As he pedalled along, Amos was once again struck by how beautiful an airfield could be. In the clear light of an early Lincolnshire morning the gently rolling fields in the distance were darkly marked with lines of elms emerging from a stealthy ground mist: familiar shapes without which no English landscape would ever be truly complete. This hardening panorama, he now decided, performed the same function as the background of a Renaissance painting. There, behind the rallying men and horses, gorgeous with flags and harness, a far-off river might wind placidly past unheeding villages and olive groves. Here, the pale tower of the medieval church in Market Tewsbury five miles away seemed equally unwitting of the engines of war marshalled in the foreground. And just as an art-lover could read a painting’s iconography and marvel at details of sword and armour, so could an airman’s heart lift at the sight of the great ghost-white bombers on their dispersals like pale cattle caught sleeping at dawn. Yet human ingenuity had designed them to spring into the air within minutes and fly faster than the footprint of the sun.
Lately, Amos had taken to starting the day with a visit to one of the airfield’s remoter corners. There was seldom anyone about although, as on any active station, there were always sounds of industry from some quarter. This morning it was from the crews working overnight in one of the vast hangars to bring a Vulcan back to serviceability. On the cool, still air as he passed came the distant chugging of a mobile generator and the faint screech of a power tool. His cycle tyres whined softly over the perimeter track’s ribbed concrete. Out here, where less than twenty years earlier bombed-up Lancasters had waddled from dispersal, the expansion joints between the sections of pavement were still filled with bitumen. Nowadays, spilt kerosene and the searing heat of jet engines too easily dissolved or burned such tar fillings so out on the pan all the old joints had been reamed out and replaced with concrete. This perimeter road, however, remained a fossil from the Second World War, still functional in these chill and perilous times.
This and associated trivia freewheeled through Amos’s mind as he cranked his bicycle along in the growing light. Off to his right stood an immense black water tank on tall iron legs with cross-bracing, another relic from the previous war. It still functioned as an emergency supply and had always been a useful point of reference for pilots on final approach. Ahead of him there now appeared the figures of a military policeman and his Alsatian dog returning from a night’s patrolling of the inner perimeter fence. He braked to a halt as the man raised his hand in slightly more than greeting.
‘Morning, Corporal. Quiet night?’ He handed over his F.1250. There had been a security scare recently.
‘Morning, sir. Thought I recognised you. Quiet enough, it’s been.’ The immaculately blancoed white webbing of the man’s belt, holster and shoulder strap gleamed in the early light. As the policeman bent his head to read the ID Amos could see beads of dew on his service cap’s white top.
‘And how’s Air Dog Bonzo this morning?’ Amos addressed the question facetiously to the Alsatian. ‘No Russky spies to get your teeth into?’ The animal merely fixed him with a blank, killer’s gaze. There was a dusting of dew on its back and mud had oozed up between its toes.
‘Thank you, sir.’ The MP handed back the folder. ‘Long way from married quarters, sir.’
‘You married, Corporal?’
‘Not quite, sir.’
‘Just you wait. You’ll soon find a bit of distance essential now and then.’
When the guard and his dog were dots on the track behind him Amos turned in at the edge of the woods that screened the fire dump equally from the personnel on base and from the occasional British taxpayer travelling the B road a couple of hundred yards away beyond the airfield’s high outer fence. A favourite destination of his, the place drew him as the archaeological site it was. Less than two years previously RAF Wearsby had been a Fighter Command station. Then, after welling anxiety in Whitehall and Washington about the Soviets’ ability to deliver a nuclear strike, Bomber Command had taken up residence instead. The Airfield Construction Branch had worked night and day to lengthen the main runway and build a series of individual operational readiness platforms leading off it so that each bomber had immediate access to it for scramble take-offs. The crews had been busy right up to a month ago building blast pens, hardened aircraft shelters and the reinforced bunkers where Blue Steel nuclear bombs were stored. The two previous squadrons had flown off in their Hunters to Jever and Gütersloh in Germany and the great delta-winged V-bombers had moved in, three of them brand new from the Avro works, their anti-flash white finish smelling of fresh cellulose. Since the strategic catchword these days was ‘deterrent’, they were facetiously deemed to constitute part of Britain’s Great White Deterrent, a phrase which the service had reliably downgraded to Great White Detergent in honour of the novelty value of washing powders like Omo and Tide. The very word detergent brought with it an air of modernity, a suggestion of effortless efficiency.
In all the recent hectic activity at Wearsby the station’s fire dump seemed to have been overlooked. Tucked away in its distant corner, it remained an oasis immune from the new Ministry of Aviation’s world of strategic urgency. It simply went on giving a last home to the victims of mechanical failure, pilot error and sheer bad luck. Lincolnshire – like much of East Anglia – was dotted with airfields of all kinds and despite Wearsby’s nuclear status it was also a Master Diversion Airfield, guaranteed open all year round (weather permitting) for emergency landings, civil or military. It was surprising how often it played host to pilots declaring an emergency. It might be some fighter jock far from home whose engine had surged, flamed out and refused to relight who thought he still had the altitude and was bullish enough to try to ‘dead-stick’ it onto Wearsby’s long runway instead of ejecting and letting the aircraft fall where it might. Another could be down to his last hundred pounds of fuel while searching fruitlessly in a thick sea mist for his home base. Or else a fledgling pilot from Cranwell became lost on a night flying exercise and put down at Wearsby, typically so overjoyed to find terra firma again that he would forget to lower his landing gear first. The physical remains of such episodes, once they had been designated Category 5 – written off as beyond repair – were struck off charge, lifted onto a battered Queen Mary low-loader and hauled off to the fire dump. And it was here that Amos sometimes came for a reflective visit before the day’s routines summoned him elsewhere. It was something he tried to keep from his crew, none of whom was married. They would have seen it as disquietingly morbid, their own spare time being reserved for more extroverted pursuits. As his crew chief ‘Baldy’ Hodge would remark with the sour wisdom of a married man in his mid-thirties, ‘Growing old is compulsory; growing up is not.’
On entering the dump a visitor was confronted by four main rows of scrap, in places piled twenty or more feet high, separated by broad concrete lanes stretching some fifty yards to a pair of Nissen huts at the back that still wore the fading blotches of wartime camouflage paint. The wrecked aircraft were pretty much stratified by era, the majority dating from Fighter Command’s recent occupancy. The oldest types that formed the bottom layers had been propeller-driven. Off to one side were several stacks of Meteor fuselages that had been whimsically propped on their noses, wigwam-like, with tail fins interlocked. From their plain metal finish and the yellow bands painted around wings and fuselage it was clear that many had been training aircraft: a mere handful of the nearly nine hundred Meteors the RAF had lost in service. Everywhere the early sunlight glistened on the dew-beaded remains of cockpit canopies, the crazed perspex of the older models already acquiring a brownish tinge from exposure to the elements. One of the rows of scrap was composed entirely of wings and other flying surfaces, at the bottom of which some were recognisable among the tangle of oxidising alloy as having belonged to old monoplanes such as Harvards or Typhoons. Immediately above this layer were more relics of the RAF’s earliest jet fighters: Meteors, Vampires and Venoms. Wherever water could pool, moss and even small seedlings had sprung up, especially in the tiers devoted to fuselages, where brilliant green algae favoured the rails in which cockpit canopies had once slid. In one pilot’s seat a crop of groundsel had colonised its sodden and decaying foam stuffing.
From a neighbouring lane the towering jib of a Coles Mk 5 crane was outlined against the paling sky, its steel hawsers dangling slack above the tailless fuselage of a Canberra that had landed short some weeks earlier, caught its wheels in an unseen drainage ditch and cartwheeled onto the airfield. Two dead on the spot and the third within minutes of the crash crews’ arrival. All its high-altitude photos of East Germany were lost in the ensuing fire. The crane rested its heavy grab impassively on the Canberra’s blistered hide as if holding it down against some atavistic struggle the fuselage was making to heave itself back into the air. Wire pulleys, thought Amos. Typical of the RAF to make do with a museum piece. But then, why waste a modern crane on a junkyard?
Unlike most airmen, Amos found the fire dump perversely comforting. Aircrew generally avoided confronting the evidence of the death or disaster that was anyway seldom far from their daily lives. Of necessity they inhabited a blessed present squeezed between the dangers of yesterday and the probable nuclear holocaust of tomorrow. Everybody knew of someone who had died. Some had gone instantaneously, some nastily, some even absurdly – like the ground crewman in Aden who had been replacing a faulty relay in the bomb bay of a Valiant. The aircraft was to be flown back on a UK ranger, to the delight of its crew, for a complete overhaul of the bomb-bay heating system which constantly failed. By some freakish screw-up the technician had been shut into the bay by an inattentive crew chief. The aircraft had taken off from Khormaksar, flown back to the UK at fifty thousand feet with a refuelling stop in Akrotiri, and at the last minute had been diverted to Wearsby because of an accident on its home base. Before landing the Valiant had done a low, slow run over the airfield with its bomb doors open to test them, watched by binoculars from the control tower. The deep-frozen ground crewman in his frost-covered khaki shorts fell three hundred feet onto the main runway and shattered like marble, white and crimson chunks bounding away across the grass on either side. Still other deaths remained pure enigmas. Handsome Peter Torrance had gone off in a leftover Hunter F.6 to test its Aden cannon by shooting a few holes in Knock Deep, off Felixstowe, a fifty-minute sortie at most, and had simply vanished. No radio message, no thin slick of kerosene, let alone wreckage. He had promised to be back in time for Yogi Bear on the mess TV at 17:00 and broke his word by flying off into everlasting silence.
But that wasn’t the salutary part of all this: there was nothing new to be learned from sudden death. For Amos the real point was the temporary nature of the whole strategic enterprise, from summit-level politics to outdated hardware. He found it ironic, even reassuring, that the top secrets of fifteen years ago were now junk buried beneath later layers of other top secrets, with the most recent and secret of all open to the skies and held down by the rusted grab of an obsolete crane. They were casualties of the hectic technological advances which the Cold War mandated. Everyone on the station knew that some of Britain’s most ground-breaking experimental aircraft were scrapped by government decree before they had ever flown, winding up as targets on the artillery ranges at Shoeburyness. Millions of pounds’ worth of ingenuity, labour and materials blown up by a bunch of pongos.
Yet it wasn’t really a simple issue of outrageous waste, as the newspapers claimed. If you flew a V-bomber you knew only too well the difficulty of designing new weapons on the edge of what was technically feasible. Unavoidably such weapons had long lead times, and an unexpected breakthrough on your opponent’s part might change the whole strategic plan overnight, rendering the latest interceptor or radar set obsolete before it was even rolled out. No NATO airman was ever likely to forget that day in 1960 when the American Gary Powers had been shot down deep over Russia in his U-2 reconnaissance aircraft by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. Nor had the Yanks been alone in thinking themselves safe at an altitude of over eighty thousand feet; everyone in the West had been counting on sheer height for protection. That one SAM had demonstrated they were safe no longer. It was an immense technological and political coup for the Russians; and in Powers’s later public trial Khrushchev had rubbed it in. The real worry was that the USSR had revealed itself as a good two or three years more advanced in missile-guidance systems than the West’s intelligence services had believed. In how many other fields might it already be equal – or even superior – to the best NATO could offer?
So here in a relatively forgotten corner of RAF Wearsby the strengthening light revealed the sedimentary layers of the best the RAF could once offer: a geology of ex-secrets. Amos wandered to the end of a row and opened the door of the right-hand Nissen hut. The air inside was cold and smelt of kerosene. A few more or less intact engines rested neatly on steel trestles with drip trays beneath them. Periodically, he knew, a heavy lorry would call for them, presumably to take them back to Bristols or Rolls-Royce for rebuilding. Other lorries collected the more battered engines piled to one side so their valuable alloys could be reclaimed. The second hut was locked and mainly contained salvaged instruments and avionics other than radar. Anything to do with radar and electronic countermeasures was far too sensitive to be left in a shed, no matter how well locked and patrolled by RAF police with Alsatians. Some way off was an open area of blackened soil. This was where combustible stuff was periodically burned to give the fire crews some practice. On a still day the viscid column of smoke from shredded aero tyres and engine oil provided a marker that could be seen for miles around. Evidently the last things to go had been some seats, presumably from a crashed transport. Their skeletons, orange with heat or rust, were still tangled at the centre of the bonfire site whose edges were marked by odd lengths of half-charred hydraulic tubing like stubs of liquorice.
Between the huts rested the flattened remains of a Sycamore helicopter. For Amos this wreckage had become the dump’s focal point, almost a private shrine. By sheer chance he had happened to witness the accident, which took place in Wearsby’s airspace. He had been replacing a windscreen wiper on his tatty Hillman one unusually slack day towards noon when, as habitually as any airman, he had glanced up at the sound of aero engines. A huge Beverley transport was lumbering over a corner of the field at about fifteen hundred feet, not with any obvious intention of landing but at what looked like close to stalling speed. Buzzing beneath it and far too close, like a cleg trying to settle on a cow, was a small helicopter. At that moment Amos had a powerful premonition of disaster that leaped through him like voltage. Possibly the helicopter’s pilot misjudged the distance or else his Sycamore was caught in the vortex that the massive transport was generating, which amounted to the same thing. Its main rotor touched one of the transport’s fixed undercarriage legs, instantly shattering its blades which were hurled aside like twigs. The suddenly relieved engine raced itself to destruction within seconds and the helicopter twirled from the sky, falling towards the distant outskirts of Market Tewsbury. It disappeared from view behind the station’s chapel while the Beverley droned on, seemingly unaware of anything amiss, not deviating from its course until it, too, vanished.
Bloody fool, Amos thought almost viciously, turning back to finish with the wiper. Only an idiot would fly a helicopter that close. What did he think would happen? It was the familiar reaction with which airmen so often masked distress and fear. Immortality was naturally granted to those who were not that stupid . . . Amos had witnessed several fatal accidents in his flying career and thought little more about this one until he overheard some gossip and caught the unfortunate pilot’s name: O’Shea. Simultaneously the small shock raced through him again. Surely not Marty O’Shea? But inevitably it was. Apparently the pilot of the Beverley had reported foreign object damage to his starboard wheels on take-off, and as the nearest aircraft Marty’s Sycamore had been diverted to make a visual inspection. It had simply flown too close. Although Marty and his no. 2 were wearing parachutes, neither had managed even to release his seat harness: centrifugal force must have pinned them where they sat. Wrenched violently in all directions, they might dimly have perceived for a few seconds that they were doomed. The Sycamore had slammed into the ground upside down, digging itself a grave several feet deep. The removal of the two men had taken place piecemeal; and although fire hoses had later flushed out the wreckage it still smelt and attracted flies whenever the sun was on it in Wearsby’s dump. Pilot error, the Accidents Investigation Branch inspectors had reluctantly concluded.
It had hit Amos hard. Marty and he had been at Cranwell together and had shared many a daft escapade. They had been at the same drunken dance in Grantham the night they met Avril and Jo. In what Amos now ruefully considered the daftest escapade of all, Marty had married Avril and he had married Jo. It had been all the dafter because at the time the RAF reinforced its disapproval of officers marrying before they were twenty-five by not assigning them married quarters even when they were available, which was seldom, and frequently obliging young couples to buy their own caravans to live in and to move them at their own expense when they were posted. The promise of a life of Calor gas lighting, Elsan toilets and a likely bus ride for the wife to reach the NAAFI shop surely argued true love.
That had been in 1957. Or was it 1958? On graduation Marty had opted for a rotary-wing course and had stuck with helicopters, winding up flying rescue missions with Coastal Command. For some years he and Amos had seen little of each other until Marty was posted not far from Wearsby, somewhere out by the Wash. Jo and Avril, who had remained in touch by occasional letter, still met quite often. These days Jo contrived to spend ever more time with her widowed friend and two small fatherless children and had ever less to say when she fetched up back at Wearsby. ‘This whole world of yours,’ she would gaze stonily out of their married quarters’ metal-framed windows at the identical brick blocks of flats on either side. ‘It stinks of death, Amos. You do realise that?’
I’m every bit as upset about Marty as you are, he would think to himself, reflecting that he’d known his friend rather longer than he’d known his wife but managing to stop himself from saying so. One had to make allowances for the womenfolk, everyone recognised that. Most of the time they were as keenly wedded to the ethic of the service as their men; but every so often an emotional side could surface when they seemed to forget the overriding demands of this attritional war against communism in which they were all, willy-nilly, combatants. Amos preferred not to risk one of Jo’s disparaging retorts about ‘male bonding’, whatever that was. No doubt some phrase she had picked up from the Reader’s Digest to which she subscribed at a Forces discount. It paid to increase your word power, Amos thought bleakly. ‘You married into the services, Jo,’ he protested as quietly as he could, nettled more by the idea of embarking yet again on a tedious circle of repartee than he was by her implied accusations.
‘Into, yes. But I didn’t marry the Royal bloody Air Force. “I Give My All”. What kind of a daft squadron motto is that? Not to me, you don’t, and I’m your wife.’
‘I think I’m supposed to give it to my monarch,’ he told her mildly. ‘Private life gets whatever’s left over.’
‘Slim pickings.’
‘Maybe. But at Cranwell I took an oath of allegiance to “Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors”.’
‘And may I remind you that you also took an oath of allegiance to me. Your marriage vows – affirmed before God, in case you’ve forgotten.’
‘We knew all that beforehand, Jo, remember? Frankly, I don’t mind giving my all if it prevents the world being obliterated with nuclear weapons. I’ve never made a secret of it. I like being a cold warrior. I regret but believe in its absolute necessity. It’s what I’ve been trained for.’
He supposed it was the shock of her friend’s widowhood causing this bitterness. That and the new regime of QRAs – quick reaction alerts – to say nothing of his frequent absences on exercises and sorties to far-flung places around the globe. ‘It’s the job, Jo. We can’t ease up. Do you want Britain turned into a wasteland of fused glass just because we’ve been caught napping by a pre-emptive Soviet attack? You can’t trust the Communists an inch, you know that.’ But it remained acknowledged and unspoken that the constant state of alert could break normal life, collapse marriages. It was the poisonous fallout of a confrontation structured to ensure no nuclear bomb would ever be dropped in anger. Security was such that wives quickly sensed what questions not to ask about their husbands’ work, the operations they flew, and least of all about the weapons and equipment they deployed. And there were even a few women who outranked their husbands, or whose jobs made them privy to information they couldn’t share in bed.
‘Shit-a-brick, that’s the deal,’ Amos told the stratified heaps of sheet metal in the fire dump as he stood in the morning light full of righteous exasperation. Unexpected absences, certain no-go areas – they were surely the trade-off for cheap living, for allowances and pensions, the best medical attention, paid holidays, even the occasional free flight care of Transport Command to sunny places like Singapore or Aden or Nairobi. Not for the first time – by no means for the first time – he was aggrieved enough by his own rhetoric to add aloud, ‘Bloody women.’ What a ridiculous mistake to have made: starting out his adult life by swearing solemn oaths to not one but two of them. At least the Queen didn’t moan at him over breakfast. One of these days, he thought with a tiny lift of satisfaction, I shan’t be able to stop myself telling Jo that I love flying more than I love her. Never mind the initial drilling and bull back at Cranwell, learning to fly had been wonderful. And now years of disciplined study and practice as well as the Operational Conversion Unit course have finally put me in the left-hand seat of a nuclear bomber. The responsibility would probably scare me shitless if I ever allowed myself to think like that instead of treating it as the best thing in my life . . . For a moment Amos thought fondly of his crew: professionals all who loved what they were doing and believed in it. By comparison the domestic and emotional world was strangely aimless, its civilian inhabitants amateurish and clumsy. From where he stood he could glimpse between two elms one of his squadron’s Vulcans nearly a mile away. For a long moment its dew-beaded tail fin blushed beneath a pinkish ray of the rising sun and again he felt his heart lift as once a cavalryman’s might at the magnificence of a charger in peak condition. It was more than the mere tool of his trade, a piece of service-issue equipment. Wives sometimes referred sourly to their husband’s aircraft as ‘the other woman’. That’s the deal, he thought again.
In the strengthening light Amos glanced around before laying an affectionate hand on the Sycamore’s shattered carcase.
‘Bless you, Marty,’ he murmured a little self-consciously. ‘You knew what it was about. Good hunting to you, old boy, wherever you may be.’ The words said themselves without the least belief in anything beyond the point of impact; but the sentiment filled his eyes with momentary tears.
After a few more minutes in this junkyard-turned-shrine he glanced at his watch and pedalled away. The day had begun. Within a matter of hours the weather had turned and he was suited up and sitting patiently in the captain’s seat of XM580 on yet another QRA.