The Challenging Heights (8 page)

‘I meant it, you know,’ Zoë said as they lay in the dark in the hotel in Cornwall where they’d gone for their honeymoon. ‘Love, honour and obey. All that rot.’

‘I always thought you wanted to be a liberated woman. I thought you’d insist on leaving that out.’

‘I lost my nerve at the last moment. I do want to love, honour and obey. If I don’t always manage it, you’ll try to forgive me, won’t you?’

‘It shouldn’t be difficult.’

‘I’m looking forward to Egypt and India. It should be fun. Charley Wright’s got nothing to offer like that.’ Zoë paused. ‘There’s just one thing, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘No children.’

‘Never?’

‘For a while. I haven’t done anything yet, except run Pa’s garage while he was away during the war.’

‘You’ve learned to fly. Not many women have done that. You’ve been to Canada and the States.’

‘That was a disaster, Dicky Boy. I went to find Casey Harmer, you know. I thought I was in love with him but when I got there I found he was married.’

‘So you married me on the rebound?’

She slipped warm soft arms round him. ‘I just realised that there was something about you that Casey couldn’t claim.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Honesty. I don’t think you’d ever lie to me.’

Dicken wasn’t so sure. He still hadn’t plucked up courage to tell her that he’d once discarded her for Nicola Aubrey, whom he’d felt was everything a man could wish – shy, gentle, kind, well brought up, all the things his mother insisted a man needed in a wife. Yet his own mother had been like that, and his father had run off with one of his typists. Perhaps men wanted more than just shyness, gentleness and kindness. Perhaps they wanted what Zoë had in abundance – vitality, vibrant enjoyment of living, laughter, strength and reality.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked suddenly, her face in the angle of his neck. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’

‘Oh, things,’ he said. ‘Things that happened in the war and can’t happen again because, after that one, there can’t be any more wars.’

‘What was it really like, Dicken? You never talked much about it.’

He thought for a moment. ‘A perpetual state of wind-up for most of us,’ he admitted. ‘Cold. Cracked lips. Better than the infantry, though. All that man-to-man stuff with bayonets. Sometimes it came as a surprise to find there was a man in the plane you were shooting at.’

‘What about Arthur Diplock? What was he like?’

‘Very warlike until he crossed the lines.’ Dicken pulled her closer. ‘But, good God, we didn’t get married to spend our first night talking about what it was like fighting the Germans.’

‘Trust a man to ask for seconds.’

‘It seems like a good idea to me.’

‘All right. Provided you take me to India and Egypt.’

‘Done. They can’t keep me in that stupid job I’ve got now after all the flying and experience I have.’

They were both wrong.

With Lloyd George so immersed in the details of peace he had no time for anything else, the dissolution of the RAF suddenly appeared inevitable. German air power seemed to be dead and only called for burial, and the peace treaty to be covering that very efficiently by prohibiting military aviation in Germany. Clemenceau, the French leader, was taking no chances and had demanded that the Germans accept the terms without argument.

Despite Lloyd George’s sentence of death on the RAF, however, Winston Churchill had managed to grant a stay of execution and Trenchard was working day and night to make sure the condemned service had a future. But every man who wore the light blue knew the implacable hostility of the navy and the army, even the contempt with which Wilson, the head of the army, held Trenchard’s suggested new ranks.

‘Marshal of the Air?’ he had said. ‘Do you want to bring disrepute to the rank of field marshal?’

Trenchard was a jump ahead. ‘The word “marshal” exists in a number of contexts,’ he boomed. ‘Provost marshal, court martial, Marshall and Snelgrove, the London store.’ No one had laughed louder than Churchill.

‘Even so,’ Hatto observed dryly. ‘Marshal of the Air’s poaching on the preserves of the Almighty a bit, isn’t it?’

In the end, the rank chosen was Marshal of the Royal Air Force but, as the story went round the RAF messes, the dislike of the army and the navy increased. Trenchard went doggedly ahead, however, building up his staff courses, training colleges and ancillary services, though his belief that in any future war bombing could force the government into the bowels of the earth caused him to be regarded as a crank. And when he claimed that the RAF should take over the navy’s role as the country’s main defence because battleships were out of date, he called down the wrath of the indignant admirals on his head. It was only when
The Times
revealed that, while France still retained 126 of its wartime squadrons, the 185 squadrons that the RAF had possessed in 1918 had been whittled down to twenty-eight, of which only seven were in England and only three were allotted for home defence, that the pillorying of the RAF subsided.

Meanwhile, however, the RAF seemed to have forgotten all about Dicken’s war record and while he was soon removed from being adjutant at No 2 Flying School, he was given a second administrative job at the School of Technical Training at Manston in Kent. Willie Hatto was flying Bristols nearby.

‘Why are they doing this to me, Willie?’ Dicken demanded. ‘Surely I deserve better than this.’

‘Old lad,’ Hatto smiled, ‘when you join the regular forces you’ve got to show you can stand every boring job there is before they start giving you the interesting ones. I did my stint before the war.’

‘Diplock’s at the Air Ministry.’

‘Toadying round his old friend, the Wing Colonel, now known as Group Captain George Macclesfield St Aubyn. Hold your water. Your time will come.’

‘Can you guarantee that?’

‘I know how regular brains tick. You’ll get the hang of it before long. Just enjoy yourself and keep your thumb in your bum. It’s considered good for the soul. The idea is that ambitious chaps like you should be able to count beds and knives, forks and mugs, blankets and sheets, without turning a hair while still swotting for the Staff College exam. Are you swotting for the Staff College exam? Because if you’re not you ought to be. New as it is, even the RAF will need staff officers. We might even do it together because the Hattos were never known for their brains.’

Accepting that Hatto knew what he was talking about and even had inside knowledge that came from a father in the House of Lords and a brother in the Foreign Office, Dicken got down to work. But, even as he did so and just when it finally seemed to have been established that an air force was needed, an election removed Lloyd George from power and the new Prime Minister made no bones about his wish to divide the RAF between the army and the navy. Only the fact that the toughest old sea dog of them all, Jacky Fisher, the very man who had built the battleships, had argued that the development of aircraft could render the fleet useless, saved it. He had long since thrown his weight solidly behind Trenchard, and the fact that aeroplanes were cheaper to build than battleships clinched it. True to time-honoured British methods, committees were formed to look into the question but the outcome was inevitable. The RAF had been saved.

By this time the war was long past but the haunted-eyed veterans of the fighting were still struggling to find a place in the scheme of things. Survival, which had been the only thought in their minds in the trenches and had given way to the hysteria of realising they were not only alive but likely to go on being alive, was now back in their thoughts as they struggled to find work in a world that was increasingly lacking in it.

Once again Dicken began to have doubts. He had a wife to support now and the RAF seemed totally unaware of him. He had entered the war ignorant of life and was almost as ignorant of it when the war had ended. He couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else but fly and, since his experience seemed to count for nothing in peacetime, he started once more to consider what use he might be in business or industry. The answer was not encouraging, yet the dreams of unlimited flying which had drawn him back to the RAF were finally dispersed by a series of unimportant ground jobs which culminated – due to the fact that he had once trained as a wireless operator – as head of a signals and communications department at Northolt. Since he had sergeants and junior officers beneath him, he didn’t even have to use his fading skills.

Although training had ceased with the end of the war, some of the more senior non-flying officers of the new post-war RAF were feeling naked without wings above the decorations they had received during the fighting for working at a desk, and as they set about acquiring them, by a special dispensation they were allowed to qualify on the Avro, the absolute perfection as a non-combat aeroplane. After flying round Northolt for thirty hours they were allowed to put up their wings, and most of them went back to their desks determined never to fly again.

The one advantage his job brought Dicken was that he was able occasionally to fly an Avro from the training and communications flight when one of the mighty didn’t need it to put in his required number of flying hours. There followed a period of ferrying Snipes from Rochford, near Southend, to Hawkinge in Kent where Keith Park, who had run up a score during the war flying Bristols, was commanding a dump of surplus aircraft.

The months passed with only the occasional flight but, because nobody properly understood the RAF’s function in peacetime, nobody had any work to do and the boredom began to affect everybody. A few old faces appeared occasionally – Hatto, Park, Sholto Douglas, Taffy Jones, Hill, Vincent, all of them men who’d done well in the war but were now as bored with peacetime duties as Dicken himself. Seeing little prospect of promotion, several had gone like Dicken into commercial flying only to find the experience enough to make them change their minds so that, again like Dicken, they had been forced to return with a loss of seniority.

Once Diplock appeared with Group Captain St Aubyn, plumper than when Dicken had last seen him, paler from long hours in his office, his ears, it seemed, more prominent than they had ever been. He was now at the Directorate of Training at the Air Ministry, still working with his benefactor, and so Hatto said, hourly expecting his step up in rank.

Even Zoë seemed to be doing more flying than Dicken, and it was galling to see her building up the flying hours while his own stood virtually still. Charley Wright was operating along the south coast, giving flights at five shillings a time for a single circuit and a pound for a little extra. His pilots seemed to come and go with alarming regularity and he was constantly calling on Zoë to help him out.

It didn’t help their marriage. On several occasions, when Dicken had hoped she’d be with him at some mess function she disappeared to help out and he had to go alone, aware of the eyes on him of the other officers, all dogged up in bum-freezer jackets and cavalry type overalls. Occasionally, it even led to high words between them and once she threw the coffee pot at him at breakfast.

She was contrite immediately – ‘After all,’ she said, ‘breakfast isn’t meant to be a social meal’ – but it happened again and the occasions when they were at loggerheads seemed to come with greater regularity, so that Dicken found he was learning to live without her. While he was at Northolt she was flying at Brighton or Winchester or Exeter, and he even began to wonder if there were anything between her and Charley Wright. He couldn’t imagine it somehow, because Zoë, brisk, forthright, modern as the aeroplane itself, somehow didn’t go with Charley Wright, with his red face and booze and dirty stories. Nevertheless, it left him uneasy and uncertain, wishing to God the RAF would post him to Egypt or India so they could disappear from Charley Wright’s reach and start living with all the happy informality of a foreign station that was so distinct from the rigidity of dress and behaviour which was being stamped on the RAF by people like Diplock and Group Captain St Aubyn.

His duties didn’t vary much but, while he was bored and restless, Zoë was thoroughly enjoying herself. Her father had died and, true to the promise he had made during the war, had left Annys his house and Zoë the garage he owned. It was clear Annys thought she’d got the best of the bargain because the garage consisted of little more than a few wooden sheds and a certain amount of goodwill, but, skilled at business, loving engines and a competent mechanic herself, Zoë had already started to develop it and had even opened a second garage in Brighton.

‘It won’t be long,’ she said cheerfully, ‘before I’ll be able to buy the house back from Annys at whatever she chooses to ask for it, and never miss the money. Even if I don’t manage to be famous, Dicky Boy, I’m certainly going to be rich. Why not come into the business and keep an eye on things for me?’

‘I’m not the type to keep an eye on things.’

‘Oh, stuff! You men are always so manly and tough. Anyway–’ she put her arms round him, wheedling – ‘you
will
keep an eye on things for me, won’t you, if I happen to be away somewhere.’

‘Where might you happen to be?’

She shrugged and planted a kiss on his cheek, leaving a lipstick imprint on his skin. ‘You never know. I’m thinking of opening a third garage. It might be anywhere.’

She had her own car now but occasionally Dicken went along to drive her home from wherever Charley Wright was operating. He was always made welcome but there was a vague suggestion of contempt in the friendliness of the civilian pilots.

‘The experts welcoming the amateur,’ Wright said with a grin. ‘After all, we fly all day and every day. You fly when the powers that be let you.’

They had roped off an area round the aeroplanes – ‘To stop the spectators walking into a propeller,’ Zoë said – and flagpoles had been erected with bunting strung between them. There were a few cars but most of the spectators had arrived on foot and, with the last performance of the day about to start, were beginning to trail homewards.