Trial By Fire Read online

  There was no changing into plain clothes now. It was odd to see the mess full of uniforms in the evening. James telephoned home. His mother answered.

  “I hope you’re keeping a strict blackout there.”

  “Your father is quite obsessive about it. He’s been prowling round outside the house checking there are no chinks of light showing. But never mind the blackout: how are you, dear?”

  “Bored. How’s Christopher?”

  “You can speak to him yourself presently. Roger’s gone, of course. He got his orders on Friday to report yesterday. He went off pleased as Punch, although I do think it’s a pity about that dreadfully shoddy material the sergeants’ uniforms are made from.”

  “He’ll get a commission before long. I won’t ask you where he’s gone, but is it the place where he did his two weeks this summer?”

  “I believe so.”

  They talked some more and James could hear the tension in his mother’s voice. Then she handed the instrument to his father: who, for the first time that Christopher could recall, sounded uneasy; heartiness was not an adjective he would ever have applied to his father, but it was the only one of which he could think to describe his manner now. Then Christopher came on the line.

  “What have you been up to James?”

  “Sitting in a deckchair, sunning myself.”

  “Barbara said to give you her love.”

  “Give her mine. Now what are your plans?”

  “I’ve spent ages on the telephone today trying to talk to someone at Oxford, but I couldn’t get hold of the right person...”

  “Sunday.”

  “Precisely. Idle lot. Don’t they know there’s a war on? Anyway, Dad’s driving me there early tomorrow and if I can get them to agree to keep my schol. for me, I’ll go straight to the nearest recruiting office and tell them I want to be a pilot. I’ll tell them it runs in the family.”

  “You shouldn’t have any trouble. Air Ministry must be crying out for pilots now. They’ll be taking anybody!” James laughed.

  “Thanks very much! I suppose you can’t pull any strings to make sure I do get in?”

  “Strings are far outside a P.O’s reach. Perhaps one of Dad’s old wartime pals could help. He knows a few group captains and an air vice marshal or two. But I shouldn’t think you’ll need any string-pulling. Good luck, anyway. Let me know tomorrow evening how you get on.”

  “I will. Good luck, too. Sorry you missed the party on Thursday: it was...er...wizard.”

  “You’ll dazzle any selection board with your knowledge of Air Force slang, anyway.”

  James hung up, smiling. Christopher was always effervescent and irrepressible. He had no doubt at all that his young brother would extract the concession he wanted from the university authorities. Dash and charm were qualities which the Fenton males did not lack. In Christopher, the dash was rather too predominant. He didn’t wonder Dad wasn’t entrusting his new Flying Standard Fourteen to him: he’d passed his driving test only about ten days ago. And the train journey from Southampton to Oxford was surely tortuous and torturous. It occurred to him that Christopher had mentioned Barbara; and he had not given her a thought since he had parted from her on the beach three and a half days ago. Odd, considering she had dominated his thoughts for most of the immediately preceding five days; despite the passes he’d made at all the others. He had enjoyed his leave. Barbara lived in London. He might look her up sometime.

  He went to bed reflecting that the day had been an unexpected introduction to war. It must be the most significant day in his life, but it had been a damp squib instead of the anticipated vivid explosion.

  When the Nazis had marched into Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland, it had been a cataclysm each time. When the Luftwaffe attacked Poland the day before yesterday they were reputed to have unleashed two thousand aircraft. Intelligence said that the Poles had two hundred fighters, two hundred and eighty bombers and thirty army co-operation aircraft. On the first day, according to the B.B.C. and the station Intelligence officer, the Germans had bombed sixty Polish towns. Yet neither Briton nor France had been attacked by even one small formation of enemy aeroplanes. He had passed his time in idleness.

  He had expected the outbreak of war to mean a dramatic and instant disruption of normal life: the wanton smashing of the many threads of affection and usage, of comfort, pleasure and freedom from fear or want which connected everyone with his or her peaceful environment. Instead it had not even signalled an immediate sliding, shifting and crumbling of all that was accustomed and reassuring. When his grandchildren asked him what he had done on the first day of the war, he would not be able to recount a tempest of dashing bravery. If he was an honest old man, as he was a truthful young one, he would have to tell them “I sat in the sun and waited; in boredom.”

  But it had been a boredom tinged with apprehensions. Looking back on it he acknowledged that there had been a febrile core beneath all the calm preparations of the last two days and the waiting of this one. He had not been racked by any resounding horrible mental images. But he had assumed that something very unpleasant was in store for him and his comrades, as well as the gallantry and excitement conjured by the very words “in action”. He took it for granted that he was more likely to be killed than to survive. The last war had lasted four years and three months. There was no reason to suppose that this one would take any less time to win. The Royal Air Force was small and would have to face a hugely outnumbering Luftwaffe until it grew in size. While it was growing, that nucleus of regulars and reservists would be both the shield and the spear of their country: defending it against what must surely be heavy bomber onslaught and carrying out constant raids on Germany in the teeth of a vast fighter force and thousands of anti-aircraft guns. It would be unrealistic to expect a high survival rate.

  The cliché that soldiers, sailors and airmen always contemplated the probability of death in battle objectively as a fate which would befall anyone else but never themselves came to James’s mind and he was surprised to find that, despite his rational acceptance of probabilities, he could not really believe that he was likely to be killed. Reason told him that it was so, but natural optimism and confidence in his own ability and in his aircraft argued strongly against it.

  He admitted that he was not unafraid, but this litotes did not, he insisted to himself, mean that he was afraid. Fear, by his code, implied funk; which was inadmissible. He fell asleep comforting himself with the assertion that what he felt was a perfectly honourable misgiving about being under fire for the first time and about such disagreeable experiences as being burned, blinded or permanently maimed. Death, if it came swiftly, did not perturb him.

  That was what he told himself and it was superficial because he did not want to dwell on it. If he had examined his fearlessness in terms of all that he would lose if he were killed, his courage would have held firm but it would have given him a strong aversion for death: never to see his parents again, never more to fly or sail, never to hold another girl in his arms, never to marry and have children, make a career and enjoy the fruits of maturity; and the insensible plunge into what was presumably total darkness and the unknown: oblivion, obliteration. He had as much faith as the average Christian, but there was no guarantee that it was well founded and that an after life awaited which would contrast with life on earth as honey with gall. He had never known a clergyman who actively sought his own demise in order to quit the world he knew for the one in which he professed to believe! Had James thought long on those lines, he might not have dismissed fear so robustly. But he was too tired to lie awake thinking; and, in any event, there was a psychological mechanism which erected barriers against such analysis.

  * * *

  James woke to find his batman shaking his shoulder and offering him a cup of tea. It was half an hour before dawn on the second day of the war. He dragged himself blearily from bed, down the passage for a cold shower to rouse himself, shaved quickly, dressed and went downstairs to board the
fifteen-hundredweight lorry waiting at the front door.

  There was a lot of yawning and some grumbling. James felt sympathy with both. He would not mind rising at this hour if there were some purpose in it. He resented doing it merely to spend another inactive day. There was no chatter on the way across camp to dispersals.

  When they arrived they found Squadron Leader Wilson already in the crew room. He looked as rubicund and fresh as though he had had eight hours’ sleep.

  “I’ve just been to Ops. Group have put us on convoy patrols all day.” He went to a map on the wall, indicated a point off the Sussex coast, and gave them the convoy’s code name. “It’s on its way to the Thames.”

  A Flight was to provide the first section. Flight Lieutenant Addison detailed himself, with James as No. 2 and Ross No. 3. They were both thankful to be occupied. It may not be much by way of a first operational sortie, but it was at least a gesture. There was no massive threat to convoys in the Channel from enemy bombers based in Germany, but there was a threat of U-boats. In addition to protecting the convoy against an unlikely air attack, they would have to search for signs of submarine periscopes disturbing the surface. James did not think much of his chances of spotting a periscope’s faint wake unless he was less than two hundred feet above the water; and he had the best eyesight on the squadron.

  He plugged his helmet earphones in and at once was assailed by the static which was a bane of the high frequency TR9D radio-telephone set. He started his engine and through the crackling and whining heard Walter Addison’s voice.

  “Red Two from Red One, are you receiving? Over.”

  “Red One from Red Two, strength ten through interference. Out.”

  He heard a similar exchange between Addison and Ross, then the three Hurricanes, already in vic, taxied away from the dispersal bays outside which the ground crews had placed them. Once he was off the ground, James felt glad he had had to get out of bed early. There was a special delight in dawn flight. They climbed into rapidly increasing light and in a few minutes the convoy came in sight: a gaggle of small cargo ships escorted by a destroyer and a corvette.

  The three fighters turned to circle the ships. James thought that even the stubby, no doubt grimy, coasters looked trim from this height in the rosy light. The warships’ sinister lines had a sleek beauty. He felt a vicarious pride in them and a protectiveness towards the plodding merchant vessels. A bright flicker of red splashes rippled along the starboard side of the destroyer: how pretty that was. There was another succession of winking lights clustered fore and aft on the corvette: that made a jolly sight, too.

  Dark grey smudges of smoke pocked the sky around the fighters. At the centre of each was an angry red and yellow flash.

  Through the static, James heard “Break!” and he automatically peeled off to the right in a steep turn. “Bastards are shooting at us.” Despite his epithet, Walter Addison sounded more amused than alarmed.

  James rolled out of his bank and looked for his section leader. He saw his downward recognition light flashing. There was no more gunfire from the convoy escort. Addison ordered them to re-form. James wondered what had gone wrong. The Navy’s aircraft recognition must have been poor if it could not identify Hurricanes, even if they had approached from an unexpected direction or someone had confused the signals. The nearest shell burst had been fifty yards away. He hoped the sailors would shoot better when the enemy did pay them a visit. He felt less keen now about searching for U-boats. He would have felt positively indifferent had he known that this was an experience to be repeated many times and that several Hurricanes and Spitfires were destined to be shot down by Royal Naval vessels.

  By the time another section came to relieve them James was bored with flying round and round the slowly moving ships. Addison warned the other section leader that he had been shot at.

  “Inhospitable,” came the answer.

  “Downright ungrateful.”

  When they landed and reported the episode, Squadron Leader Wilson said “That sort of thing is going to happen all the time. Apparently there was a suspected hostile over the Midlands at three this morning, and when a Hurricane was scrambled from Wittering to intercept, it found it was a Whitley.”

  While A Flight was at breakfast, the squadron Intelligence officer, a middle-aged reservist who had been recalled, joined them.

  “Looks like being quite a day. Some Spitfires were scrambled at half past six from Biggin Hill to intercept a raid which turned back before they made contact. As the Spits crossed in again over the coast, our ack-ack opened up at them, thinking they were the Jerries.”

  James looked at Ross and pulled a face.

  “I think we ought to get danger money if this sort of thing goes on. Whose side are the Army and Navy on?”

  * * *

  A Whitley bomber had made a forced landing at Stanswick during the night. James, Ross and one or two others walked over to it for a chat with the crew. They envied them because they had done something more valuable and active than waiting at readiness or tamely orbiting over a Channel convoy.

  James asked the captain “Did you hit your target?”

  The bomber pilot gave him an enigmatic look. “I don’t know about hitting it, but we found it.”

  “What bomb load did you carry?”

  “We didn’t.”

  The fighter pilots exchanged puzzled glances.

  Ross said “We thought you’d been on an op., not an exercise.”

  “We were. So-called. Bumph.”

  “Bumph?”

  “Leaflet-dropping. Trying to persuade the Jerries to give up instead of thumping the bastards.”

  “God! What a waste of petrol,” Ross said. “Did they shoot at you ?”

  “A bit. Jerry doesn’t want to give away his ack-ack sites unnecessarily: not as long as we’re only dumping paper.”

  James looked disgusted. “Hitler said ‘Guns, not butter’, and Chamberlain apparently believes in ‘Bumph, not bombs’.”

  THREE

  Roger Hallowes reported to the bomber station in Lincolnshire where he had done his fortnight’s attachment in June. It was the afternoon of Saturday 2nd September. He had enjoyed the drive of two hundred miles across Hampshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, through Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, a corner of Northamptonshire. This was the country for which he was going to fight. As he drove over its gentle landscape of low hills and lush valleys, past somnolent villages and along hedged byways that bordered rich acres of pasture and arable, crossed bridges that had known the tramp of Norman soldiers, skirted woods where Saxon yeomen had cut yew saplings for their bows and followed the straight roads which the Roman legions had built, he was imbued with profound sentiment and patriotism.

  He was also filled with a heady sense of freedom. No more confinement from nine to five every weekday and nine to one on two Saturdays out of three. No more evening study for banking examinations, no more cheap and stodgy lunches in steamy little cafés or stuffy saloon bars.

  He enjoyed the respectful and admiring glances cast on his uniform when he drove slowly in his open car through a village or town or stopped at a traffic light. He delighted in the frequent smiles and waves from pavements crowded with Saturday shoppers and from passing cars on the road.

  When he stopped for bread and cheese and pickled onions and a pint of bitter at a pretty country pub, he was the centre of attention. Landlord, barmaid and customers all made much of him. They asked him what kind of aeroplane he flew, they solicited his opinion on the most esoteric aspects of warfare, they put political questions which only a Cabinet Minister could have answered; and they all wanted to buy him drinks. The landlord refused payment for his food or his pint. Outside the pub, children clustered round and cheered. He drove away with three pints of beer swilling around inside him and with his senses alight with pride.

  R.A.F. Baxton was a new station, built a year ago. Its red brick buildings were still raw and no trees grew beside its roads. The flat Lincoln
shire countryside undulated gently to the west and north. An occasional low hill stood against the horizon, perhaps topped by a clump of trees or a wood. Tall objects such as steeples, windmills or the station’s wireless masts stood out with peculiar clarity but the distant ones seemed, by a local aberration of the light where land and sky merged, to be floating in space.

  At the main gate a Service policeman with blancoed corporal’s stripes (“tapes”, in the R.A.F.) stepped off the Guard Room veranda to examine Roger’s identity card.

  “Right you are, Sarge. Know your way to the sarnts’ mess?”

  “Yes, thanks. I was here a couple of months ago.”

  The corporal waved him on, wondering how it was that a sergeant spoke with such a posh accent; like an officer.

  Roger drove first to Station Headquarters to report to the Orderly Room. The flight sergeant in charge regarded him with apparent disfavour. He resented having to work on Saturday after midday, to start with. He was a stout, moustached man with the ribbons of the General Service medal he had acquired in Iraq and Palestine, and the India General Service 1936-7. It had taken him ten years to earn his sergeant’s tapes and another three for the brass crown above them. He had sixteen years’ service behind him. He did not think it proper that non-commissioned pilots were given sergeant’s rank within a couple of years of starting their training. Some were put on a pilot’s course after a few years’ service as aircraftmen in one of the trades, but many joined the Service directly to fly. He had never met a sergeant pilot yet who was a disciplinarian; and, to make matters worse, the junior officers treated them almost as equals. They were well paid, too, just because they had qualified for a pair of wings on their chests. And they tended to keep to themselves in the mess.

  He would have rejected a suggestion that the N.C.O. pilots’ apparent clannishness arose from the hostility of some of the older members; or that their pay scale reflected the fact that, by flying, they put their life and limb at risk.