Pringle immediately regretted his brusqueness to the padre but he had no opportunity to smooth his ruffled feathers, and indeed he doubted he would have the sophistry so to do. A Christian conscience was such a superstitious luxury at this moment. He doubted he would know the right words to span the divide between it and the emerging nuclear world.
For here it was taking shape in front of his very eyes. As a student, cycling in Italy and Greece during the long vac at Cambridge, he remembered seeing distantly out on the horizon over the Aegean the eerie black funnel of a sea trumpet taking swift shape. He had barely time to reach shelter before it struck the coast, sucking everything up in its path – waves, trees, tables, tents, chairs, cars, bicycles.
That had been a brief meteorological interruption. But this thing that was as certainly taking shape might be the end of everything.
Three days after his conversation with Simon, 13 Squadron was placed on the Battle Order again. Although no op was yet on the cards, that in itself argued some urgency. Maintenance were working flat out to repair the damage sustained during the raids, the equipment officer was going mad in his search for spare parts from maintenance units all over the country, and the low-level gunnery practice was still continuing.
Not that the crews minded the practice. As MacGregor remarked, it was better them sitting on their bottoms waiting for what Group would dream up next, but it played ducks and drakes with getting the aircraft on top line.
The weather was still moist and heavy. November mists had given way to cold December sleet and rain. And with the typical muddle-headedness of the RAF, the penguins, that is the chairborne brigade, led by the SAdO, decided that since December was here, Christmas should now be on the Station menu. There was nothing, the SAdO declared, like Christmas preparations to raise morale.
He set about badgering a morose and unenthusiastic Simon Wetherby to suggest something especially Christmassy. The padre’s suggestions were dolefully unenlightening. In fact ever since the shooting down of the Me 109 the padre had been especially doleful and unenlightening. So the SAdO had perforce to dream up most of the Christmas programme himself, with the help of the Queen Bee, who was an overgrown schoolgirl at heart and liked that sort of thing.
There would have to be a Christmas service of course, but best not to make it a compulsory parade. A crib in the chapel and others in the various Messes. That would give the chippies and the wallahs in the paint shop something to keep them out of mischief. Dances in all the Messes too, and a tree beside the flagpole, with decorations on the grass beside it, each Section being told to make a contribution for it.
‘Why so keen all of a sudden for a walk?’ Jack Horner asked Pip in a mixture of suspicion and hope after Maddox had landed them brutally and bouncily at the end of a low flying practice at fifteen hundred hours that December afternoon. ‘I’ve hardly got an unbroken bone left in my body.’
‘Well, lots of reasons why,’ she answered, ‘and your bones look all right to me.’ She seized his hand. ‘Feel all right, too. It wasn’t that bad a landing. I saw it.’
‘Landings, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. You’re biased towards the little bastard.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘So why d’you want to walk?’
‘Goodness!’ she sighed, putting her hands to her waist and stretching her muscles. ‘Why do I want to walk, eh lad? I’ve been bent double over S-Sugar all day. Since seven hundred hours. I’m off shift now. I just waited to see you in. I need a change. I need to stretch my legs. Besides, I want to collect things.’
‘All right. Such as what?’ Jack asked, deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth. If she’d got around to suggesting walks, who knew where that might lead? And though his pragmatic self told him, not far, he repeated less suspiciously, ‘Such as what?’
‘Such as materials for Christmas.’
‘Jesus!’ he turned his eyes up to heaven. ‘Women!’
‘No, not women,’ she told him, wriggling out of her overalls. ‘The SAdO! Chiefie just this minute told me. We’re having a tree by the flagpole outside SHQ.’
‘Lit up, I suppose, so that the Hun can get a better aim.’
‘No. Not lit up. But decorated by each Section. I’ll enjoy that. I’m a dab hand at making stuff out of nothing.’
‘I believe you are,’ he told her fervently, as they set off together to walk towards the Napoleonic canals. ‘I believe you could even make something out of me.’
She eyed him sideways, frowning. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re nothing, Jack Horner?’
‘As good as.’
‘Then you’re stupider than I thought!’ She sounded monstrously angry. ‘Don’t you ever dare say that to me again! And don’t dare think it! Mind,’ her brows smoothed, ‘I know you don’t really think it.’
‘Not always,’ he admitted, smiling.
‘Sometimes you reckon you’re a hell of a navigator.’
‘Not very often.’
‘A dead eye on the guns when you get the chance.’
‘Possibly.’
‘That you’d make a really good pilot.’
‘Not really good. Just about a hundred times better than Maddox.’
‘Oh, shut up about Maddox!’ she said. ‘Let’s forget him for now. I want to enjoy the walk.’ She breathed deeply of the mossy, marshy smell of the dykes. ‘There are so many things you’re good at, Jack.’
‘Tell me one,’ he said, catching her hand and slipping it through his arm.
‘Well, you told me one yourself,’ she laughed. ‘You make a perfect iron hexagon!’
She turned and held up her face for him to kiss her.
‘And I have,’ he said, ‘a near-perfect way with women.’
Alas, too perfect! Too perfectly gentlemanly. It was a kiss and no more, and there was no way walking along the dykes, outlined against the fading sky, that anything more exciting or intimate than a kiss could take place. Besides, the ground was soggy, the dykes full of black water, hazardous enough for gathering the materials for Pip’s Christmas creativity without bringing in sex.
The greatest hazard was snatching the bulrushes, the ones with the great brown torpedo-like heads which could be made into marvellous displays, Pip said, using silver aircraft paint. Some of the fitters had already begun on making stars out of broken bits of Perspex and angels from Duralumin.
‘I can’t wait to see all this,’ he said. ‘Roll on Christmas!’
They returned to camp via the Waafery with an armful of the bulrushes and branches of hazel which already showed next spring’s tiny pinky-green catkins. Those catkins were like seeing the rainbow, a promise of better times to come.
And why not? Why not better times this very evening? Before whatever tomorrow might bring. ‘How about us going in on the Liberty bus to Marshfield?’ he suggested.
‘Tonight?’
‘Why not? We’re free tonight. But they’ve just pinned up a warning we’re on ops tomorrow.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Give me time to clean up.’
‘All right. We can just do it. See you at the guardroom. Seven-thirty.’
He stood at the gate of the Waafery, watching her disappear with her armful of rushes and hazel branches.
She turned at the corner of one of the Nissens and waved. Then the semi-darkness swallowed her up.
Thankfully Pip saw that Pam had made down her bed for her. She laid her harvest carefully on the topmost brown hairy blanket, and turned to Bronwen, the only other occupant of the hut at that moment.
‘Be a love will you, Bronwen, and see no one swipes it.’
‘I will if you’ll win me a bit of Perspex from the hangar.’
‘OK. What’re you going to make?’ she asked, busily unlacing her shoes, and taking off her jacket.
‘It’s not me. It’s Johnny. He’s going to make me a ring.’
‘Oh, that’s lovely! Really romantic. Have you two clicked?’
‘Yes. He’s ever so keen. He’s making plans. The Wingco says he might give him a job as a footman come the end of the war.’
‘Lucky you! Nice work if you can get it, eh? Roll on civvy street!’
‘Amen to that.’ Bronwen sighed, and then offered, ‘Want me to rub up your buttons while you’re getting ready?’
‘Oh, please!’ Pip threw her jacket to Bronwen, and fled out of the hut, across the soggy grassy field to the ablutions block. The bath-water was just off cold, but bearable. She had managed to buy a cake of Imperial Leather soap from the NAAFI and she had also queued for another tiny bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. Those aids to feminine appeal, plus her parachute knickers and her cochineal lipstick, made her feel quite close to the million dollars of the movies.
‘Hope you have fun!’ Bronwen wished her, as she watched Pip carefully brushing and arranging her short, springy hair.
But what was called the Exigencies of the Service dictated otherwise. At that moment, the door of the hut burst open. In came one of the SHQ runners, the message carriers, red-faced with the exertion of cycling up from Flights. ‘LACW Armitage?’
‘That’s me!’
‘You’re wanted at Flights! At the double!’
‘Did Chiefie say why?’
‘No. Just to come. Bring your overalls.’
‘Oh, no!’ Pip folded up the man’s boiler suit that did duty for overalls, stuffed it in her respirator case, and set off.
At the main guardroom she left a message for Jack Horner and just past the guardroom she managed to flag down a petrol bowser going towards Flights.
‘Looks to me like tomorrow’s a maximum effort,’ the driver told her as she climbed up into the passenger seat. ‘Bags of hundred octane on the indents. A bit of a flap on.’
‘There’s always a bit of a flap on.’
‘You’re right there.’
‘Sorry to drag you back, hinny!’ Chiefie Chalmers apologised when the bowser dropped her off at Flights. ‘The Wingco now reckons he needs S-Sugar as well.’
Pip blew out her cheeks in an exasperated sigh.
‘It’s a big do. The bugger said we were to work all night if necessary.’
‘Well, it won’t be, I don’t suppose.’
‘No. But I didn’t tell him that. He likes to think the great unwashed are suffering.’
‘I’ll say he does! And so we are!’ She looked at her watch as she rolled up her sleeves. Jack would just about now be arriving at the guardroom, no doubt wondering if she’d changed her mind or had spent too long luxuriating in the half-cold bath. She hoped the corporal SP gave him the message, but SPs couldn’t always be relied upon.
However, he and Maddox and Ginger would probably be glad they’d have S-Sugar for tomorrow’s op. Though not the newest of aircraft, she was an old and familiar friend. Tonight, especially tonight, it gave her a funny feeling to be working on the rest of S-Sugar’s damage. There was a suspicious little pool of hydraulic fluid on the concrete. There were bullet holes on the port fuselage, perilously close to the pilot’s seat, and then there was a half-inch fracture inside a bend in a pipe leading to the starboard engine. Although she didn’t need it, everywhere under her hands was proof of how close to death Jack and Ginger and Maddox had been. The overwhelming feeling of thankfulness that they had survived so far gave way to overwhelming apprehension that tomorrow they had to go through it all again. And tomorrow, maybe the opposition would be worse. And would their luck hold for that?
‘What’s all this about a maximum effort, Chiefie?’ she asked him as he came up and stood watching her struggling with the unions.
But he just shrugged and walked away to look at the new tyres they’d put on yesterday.
It took half an hour to undo the wretched unions and do them up again after she had dealt with the pipe. When she’d finished, something made her look down and there was Jack, all done up in his best blue, with trousers pressed and untidy hair slicked down with Brylcreem.
She scrambled down. He caught her and they threw their arms round each other. Then she lifted his forage cap and ruffled his hair, and threw her arms round him again. ‘I mistook you for Ronald Colman,’ she said, ‘with your hair like that!’
Chiefie coughed loudly to show he was in earshot, but she didn’t care. All she could think was that here she was working on the proof that Jack had been within an inch or less of death, and here he was with her, till tomorrow at least, so wonderfully alive.
After a moment, Chiefie came up again, wiping his hands. ‘I gotta go over to L-London, have a dekko at how Corporal Lumb is working out. You can cope here, can’t you?’
It was his way of being nice to them.
Jack took off his tunic and got ready to work in his shirtsleeves. ‘Might as well see you do a proper job,’ he said, climbing up onto the Blenheim wing beside her.
With the beetle-backs, the engine cowlings, off, she was meticulously examining the long lengths of alloy tubing, hoping the tiny leak of fluid she had spotted on the concrete was from no more than a loose union.
After a long silence, she looked across at him and said, smiling apologetically, ‘Not much of a night out for you.’
For several minutes, he watched her as she concentrated on the lengths of alloy, testing the integrity of every union.
Then he said, slowly and weightily and with painful sincerity, ‘There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Nowhere I’d rather be. No one else I’d rather be with.’
She had found the guilty union and was apparently totally absorbed in tightening it. She didn’t trust herself to say anything in case she spoiled that most precious moment.
Then he went on, ‘Pip, I’ve got very fond of you. Very, very fond.’
She nodded and made a rough little noise in her throat, and then said thickly, ‘And I’m very fond of you.’
‘When we’ve finished on the kite, let’s go and have a coffee and a bite in the Sally Ann. Then we can talk, can’t we?’
‘About?’
‘About us.’
She felt a great lurch of excitement. She thought he was probably going to ask her to marry him, or perhaps because aircrew were funny about marrying in case they got the chop, to ask her to be engaged till the end of the war.
She nodded, reached across and squeezed his fingers. He took her hand in both of his. That in itself was a bit like an engagement, their hands solemnly joined over the wing of his aircraft.
It was nearly twenty-two hundred hours when they finished work on the aircraft. Just early enough to get coffee at the Sally Ann and maybe one of their doughnuts.
‘Back in two shakes.’ Pip jumped down onto the concrete and went into the Flights hut to take off her overall, wash her hands and face, take her comb and lipstick out of her respirator case and repair her appearance.
When she came out, she heard voices. Angry voices. And there was Maddox talking, if it could be called talking, to Jack Horner. They were both shouting and swearing and gesticulating at each other.
Jack was demanding to know why Maddox had appeared, why he was always bloody well appearing. He had been standing bemused under the wing, going over in his mind what he was going to say to Pip. He knew what he wanted to say, but talk of love and whatnot was alien to him, and he didn’t know how to put his very real sentiments into words.
Then he had heard Maddox trotting around, calling, ‘Pip? Are you there, Pip?’
And immediately his blood and his suspicions boiled over.
‘So why the hell have you come down here?’ Jack was yelling.
Maddox at first didn’t reply. He must have taken on a load in the Mess bar. His breath smelled like a glycol leak. He couldn’t keep steady on his feet.
Then he muttered, ‘I came because Pip asked me to. Didn’t you, darling?’
‘No!’ Pip said.
‘Yessh, you did!’
Maddox turned to her. As he did so he swayed and stumbled. To steady himself, he grabbed Pip’s arm.
And that did it.
Horner sprang forward with his fist clenched and with every intention of landing it on Maddox’s nose, officer or no officer. But faster than he, Pip grabbed his wrist.
‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘No, don’t hit him! Please don’t hit him!’
All she could think of was, strike an officer and you were finished. You were dead. Or as good as. Court-martialled. Discharged with ignominy. Probably imprisoned.
Stoutly, she stood between them, her arms outspread, like a bloody mother hen, it looked to Horner, protecting her favourite chick.
‘You bloody rat!’ Horner shouted at Maddox. ‘That’s right! Hide behind a girl! I’d make mincemeat of you!’
‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on me, Flight Sergeant! I am an off… issher. And I have more right than you down here. Thissh issh my aircraft. I am your Ssshkipper.’
The slurring of his S’s might have been funny under any other circumstances. But not these.
‘You’re not a Skipper! You’ll never be a Skipper! You’re a bloody liability!’
Once he’d started, Horner couldn’t stop. Out it all came, all the frustrations and angers of the past months.
Oh, God, don’t let Jack go too far! Don’t let him get put on a charge for insubordination. And don’t let him destroy Maddox’s confidence. For then Maddox’s famous luck really will drain away. So will Jack’s. And so will mine.
‘You’re the worst pilot on the squadron. The worst Skipper!’
‘How come I bagged the Me, then? You insubordinate, uneducated, ignorant bastard!’
‘You didn’t bag it, you clueless clot! Ginger did! It was Ginger’s shooting! You did fuck all, except go green! You whining miserable rat!’
They both tried to push Pip aside, to get at each other. They looked as if they could kill. Pip lifted her foot and landed the heel of her good heavy WAAF-issue shoe on Maddox’s shin, and with both her hands shoved hard against Jack’s chest.
‘Stop it!’ she shouted, swinging her foot forward now to land a hefty kick on Horner’s shin.
He looked at her aghast, disbelieving, as if she had suddenly turned into an alien and unrecognisable monster. ‘Are you taking his side?’
‘Of course she is,’ Maddox shouted. ‘She always has done. She’s mad about me!’
That really got through to Horner. Suddenly he remembered things about her attitude to Maddox that he would rather forget.
‘I’m not! I don’t! Oh, just break it up! Just go!’ she babbled, wondering how long she could keep them apart, wishing Chiefie would come back and then immediately wishing he wouldn’t, because then Jack really would be for the high jump. Officers always won in the end.
‘Are you telling me to go?’ Jack asked her in a suddenly deadly-cold voice.
‘Yes, yes,’ she gabbled, ‘go!’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes! Go! Just go!’
And at that, without a word, he turned on his heel, his jacket over his shoulder, and walked away, his feet hard and angry on the concrete, then disappearing softly over the grass.
When he was at a safe distance from Maddox, she called after him, ‘See you in a moment!’
But he threw over his shoulder, ‘Like hell!’ and quickened his step.
For a moment, she was bereft of speech. For several seconds, she considered running after Jack, or shouting after him again that she would come in a moment to the Sally Ann. But the Sally Ann by now would be shutting. If she ran after Jack, Maddox would come with her and the row would start up again, and if Jack was foolish enough to lay a finger on Maddox, the little clot would have him court-martialled.
It was Maddox who broke the silence. ‘What on earth do you see in him?’ he asked scornfully, not in his usual voice. She began to glimpse a different Maddox from the eager blue-eyed boy. But then, she told herself, it was common knowledge drunken men often reverse their characters completely. The feckless Irishman was quite different, her mother said, drunk from sober.
In reply she said coldly, ‘I think you’ve had too much to drink,’ and added, ‘sir,’ in a derisory manner.
‘Maybe I have. Maybe I haven’t.’ His mood teetered between apology and aggression. ‘Maybe I haven’t had enough of that wonderful stuff.’ He suddenly laughed.
‘You should go back to the Mess, Peter. Go to bed. Get some rest. Otherwise you won’t be fit for anything tomorrow.’
Tomorrow. That was a daft remark to make, a daft reminder.
‘Tomorrow! Yep, tomorrow!’ his face seemed to crumple. ‘Christ, tomorrow I got to fly with those bastards again!’
Pip opened her mouth to say something and then prudently shut it again.
‘You heard what he called me,’ Maddox went on, breathing now on the embers of his anger. ‘You were a witness to his…’ he tried to say the word ‘insubordination’, couldn’t quite get his tongue round it and gave up.
‘Where’s their team spirit, Pip? Where’s loyalty to their captain?’
‘You’ve done all right so far.’
‘I have! I’ve done all right! But have they?’
‘Yes, you’ve all done all right.’
He swayed on his feet staring at her, a bit like a cobra about to strike, she suddenly thought. But that was a very fanciful thought indeed because there was no one less cobra-like than clumsy clueless harmless Maddox. And yet his eyes seemed to glitter with malice as if he hated her. As if she were suddenly the source of all his troubles, and the one thing she wanted at that moment above all else was to get away from him and make him go safely back to bed. Then she would leave a little note for Jack at the Sergeants’ Mess, or else she’d see him tomorrow before the op and all would be well.
‘Look, Peter,’ she said reasonably, ‘I’m going back to the WAAF site now. I’ll walk with you as far as the Mess.’
As they were leaving Flights and turning towards the main road, he said, ‘Let’s cut across the airfield. Cavendish doesn’t like officers fratting with other ranks.’
It was certainly a Station Standing Order that officers and airwomen shouldn’t have dates, and if seen out together it was a chargeable offence. But most aircrew didn’t give a damn.
‘Cavendish has more or less promised me my full ring.’ He turned to her with a smirk, and lest she miss the weightiness of what he was saying, ‘Flying Officer!’
‘Congratulations.’ She swallowed a smile.
Then suddenly, as they reached the grassy mounds on the Flights air raid shelters, he grabbed her arm. Taken off guard, she felt herself spun roughly round. He was only a few inches taller than her, but thickset, strong and desperate. Pulling her fiercely against him, he twisted one arm behind her back, as his wet mouth tried to find hers.
‘You’re hurting me!’ she gasped and he gave an eerie, alien, childish laugh. She wriggled and kicked and squirmed, her feet slipping on the muddy grass. She tried to bite his hand. She could feel that torch in his trousers again, and remembered what Pam had told her and felt sick with fear.
Instinctively she fought. She dug in her nails. She used her feet. But the more she fought, the more did he come on, the stronger, the more desperate he got. She had a nightmare vision of him as a wild animal grunting and slobbering and snuffling, fears and tension all swept into a terrible animal aggression, no longer human, no longer reachable.
Still panting, twisting her arm behind her again, he half-dragged, half-frogmarched her into the foul-smelling shelter. Shoved her to the damp earth floor, subsided on top of her, tearing at her skirt, her silk knickers, fumbling at his trousers.
Nothing could be as bad as that again. Ever.
When it was over, she tried to get up and stagger away, but he came after her, grabbed her arms, flopped his weight round her shoulders, weeping like a baby.
She couldn’t remember much after that. Only the cold and painful walk to the WAAF site, sidling past the blacked-out WAAF guardroom, making straight for the ablutions block. The need to cleanse herself was the only driving force she was immediately conscious of.
It was there that Pam found her, took one aghast look at her friend on the concrete floor beside the bath, and took charge.
‘Oh, God!’ she said, putting her arms round Pip’s shoulders. ‘Jack didn’t…? It wasn’t Jack? Jack couldn’t have… wouldn’t have… not Jack…’
‘No. No. It wasn’t Jack.’
‘Thank God! Ginger would have killed him. So would I. Who was it? Tell me! Let me get my hands on him!’
But Pip wouldn’t say. ‘Not now. Maybe some time. Not now.’
Thank God for small mercies, the bath-water bordered on hot. Pam streaked back to the hut and brought towels and some of her precious bath salts. She took the knickers and stockings and bust bodice along to the incinerator and burned them. Then she sat on the edge of the bath and they wept it out of their systems.
Pam had stowed away the twigs and rushes and put a hot-water bottle in her bed. She had put on an extra blanket from her own bed, and she made her take a couple of aspirin because Pip couldn’t stop shivering.
She couldn’t get off to sleep. Her mind was full of nightmare pictures, feelings, fears. She didn’t feel angry. She felt soiled, dirty, lost and desolate and immensely sad. She couldn’t hate Maddox. She knew it was the terrible inhuman strain aircrew were under. That Maddox had finally cracked. That he was done for. That Jack would probably now get his way and that Maddox’s name wouldn’t be on the Battle Order again.
She woke late in an empty hut, with the black-outs down and a cold, shimmering snowy light streaming in. All the other girls except Pam had gone off to their duties. Pam was standing next to her holding a mug of tea she had brought over from the cookhouse. Her cheeks and nose were bright red with the cold. There were flakes of snow on her cap. ‘I’ve phoned in to Chiefie and told him you’re sick. He said not to worry about coming in. Stay in bed. Keep warm. It’s bloody cold out there. Snow. Christ! We could do without that! So you just rest yourself. I’ll wave the boys off for you! Shall I give Jack your love?’
Pip shook her head.
‘Why not?’
‘Because.’
‘Just that? Just because?’ She leaned forward and whispered, ‘Not because of what happened last night? You’re not going to let that come between you, are you?’
Pip didn’t answer. She bit her lip. How could she explain that the world had changed overnight, wobbled off its axis? She wasn’t the same person any more. Would never be it again.
‘You mustn’t!’ Pam urged, her face contorted with anxiety. ‘You really mustn’t! You and him are made for each other! He won’t let it come between you, so don’t you!’
Pip shook her head wordlessly. Then she gritted her teeth and asked, ‘What time are they due back, have you heard?’
‘Sixteen hundred.’
‘Is it a maximum effort?’
‘Yep. So long as they can get them all airborne with the snow.’ Pam took off her cap and shook the melting flakes from it, eyeing her friend anxiously. ‘So what shall I say to Jack?’
‘Tell him to take care.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘I don’t have to tell him that. Ginge’ll take care of him.’
‘I know.’
Under the pile of blankets, she crossed her fingers. There was nothing else she could think to do.