couldn’t get out of his mind the fact that 13, because it was their first baptism of fire, had been given the easier target, the handful of barges up towards the Scheldt. They had apparently all been wiped out, while the more experienced Wellington crews, attacking a more difficult target at a more difficult height, had returned to base relatively unscathed.
So this further question must be asked. Had those five aircraft stumbled unwittingly on something else?
If so, what?
Furthermore, had Group any suspicion that they might?
His keen intelligence officer’s mind went squirrelling round that suspicion. It was bad enough to try to read the mind of a madman like Hitler without having also to try to read the inscrutable mind of one’s own Group. And Europe now was just a vast, dark fortress with every port and estuary and creek marked with black swastikas.
There were, thankfully, scatterings of pro-Ally resistance groups throughout enemy-held territory, but these were as yet not well organised, and insufficient intelligence was getting through.
Tactful enquiries from his opposite number at Group elicited little except that 13 should thank its lucky stars they were being equipped with new aircraft. Not only the first two aircraft would be arriving forthwith, but the possibility of further replacements in double-quick time.
Had Group some special interest in Marshfield? Pringle got as far as asking. And, yes, came back the jovial reply. One only had to look at the map to understand the reason. Perched on Romney Marsh, eyeball to eyeball with that coast which the enemy now occupied from the Arctic Circle to sunny Spain, Marshfield’s position was what interested Group.
‘And 13 Squadron rejoices in a very press-on Wing Commander,’ Pringle’s opposite number told him.
‘One,’ Pringle replied, but only to himself, ‘who has never been on a single operation.’
It didn’t take a master’s degree in physics to work out that excessive pressure from Group on an eager-to-succeed and inexperienced Wing Commander, himself leaning on an inexperienced and under-trained squadron, would sooner or later equate with the heavy loss of young life.
And then, the following morning, the WAAF Code and Cipher queen, a stern-faced widow in her thirties, put a message on his desk just for his information and interest.
It was from one of the few Resistance contacts on the Dutch-German border. It reported extraordinary activity around a previously unimportant port along the Scheldt. Workers had been bussed in. A makeshift landing-strip had been laid down, extra fighters moved into the area, guns hidden in a small woodland.
Pringle flicked through the maps of the area. Then he opened the filing cabinet and brought out the briefing map for 13’s first and fateful operation.
He ran his finger along the red line of their projected route, frowning. That route would have taken them to this now strangely active area. Their attention would have been focused on the barges, and on an operation that was unlikely to prove difficult. They would have been unprepared for a heavy and sudden fighter attack.
He brought the matter up at the afternoon’s Operations meeting. ‘Water under the bridge,’ Cavendish told him. ‘One of those things. You know better than I, Mark, you can’t place much reliance on these so-called intelligence reports.’
‘Sometimes it’s all we have.’
‘Even so. We must treat them with considerable scepticism.’
‘We do. But if there are extra fighters and signs of unusual activity…’
‘My dear fellow, there’s bound to be a great deal of coming and going in that area, now Der Tag is on hold. One day the fighters are there, the next they’re not. Maybe they’re getting geared up for Hitler’s new spring invasion. Maybe they’re up to other mischief. Got their sights on somewhere else. Meanwhile we can’t have any fanciful theories. Our job is to get the crews trained onto the top line. Prepared for anything. Rarin’ to go. We can’t second-guess what lies behind operations. Now we’re getting new aircraft, that’s good news. Couldn’t be better! Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, old chap.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘We’re in business.’
‘And on ops again as soon as the weather clears?’
‘Exactly. It can’t come a moment too soon. Thirteen wants to be where the action is. I wouldn’t take that much notice,’ he snapped his fingers, ‘of that so-called intelligence. These well-meaning little chaps on the ground have no overall picture. They see an extra fighter, they see a few extra guns, and they’re tap-tap-tapping away.’
‘Sir?’ Pringle appealed to the Station Commander. ‘Do you think it might be important?’
‘Just a straw in the wind, dear boy, I would say. A straw in the wind.’
But a straw shows the way the wind is blowing, Mark Pringle told himself, giving up the unequal struggle, as he walked to the Officers’ Mess for a quiet beer and the relative calm of a chat with Simon Wetherby.
But Simon had his own cross to bear. His cross, too, bore Cavendish’s imprint…
‘He nearly blew me out of the chapel office,’ he moaned into his half pint.
‘What was it this time?’
‘The same as before. Not pulling my weight for morale. Told you he thought that. Asked me if I didn’t know there was a war to be won. Gave me a few texts which he thought I should weave into my next sermon, and told me he expected me to be waving at the end of the runway for the next op.’
‘And you told him what?’
‘That I would think about it. And he told me that our Group padre – I knew this of course – had no difficulty whatever in reconciling blessing the bombers with his ideas of Christianity.’
‘He wouldn’t have,’ Pringle said, and smiled. ‘Anyway, it’ll be a while yet, I hope.’
‘He also told me to scotch any rumours about the dog. Interesting, I thought, in view of what we heard at the pub.’
‘You don’t believe the rumour?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just a silly superstition.’
Pringle nodded. It struck him as ironic that a man who not only believed in Christianity, but who felt able to dedicate his whole life to it, could despise superstition. For wasn’t Christianity ninety-five per cent superstition? Its whole vast edifice built on a two thousand-year-old story of a dead man rolling away a stone, and getting lifted up bodily to heaven, on a handful of so-called miracles – water into wine, loaves and fishes multiplying, someone in a coma suddenly rousing? Incomprehensible!
‘You see, if I thought it would actually help the boys, I would go and wave them off. But at the same time I keep thinking, how can God be in a bombing mission? How can He possibly want me to bless that?’
‘If you think Hitler is evil, then I suppose you might just. Always supposing you believe in God in the first place.’
He scooped up the glasses and went up to the bar for refills, and when he returned Simon, to get away from his own troubled career, began asking him about his work at Cambridge.
So Cambridge was on Pringle’s mind when he went to bed. His heavy sleep was filled with vivid, fragmentary dreams of Cambridge. Not about his wife or her paramour, strangely enough. But about work, about people he hadn’t thought of for years, about their work on atoms and nuclear fission and, overlaying it all, Rutherford’s announcement three years before the war began: ‘Gentlemen, remember the genie is now out of the bottle.’
Why should he so suddenly and vividly remember that? Why should his overworked subconscious be telling him that?
He dismissed both the dreams and his questioning of his subconscious with several cups of strong coffee, and a plateful of gristly sausages and reconstituted dried egg, before walking briskly to the Section. Water still streamed down the window-panes and gurgled in the gulleys.
Amongst all the bumf on his desk which he gradually worked through was another Intelligence flimsy, this time via Group and already decoded. Its source, a small enclave in the Norwegian underground. This was clearly a further info to one which Group in its wisdom had received some weeks ago but had not thought worth communicating to Marshfield. It said that the plant previously mentioned was now in operation, that its output was not just the deuterium oxide, but other components of The Project. And that a large armed merchantman was taking on supplies.
Deuterium oxide, that rang an ominous bell. And the armed merchantman? Could that be the strange vessel, neither tanker nor cargo, which MacGregor had glimpsed? It now had a name – the Derflinger – according to Group.
Pringle walked over to his maps. The enclave was at the head of an unimportant fjord. The village, originally a fishing and logging community, with behind it a small mine and a hydro-electric installation.
That was all. And yet putting those three pieces of the jigsaw together, his mind was already beginning to envisage a terrifying scenario.
If he had been a praying man he would have prayed earnestly that he was wrong.
Over in the Parachute Section, Pam was praying for the bad weather to hold. Ginger, she was telling the other girls, was about to come to the boil. A few more dates and who knew?
The news that replacement Blenheims would soon be arriving had been greeted philosophically by the packers. It meant 13 Squadron was on the up and up. The boys got browned off with kicking their heels, and even if ops did mean less time for dates, they looked forward to the big achievements promised by Wing Commander Cavendish. Some of the simpler even believed that 13 would become, as he had assured them, the crack squadron of the RAF.
‘And then we’ll see bags of action,’ one girl said.
‘Bags of casualties,’ piped up someone else.
Then Ginger came in, and they all shut up.
All except Pam of course.
‘Well, well, well!’ she said. ‘Look what the wind’s blown in! Haven’t they got you boys doing anything useful to keep you out of mischief?’
‘We’ve just been to a lecture.’
‘What was it this time? Flower arranging?’
‘Air-to-ship gunnery and ship recognition. Some bloody ship called the Derflinger that Group’s having a love affair with.’
He watched her admiringly as her deft fingers stowed the lines of a parachute, then the canopy, and then rammed the pins of the rip cord home. Silently he prayed he’d never have to use one of them, but that if he did, it would be one she’d packed.
‘They’re putting on an extra flick at the cinema tonight, Pam. Thought you might like to come.’
‘What is it?’
‘Goodbye, Mr Chips.’
‘Goodbyes are all we ever get,’ she began to say and then thought better of it. She wished she hadn’t even thought it. It was too true. Ships that pass in the night. Here today and gone tomorrow. Hell!
‘OK then,’ she said instead.
‘Jack wants to make it a foursome.’
‘Suits me. So long as you bag the back seats first. And supposing Pip says yes.’
Pip agreed reluctantly. She would much rather have gone for a walk even in the wet, and she was reluctant to sit, slapping Jack’s hand while Pam giggled and wriggled in response to Ginger’s.
In the event, she didn’t have to do that. Jack didn’t even try anything of the sexy stuff, except to slip an arm comfortably round her shoulder, much needed because the camp cinema was just a concrete block of a building, hastily thrown up last year, and the damp and the cold seeped in. The floor was concrete too, but there were thinly upholstered tip-up seats and the back row was like a long bench, where couples could get astonishingly far advanced in their courtships.
Pam had secured four places, reserving the best, the most intimate ones against the far wall, for Ginger and herself.
The film was sweet and sentimental. The strange thing was that Jack seemed to be the one most absorbed by it.
Ginger, in Jack’s presence, behaved at first with decorum, then, egged on by Pam, they began their heavy breathing and squirming.
The projector broke down only once, which was a record. A group of rowdies at the front yelled and stamped as the film went into a crazy overdrive, but the projectionist got it going again in minutes and the lights didn’t go up, which saved Pam’s blushes.
Then, just before the weepy end, big handwritten letters appeared on the screen: ‘Enemy Aircraft in the Vicinity, Take Cover, Take Cover’, and that time up went all the lights.
Pam hastily pulled down her skirt and buttoned up her tunic, and there were lots of other girls doing the same.
A tannoy announcement filled the auditorium: ‘This is an Alert. All personnel not on essential duty proceed to the air raid shelters.’
‘Number Three round the corner’s the best,’ Pam said, ‘isn’t it, Ginge? Floor’s quite dry, doesn’t smell hardly at all.’
‘Who could ask more?’ Jack smiled and began pushing towards the exit. Pip followed. And then as she looked down the rows of emptying seats, she saw Maddox two rows farther down, standing alone, not like a young RAF officer, but like a child abandoned.
She called to him. He turned his head, and then she saw the silly little blighter had been crying.
‘We’re going to Number Three shelter,’ she called. ‘Come on! Come with us! Look slippy.’
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ Horner hissed in her ear, as they all shoved into Number Three and Pam burrowed ahead of them and, practised air raid shelter enthusiast that she was, got them all seats in the darkness.
‘What did you bring him along for?’ Horner hissed again in Pip’s ear.
It was difficult to talk because the Bofors guns all round the airfield were banging away and spent cartridges kept rattling down. There was the distant crump of bombs, but trust Jack, he didn’t seem to give a damn about the outside effects, he just continued seething about Maddox sitting on the other side of her.
‘I felt sorry for him,’ she whispered back into Jack’s ear.
‘You’re wasting your sorrow,’ he whispered back.
Then suddenly she laughed out loud.
She couldn’t tell Jack what she was laughing at. But the clueless little clot, the cheeky little lad who wept at sad films, had got his hot little hand on her knee.
She let it rest there for a count of three, and then she lifted it firmly and put it back where it belonged. No words were exchanged.
And not many words did she exchange with Jack for the next few days. Cavendish kept them all busy with lectures and shooting practice and even a squadron gas drill.
The new aircraft arrived, and that tempted Jack Horner down to Flights to inspect the new toys. He was still a bit sulky about Maddox tagging along to the air raid shelter, but he was keen to look over the new aircraft. Like Pringle, he was intrigued by the two outer wing tanks, each holding an extra 94 gallons of fuel.
‘What d’you make of them?’ Pip asked, watching his face.
‘They’ll let our boy wonder have a bit more time in the air.’
‘Seriously.’
He shrugged. ‘We’re going farther in.’
‘To Germany?’
‘Where else? Or spending more time looking.’
‘For what?’
‘Ah, there you have me, love! Looking for trouble, I suppose.’
He laughed.
She gave a pretty fair imitation of a laugh herself.
The appearance of Ginger interrupted that brief conversation. Ginger was keen to get into the new turret, to try the foot pedals and the twist grip handles, and have a look at the gun sight.
Walking back to the Waafery, Pip felt a sudden wind in her face, saw the sky was clearing, the overcast melting away.
The bad weather respite was over.