Out of the Blue (2 page)

Roused by the ground crew, Frank unharnessed himself and pushed back his cockpit canopy. For a few seconds more he still carried
the silence within him, like a full glass of water. Always, even after a successful mission with reason to celebrate – another kill –
he was reluctant to re-engage, to spill the water. And always, the moment the glass was smashed, he thought no more of it.

A tractor was towing the Dodger’s plane off the end of the runway, fire engine and ambulance in attendance. Frank
could just make out the Dodger’s squat shape and characteristic gesticulations. Uninjured, evidently. That was no surprise; it was possible to imagine the Dodger not
existing at all but impossible to imagine a lesser, maimed or disabled Dodger. It seemed his body could barely contain his energy. Like him or loathe him, he filled a
room, was a quick and adept pilot, daring in combat to the point of foolhardiness, impulsive and unpredictable. He owed his nickname
to his ability to dodge trouble both in the air and on the station, where he often sailed pretty close to the
wind. Frank envied him his confidence and was pleased to have been able to shepherd him home.

In the debrief afterwards the Dodger was exuberant. ‘Did you get him? Did you get the bastard who got me?’

‘I got him. The film will confirm. But I got him.’

The Dodger slapped him on the shoulder, his grin showing nearly all his large, widely spaced teeth.

‘Good old Moose. First I knew of it was a bloody great bang and I could see bugger all, oil all over my goggles, half my instruments gone. Talk about flying blind, all
I could do was heave up and away till the fog cleared. Marvel I didn’t fly into anyone. Christ knows what happened to the bastard I
was chasing. Sure I hit him. Did anyone see?’

Tim, the lanky Kiwi, thought he might have seen him go down but couldn’t be sure. Nor was anyone else. The squadron hadn’t lost
anyone and had accounted for two Focke-Wulfs, including Frank’s, plus a possible, so the atmosphere was cheerful. The Typhoons had suffered badly, though, losing two to flak, another to the Focke-Wulfs and a fourth caught by the explosion of the third.
It was too often the way with low-level attacks on defended targets: they might work but they were always costly. Someone thought
another Typhoon had fallen prey to two Focke-Wulfs near the end of the scrap but someone else reckoned he had intercepted them,
allowing it to escape. An argument began.

Patrick held up his hand. ‘Cut it. Leave it to film and body count. We’ll find out later.’ There was immediate silence. They sat on their
fold-up chairs, looking at him. He was seated at the table with the station intelligence officer. The wing commander was elsewhere. ‘Now,
before you all cut along for nosh, one more thing.’ He lit another cigarette, taking his time. Patrick never hurried,
never raised his voice, never needed to. He spoke with a calm assurance that was assumed by those with
no experience of it to be due to his Eton schooling. He was known to miss nothing and to pull no punches, but
was never less than polite. ‘We nearly lost two pilots today through basic errors, errors you all know
to avoid. Dodger, because you were too intent on your prey even after he was obviously hit and
out of it. You didn’t look behind you. It’s basic, elementary. You’d have hit the ground before he did
– if he did – if Frank hadn’t saved your bacon. And Frank, right at the start because you were hanging around sight-seeing, looking at the pretty pictures on the ground instead of
looking out for Jerry. You should have seen those 190s before I did. They came from your side and damn nearly caught us all
napping. Save daydreaming for your fishing and keep your eyes peeled, all the time. That applies to everyone.’
He looked at the young faces around him, silent and solemn now. ‘Apart from that, well done everybody. It was a good
score and we gave the Typhoons time to do a proper job on the airfield, which they did, poor buggers. A good show.
Well done.’

There was bacon and eggs in the mess, smelling better than it looked or tasted. The Dodger sat next to Frank, held up his
single thin rasher and snorted like a pig. ‘You saved mine. Guess you’re entitled to this.’ His Mancunian voice carried along the
table, prompting dismissive remarks about the bacon.

‘Keep it on account,’ said Frank. ‘Save mine next time.’

The Dodger held his rasher up to the light. ‘So bloody thin it’s transparent, look. Like
fag paper. Rizla Red, that’s all it is.’

Afterwards, the Dodger, Tim and a couple of others remained at the table and resumed their analysis of the scrap. Frank took his tea
over to the armchairs, where Patrick was reading a paper. ‘I should have given you my bacon,’ he said. He so respected Patrick, so wanted to please him, that he was often nervous about speaking to him. ‘You saved mine.’

Patrick shook his head and proffered his cigarettes. ‘You’ll do the same for me.’

‘Sorry that I—’

Don’t be.’ He held up his lighter for Frank. ‘Why don’t you push off for the rest of the day? Go fishing. You like fishing, don’t
you? No more ops planned. We’re stood down. The other lot are on standby. Take Roddy’s bike.’

Roddy had gone down during a scrap over Calais a few days before, spinning helplessly with half his port wing shot away. His
possessions had been cleared from their hut with the usual prompt and discreet efficiency but his bike was still outside.

‘Have it,’ continued Patrick, ‘have it as yours. It wasn’t really his, anyway. He inherited from Ian. Or maybe
what’s-his-name – Bruce, the South African. Before your time, anyway.’ He exhaled forcefully. ‘Not that there’s much for
a fly-fisher here in Kent, is there?’

‘A few. Brown trout. Nothing big but just enough for a bit of sport.’

‘We should move the squadron to Hampshire. You’d have the Avon, then. Mainly coarse fish but there are some decent trout to be had on mayfly. Even a few salmon
below Fordingbridge. Better still the Test, of course. Beautiful river, the most perfect chalk stream.’

Patrick’s range of accomplishments never ceased to surprise. He had learned to fly at Oxford, won a blue as a half-miler and
seemed to know a bevy of senior generals, admirals and air marshals.

‘I didn’t know you fished.’

‘Used to. Get back to it one day. Can’t think of anything better than a day on the Test,
right now.’ Patrick yawned. ‘Well done this morning, anyway.’

‘Sorry again about the sight-seeing.’

‘We all do it. Need each other to remind ourselves. It’ll be me next time. Just make sure you tell me. Go and catch a fish.’

On his way out of the mess Frank saw a letter from his mother on the round table in the entrance, obvious
immediately by its Canadian stamp and her hand. It was a short account of home, the farm, his father, his brothers and sisters,
the puppy he hadn’t seen, nothing of herself and at the end a brief but telling wish that all was well with him.
It was clear she hadn’t got his last, sent some time – weeks, perhaps, he had lost track – ago. Her restraint
was eloquent of her concern and reproach. He pushed the letter into his tunic pocket, intending to reply that evening. He would fish
first.

Roddy’s bike was an ancient black Hercules, heavy-framed with pitted handlebars, three-speed gears, no lights and a warped leather saddle. The
tyres were pumped up. Frank remembered seeing Roddy on it, pedalling slowly, his blond head bent low over the handlebars. He was a
quiet man, an equable Londoner, always carrying a book. Frank had no idea where he went on his bike, apart from using it to get around the airfield.
Perhaps he rode off into the country to read, seeking silence, like Frank. He’d joined the squadron a week or so before Frank and had lasted
about six, therefore. They hadn’t spoken more than half a dozen times.

When he mounted the bike, his tackle slung in a kitbag over his shoulder and his rod tied to the
crossbar with string from the station office, he discovered why Roddy used to ride so slowly and with such apparent effort. It was stuck in top gear and no amount of fiddling with the cable would move it. The rear wheel would have to come off and the
hub be dismantled. He would put up with it for now and do that another time, as Roddy had no doubt intended. And perhaps Bruce before him, and whoever it was
before Bruce. No one really owned anything on the airfield; if you used something regularly you acquired a temporary and informal title to it, until
you were gone. Best known and most coveted was what was known as Martin’s motorbike, a much-abused BSA 250cc whose temporary owner was anyone who could be bothered to tinker with it enough to keep it going. No one now remembered who Martin had been.

It was not far to the Beult, the nearest fishable stream, and Frank enjoyed his meditative progress through the elm-lined lanes of Kent, a
welcome change from flying at 300 knots a few feet above them. The Beult, a small stream, was low that summer. He had already fished the most accessible reaches, with ready
permission from the landowners who were pleased to indulge a pilot. But with the water now so low, there was
only one stretch that would do, a slow bend with deeper pools shaded by willows, hidden from the lane by
an orchard. Unable to discover the landowner, he had fished it several times without permission.

He hid his bike behind the hedge by the humped stone bridge and set off through the orchard. They were old trees, high and awkwardly angled, full of young apples that
would be difficult to pick. In a month or two there would be pickers, ladders, baskets and busy-ness, and after them the hop-pickers for the hopping,
but now there was no sound apart from the regular soft brush of his boots in the grass and the
hum of insects. No birdsong, no aircraft. It was mid-afternoon, warm but not hot, and the fish would probably not be feeding. But he wouldn’t mind
that, or not very much. The point was to be there. It was enough that the world seemed peaceful and somnolent.

A gate in the hedge on the far side of the orchard opened into a field of cow-pats and chewed grass. There were no cows,
unless they were behind the willows and alders at the bend of the stream. He chose a pool he had fished before,
hidden from view by long grass but with sufficient gap between the trees for him to cast.

Half an hour after the white flash and still fish-less, he had not moved on. The trembling in his arms had stopped and he was no longer troubled by images of all
those earlier flashes. As the afternoon cooled into evening the trout might rouse themselves to feed. Anyway, it was good to feel
hidden and private, a time to recollect himself. He cast again and watched his fly slowly sink until soft sounds of champing and swishing announced a dozen reddish-brown and white cows in a semi-circle behind him. Some were twisting and tearing the grass with
their long tongues but most stared at him, dark eyes passively curious, tails swinging.

A while after that he noticed that the gentle champing had stopped and he looked
round to see they had moved farther from the bank and were grouped more closely, facing the orchard. A tall man
in a tweed suit and deer-stalker was closing the gate. Frank’s first thoughts were that he looked like a traditional landowner who would not be welcoming and that he
must be hot. Frank turned back to the stream, pretending to concentrate on his line. If the man kept to the field rather than the
riverbank Frank might not see the poacher, but after a minute or two Frank heard footsteps in the grass. There was no point
in further pretence, so he turned. The man seemed a walking incarnation of pepper-and-salt, in the pattern of his tweeds, his mottled white
moustache and even the stippled bark of the thumbstick he leant upon when he stopped. He looked old to Frank, or at least of uncertain age, his red complexion wrinkled like
parchment, his eyes blue and bloodshot.

Frank began winding in his line. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I guess I shouldn’t be here.’

‘Indeed you should not.’ The voice was deep. If it had a colour it would have been walnut.

‘Don’t worry, I’m on my way.’

The man held up a hand and shook his head. His drooping cheeks wobbled like a bloodhound’s. ‘Carry on, carry on. Join you if I may.’ He
sat stiffly on the bank a couple of yards from Frank, sighing with the effort. He took off his deerstalker, revealing white hair peppered
with flecks of brown, and fumbled in his jacket pocket.

Frank paused in his winding. ‘If you’re sure that’s OK. Kind of you, sir.’

‘My river, your fish, if you get any. Which I doubt.’ He took out a curved pipe and began filling it from a leather pouch as wrinkled
as his face. ‘What’s that fly you’re using?’

‘An Infallible, it’s the only—’

The man wobbled his cheeks again. ‘You need a dry fly on this stream.’

‘Haven’t got any. Nor any oil for the line.’

‘Wet flies never do on the Beult.’

Frank resisted the temptation to say he’d done pretty well with them so far. ‘You fish a lot, sir?’

‘Not now.’ The man lit his pipe. ‘Unless you’re going to tell me you’ve had luck with wet
fly here before?’

Frank smiled. ‘’Fraid I have, sir. Sorry for that.’

The man smiled, too, showing a full set of discoloured teeth. He flicked his match into the stream.

‘What rod is that?’

‘It’s an American rod, it’s a—’

‘Are you?’

Frank explained. He had it off pat now: the family farm north of Toronto, aeronautical engineering at university, his decision to interrupt
his studies and join the RAF before the war ended. ‘Guess I didn’t have to hurry much after all. I missed
the Battle of Britain but that’s about it. Doesn’t look like the war’s ending any time soon.’ In fact, it did; or at least the beginning of the
end. Preparations for the landings, the second front, would have been as obvious to the landowner as to him. Everyone was aware
of the influx of troops, guns and armour into south-eastern counties, the restrictions on travel and movement in coastal areas, but no
one was supposed to discuss what they were for.

‘Where north of Toronto?’ asked the man.

‘Well, the area’s called Algonquin. It’s not near anywhere really. Lot of lakes.’