Other Earths Read online

  “Really, Wally?”

  “Not a clue, sir.”

  The ambulance slowed a little, and we passed a concrete plinth on which was mounted a curious object, resembling a flattened searchlight on a cradle that could be aimed in various directions. Two men were sitting on chairs attached to either side of the moving part of the cradle. In addition to their gas masks they were wearing heavy black headphones. The men were gripping levers and steering wheels, and as we passed the cradle, it tilted and rotated, making me think of a sleepy dog suddenly waking up to follow a wasp. A third man was standing next to them holding a portable telephone to his ear.

  “The name of the game’s acoustic location,” Ralph said, before looking at me expectantly. “I expect it’s all as clear as crystal now?”

  “Not really, sir. But you said ‘acoustic’—I presume this has something to do with sound?”

  “Very good. This is one of the main stations on the south coast. Those chaps we just passed are listening to the sky; that thing they’re sitting on can pick up sounds from tens of miles away.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Won’t they have been deafened by us driving past?”

  “No more than you’d be blinded by the sun if you were looking in the opposite direction. The receiver only amplifies the sounds coming into it along the direction it’s pointed—nothing else matters. Those chaps steer it around until they pick up the drone of an incoming airplane, and then they nod it back and forth and side to side until they know they’ve got the strongest possible signal. Then a third chap reads off the elevation and directional angle and telephones that information straight to the coastal defense coordinator, who can then telephone instructions to the big guns or the Flying Corps.”

  “When we were told to point our guns, sir, I always assumed it was down to spotters.”

  “Which was undoubtedly what they wanted you think. Not that the Huns didn’t have their own stations, but we always reckoned our coordinating system was superior. On a clear day, when the airplanes are within visual range, a spotter will always do a better job than the sound men—it’s all a question of wavelengths and the problem of building sound mirrors much bigger than the ones we already have. But when it’s dark, or the weather’s closed in like this, and the aircraft are a long way out, the fix provided by the sound stations gives us several minutes of advance warning.”

  The second concrete shape was now to our right. I noticed that the rim of the dish was missing a big chunk and some concrete rubble was lying on the ground under it—it was as if someone had taken a nibble from a biscuit. A man with white gloves and a gas mask was standing by the hut directing us to continue driving.

  “Looks like they took a direct hit,” I said. “What do you suppose it was?”

  Ralph steered for the third shape. “Flying wing or long-range shells. Doesn’t make much difference now—the one’s as bad as the other.”

  “Are the concrete things the same as the one the men were steering?”

  “Same general idea, just scaled up. The men call them sound mirrors, which is what they are, really—giant mirrors for collecting all that sound and concentrating it on a tiny spot just in front of the dish.”

  “I don’t see how you can steer one of those, sir, let alone nod it back and forth.”

  “You can’t, obviously. But you can move the pickup tube a little, which has a similar effect. The three of them are pointed in slightly different directions, to cover likely angles of approach. On a good day they’ll pick up the bombers when they’re still grouping over France.”

  I couldn’t see any shapes beyond the third one, so I assumed this was the limit of the Dungeness station. Beyond was a colorless tract of marshy scrub, as far as the mist would allow me to see. The final shape was even more badly damaged than the second one, with two chunks missing from it. A big piece of concrete had even fallen onto the roof of the hut, though the structure appeared undamaged. A guard with a gas mask box around his neck was ushering us to park alongside the hut, gesticulating with some urgency. He had a beetroot-red face and pockmarked cheeks, and he looked thoroughly fed up with his lot.

  Ralph brought the ambulance to a halt, and the engine muttered itself into silence. Even through the airtight windows I could hear the slow rise and wail of a siren. The sirens went on for so long and so often that the only thing you could do in the end was pretend not to hear them. If you didn’t, you’d go witless with worry.

  We got out of the ambulance, collected our gas mask boxes from under the seats, and took two rolled-up stretchers from the rear compartment, carrying one apiece. We didn’t know how many injured we would have to deal with, but it always paid to assume the worst—if we had to come back for more stretchers, we would.

  “In there,” the beetroot-faced guard said, before stalking off in the general direction of the second shape. “Be quick about it—after a shelling like this the flying wings usually come in.”

  “How many injured?” Ralph called after him, but the man was already fixing his mask into place and appeared not to hear him. A seagull flew overhead and seemed to laugh at us.

  “He’s having an off day,” I said, as we walked over to the hut.

  “Your nerves wouldn’t be in fine fettle after spending long out here. The Huns have been bombing these listening stations to smithereens for years. Of course, we build ’em up again as soon as they’re done—the thing about concrete is it’s cheap and quick—but for some odd reason that only encourages them to keep coming back.”

  “Pardon my asking, but how do you know all about this stuff, sir? Isn’t it top secret?”

  “It was, although it won’t be for much longer. I don’t doubt you’ve noticed those wireless towers that are springing up everywhere?”

  “Yes?” I answered cautiously, for I had seen the spindly constructions with my own eyes.

  “Rumor mill says they’re something that’ll put these listening posts out of business in pretty sharp fashion. Pick up planes from hundreds of miles away, not tens. But until they’ve got ’em strung across the south coast and wired together properly, these acoustic locators are all we’ve got.” Ralph put his hand on the door to the hut. “To answer your first question . . . well, let’s attend to the chaps in here first, shall we?”

  The door to the hut was stiff with rubberized gas seals, but after a good tug it swung open easily enough. I followed him inside, not quite sure what to expect. Despite the seals, the hut was damp and cold, like a slimy old cave by the sea. Although there were no windows, there was an electric light in the ceiling, a bulb trapped behind a black metal cage, with a red one next to it that wasn’t on. The lit bulb gave off a squalid brown glow that it was going to take my good eye a few moments to adjust to. There was some furniture inside: a gray metal desk with a black bakelite telephone, some chairs, some shelves with boxes and technical books, and a lot of secret-looking radio equipment, most of which was also black and bakelite. And a man sitting in one of the chairs at an angle to the desk, with a bandage around his head and another around his forearm, his shirt sleeve rolled up. As we came in, he tugged headphones from his head and put them down on the desk. He also closed a big green log book he had open on the desk, sliding it to the back. I’d only had a glimpse, but I’d seen loose papers stuffed into the log book, with lots of scratchy lines and blotches on them. I noticed there was a fountain pen on the desk next to an inkstand.

  The man was a good bit older than me, although I’d still have said he was ten years younger than Ralph—fiftyish, give or take. He still had a moustache even though they weren’t in fashion nowadays. He looked at us groggily, as though he’d been half asleep until that moment, and waved us away in a good-natured kind of way. “I’m all right, lads—just a few scratches, that’s all. I told ’em it wasn’t worth sending out for an ambulance.”

  “We’ll be the judges of that, won’t we, Wally?” Ralph said to me, as if we’d been working together for years.

  I close
d the door behind us.

  The man stiffened in his chair and peered at the door with squinty eyes. “Ralph? Good lord, it can’t be, can it?”

  “George?”

  “One and the same, old boy!”

  Ralph shook his head in delighted astonishment. “Of all the places!”

  A smile spread across the other man’s face. “I presume you found out I was working here?”

  “Not at all!”

  The man laughed. “But it was you that put the word in for me!”

  He had quite a posh way of speaking, like Ralph, but there was a bit of Yorkshire in there as well.

  I placed my stretcher against the wall, coming to the conclusion I wouldn’t be needing it, even though the man would still need to come back to Cranbrook.

  “Well, yes,” Ralph said. “But that was a while ago, wasn’t it? You’ll have to make allowances for me, I’m afraid—getting a bit doddery in my old age.” He put down his own stretcher and shook his head again, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Slowly he moved to examine the seated man. “Well, what happened? Did you get knocked down in here?”

  “No,” our patient said. “I was outside, coming down the ladder from the pickup tube, when some shells hit the dish. Got knocked off the ladder by a couple of splinters. Dashed my head on the side of the hut and grazed my arm.”

  Ralph gave him a severe look. “You were outside during a shelling? You silly old fool, Butterworth.”

  “The pickup tube needed adjustment. You know how it is—someone had to do it.”

  “But not you, George—not you of all people. Well, better get you back to Cranbrook, I suppose. The fellow outside said we can expect flying wings. Don’t expect you’ll be too sorry to miss them, will you?”

  “That’s always how it happens,” George said. “Berthas take out our listening posts, then the planes can come in and pick their targets at leisure. You’re right, Ralph, you chaps had best be moving. But you can leave me here—I’ll mend.”

  “Not a chance, old man. Can you stand up?”

  “Honestly, I’m fine.”

  “And we have a duty to look after you, so there’s no point in arguing—right, Wally?”

  “Right, sir,” I said.

  Ralph offered him a hand, and the seated man moved to stand up. Seeing that he didn’t like having to put weight on his forearm, I wondered if his injury was a bit more serious than just a graze.

  Just at that moment there was a distant whump that made itself felt more through the ground than the air. It was followed in quick succession by another, a little closer and sharper sounding. Accompanying the sound of the bombs was a mournful droning sound.

  “That’s your flying wings,” George said, standing on his own two feet. “They were quick about it this time—give ’em credit. Probably got U-boats watching the station from the sea.”

  I heard the boom of our own antiaircraft guns—you can’t mistake a seventy-five millimeter cannon for anything else, once you’ve worked on them. But something told me they were just taking potshots, lobbing shells into the sky in the vain hope of hitting one of those droning, batlike horrors.

  “Righty-ho,” said Ralph. “Let’s get you to the ambulance, shall we?”

  I moved to the door and opened it again, just enough to admit a sliver of overcast daylight. At that moment another bomb fell, much closer this time. It was only twenty or thirty yards from the barbed wire on the other side of the road, and the blast launched a fan of sand and soil and rubble into the air. I felt as if someone had whacked a cricket bat against the side of my head—for a moment my good ear went pop, and I couldn’t hear anything at all. Suddenly the distance to the ambulance looked immense. My hearing came back in a muffled way, but even so the siren managed to sound more insistent than before, as if it were telling us: Now you’ll believe me, won’t you?

  I closed the door hard and looked back at the other two. “I think it’s a bit risky, sir. They seem to be concentrating the attack around here.”

  “We’d best sit tight and hope it passes,” George said. “We’ll be safe enough in here—the hut’s a lot sturdier than it looks.”

  “I hope you’re right about that,” Ralph said, sitting down in the other chair. Then he looked at me. “I don’t suppose you have the faintest idea what’s going on, Wally?”

  “Not really, sir. I mean, I gather you two know each other, but beyond that . . .”

  Ralph said, “George and I go back a long way, although we haven’t clapped eyes on each other in—what? Ten years, easily.”

  “I should say,” George said.

  “This is Wally Jenkins, by the way. He’s a good sort, although I don’t think he much cares for my driving.” Ralph leaned toward me with a knowing look in his eye, as if he were about to offer me a sweet. “George and I were both interested in music before the war. Very interested, I suppose you might say.”

  “I heard you were a composer, sir,” I said.

  “As was George here. Great things were expected of Butterworth.”

  I racked my brains, but I didn’t think I’d ever heard of anyone called George Butterworth. But, then again, I’d never heard of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and I’d heard from the men at Cranbrook that he really was something, that people used to go to concerts of his music before the war.

  “Actually,” Ralph went on, “there were three of us back then—George, me, and dear old Gustav.”

  “Isn’t that a German name, sir?”

  “Gussie was as English as you or I,” George said sternly.

  “You did hear what they did to him, didn’t you?” asked Ralph. “Locked away by the Patriotic League for having latent Germanic sympathies. They say he hung himself, but I’ve never been sure about that.”

  “It was just a name, for heaven’s sake. He’d stopped calling himself Von Holst. Wasn’t that enough for them?”

  “Nothing was ever good enough,” Ralph said.

  A brooding silence fell across the room, interrupted only by the occasional muffled explosion from somewhere outside. Ralph turned to me again and said, “George and I were both members of the Folk Music Society. Now, I don’t imagine that means very much to you now. But back then—this is thirty years ago, remember—George and I took to traveling around the country recording songs. We were quite the double act. We had an Edison Bell disc phonograph, one of the very few in the country at the time. A brute of a machine, but at least it provided a talking point, a way of breaking the ice.” He nodded at the equipment on the shelves. “Of course, it meant that we had some basic familiarity with recording apparatus—microphones, cables, that kind of thing.” He paused, and for the first time I saw something close to pain in his otherwise boyish face. “In twenty-three I was shellshocked while on ambulance duties in the Salient. I was no good for battlefield work after that, so I was transferred here, to Dungeness. I was one of the operators, listening to the sounds picked up by these dishes, straining to hear the first faint rumble of an incoming airplane. In the end, I was no good for it, and I had to go back to ambulance work; but I got to know some of the names in charge, and when I heard that dear old Butterworth had been shot . . .”

  “I was wounded by a sniper,” George said. “Not the first time, either—took one in the Somme in sixteen. That second was my ticket out of the war, though. But do you know the funny thing? I didn’t want it. What was I going to do—go back to music, with all this still going on?” He shook his head, as if the very idea was as ludicrous as staging a regatta in the English Channel.

  “I know how you felt,” said Ralph. “I had so many things unfinished when this all began and so many more things I wanted to do. Lark Ascending—that needed more work. That opera I keep talking about—I feel as if Falstaff’s been standing at my shoulder for twenty years, urging me to get Sir John down on paper. And another symphony . . . I’ve had the skeleton of the Pastoral in my head ever since I was in the Somme, all those years ago.”

  “T
he bugle player,” George said, nodding—he must have heard the story several times.

  “They still won’t understand it—they’ll think it’s all lambkins frolicking in meadows.”

  “Give them time. They’ll work it out eventually.”

  “If I ever write it, old man. That’s the clincher. Find myself a spare half hour here, a spare hour there, but if I’m not scribbling letters to Adeline, I’m filling out requisitions for bandages or spare tires, or organizing raucous singsongs around the mess piano. I have tried, but nothing good ever comes of it. Most of the time I can hardly hear the music in my head, let alone think about getting it down on paper.”

  “How is Adeline now?” George asked.

  “As well as can be expected, old man.”

  After a silence George said: “At least we’re doing something useful. That’s what I keep telling myself. Music was a pleasant dream, but now we’ve grown up, and there are other things we have to do—proper, serious things, like listening for enemy airplanes or driving ambulances.” Something seemed to snap in him then, as if he had been waiting a very long time to unburden himself. “The damage is done, Ralph. Even if you gave me a year off to go and sit in some quiet country cottage and scribble, scribble, scribble, it wouldn’t achieve a blessed bit of good. There’s too much noise in my head, noise that won’t just go away because I’m not in France or not in earshot of the coastal guns. Why, there are times when I think the only place I can concentrate is here, in this cold little hut, listening to the noises across the sea.”

  At that moment the red bulb, which had been dark when we came in, starting flashing on and off. There was a harsh buzzing sound from one of the black boxes on the shelf. Ralph looked at it worriedly.

  “That’s torn it,” George said. “Gas detectors have gone off.”

  “One of those bombs was carrying gas?” I asked.

  “Mustard, phosgene or radium fragments—there’s no way of telling from here.” George looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Been in a gas attack, Wally?”

  “Once, sir. But it’s not really gas in the radium shells. It’s little particles, but they get carried on the wind just as if they were a gas. They say there are parts of Woolwich no one will be able to live in for years, because that stuff can still get inside you.”