The following afternoon, the little clueless clot was throwing his weight about at Flights to the shielded amusement tinged with sadness of Leading Aircraftwoman Phyllis Armitage, a bright-eyed, curly-haired eighteen-year-old, pleasingly an inch or two shorter than he was.
In her brief time in the WAAF she had seen too many of these eager boys come and go. Now, wearing his ridiculous round hat with its oily crown, he was doing S-Sugar’s visual, trying to look as if he knew what it was all about, kicking her tyres, peering at her oleo legs, gazing up critically at her Mercury engines and running a finger down a line of her rivets.
‘She’s on top line, sir!’
‘I should hope so, Armitage.’ He made another circuit of S-Sugar, and then clearly running out of items to observe or touch, he came and stood beside her. ‘Know anything much about aircraft, do you, Armitage?’
She had been specially selected because of her knowledge of engines, and because of the shortage of fitters immediately taken on.
‘A bit, sir.’
‘Like it?’
‘Love it. I wouldn’t want to do anything else. They’re wonderful things. Like birds!’
At that point, they were joined by the two other members of the crew, and instantly she recognised tension and trouble.
‘This is Armitage,’ Maddox introduced her in a lordly manner to the tall dark navigator with a big nose and jaw, and what seemed a permanent frown on his forehead. But he had kindly eyes underneath those dark brows, and when he smiled his whole face lit up.
‘This is Flight Sergeant Horner. And this,’ Pilot Officer Maddox waved his hand to a stocky rosy-faced bod with bristly ginger hair and a cheeky-chappie grin, ‘is Flight Sergeant Johnson.’
‘I’m Jack. He’s Ginger.’
The boys shook hands with her. They both had firm hand-clasps. Her mother, or rather as she had now to remember to think of her, her grandmother, had always said you could trust a man with a good handshake.
‘Armitage and I,’ Maddox told the other two, ‘have just finished our visual check, haven’t we, Armitage?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘No lipsticks, compacts or spanners in the works, I hope.’ Ginger essayed a teasing smile.
LACW Armitage’s grey eyes sparked angrily.
‘Hey you! Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I’m not a good fitter, think on!’
‘Of course it doesn’t! Don’t take any notice of him.’ Jack Horner looked at her kindly. ‘That’s Ginger’s idea of a joke.’
‘Well, I’m not laughing!’ She stuck out her little rounded oil-streaked chin. ‘My Chiefie’d have my guts for garters if there was a spanner in S-Sugar’s works. And I’d give him them before he asked if there was.’
She spoke with a slight Yorkshire accent.
‘I believe you!’ Jack Horner gave his oddly beguiling smile. If anyone had told him he’d be reassured because a little bright-eyed sparrow of a girl was the fitter for his aircraft, he’d have fallen about laughing.
‘Well, Ginge and I’ll do our checks now.’ He turned to her as they began to climb into the Blenheim. ‘What’s your name?’
‘I’ve told you her name,’ Maddox said pompously, ‘Armitage.’
‘First name?’
‘Phyllis.’
Horner and she both laughed simultaneously.
‘That’s an awful name! Doesn’t suit you.’ Horner shook his head. ‘What do your Mum and Dad call you at home?’
Her smile faded. She shrugged.
‘I’ll call you Pip. That suits you.’
‘Call me what you like,’ she answered, her face still clouded.
She watched them mount the ladder on the port wing and disappear through the hatch, thinking there was a pair who could take care of themselves.
She turned to the gormless pilot still standing beside her and wondered what she was going to do about him.
Doing what she could about people and things had been her lot in life. She had been brought up by her Mam, now suddenly revealed to be her Gran, in a sooty terraced two-up-and-two-down in the middle of Leeds. It was close to the LNER station and the whole place shook when a train went by. They had done their best to keep it clean and make ends meet.
Her Gran was a strict Primitive Methodist, so having a good time was never even dreamed about. The nearest to fun was on the very infrequent times when Auntie Kathleen visited. She was quite young and pretty and wore tight skirts and laughed a lot. She’d married a feckless Irishman and was living in Eire. She once gave Pip a picture of herself, but her Mam, as she thought of her then, wouldn’t allow her to put it up.
The only picture allowed up in the sooty little house, other than ‘The Light of the World’ and one of Jesus on the Cross, was a big one over the mantelpiece of an angelic-faced little girl with blue eyes and fair ringlets. She was helping an enormous collie over a stile that led from one field into another exactly the same on the other side. The picture bore the unnecessary caption ‘Helping Lame Dogs over Stiles’.
That, her Gran said, should be her motto in life.
‘So where did you learn about aircraft, Armitage?’ P/O Maddox folded his arms across his chest and squinted condescendingly down those two extra inches at her.
‘Oh, they give us a course, sir. Have to pass it an’ all. But I knew a bit about mechanics before I joined up. I worked on cars.’
‘Your father’s?’
‘No, sir. My father didn’t have a car.’ Come to that, she didn’t have a father. She had been clever at school and got a scholarship to Leeds High. But her Gran couldn’t afford the school uniform.
‘I worked at the local garage. Mr Smithers taught me how to service cars when his mechanic joined up.’
Although she had been taken on as office clerk, she had continued to service the cars even after Mr Smithers got a lad in, because the lad was as gormless as P/O Maddox, and she had ended up doing most of the work. That stood her in good stead when the RAF, like the other two Services, was appealing for women and she decided to join up.
Her Gran didn’t object at first. But after Pip had been to the RAF recruiting office in Briggate, the main street in Leeds, and the officer there told her she would need her birth certificate – that had really thrown the cat among the pigeons.
Then it was revealed her Mam was her Gran and her real mother was the tight-skirted Auntie Kathleen, but the feckless Irishman wasn’t her father, and all she could find out about her father was that he was dead or as good as.
Since she’d joined up, she had become used to men being dead or as good as. Full of life and fun one moment. Dead the next. Youngsters, not nearly as old as her father when he copped his clog.
One of the MT drivers in the hut returning yesterday from a duty run to Maidstone had seen a Spit go in the drink, two Me 109s shot down in flames. Another had crashed but she’d seen a parachute open.
It was to the Parachute Section, their visual checks satisfactorily completed, that Jack Horner and Ginger were now repairing.
‘So who was giving the glad eye to LACW Armitage?’ Ginger asked.
‘I don’t know, Ginger! You tell me.’
‘As if you didn’t know! I’ll tell you something else. I think she gave you the glad eye back.’
‘She’s not that sort.’
‘Wanna bet?’
‘No.’
‘You’re right not to, Jack. They’re all that sort. You just don’t try hard enough, Jack. You need to be a bit more jokey.’
‘Not with her.’
‘You seem to know a lot about her in a very short time.’
‘Give it a rest, Ginger. I’m not in the mood. I’m still thinking about Maddox.’
That wiped the smile off Ginger’s face for a moment. But then they pushed open the door of the Parachute Section, and what did they find?
The Parachute Section was always dear to the heart of any aircrew. In the final instance, the parachute was the piece of silk that separated the living from the dead, and the packers who so conscientiously examined and packed them were by association guardian angels. Better still, for the most part guardian angels with pretty faces. It was apocryphal that so well were the parachutes inspected and packed that they never failed you. The aircraft might, your comrades might, you might fail yourself, but your parachute, never!
And that damp Monday afternoon, there were three good-looking young Waafs behind the counter handing out the parachutes, one of whom would have lit up any day with a head of bright gold hair like the best Christmas tinsel and a large sexy mouth the colour of a new pillar box.
Ginger homed straight in on her.
‘It’s out of a bottle,’ Jack warned ungallantly from the side of his mouth.
‘I don’t bloody care!’ Ginger replied, making a silent apology to the Lord and the Methodist elders. ‘She’s a smasher.’ And leaning forward over the counter, ‘What’s your name, Gorgeous?’
‘Gorgeous’ll do. But really it’s Pam.’
‘I’m Ginger.’
‘You surprise me!’ She laughed. ‘Ginger what? Ginger Biscuit?’
‘Johnson.’
She assumed a prim and proper expression and began busying herself with the forms for signing over the parachutes.
Jack Horner was dealt with by a dark-haired girl who whispered ‘Good luck’, and by the time they left the Parachute Section Ginger was cock-a-hoop at having made a date with Pam.
His euphoria ended shortly afterwards when they returned to the Blenheim and the inescapable problem of Maddox.
No matter how you looked at him, he was a clumsy bugger, and the cockpit of a Blenheim, with its haphazard control lay-out, was not the place for a pilot like Maddox. He stumbled going up the ladder into the aircraft. He got into the seat clumsily, and the attentive LACW Armitage had to help strap him into his Sutton harness like a baby in his pushchair.
The round faces of the airspeed indicator, the altimeter, the artificial horizon and the 360 degrees gyro – the most vital for flying survival – looked blankly down from the pilot’s instrument panel. On the right, the twin revolution counters stood straight as soldiers, one on top of the other above the boost gauges. Under the panel to the left was the compass. Above the artificial horizon were the twin oil pressure and temperature gauges. On the left was the clock, the only instrument alive, its second hand relentlessly rotating. The red-topped throttles were on the right beside the mixture controls and the red and green undercarriage position indicators. Shuffling around in the cramped cockpit space, Horner and Johnson were apologising to the girl and swearing at each other as they pushed their way to their stations.
Horner reached the navigation table in the nose, checked the anglepoise lamp, plugged into the intercom the leads to the earphones in his helmet, checked the Identification Friend or Foe was on and the main batteries.
Ginger had struggled his way to the radio. Now he checked the transmitter/receiver before turning on the TR9 R/T.
‘Marigold,’ (Marshfield’s call-sign), ‘this is Bunter’ (13 Squadron’s call-sign) ‘S-Sugar. Are you receiving me?’
‘Strength five,’ came the immediate laconic reply.
Up front, the Waaf had left. The ladder had been taken away, the hatch closed. Maddox was pressing the starter button for number one engine.
The port propeller wheezed protestingly around before the engine burst into life with a loud guffaw.
‘Starting number two,’ Maddox shouted through his open side window to the ground crew manning the starter acs (accumulators).
Then, with both propellers turning, after scurrying through the Before Take Off check, he waved the chocks away, opened the throttles and went squelching over the wet grass to the far end of the field.
‘Bunter Control,’ he called on the R/T. ‘Marigold S-Sugar ready to roll.’
‘Sugar cleared to take off.’
Maddox opened up both engines fully on the brakes. When he released them the Blenheim shot off like a bullet. But the take-off wasn’t too bad. Apart from the fact that he got the tail wiggling like a tart’s bottom, they left the ground still straight and mercifully in one piece.
But suddenly for some reason, only inches from the ground and still at full power, he put on full left aileron. The Blenheim did a steep turn to port round the control tower.
And then he had the gall to turn to Horner, a big uneven grin splitting his face, and say, ‘Thought I’d let ’em know we’d arrived!’
‘Look out!’ Horner shrieked, resisting a temptation to hit him with the aircraft axe. ‘Water tower’s dead ahead!’
Maddox pulled hard over and managed to avoid it, but Horner swore he looked straight into the eyes of the outraged Flying Control Officer.
Once they had got their breath back, they cruised around the countryside, familiarising themselves with Hythe, Dymchurch, Ashford, Dover, and the outskirts of London. The southern suburbs were still smouldering after six of Kesselring’s Gruppen had dropped their tons of bombs the night before. The bombers had got Woolwich Arsenal and Shellmex House. Battersea, Brixton, Camberwell, Clapham and Chelsea had all been knocked about, the damage clearly visible even with the intermittent covering of rain clouds.
‘Keep a sharp look-out, Johnson,’ Maddox called importantly, ‘for the Hun!’
And then as they turned south and beyond the Channel they could see the low grey coastline of Occupied France. ‘Jerry might have a go at us.’
Mercifully, he didn’t. Only distantly did they see sign of enemy activity – a Spitfire getting the worst of it in combat with a Ju 88 over the Channel to the east. The last they saw, the Spit was heading for the sea.
After that, Maddox called, ‘Course for base, Horner.’
Johnson winked at Horner. Most crews used ‘Skipper’, ‘Navigator’, ‘Gunner’, or Christian names. But Maddox was clearly going to act as if they were all at boarding school, whence he had so lately emerged.
He bounced on landing. Twice. LACW Armitage was waiting at Flights, little feet planted firmly apart, arms folded, a frown of concentration knitting her brows.
Then she put the ladder in place and climbed up to the open cockpit hatch. ‘Everything OK, sir?’
‘Top line, Armitage.’
He struggled like a Houdini apprentice to get out of his straps. ‘Absolutely bung-ho!’
Ginger and Horner looked up to heaven.
Returning to the crew room, they stood beside Maddox as he signed the authorisation book – DCO (Duty Carried Out).
He signed it with his left hand.
Horner was struck dumb. And that really got through to Johnson as well. Once outside, Ginger exploded, ‘He’s a cack-hander!’
‘Certainly is.’
‘You know what that means?’
‘Trouble.’
‘That’s why he’s so clumsy.’
‘Not just clumsy. Not just a cack-hander.’ Horner was almost choking. ‘A schoolboy show-off trying to fool us he’s an ace!’
The big picture window in Wing Commander Cavendish’s office at Flights gave a panoramic view of the whole of the grass airfield fringed by the huddle of Marshfield village two miles to the east. Since the first arrivals of the newly generated 13 Squadron a fortnight ago, that screen had been filled with hair-raising scenes of aircraft bouncing, swinging, ground-looping and overshooting as the Blenheims objected to their half-trained masters in their cockpits.
A noise like thunder shook the whole Flights hut.
Squadron Leader Slade and Group Captain Hurst looked up from the table in the CO’s office round which they were all sitting, and watched a Blenheim bounce higher than a house three more times before coming back on the ground with an ear-splitting bang.
The Wing Commander had seen it all too often even to look up. ‘Is it still all in one piece?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Slade.
‘You’ve all seen and heard the uphill task we’ve been assigned,’ Cavendish went on. ‘And you’re only too aware that there are thousands of enemy barges twenty miles away, all being loaded up for the invasion. Group has given us three weeks to complete our training and become operational.’
‘Ridiculous!’ said MacGregor.
The Wing Commander put down his pen. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It cannae be done, sir.’
‘And that’s where you’re wrong, MacGregor. It can be done, and it will be done!’
‘Sir, they’re as green as the grass! What hours they were originally trained on have been on unsophisticated aircraft – fixed undercarriage, flapless kites. Far too few hours on Oxfords. And a pitiful introduction to the Blenheim. It’s dangerous!’
‘Not nearly as dangerous as the enemy waiting at the gates.’
‘Sir, we’ve all seen their antics. They’ll kill themselves if they don’t get more training.’
‘But they are going to get more training, MacGregor.’ Cavendish’s thin lips tightened. ‘And you’re going to give it them. Slade will be our new Squadron Leader A Flight, And you, MacGregor, as of now are our new Training Captain.’
There was a short pause while they digested that in silence.
‘So can we get back to the business in hand?’ Cavendish asked pointedly. ‘The new boys have to carry out the exercises they did not complete at OTU, namely air to ground firing, fighter affiliation, night flying, and a long cross-country.’
‘What about the weather?’ Group Captain Hurst put in.
He had been at Marshfield ever since it was re-opened as a landing ground a month ago, and it had rained almost every day. An ex-RFC pilot of DH 4s in the last war, he had become responsible for this godforsaken place in the most dangerous corner of Britain. Not once had he even gone up in a Blenheim, let alone flown one. And having seen the gyrations of 13 Squadron around the Station, he had no desire to do so.
‘We can’t worry about little things like that with the enemy already at our throats.’ Cavendish picked up a pen. ‘We start the cross-countries tomorrow. Butterworth looks a reliable sort of bod, wouldn’t you say, Angus?’
‘None of them look reliable sorts of bods,’ MacGregor replied, true to form.
‘He’s the only one to get an “Above Average” at FTS,’ Slade put in. ‘But—’
Hugh Slade had been attempting to do what he could on training before MacGregor arrived. Now he was only too glad to unload training onto MacGregor. The biggest problem which Cavendish had carefully not mentioned was that there were no dual controls on the Blenheim which meant the pilots’ actual flying couldn’t be checked out. All the instructor could do was to watch take-offs and landings which usually made him wince.
‘No buts.’ The Wing Commander simply continued with his list. ‘Lennox seems to me a clued-up type. Have you any ideas, Angus?’
‘I haven’t had the chance of a word with them, sir. But from what I’ve seen—’
‘Right then! Butterworth goes on the detail. Take-off ten hundred hours tomorrow. Let’s choose the order for the other chaps.’
MacGregor reluctantly agreed that Butterworth should go off tomorrow, and Lennox the day after. Maddox could go on doing circuits and bumps and local flying before going last on the cross-country.
‘Why, MacGregor?’ Cavendish raised his eyebrows. ‘Seems a keen little chap to me.’
‘Too keen. Overconfidence masking underconfidence. The fellow needs to be watched.’
‘They all need to be watched,’ Slade was saying, ‘but in our present situation—’
Suddenly through the open window came the sounds of a clanging bell and the screaming of a siren.
‘The blood wagon,’ Cavendish said.
Without a word, all four men made for the door. ‘And the fire engine.’
The Group Captain led the way to his Hillman, jumped in, shoved the accelerator down to the floor.
The car hurtled across the grass to a Blenheim forlornly standing on its nose in the far hedge.
By the time the Hillman slid to a stop beside the ambulance, all three of the crew were out of the aircraft.
‘It’s all right, sir,’ the Flight Sergeant pilot called out. ‘We’re all in one piece.’
‘Which is more than L-London is!’ Cavendish scowled. ‘What happened?’
Slade answered for him. ‘You came in too high and too fast, didn’t you, Sullivan?’
Tractors came up with tow ropes. The Squadron Leader Maintenance and his Flight Sergeant arrived, The blood wagon departed with the three crew to be checked at Sick Quarters.
On their way back to his office to continue the training conference, Slade said, ‘That’s the third prang in a fortnight.’
‘But at least we haven’t had one casualty,’ Cavendish countered.
‘Yet,’ said MacGregor.
Fifteen minutes later, he left the squadron commander’s office in a state of mental perturbation. He had been sold a pup. By the good old RAF formula of giving trouble-makers promotion or a position of responsibility, Cavendish thought he had disarmed him. Well, not altogether. It would take more than that spoilt, over-bred, overly rich Sassenach to disarm a MacGregor. MacGregors were the sons of kings. ‘S rioghal mo Dhream – ‘royal is my race’ – was the MacGregor motto. MacGregors were fighters. And not just against the enemy, but against petty authority as well.
But MacGregor had to admit to himself that his right arm had been weakened and his claymore blunted by his new position as Training Captain. Something, in fact, that he had felt himself quite capable of being, but not, for Chrissake, under these conditions. Not trying to square this awesome circle of too many pilots squandered in France, so many youngsters too hastily taken on and far too hastily semi-trained, resulting in yet more squandering not only of the lives of pilots, but also of their crews. Before the war ever began, ten per cent of the new Blenheims had been lost to accidents because new pilots were unable to handle their great leap in performance and complexity. Meanwhile Group and Command pressed the squadron to get into action at this most desperate state of the war. And perhaps worst of all, at this moment when, distantly but persistently, he himself was beginning to have doubts about his own nerve.
Yet who else could do it better? Who else could do it at all?
Before he addressed himself to the problem, he did what he always did when in doubt, he went for a long solitary walk. His father had been an estate manager in Sutherland, so MacGregor was used to seeking out the wisdom of the empty unsullied Highlands, alone except maybe for a dog at his heels.
Romney Marsh on a misty early autumn evening didn’t compare, but it had its own almost eerie quiet. It did, that is, until he was returning from his walk via Flights, when Jack Horner came out of the hangar and hailed him.
‘Bush telegraph has it you’re i/c training.’
‘God in heaven, some telegraph! Och, I only heard myself a half hour ago.’
‘Is it true?’
‘There was nae anyone else, laddie.’
Horner accepted that in unflattering silence. Then he added commiseratingly, ‘A bloody awful job.’
‘I know that well, laddie.’
Then Horner came swiftly, as was his wont, to the point. ‘Maddox is useless. You’ll need to fail him for a start.’
MacGregor frowned forbiddingly. ‘That’ll be up to me, laddie,’ he said stiffly. ‘Me and Cavendish.’
Then he stalked off, thinking, it doesnae take long to become a management man.
Maybe that was why, when he returned to the squadron offices, he really went to town. Still frowning, still not easy with himself, he nodded to the adjutant and went straight into the Flight office. Clearly Cavendish and Slade hadn’t been able to give much time to the nuts and bolts of training. There was still a stack of log-books on the table, belonging to the latest arrivals, waiting for Cavendish’s scrutiny. Also on the table, a rough programme, some queries on dates for fighter affiliation.
MacGregor drew up a chair and began on the stack of log-books, all new and blue and so sparsely filled, like the exercise books of new scholars at an infant school.
Conscientiously he made little notes as he worked, trying to assess who was good at what, and who weak. But they were all much of a depressing muchness. Only the log-books of two of the pilots stood out from the rest. Butterworth was the best by a short whisker, and Maddox – Jesus Christ, how had they ever let him out? – was the worst by a mile.
Twice as long as anyone else to go solo on Tiger Moths, then a lamentable period to master the Oxford. Three goes at converting to Blenheims. Twice his current instructor had passed him on to a colleague for another opinion, the comments column sizzling with controlled exasperation. But somehow he had got through, being passed out with the dismal assessment for pilot skill of ‘Below Average’.
Christ, MacGregor thought, no wonder Horner and Johnson were shit scared. He’d have been the same himself. But what the hell could he do, caught between Cavendish breathing fire down his neck, and the poor material he had to work with?
At least, one decision was reasonably clear. Though he still said it was too soon, Butterworth was the only possible candidate for the first cross-country. Carefully he wrote out the Flying Detail for tomorrow and the next two days, and sent for a runner to come and collect it. He felt better for making that first decision.
Then he sat listening for a while to the BBC News. Blenheims from an unnamed airfield in southern England, which was probably Thorney Island, had attacked Hitler’s invasion barges. That would no doubt make Cavendish and Group more eager than ever to get 13 operational and in with the action. Understandable. The proximity of those barges gave one an odd feeling. Just twenty miles of tonight’s calm sea separating the British from an enemy who so far hadn’t lost a battle. No wonder the powers-that-be were twitchy, maybe going to bed wondering if tonight was the night, or tomorrow the day for Der Tag, Operation Sea Lion, the Invasion of Britain.
However, those were their problems. His own were more immediate. He had no sympathy to spare for top brass.
It was gloaming when MacGregor got to his feet, pushed back his chair and stretched to his full lofty height. Grisewood, the adjutant, had left and gone up to the Mess for dinner. MacGregor closed the door of the squadron offices behind him and went out into the moist evening air.
A half moon had risen above intermittent cloud. As his eyes got used to the gloaming he could, from the slight hummock on which the offices stood, see the black rolls of barbed wire that edged the beach and, beyond, the white phosphorescent curl of the shallow waves.
Twenty miles away, he thought again. Maybe some Jerry bastard was also looking at the curl of the waves, almost eyeball to eyeball, maybe intoning Hitler’s July directive about his decision to carry out a landing operation ‘to eliminate the English motherland… and if necessary, to occupy the country completely.’
MacGregor blew a good Scots raspberry over the water and was about to turn and get himself up to the Mess for dinner when he heard a sound behind him. It filled him with a quite disproportionate melancholy. And yet it was only the mournful sound of a dog howling at the young moon.
He heard that same sound again the next morning early when there was no moon and the sun was about to rise. His batwoman, a nervous girl with large horn-rimmed spectacles and a pleasant sing-song Welsh voice, had just called him with his morning tea.
‘Did you hear that, Bronwen?’ he asked her.
‘No, sir! What, sir?’
‘A bloody dog howling.’
‘Oh, sir!’ The airwoman’s eyes blinked rapidly behind the horn rims. ‘You’re not flying today or anything are you, sir?’
‘Not today, no. Why?’
‘Oh, sir! It’s unlucky. That’s why.’ She clapped her hands over her ears, lest she hear it too. ‘A dog howling means a death.’
‘Away with you, woman! Dinna be sae daft! It means nothing of the sort. The poor animal’s hungry. Or its owner gone and left it.’
He waved her out of the room, laughing at her solemn face derisively. But he wished to God she hadn’t said it.
And he wished that all the more ardently as the day went by.