Landfall (2 page)

He said: “I’m glad Ginger Rogers couldn’t come. You dance much better.”

“You do talk soft.”

“Would you like to do it again?”

“All right.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“If you like. Same time at the Pavilion?”

“I’ll have to shake off Loretta Young, but I can get rid of her all right. I’ll tell her I’ve got chicken-pox. Half-past ten?”

“All right.”

“Is this where I kiss you?”

“No, it’s not.”

“You’re wrong.”

Presently she got out of the car and stood for a moment in a shadowy doorway, slim and erect, waving him good night. He started up the worn engine of the little sports car again and drove out of the city on to the country roads.

The girl pulled the door behind her and bolted it, turned out the flickering gas-jet, and went up the narrow stairs to her room. She trod softly on the oilcloth and shut her door furtively behind her, because she did not want to wake her mother. Her mother never minded whom she went about with, but liked her to be home by midnight.

She had a room to herself, being the only one of the children still at home. Her brother Bert was in the Navy, a leading seaman in the
Firedrake
; he was away from England. They thought he was somewhere in the South Atlantic; it was six weeks since they had heard from him. It had had to be the Navy, of course. Her
father had served for nearly thirty years, finishing up as a chief petty officer. He had a small pension, and the shop made a profit of a few shillings a week, enough for them to get along on.

Millie, her sister, had shared the room with her till the beginning of the war; she had been working at the corset factory. A panic reduction had thrown Millie out of work with a hundred and fifty other girls; she had then joined the A.T.S. and was doing canteen work at Camp Bordon. She looked very smart in her khaki uniform; Mona sometimes regretted that she had not done the same. But it was more fun in the snack-bar, with everybody having a good time, and all the officers drinking with their ladies, and that.

The room was cold; she undressed quickly and jumped into bed. Was that a bust bodice, indeed! The cheeky thing! Probably he only said it to tease her. She never had heard anybody talk so silly, but it was fun being out with him. She was glad he had asked her to dance again. He was ever so tall, six foot two at least; the long blue greatcoat and the little blue forage cap stuck sideways on his black hair made him look taller still. She thought he was older than she was, twenty-three or twenty-four perhaps. He had a very young face, with pink cheeks.

She liked him. She was glad to be going out with him again; it was something to look forward to.

Jerry, they called him. It was really awful; a typical officer’s joke.

Very soon she was asleep.

Ten miles away Chambers turned his noisy little car in at the gateway leading to the officers’ mess and parked it in the open-sided garage barn. He draped the rug over the radiator in case of frost and went into the mess. It was a good mess, a solid building of red brick designed by a good architect and put up about ten
years previously. It was overcrowded now; the aerodrome accommodated five squadrons instead of the two that had been the establishment in peace-time. A cluster of bedroom huts were springing up on what had been the tennis-courts, but Chambers had a bedroom in the original building. He had been there since he had left Cranwell three years previously.

There was still one light burning in the ante-room; he crossed the room and studied the operations board. The weather report for the morning was there; cloud ten-tenths at a thousand feet. Sleepily he made a grimace; still, it was December and you couldn’t expect much else. He scanned the other notices on the board. Battle practice in Area SQ from 1200 to 1400—that wouldn’t worry him. Experimental flying in Area TD at 1,000—that might be interesting. AA gunnery practice from Departure Point in Area SL—that was off his beat. There was nothing that concerned him.

He looked at his watch; it was half-past one. He went up to his room.

His room was comfortable enough, though furnished with a Spartan simplicity. There was an iron bedstead with a clean white counterpane; his batman had turned down the bed and put out his pyjamas. The walls were cream distempered, and the paint was grey. There was a small wash-basin with running water, a small radiator, and a large painted tallboy for his clothes. There was a double photograph of his father and mother on the mantelpiece, and a couple of detective novels. There was a large deal table in the window, and most of his private life revolved around this table.

He kept his letters in its drawers, and his fountain-pen, and the bottle of ink, and all the oddments that he would have liked to carry with him in his pockets if it had not been for spoiling the set of his tunic. On it stood his wireless set, a jumble of valves, chokes and
condensers on a plain deal board innocent of any covering. He had put it together himself; it got America beautifully. Beside it was his galleon. He had bought the kit of parts to make the galleon a couple of months previously and he was laboriously rigging the yards with cotton thread according to the book of the words, and painting it with the little pots of brightly-coloured pigments supplied with the kit. It was about half finished.

He ran his eyes over it lovingly; he liked the delicate, finicking work with his fingers. It was fun to work at, in his long leisure hours. He had thought of calling it the “Santa Maria”; that was what the book told you to paint under the stern gallery. “Mona Lisa” would go as well, he thought, and it would leave a little more room for the lettering. Mona.

He switched on all the switches that controlled the wireless set, and tuned it in to Schenectady. He heard a dance band faintly, overlaid with background noise and echoes of Morse, and got his customary thrill out of it. The room was cold; he slung his gas-mask over the back of a chair and started to undress.

In bed, he twitched the string that ran ingeniously round the picture-rail to the switch at the door, and pulled the cold sheets round him. She was a decent kid, that Mona. He had danced at the Pavilion several times before, but had never wanted to meet his partners again; usually he had been only too glad to get rid of them. This one was different. She was dumb as a hen, of course, but all girls seemed to be like that. It would be fun to spend another evening dancing with her, provided no one from the mess happened to see them. He didn’t want to get his leg pulled.

Perhaps it was better, after all, to stick to beer.

He thought of her again, remembered the feel of her shoulders, and drifted into sleep, smiling a little.

Five hours later he woke up with a start as his batman snapped the light on at the door. The man put a cup of tea beside his bed. “Half-past six, sir,” he said. “Been raining in the night, I see, but it’s stopped now.”

The pilot sat up in his bed and took the cup. “What’s the wind like?”

“Blowing a bit from the north-east.” The man took his boots and went out of the room, leaving the light on.

Chambers got up, shaved and dressed and went down to the dining-room. At one end of one of the long tables there were three or four young men at breakfast, served by a sleepy waitress of the W.A.A.F. It was still dark outside and the curtains were still drawn; in the cold light of a few electric bulbs the meal was cheerless and uncomforting. He pulled a chair out and sat down to porridge.

Somebody said: “’Morning, Jerry. What time did you get home?”

“Half-past one.”

The other said: “I saw you—you were doing nicely. I got fed up and left.”

The conversation flagged: the pilots ate hurriedly and in silence. They had been on the morning patrol now for a month, and they were sick of it. With the late, dark mornings and the cold weather the patrol over the sea was unattractive, boring in the extreme, and a little dangerous. There had been losses in the squadron, unromantic, rather squalid deaths of pilots who had miscalculated their fuel and had been forced down in the winter sea to perish of exposure or by drowning. To set against the black side of the picture there were only long strings of meaningless statistics gleaned each day, the names and nationalities of ships within their area, the course and the position of each. It was uninspiring, clerical work, meaningless until it reached the commanders R.N. in the operations room, who daily made up the great mosaic of the war at sea.

This was the last morning patrol that the flight were to do. Tomorrow they would have a change of timetable and would take on the afternoon patrol over the same areas of sea.

“Like the bloody threshing horse that takes a holiday by going round the other way,” said Chambers. In the three months since the beginning of the war, nobody in the squadron had seen an enemy ship, or fired a gun, or dropped a bomb in anger.

The pilots finished their breakfast, pulled on their heavy coats and went down to the hangar. The machines were already out upon the tarmac with their engines running; grey light was stealing across the sodden aerodrome. In the pilots’ room the young men changed into their combination flying-suits, pulled on their fur-lined boots, buckled the helmets on their heads. The machines that they were flying were enclosed monoplanes with twin engines; in summer they would dispense with helmets. Now they wore them for warmth.

Each machine carried a crew of four, an officer, a sergeant as second pilot, a wireless telegraphist and an air-gunner. They carried two one-hundred-pound bombs and a number of twenty-pound, and had fuel for about six hours’ flight.

The officers gathered round the flight-lieutenant, armed with their charts, and heard the latest orders. Then they separated and went to their aircraft. The crews were standing by and the engines were running. One by one they got into the machines and settled into their places; the doors were shut behind them. There were four machines in the patrol. Engines roared out as each pilot ran them up, chocks were waved aside, and the machines taxied out to the far hedge and took off one by one in the cold dawn.

Chambers sat tense at the controls during the long take-off. He knew the machine well, but with full load
it was all that she could do to clear the hedge at the far end. It was easier than usual today; they had the long run of the aerodrome and there was a fair wind. He pulled her off the ground at eighty miles an hour three hundred yards from the hedge and held her near the grass as she gained speed. Then he nudged Sergeant Hutchinson beside him, who began to wind the undercarriage up with the old-fashioned, cumbersome hand gear.

From time to time, as they gained height, the sergeant paused in his task to wipe his nose. He had a streaming cold in the head, and he was feeling rather ill. By rights he should not have been flying, but the squadron were temporarily short of pilots, having despatched a number to the Bombing Command.

Behind the sergeant the young white-faced wireless operator unreeled his aerial and made the short test transmission that he was allowed before relapsing into wireless silence, only to be broken by orders from his officer in an emergency. He sat with head-phones on his head, searching the wave-lengths with the knob of his condenser, sleepy and bored and cold. Behind him the corporal gunner sat in the turret playing with the gun. As they passed out over the beach, the corporal fired a long burst into the water to test the gun; the clatter mingled strangely with the droning of the engines. Then he sat idly on the little seat in the cramped turret scanning the misty, grey, and corrugated sea.

Chambers passed over the control to Hutchinson and moved from his seat to the little chart-table. He gave a course to the sergeant, who set it on the compass. They flew on out over the Channel, flying at about seven hundred feet below a misty layer of cloud. Very soon they lost sight of the other machines, each having taken its own course.

The young man sat at the chart-table staring out of
the large windows of the cabin. He had an open notebook before him: on the vacant page he had written the date, the time of taking off, and the time of departure from the coast. In the grey morning light the visibility was very poor: unless they were to pass right over a ship it was unlikely that they would see it. They were all on the look-out; there was nothing else to do.

They flew on for an hour, gradually growing cold. The wireless operator was the first to feel it as a bitter privation. He was a pale-faced lad of nineteen with a home in Bermondsey; he had little stamina and hated the monotony of the patrol. He had nothing to do, ever. The rules against transmitting on the wireless were rigorous, and could only be broken in emergency; in the three months of the war they had not suffered an emergency. In three months he had done no useful work at all, and he was sick of it. For this reason he hated the patrol, and felt the cold more than any of them.

Chambers moved back into the first pilot’s seat. “See the Casquets pretty soon,” he said. The sergeant nodded his agreement.

Five minutes later Hutchinson plucked his arm and pointed downwards. The young officer craned over and saw through the grey mist a small black rock awash in the sea, with white surf breaking on it. Then there was a long black reef, then nothing but the sea again.

Chambers said: “For the love of Mike, don’t lose it. Shove her round.” He moved back to the chart-table and bent above the chart. It might be Les Jumeaux, or a bit of Alderney. He set a new course as they circled round the reef; the sergeant steadied on it. Very soon an island rose out of the mist, rocky and barren, with a lighthouse on it.

The machine turned away and took a course back for the coast of England, flying upon a course ten miles to
the west of their flight out. It was their job to cover the whole area in strips, so that at the end of their five-hours’ patrol they would have an accurate report of everything that floated in their zone. In theory, that was, for on mornings like the present one they could see barely half a mile on each side of their path.

They saw a ship before they reached the English coast, a collier with the letters NORGE painted upon her side. They circled her and swept low by her stern to read the name, the
Helga
. Then they resumed their flight. The young officer produced a bottle of peppermint bull’s-eyes; they all had one, with a drink of hot coffee from the Thermos-flasks. The drink and the hot sweet refreshed them and brought back a part of their efficiency; they were all suffering a lassitude from the raw cold.