‘Marshfield… Marshfield…’
An old man in a peaked cap stamped his feet in front of the two beheaded poles where the station name had once been, intoning sonorously, ‘Marshfield! Alight here for Marshfield!’ before disappearing in a ghostly white cloud as the engine blew off its steam.
‘This is it, Ginger!’
Jack Horner, a tall gaunt-faced flight sergeant, wearing the navigator’s half wing, dragged his battered suitcase from the rack, slung his respirator and tin hat over his shoulder and picked up his kitbag.
‘You heard what the man said. Alight here.’ He shoved his head through the open window to turn the carriage door handle. ‘Jesus! What a dump! And Christ, it’s raining again!’
‘Certainly clouded over,’ Ginger said cheerfully. ‘Mebbe a good thing.’ He turned his small bright blue eyes skywards. ‘With all them up there.’
‘Typical Johnsonian understatement,’ Jack Horner scowled. ‘Hellfire corner! That’s what we’ve come to.’
And in confirmation of his gloomy prediction, as they stepped out onto the platform an air raid siren on top of the railway station suddenly began to howl.
The city had been in the middle of an air raid when they pulled out of London Bridge. Their noses had been filled with dust and the acrid stench of burning. Sirens were howling, ambulance and fire bells ringing, the crump of bombs, the boom of ack-ack fire. Looking down as the train clanked over the bridge they’d seen buses upended, office blocks and houses turned to rubble, the streets awash with burst hydrants. A right busman’s holiday, as Ginger had remarked. And down through the glistening garden of England, with its hop-bines heavy and ripe in the intermittent September sun, the blue and white sky had been crisscrossed with vapour trails, spattered with wheeling, diving, warring aircraft. They had seen five separate aircraft, fire bursting out of their bellies, nose-dive to the ground.
‘Ker-rump!’ Ginger had said cheerfully each time, licking his finger and chalking up an imaginary tally on the dirty compartment window. ‘One of theirs.’
‘Never knew the Huns flew Spitfires,’ Jack Horner had said with his daunting adherence to truth and reality.
‘They weren’t Spits!’
‘You know bloody well they were!’
They had argued mildly to pass the time. Twice they had ducked as first an Me 109 and then a Hurricane had screeched inches above the carriage roof. Ginger had brought the Daily Sketch out of his pocket, but had tossed it away when he saw an item about Hitler’s latest boast that barges would be landing on the Romney Marsh coast of Kent. Ginger Johnson hadn’t a nerve in his stocky body, but he never liked taking on board irrelevant information. Skilled gunner that he was, he kept his eyes dead ahead on the target and nothing else.
But several times during the journey he had remarked with rare feeling, ‘Hope we get a decent Skipper.’
‘I’m going to make bloody sure we do!’
Aerial combat had continued fiercely above them. Then, just after Ashford, the clouds had rolled in from the south-west, and now a light, mizzling rain had begun to fall, shrinking the daylight.
‘Any RAF transport waiting out there?’ Jack asked the porter, as they handed over their railway warrants.
‘You’d be lucky!’ the railwayman said, waving off the train. ‘Just a tractor out there and a beet lorry.’
‘Going towards the airfield?’
‘No, matey! Hard luck! The other way. You want that-away!’ He jerked his thumb to the west. ‘Coupla miles, no turnings. Can’t miss it. And the best of British luck!’ As they humped their kit-bags on their shoulders, there was a muffled explosion, followed in rapid succession by two more.
‘D’you lads want the shelter? It’s just down here,’ the railwayman called after them, making for the direction in which he was pointing.
‘No, thanks,’ Horner called back. ‘Claustrophobics, us!’
‘Oh! Well, you better put your tin hats on!’
He waved them off down a country road, thin as an eel, which wriggling round the reeds and rivulets of Romney Marsh connected the railway station with the village.
Now, above the low cloud, they could hear the desynchronised grind of enemy aircraft.
‘More Spits,’ Jack Horner remarked sarcastically. Ginger smiled unconcernedly. ‘The Huns are lousy shots.’
‘Yeah! But they might get us while they’re aiming for Buckingham Palace. Or the Short’s factory.’
‘Or the Liverpool Docks.’ Ginger drew in his breath. ‘I can smell the sea.’
‘Too bloody close. Listen! Stop a minute! I can hear the bloody sea, never mind smell it! Waves breaking.’
‘I can’t hear then!’
‘It’s the guns. Made you deaf, Ginger! Sea can’t be more than a few hundred yards away. Just beyond that bloody dreary-looking marsh.’
He pointed to the south of the road where flat marshland, covered in short, tussocky sheep-grazed grass, was intersected with the old Napoleonic canals left over from that previous invasion threat a hundred and twenty-five years ago.
Twenty miles across the Channel, a thousand enemy barges had been assembled in Calais, in Boulogne, and in Dutch and Belgian ports. Three times as many tanks, four times as many guns, twice as many aircraft as Britain then possessed were to provide the spearhead for a highly trained and victorious German army to make the short crossing to land along the Romney Marsh coast.
‘It is a bit dreary-looking,’ Ginger conceded.
‘And this is a helluva long road.’
‘But we’re coming to a village now. Of sorts.’
‘Of sorts being the operative word, Ginger.’
Built on sand a foot above sea level, at first sight the village appeared to be sinking into a stagnant swamp to join the English Channel to which it had once belonged. They passed a couple of semi-detached cottages with thatched roofs and clematis round the doors, their once pretty gardens now filled with cabbages.
‘Diggers for Victory, Ginger.’
A small discreet notice on the gate of the second one read ‘Eggs for Sale’. A young woman smiled at them from the doorway. ‘Crumpet!’
‘Aye, aye, Ginger! I’m making a note in my navigator’s log.’
Then fields again, and ahead, to the right, a grey stone church tower half-hidden by trees and, right beside them, the beginnings of its ancient churchyard wall.
‘I hate churchyards,’ Horner sighed.
Ginger quickened his pace. ‘I don’t go all that much on them myself.’
And then, as if determined that they should not pass it by unnoticed, an obelisk reared its ugly head. Standing near to the wall and a couple of feet taller than the mass of headstones, soaked and darkened in the mizzling rain, it glared out on the road, demanding attention like the Ancient Mariner himself.
Like the Wedding Guest, they halted, their eyes suddenly riveted first by a carving of the Stars and Stripes on top of the obelisk and, immediately below it, that of an aircraft – their familiar friend, the DH 4.
‘So what story do you tell, old friend?’ Horner asked, quite cheerfully for him.
He leaned forward to read.
But the story was far from cheerful.
‘Erected,’ said the obelisk, ‘by the villagers of Marshfield in proud and loving memory of the men of the 96th Air Bombardment Division of the United States of America who served at RAF Marshfield in the autumn of 1918, and who distinguished themselves in the successful penetration of the Hindenburg Line, continuing their attack until all had perished, but achieving their objective.
‘Ten days later, the Armistice that ended the war was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, November 1918.’
And at the bottom was carved in gold letters, ‘They shall rise on wings as eagles.’
‘What a load of old cobblers,’ Jack Horner said. ‘They’ll stay in the ground, same as the rest of us. Come on, Ginger! Quick march!’
They tramped in silence until they came to a line of cottages, a general store, a post office, and a small builder’s yard. Then a long, low white-washed pub cowering sulkily under a heavy, sodden thatch.
A swinging sign displayed the American flag again.
‘The Stars and Stripes,’ Horner read aloud. ‘Bloody awful name for an English pub!’
‘I expect they used to drink there.’ Ginger often stated the obvious. ‘The 96th.’
‘Can’t say I fancy drinking there much.’
‘Any pub’s better than no pub, Jack!’
‘Maybe. But we don’t seem able to get away from Yankee bastards, do we?’
After the Stars and Stripes, the village petered out and they followed the road in silence to where the first indication that an airfield was ahead materialised in the shape of a barbed-wire fence and, on the horizon, the familiar black rectangle on stilts of the water tower.
‘We’re nearly there,’ Ginger remarked. ‘Oh, and look!’
His voice rose eagerly. The barbed wire had suddenly grown into metal uprights ten feet tall, bent outwards with sharp spikes at the end of each. There was a big gateway with a red and white pole across it, and a small guardroom beside that. A newly made road led to a group of corrugated iron Nissen huts crouching like petrified woodlice. And between two of them, a gaggle of those most delectable items, blue-clad Waafs.
‘Marshfield’s got Waafs!’ Ginger exclaimed.
‘Of course they’ve got Waafs! They’ve all got them these days.’
‘Not all,’ Ginger corrected. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t banking on it.’
‘I was,’ Horner said.
‘Get away! You’d no idea. Anyway, it’s a bonus!’
They continued with a lighter step.
‘They’re keeping them far enough away,’ Horner grumbled as it transpired that at least half a mile separated the Waafery from the main camp.
‘Suspicious lot, the higher-ups!’ Ginger smiled good-temperedly. ‘But we’ll have bikes. And there’ll always be buckshee transport.’
‘Like today? Like now?’ Horner asked drily.
‘Soon as we know the ropes, we’ll be in like burglars.’
‘With that fence?’
‘We’ll go in all legal through the gates.’
A hundred yards farther on, the new high fence gave way to the old barbed wire of the perimeter and, half a mile beyond that, the airfield proper, or at least the 1939 apology for it. A guardroom full of service police, guarding the entrance barred by a red and white pole, the Station Headquarters block with its flagpole directly outside, the RAF flag drooping disconsolately in the mist. Farther away, a couple of rusty old hangars and a concrete control tower. No runways, only a field of green grass, and ancient huts that had once housed the gallant 96th. Clearly a Great War airfield hastily resurrected to repel the Hun once again, a Hun now so close across the Channel you could almost hear him draw breath.
The All Clear was sounding by the time the SP on the gate had directed them to the Sergeants’ Mess – four large shiplap huts set crosswise on concrete blocks.
‘Ginger! Did you see what I saw?’ Jack Horner pointed to the rotting timbers at the base of one of the buildings.
‘What? A Waaf?’
‘No! A rat! A great big brown one. Popped in that hole.’
‘Nah,’ Ginger said. ‘That’s what the concrete blocks are for. To keep them out.’
‘Trouble with you, Ginger! You never see what you don’t want to see.’
‘Nor smell what you don’t want to smell,’ he added when they pushed open the door of the Mess hall and he rightly grumbled that it stank of rotting cabbages, which Ginger denied.
‘I smell no cabbages. I smell bacon.’ Ginger rubbed his plump pink hands together. ‘Bring on the bacon and the dancing girls.’
There was bacon, fatty, stringy stuff, and two fat Waafs to serve it behind the hatch.
Ginger chatted them up, found out that a number of new boys for the squadron had already arrived, and got an extra rasher of bacon for both of them, together with a dark brown slice of fried bread which oozed gobs of fat when their forks were dug in.
As they were swallowing their last mouthfuls, the tannoy blared out,
‘All new arrivals report forthwith to 13 Squadron office for crewing up!’
Horner and Ginger exchanged glances.
‘This is it!’ Horner said, getting to his feet. ‘Our life or death moment!’
Ginger waved farewell to the two fat Waafs, and fell into step beside Horner. ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to get a good Skipper, I know we are.’
But he touched the rotting wood of the doorjamb.
Horner scowled. ‘Sez who?’
‘Sez me! Sez my bones! I got a feeling.’ He rubbed his stomach as they marched across the grass to the squadron office block. ‘A good feeling.’
The crew room was noisy and smoke-filled, crowded with baby-pink faces and excited chatter. It was not unlike the market in Far From the Madding Crowd, which Gabriel Oak attended looking for a job. Only here it wasn’t shepherds that were up for sale, but aircrew and their lives.
Gazing around, Ginger’s self-confident smile wavered.
And then both he and Horner felt an arm round their shoulders, heard an exaggerated Scots voice announce, ‘Welcome to the kindergarten, laddies!’ as the big brawny bulk of Flight Lieutenant Angus MacGregor inserted itself between them.
MacGregor, Rutherford and Slade had been the only three Skippers to have survived the gruelling Battle of France. MacGregor was a superb and daring pilot, kindly and convivial, but for some reason trusted more in the air than on the ground. He had the dark red hair and the light blue eyes of the Highlander, though he affected a strong and rather irritating Glaswegian accent. He made people feel uncomfortable. Partly it was the artificial accent, partly those light blue seer’s eyes, both proclaiming he wasn’t quite what he seemed.
Or worse, that he saw more than was good to see.
Which was the truth. A long time ago, in his childhood in fact, he had discovered that he had inherited some of that Highland gift or curse of tarbhseatachd, the second sight. He had taken an inordinate dislike to the bike his elder brother had been given for his birthday, had begged him not to ride it, two weeks before he was killed colliding with a lorry.
It was not all gloom. MacGregor had on several occasions lightheartedly used his gift by offering to tell their futures to the prettier girls at parties. It was a useful line to shoot. Pleasurable too, holding a young girl’s hand and telling her what she wanted to hear.
But lately the curse had tightened its grip. He had begun to see what he didn’t want to see. In France, he had seen curious dark haloes around the heads of aircrew who later went missing. He tried to tell himself it was imagination, but what he really feared was that he was losing his grip, getting shit-scared, that if he went on like this he would be a candidate for the dreaded LMF, Lack of Moral Fibre diagnosis, feared by all airmen.
He could confide in no one. So his accent became more exaggerated, his demeanour more devil-may-care.
‘Got myself a wee bairn of a navigator to take Smith’s place.’
Smith like Rutherford was tour-expired and now on rest. ‘Doesnae need a razor yet. Still got his milk teeth, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you two laddies are looking for Rutherford’s replacement?’
‘That’s right,’ they answered in unison, their eyes darting hither and yon in the smoky gloaming, trying to spot a likely experienced-looking pilot.
‘There’s only one pilot here.’ MacGregor pointed. ‘That bonny wee bairn in the corner.’
Ginger and Horner followed the direction of his finger. Wee bairn the bod certainly was, but even his mother couldn’t have called him bonny. Untidy blond hair. Spots visible even at this range. A loose and vacuous smile showing uneven teeth. He was proudly clutching his round hat, over which the clot must have poured a pint of oil to make it look like a veteran’s, and being chatted up by a thug of a WOP/AG, a girlish blush rising up his dirty schoolboy neck.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Horner growled.
‘Nor do I,’ Ginger agreed.
‘Name of Maddox. Peter Maddox,’ Angus went on. ‘Introduced himself by telling me he’d looped a Blenheim.’
‘He can’t be Rutherford’s replacement,’ Horner said.
‘He can’t be our pilot,’ Ginger breathed.
But he was.
As if suddenly aware of the identity of the two newcomers, Maddox came over with his right hand extended.
‘Are you Horner?’ he asked in a hoarse squeak as if his voice hadn’t broken properly.
Horner nodded wordlessly.
‘And you must be Johnson?’
‘Yes,’ Ginger said.
‘I’m Pilot Officer Maddox. Your new Skipper.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. To break it, Maddox went on, ‘I’m from 11 OTU.’
‘How many hours,’ Horner rasped, ‘solo on Blenheims?’
‘Nine!’ Maddox said, as if it was something to be proud of.
Horner closed his eyes.
‘Done your fighter affiliation?’ Ginger asked.
Maddox shook his head. ‘The Hurricane boys were too busy with Jerry.’
‘Night flying?’ Horner asked, opening his eyes wide.
Maddox shook his head cheerfully again. ‘Weather was clampers. Not to worry. Wing Commander Cavendish said we’d do it here.’
‘Jeezus!’ Horner said under his breath, and aloud, sharply, ‘OTUs have to train aircrew to full operational standard before,’ he emphasised that word heavily, ‘posting them to squadrons.’
Then his eye was caught by a notice on the door at the far end of the room: ‘Wing Commander Charles Cavendish, Officer Commanding 13 Squadron.’
Horner grabbed Ginger by the arm. ‘Come on, Ginger!’
Teeth gritted, his big jaw jutting, Horner marched them both in, bypassing the mildly surprised adjutant sitting in the outer office, and knocked on the CO’s door.
Wing Commander Cavendish looked up bleakly from his desk as they came in and saluted.
‘Yes?’
‘Horner and Johnson, sir.’
‘So what can I do for you?’
Amazing how antipathy, irritation, hostility and condescension could be conveyed in an aristocratic drawl, in so few words and in such an apparently polite enquiry.
And it wasn’t just the drawl. Horner saw the irritated frown that drew together the black brows, felt his own gaze held by the the glitter of anger in the hooded eyes, perceived the flaring of the thin nostrils, the faint curl of the lips beneath the small black moustache, and knew they would get nothing from this poncy tailor’s bloody dummy with his Gieves jacket and the polished ‘A’s of the Auxiliary Air Force in his lapels, signalling loud and clear that Daddy had paid for his flying lessons.
From his side of the desk, Wing Commander Cavendish, Eton and Oxford, now charged with the task of reforming and revitalising a decimated squadron, saw two potentially bolshie flight sergeants and prompted sharply, ‘Well?’
‘It’s about the pilot we’ve been crewed up with, sir.’
‘Pilot Officer Maddox?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good type. Keen as mustard.’
‘Sir, Johnson and I did twenty-six ops in the Battle of France. Only four more to do to finish our tour.’
It was not the most tactful statement to his commanding officer who, through circumstances beyond his control, had not yet been on any operations.
‘I know that.’ Cavendish put both his hands behind his head and leaned back easily in his chair. ‘Jolly good show!’
‘We’ve only four trips to do.’
‘So you’re a very experienced pair.’ He proffered the velvet glove of a frugal smile. ‘That’s why I deliberately gave you to Maddox. You can build up his confidence. I’m relying on you two to see him through.’
‘Who’s going to see us through?’ trembled on Horner’s lips, but what was the use? What did this inexperienced toffee-nosed scion of the landed gentry know about operations and who did what in any crew? Instead, aloud, he expostulated, ‘He’s just a schoolboy!’
‘So are they all.’
‘But he’s so… well… you’ve only got to look at him to see…’
Cavendish interrupted Horner. ‘Experienced pilots are as scarce as hen’s teeth.’
‘Couldn’t you get some in, sir?’
Perhaps it was said in all innocence, but probably it was not. ‘Getting some in’ in RAF slang meant going on operations, and this bolshie flight sergeant had no doubt heard and was subtly reminding his commanding officer that he hadn’t a single one to his credit, had in fact extricated himself by devious pulling of strings from a safe bum-polishing chair at Air Ministry.
Cavendish’s eyes narrowed. ‘The RAF has not got any more experienced pilots,’ he enunciated slowly as if to an idiot.
‘Because they squandered them all in the Battle of France.’
‘Not at all!’
‘Sir, I don’t think you were there.’
Wing Commander Cavendish simply ignored that and continued with steely clarity. ‘The reason has been the weather. The OTUs have had to cut down on training.’
‘So they pass out untrained pilots to fly on operational squadrons.’
‘Quite untrue!’
‘Maddox is one of them! He hasn’t done his fighter affiliation. Or his night flying.’
In a second, Horner thought, he’s going to remind me that there’s a war on, and then I really will fall about. Instead Cavendish simply glowered at him with undisguised loathing. Now I’ve really blown it, Horner thought, and on the very first day. My CO hates my guts. No use asking him for any favours.
‘Command,’ Cavendish spoke slowly, ‘has suggested that those exercises could best be carried out on the squadron’s training programme. Which is what 13 Squadron is doing now.’ He stared keenly at Horner. ‘Don’t worry. The squadron will not go on operations until everyone is top line. If you look at tomorrow’s Detail you will see you are flying in the afternoon.’
‘With Maddox?’
‘Of course with Maddox.’
‘But, sir—’
With crushing deliberation, Cavendish picked up a pen and began to sign a letter on his desk. Without looking up, he said, ‘I’m sure you will soon settle down with Peter.’
‘Sir… the RAF can’t do this to us! Johnson and I…’
Cavendish tossed the letter into his ‘out’ tray and addressed Ginger. ‘Is that all, Johnson?’
Horner opened his mouth to interrupt, but Ginger took his breath away by simply nodding and answering humbly, ‘Yes, sir.’
Back in the crew room Horner exploded. ‘Thanks for your help, Ginger!’
‘That’s all right, Jack.’
Horner clenched his fists and drew a deep breath. Ginger was a dead eye behind a Browning, but, Jeezus, on the ground he could be as thick as four short planks.
‘We’re landed with him now!’
‘So it would seem.’
Horner began, ‘Don’t you see what’s going to happen…?’
Then he gave up. Accept what’s coming to you was Ginger’s philosophy. No imagination, that was his trouble.
In their room in the Sergeants’ Mess that night, the two of them hardly exchanged a word. Horner’s silence didn’t seem to worry Ginger. He cleaned his buttons and cap badge and made down his bed and then began to fiddle with his radio. He got Lord Haw-Haw who was rabbiting on about the imminent invasion of Britain and all the barges assembled and raring to land on the south coast in spitting distance from Marshfield.
That traitor’s oily voice gave Horner the excuse to draw up the blankets over his ears and pretend to be out for the count. But he was too worried to sleep. During a friendship of nearly three years, there hadn’t been a cross word between him and Ginger. Today had been the closest. Not a good start.
Horner valued their friendship above most things. They had both been close to death many times in France, and that binds you together. And more important and more binding, they trusted each other. But now, Ginger was wrong. They had got through in France because of Rutherford’s skill. A crew survived or died by the skill of its pilot. So they had to object to an inexperienced boy like Maddox. But he and Ginger had to object together. Otherwise authority in the shape of Cavendish would divide and rule.
And the little clueless clot would kill them all.