10

Vic was having the time of his life. For six weeks that autumn he and Johnnie visited airfields all across the south of England, taking measurements of different aircraft: bombers, fighters, transport and reconnaissance.

He was glad to be away from the febrile hothouse atmosphere of the labs at Bawdsey. One of the men questioned about the leak had disappeared without trace, but it seemed that Frank had been exonerated and nothing more was said. Vic wished he’d had the courage to challenge him, but feared making things worse. Time had now passed, but his resentment had not. He felt constantly wary, fearful the snake might strike again.

The days grew shorter, the mornings misty. Leaves coloured red, orange and brown, then fell from the trees. Time was pressing on, and ‘Jimmy’ Rowe told each of the two teams he expected ‘workable solutions’ by Christmas, to be tested in the New Year. Frank crowed that his team’s new kit was infinitely superior and nearly ready for use, and they had fully expected to coincide with him at one of their airfield visits, but there was no sign.

‘That man’s all bluff and bluster,’ was Johnnie’s diagnosis. ‘We don’t need to worry about that lot. Just get on with the job in hand.’

The research station lent them a car, a battered old Morris Ten. Johnnie had taught him to drive but Vic usually opted to be navigator, even though his map-reading skills were often tested to the limit; sometimes beyond their limits. Most airfields were quite new and not yet signposted, but getting lost in the lanes of Kent, Sussex or Lincolnshire became part of the fun.

Vic had never seen the English countryside looking so beautiful. The trees still held vestiges of autumn plumage, and bridal veils of white gulls billowed behind the ploughing tractors that turned fields of harvest gold overnight into precise stripes of brown. Johnnie was the best kind of travelling companion: efficient but relaxed, cheerful but not overbearing. He liked a drink, but never to excess. He seemed to enjoy Vic’s company, and showed a friendly curiosity about his Indian origins.

‘Time for the Brits to get out, isn’t it?’ he said at breakfast one day, after reading a newspaper report about the progress of one Mahatma Gandhi.

‘Of course it is. But people fear what will happen when they lose a common enemy.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘They would fight among themselves instead. Muslims and Hindus both believe they have the right to rule.’

Johnnie, always curious, wanted to know more about the religious differences, but Vic’s knowledge was cursory and he struggled to explain. Apart from avoiding meat, he’d barely thought about being a Hindu since his mother died. ‘You don’t speak the language and seem to know diddly squat about their religions. I don’t believe you’re Indian at all,’ his friend teased.

‘So they dropped me in a vat of oil when I was born, I suppose?’

‘Don’t be a dolt.’

They stayed in RAF barracks and ate in military messes or, if no beds were available, would take bed and breakfast at local inns, for which they’d been given a modest allowance. After the long months of hard graft, with bosses breathing down their necks expecting results and asking for solutions ‘by yesterday’, the freedom was intoxicating.

Not that they were taking it easy. Their days were busy with visits, taking detailed notes, copying technical drawings and making sketches of their own, the evenings spent writing up their reports and developing potential ways in which the friendliness, or otherwise, of an aircraft could be detected by a radio wave. At night, easing himself into sleep, Vic would recite their names: Blenheim, de Havilland, Handley Page, Avro, Vickers, Fairey, Armstrong. When he finally slept he dreamed of engine sizes, wing lengths and torsion strengths, images of circuit diagrams and the configuration of instrument panels.

One weekend they took a detour to visit Johnnie’s home near Petersfield, on the South Downs. When Vic fretted about not having anything smart to wear, Johnnie just laughed. As soon as they arrived, Vic understood why.

They were greeted by his wife Lizzie, a strong, handsome woman digging up potatoes in a small allotment at the front of a semi-detached Victorian farm cottage. She threw down her spade and ran to Johnnie, smothering him with kisses and smearing his face with earth from her hands, but no one seemed bothered. Two adolescent children emerged and jumped on their father, almost knocking him to the ground and then dragging him indoors, leaving Lizzie and Vic to introduce themselves.

‘Vikram Mackensie.’ He felt awkward, witnessing such effuse expressions of physical affection. ‘I’m sorry to intrude.’

‘Don’t be silly, we love visitors,’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘And we’ve heard so much about you, Mac, or should I call you Vikram?’

‘Vic will be fine, but I answer to almost anything. “Here, you” works well.’

Inside, he accepted a mug of tea. The children, a girl and a boy, were talking ten to the dozen to their father, showing off their toys, models and workbooks, leaving Vic time to look around. He’d never seen a room quite so chaotic before: ancient furniture, threadbare carpets, a basket of knitting, a cat nursing kittens in a cardboard box in the corner. Faded watercolours and amateur sketches adorned three walls, and the fourth was covered with books stacked higgledy-piggledy on shelves buckling beneath their weight. Such untidiness usually left him ill at ease, his fingers twitching to restore order, but here he felt immediately comfortable. This was a real home, a place where people cared little about how they looked to outsiders, or about material possessions.

Lizzie produced a delicious supper of cauliflower cheese with kale and new potatoes freshly dug from her vegetable plot. They washed it down with a couple of bottles of beer, and afterwards she served apple crumble and custard. ‘Johnnie’s favourite,’ she said, with an affectionate glance across the table. He responded with the gesture of a kiss, earning him cries of ‘Oh, cut out the soppy stuff, Dad, pleeease,’ from the children.

Afterwards Johnnie invited Vic to ‘play for his supper’, clearing a pile of newspapers, clothes and a cat basket to reveal a dusty upright piano. Despite a few stuck keys and a general lack of tuning, he managed to stumble through a few ragtime numbers. Lizzie and the children danced and cheered when he finished, with calls of ‘encore, encore,’ to which of course he obliged. How could he refuse, when it clearly brought such joy? This is how family life should be, Vic thought to himself, not the stilted conversation in the overstuffed drawing room at his aunt’s, nor the stifling propriety at the home of his school friend Kenny. His own life seemed so empty, so barren, and his head ached with envy.

When it came time for bed, Johnnie led him upstairs to what was clearly the son’s bedroom. ‘The boy’ll be fine on Beth’s floor,’ he said when Vic protested. Left alone, he looked around, instantly overwhelmed with nostalgia. Toy trains, lead soldiers, a half-built Meccano crane, piles of comics, and books with titles like Fun for Boys transported him immediately back to his bedroom in India. He could even hear the mournful descending scale of the coucal bird and the harsh alarm calls of the parakeets that massed in the trees behind the bungalow, and smell the sandalwood incense his mother burned each day when preparing her puja.

Leaving for England more than a decade ago, little knowing that he would never see the house again, nor hear those sounds, smell those smells, he’d given it scarcely a backward glance. Besides his school uniform and regulation sports kit, the only personal possessions he’d brought with him were a teddy bear and a framed photograph of his mother and father on their honeymoon, riding an elephant.

He took up a tin car and sniffed it. The tang of metal and lead paint brought tears to his eyes. Mourning for his truncated childhood and grieving for the mother he only vaguely remembered, Vic curled up on the bed and finally fell asleep.

Christmas brought another visit to his father in Tunbridge Wells. Aunt Vera seemed to be suffering from some kind of wasting disease, an unspecified illness about which he dared not ask but which seemed to keep her confined to her room most of the time. After the spaciousness of the Manor, the narrow terraced house felt even more stifling than on his previous visit, especially since the weather, which had been snowy and bitter the week before, had turned suddenly wet and unseasonably mild.

There was no roast this year, only a cut of tinned ham for his father, and Smedley’s tinned new potatoes and mixed vegetables – soggy and metallic-tasting, even after Vic warmed them up with butter and sprinkled them with grated cheese. In the dead of night, after everyone else had retired, he went downstairs and made toast. His father had become ever slower in his movements and greyer around the eyes, and he felt assailed with guilt for failing to visit more frequently.

But he couldn’t wait to get away.

By the spring of 1938, news from the continent was certainly lending an added urgency to work at the Bawdsey research station. In March the German army marched into Austria and the ‘Führer’ began his triumphal journey to Vienna, where he declared that the country – his birthplace – would become ‘the newest bastion of the German Reich’. The prospect of war had suddenly become terrifyingly real.

‘By God, Holland and Belgium will be next,’ Johnnie sighed over the newspaper.

‘Belgium? I thought everyone said he’d expand eastwards?’ Vic said.

‘Poland’ll be in his sights too, I’m sure. They’re very vulnerable. But Holland and Belgium have sea ports.’

‘Just over there.’

‘Too right. Just over there.’ Johnnie lifted his gaze, looking out of the window at the North Sea. ‘Thank Christ I’m too old to fight again.’

‘Again?’

‘I turned eighteen in early 1918. Got conscripted the very next day and shipped out to Flanders after training.’

‘You fought in Flanders?’ Vic was impressed. ‘You kept that quiet, John-boy. What was it like?’

‘Hell on earth, my friend. Mud, lice, bodies, shells, permanent terror. At least it was only four months. Then I got a bullet in the shoulder and they shipped me home to get mended. The war ended before they could send me back again.’

‘Small mercies. I’m glad you made it.’

‘After that all I wanted to do was retire to the country, get married and have children, but I still needed to earn a living. Hence electrical engineering and the job with Marconi, which has led me to this little slice of heaven.’ He paused, turning his attention back to the newspaper again. ‘Thank heavens my boy’s too young to get conscripted this time round.’

‘D’you think there’ll be conscription again?’

‘It’s a dead cert, I’m afraid. As if they didn’t kill off enough of us last time. But don’t you worry, Mac, ours will be a protected occupation.’

‘Somehow that doesn’t feel like much consolation,’ Vic said, quietly.

‘Our contribution is to build the best possible defences.’ Johnnie folded the newspaper and slapped it onto the table. ‘So c’mon, we’d better get that big brain of yours back to work. Frank’s been boasting about their so-called foolproof system, and we don’t want his team winning, do we?’

Frank and his team had chosen an airfield on the south coast for their trial, but Vic suggested that to save time their team could use somewhere much closer to home: the flying boat experimental station he’d visited on Empire Day.

Dr Rowe was dismissive. ‘Those old flying boats have seen their day. Lumbering great beasts,’ he mumbled. ‘Won’t be any use in any coming war; they’ve got no range. And who needs an aircraft that can only take off or land on water, in perfect weather?’

‘But we don’t need height or range, not for these first tests,’ Johnnie persisted.

‘And we won’t incur any travel costs,’ Vic added. They got their permission.

Arriving at the flying boat station, they were greeted by a tall, good-looking man. Vic recognised him immediately.

‘Captain Burrows at your service, gentlemen,’ he said, shaking hands with a vice-like grip. ‘The boss says you’ve a piece of kit you’d like testing. How can we help?’

Just being in the pilot’s presence made Vic feel like a schoolboy once more: in his first term at boarding school, watching the sixth-formers with their long limbs and fine physiques, their careless confidence with the teachers, their effortless grace and skill on the tennis courts or the cricket pitch. He was completely overawed.

Johnnie at least had the advantage of age and experience, as well as nearly matching the man in height. But Vic, almost a foot shorter than both of them, dark-haired to their blond, brown-skinned to their fair, felt even more than usual as though he’d landed on an alien planet.

They repaired to a scruffy office at the back of one of the hangars, and Johnnie explained that because of the secret nature of their work it would not be possible to divulge precisely the purpose of their experiment. ‘But we’ll need to attach aerial lines – what we call dipoles – from front to aft, probably somewhere on the upper wing to the tail. We don’t anticipate they will make any difference whatsoever to the handling or fuel consumption of the plane. All we require is a few passes timed to our own equipment at the Manor. We can choose the day to your convenience. And we’ll take your advice on the type of plane you think will be suitable first time around. After that, perhaps we can try a few others.’

The captain listened with an impressive level of attention, asking intelligent questions about the aircraft they might like to use – explaining that he’d been chosen to work with them because he had the widest experience of all types on the station. Within half an hour they found themselves being led out onto a jetty.

From a distance the plane looked like a toy, but as they approached it was clear this was no flimsy biplane like the Swordfish Vic had visited on Empire Day. It had the hull of a destroyer – much of which was submerged below the water line – and two sets of wings spanning what looked like the length of a tennis court. To the underside of the upper set were attached two mighty Rolls Royce engines with propeller blades several yards long.

‘Phew,’ Johnnie whistled. ‘This is a serious piece of kit, Captain Burrows.’ Vic smiled to himself. Their recent airfield visits were often eased by his friend’s canny ability to say the right thing, and it hadn’t taken long to learn that the usual way to a pilot’s heart was to flatter him with admiration for his aeroplane.

The wind was blustery and chill out here on the jetty, the sea choppy. ‘I can’t take you up today. It’s too rough,’ the captain said. ‘But we can go on board if you like?’

The cabin was more cramped than it appeared from the outside, and even Vic had to watch his head. It required a crew of five, the captain explained: pilot and navigator plus three reconnaissance officers, who would operate cameras and if necessary man the guns mounted on the fuselage. ‘For self-defence only, of course. Too slow and hard to manoeuvre to be a fighter.’ Vic shuddered, sensing how vulnerable the crew might feel, protected only by this thin metal fuselage with large tanks of petrol so close by. He found it claustrophobic, and couldn’t wait to get out.

By the end of their visit the plan was agreed – ready for approval by what the captain called his ‘big white chief’, and Dr Rowe. Calculations would be finalised as soon as final permissions were given, installation of the dipole wires and instrumentation would follow, and the test flights would be scheduled as soon as the forecasters predicted a spell of more settled weather.

One of the team would need to be on board to direct the path of the flight and take measurements en route, ensuring that the systems on board were in working order. Vic immediately nominated Johnnie, and the rest of the team agreed.

Everything was set for their biggest challenge so far.