Turbulence (25 page)

I heard from one of the navy forecasters that Stagg had become indisposed – I imagined him vomiting again – during the 6 p.m. conference while I was away. Yates had had to take over as controller.

But Stagg was back in his seat now. Things did not look good for Monday. The Admiralty's pessimism had worsened to meet Dunstable's. They also described another significant new storm which had formed in the US, to the east of the Great Lakes, which was moving towards the Atlantic and would soon come to dominate. Petterssen's upper-air work supported the rapid arrival of this ‘Storm E', as we termed it.

Krick, as if beginning to accept the situation, made no mention of the ‘finger of high pressure' he had maintained would insulate the Channel from the earlier oncoming Irish cold front. But he still thought it was OK to go. Out of solidarity, not conviction, he was persuaded by Stagg and Yates to allow a unanimous ‘no'.

The WANTAC figures were still out of kilter, new instruments notwithstanding, which I took as further confirmation that the earlier readings were accurate.

After the conference I told Stagg what I'd discovered at Saunders-Roe. ‘We can trust WANTAC, in my view. But I don't know what it means yet. I have a suspicion that a ridge of high pressure might be developing there. More like a little tube than a ridge, maybe, but something. I tried to work it out on the ferry, but I need more time.'

Ignoring the technical details of what I said relating to WANTAC, he gave me a sour look. ‘Time is exactly what we don't have.' There was no point in telling him about Gill and the shell cases yet.

Keeping my counsel, I then accompanied Stagg and Yates to the door of the supreme commander's meeting down in the main house. As they were about to enter, Admiral Creasy
bowled up the corridor. ‘Hello, chaps. Some reassuring news for us tonight? You look happier than when you went out yesterday, I must say.'

Stagg gave him a forbearing smile. ‘I'm afraid I don't feel very much happier, sir.'

‘Well, we'll soon know the worst,' said Creasy in reply, and they entered the meeting room. I waited outside with the other aides, but I knew what Stagg would tell the assembled bigwigs. That the weather over the British Isles in the next few days would be subject to complex patterns of turbulence, with force 5 winds in the Channel, much low cloud and risk of fog in sea areas. In fact, a series of three depressions were strung across the Atlantic and the result would be rough seas – far too rough for landing on Monday – and too much cloud for successful bombing operations or landing troops from air.

After the meeting, at about 11 p. m., Stagg told me what had happened. Eisenhower had asked if there was a chance the forecast might be more optimistic tomorrow and Stagg had explained that the whole weather situation was extremely finely balanced. Last night, he had thought that there might be the slightest tip to the favourable side, but now it had gone too far to the other side for it to swing back again. Leigh Mallory, speaking for the RAF, had enquired what the conditions would be like for heavy bombers, then Eisenhower had again asked if Stagg felt he might be a bit more positive tomorrow (Sunday).

‘I'm afraid not, sir,' was all Stagg could say – adding to me, outside afterwards, ‘I've a feeling they are going to postpone. I get the sense Monty wants to go whatever, but Eisenhower is listening to us.'

‘But putting the ships back into harbour will cause mayhem.'

‘Yes,' Stagg said dourly.

‘And the Germans are bound to get wind of it.'

‘Yes,' he said again, more dourly still.

As he recounted all this to me, Stagg and I were making a circuit in the moonlight round the forbidding Victorian mansion that was Southwick. Staff cars – Packards, Morrises, Lea Francises – were drawing up constantly, their tyres crunching on the gravel. Out of one of the cars, looking like Laurel and Hardy, Smuts and Churchill emerged – their faces, flashing in the porch light, were heavy with gloom. We turned away quickly, making another tour of the building, lest the PM should identify the weathermen bringing all the bad news.

‘They say Eisenhower complains because Churchill eats all the doughnuts,' whispered Stagg. ‘And Monty gets cross because Eisenhower smokes.'

Stagg was relieved that he had at last been able to provide them all with an unqualified forecast, even though it probably meant the invasion was off. ‘I do feel a bit happier,' he said, ‘but if there is good weather on Monday I'll hang for it.'

We walked round the house, then towards a lawn at the front. The moon was full, there was almost no wind, the night sky was empty of clouds. Overall, it was almost like one of Ryman's brief moments of paradise – that condition of ‘just no turbulence' which is as near to equilibrium as the atmosphere ever comes. Meanwhile we were forecasting thick cloud and strong wind in the Channel by morning. It didn't seem to stack up. But these background conditions of apparent calm were, in fact, exactly those times during which powerful events fermented. Besides, it was time I crossed my Rubicon.

‘I'm going to go back and have one last go at applying the Ryman number in respect of WANTAC,' I said as we looked out over the blackened grounds beyond the lawn we were approaching, where spectral lines of tents ploughed the grass and rhododendron bushes rose like sea monsters.

‘Just explain again, can you, to a chump like me, why
WANTAC is so singularly important and how it ties up with Ryman?'

‘I think the reason WANTAC's showing different readings is that it is in the midst of one of Ryman's thin weather boundaries, at the edge of a small area of high pressure which would give us exactly the interval we need. I am satisfied the equipment is working properly, but I still haven't managed to make the figures stack up in a synoptic model. His number again.'

‘I'm sorry, but I still don't get it,' said Stagg beside me, his feet crunching on the gravel.

‘The Ryman number tells you how turbulent a parcel of atmosphere is. The reason Sir Peter sent me to Scotland was to find how wide or tall is that parcel of atmosphere – the range of a given number, as it were. The importance of the WANTAC ship is that its readings may show evidence of the small high pressure interval Eisenhower needs. If it is, end of story.'

‘I should get some sleep, if I were you; we're not yet at the end of any story,' Stagg said curtly.

We were at the edge of the lawn. I kicked the turf with the toe of my shoe.

‘Which reminds me,' Stagg continued. ‘There's something I have forgotten to tell you. Air Marshal Tedder came up to me after the meeting and said we – I mean the British – ought to put some meteorologists in with the invasion force to take measurements and check how close our forecasts are to the reality on the ground. Apparently the Yanks have two whole squadrons of battlefield weathermen. We've run plain out. Tedder spoke to Sir Peter and he rang me, wondering, since you are young and fit and know what we have been up against here, whether you'd like to go in with them? He said he thought it might be a way for you to make amends for that business with Ryman.'

‘Did he now?' I instinctively wanted to say no, but instead
asked for some time to think it over. In some ways it was an honour to be asked – but I had no military training whatsoever. Feeling exhausted, and overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation, I stared up into the night sky. The stars seemed to shudder, as if feeling the same apprehension.

‘I am not a soldier,' I said, as we turned to go back to the house, whose serried windows showed tiny lines of light – not visible from above – at the edges of the blackout blinds.

‘That is a drawback,' said Stagg. ‘But it would be tremendously helpful if someone who was actually involved could compare theoretical forecasts with actuality. Think about it, anyway, as even if we postpone today we are going to have to go in the next three weeks, come what may.'

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Come what June! Come on, we'd better get back.'

On our way back to the main house – as we approached that great Victorian lump – we heard heavy running footsteps on the gravel and soon met an out-of-breath General Bull, who said he had been looking for us.

‘Don't disappear like that! I've come to tell you, Monday may well be put off. If so, we are back at D minus three again as of today.'

This meant the assault would be on Tuesday, but it wasn't quite as simple as that. ‘Because of your forecasts, General Eisenhower is thinking of holding up D-Day on a provisional, hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis,' Bull continued. ‘We'll meet at four fifteen tomorrow morning and, depending on what you have to say, the supreme commander will confirm the postponement or not. If appropriate, he will then, or later in the day, decide definitely whether Tuesday will be D-Day.'

It appeared provisional, from the way Bull was talking, but really that was it. Between us, Stagg and I, Krick, Petterssen, Douglas and the Admiralty, in conjunction with thousands of
other Allied meteorological staff, had finally caused a decision to be made. It seemed like Ryman's forecast factory had come true – but for all that we still weren't sure whether the decision to postpone would be the right one. The sky was practically clear; there was no rain.

‘Maybe it is madness to send you on a wild goose chase into France under these circumstances,' said Stagg, once Bull had gone.

‘No,' I said. ‘I'll go.'

A strange feeling had come over me in the general's presence. Shaking off my anxiety and tiredness, I suddenly desperately wanted a shot of the action. I wanted to be among the ranks of men whose fates our forecast would determine. I had spent too long among figures of the mathematical type.

But I still had one last set of calculations to make. It was time that everything I had worked for was met directly. This meant facing up to the forecast problems with a new purposefulness – acting on what I had learned from Ryman and from the experiment I had conducted at Saunders-Roe, and gaining new meaning and new strength from the conviction that Gill's gift of the shell cases had supplied.

So I went, that Saturday night, back up to the Nissen hut and began applying the Ryman number to adjacent parcels of atmosphere, all the way from WANTAC near Iceland down to the Channel, using the simulation method Gill had suggested. I was not entirely confident, but I had to try. It seemed to make sense: because it allowed a measure of uncertainty into the calculation, this method was the best way to future-proof the forecast.

I needed to inoculate against my dizziness, uncertainty in general as it effectively was, but were the shell cases and their contents really the medicine? They seemed in one light like another type of dizziness in themselves, but maybe that was
the point. What the Africans did, in Zomba after the slide, was allow themselves to be bitten by whirligig beetles. The beetles were collected from mountain rivers and pools and held to the breast near the nipple where they bit in a defensive reaction, releasing a powerful steroid.

So the
kizunguzungu epidemic ended.

In the early hours of Sunday 4 June, with the 3 a.m. conference over, I was working bleary-eyed on my equations in the hut on the bluff. Outside, the sentry stirred and the Channel fretted against the boundary shore. The far-called navy was melting towards the battle line, pushing forth tentatively, like the shy anemone, unlooked at on its ocean bed. In France, on the moon-blanched land, waves turned, foam fell, whiting more the sepulchre. Meanwhile on each page, as I was writing, the figures seemed to move. These are the images that return.

An hour or so later Stagg would attend the first of what turned out to be two crucial commanders' conferences in the library at Southwick. At the first meeting, even though the weather was still fine, Stagg told them he thought it could go bad on Monday, with wind and cloud appearing in four or five hours' time. Eisenhower confirmed the previous evening's tentative decision to postpone.

Everything was in the balance, we were indeed not yet at the end of the story. We seemed to be stuck in the middle of the end, waiting for the variables to come into alignment.

I tried not to become frozen in the terrible immobility that this provisionality can entail. Smoking heavily, I continued with my calculations, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other, shell cases and numbers on the table in front of me. I knew I needed to have patience – as every silent sheet could be the one that bore fruit. But first a tree had to grow, hurrying its rivulets of roots and fibres, each one a boundary for the next, across
the waiting page. An equation tree, glowing and strong.

It wasn't easy. At one point I knocked one of the shell cases off the table and had to scrabble around on the floor picking up the precious numbers. This meant I had to start all over again, just in case I had lost one of the numbers. Extremely tense, feeling as if iron hooks were being inserted into my shoulders, I decided the best thing would be to go for a walk. Stiff from sitting for so long, I hobbled down the hill into the woods, until I came to the pond.

The rowing boat which Stagg had kicked was still moored to its jetty. Dispersed through the branches and leaves of surrounding trees the moonlight was shining, honeycombing the wine-dark water and the ribbed shell of the boat's interior. It was still a gloomy place, hooded with melancholy, but now it was a beautiful gloom.

From among the trees' black bars an owl hooted, making the air tremor. On an impulse I climbed into the boat. Having released the painter, I picked up the oars and began to row round that moon-dappled pond. With each stroke, as I leaned into the resisting water, the tension went out of my shoulders, and the mental exhaustion – like muscle pain in the brain – started to lift.

With each circuit of the pond, it was as if I was making a
tour d'horizon
of the workmanship of turbulence, not just in the zones of air and water, where vapour is lifted by the sun from oceans, lakes and rivers and diversely distributed by the wind, but the uncertain edges, where curls of mixing gas give meaning to the idea of space.

The boat shivered. I became undecided again. Once you leap the limits and start on further considerations you begin wondering – since the earth is just a little prick in space compared with the galaxy, never mind the whole – where it is all going to end.

I righted the skew.

The sound of the blades dipping in and out of the water together with the rattle of the rowlocks was like music accompanying the slow song of my thoughts. Even though I was conscious that I was sitting on the cross-plank of a rowing boat, pulling myself from eddy to eddy, it was as if I were elsewhere, seeing myself from above as I made my circuits. As I might appear to the tree-perched owl. Or from below, among the myriad mansions of submerged bacterial life. Or from the side, where a moorhen anxiously called each time I passed. Or that distant rift on Venus, from within whose folds a quite alien species might watch.

I listened. Gradually, like the appearance of a new shoreline, the realisation came upon me that to see the pond I was circumnavigating as a gloomy place, or even as a beautiful gloomy place, was to impose on it as Europeans had imposed upon Africa. As my family had imposed on Africa. As I had myself. Trying to make the world speak in human terms alone was akin to making Cecilia and Gideon speak the kitchen-Kaffir English we foisted upon them.

Somehow or other I had to learn to see the limit-rich, frame-filled world as one
without
limits
, withou
t frames – see it, feel it, speak it in that other language of turbulence which was itself differential from the start. Promiscuous of perspective, it was less liable to the drag of bias and error. Could this programme have any place in the canon of the physical sciences? Surely that was a vain ambition.

Science is not about ‘feelings'. But nor, at least at the highest level, is it the reductionist activity it is commonly supposed to be. Great scientists use their imagination, they feel their way towards a theory, then seek to prove it. With turbulence, exactly because of its intermittency and mutability, I realised that night that this ‘feeling towards' was actually key. Extrapolating
from
immediate
connections, we have to keep an idea of
all
connections hovering before us, as an ideal insight into the whole. Because the whole cannot be reached, we can grasp it only by intuition – by chasing not the specifics but the beautiful ghost of an idea.

Once this thought had rushed in on me, others came, relating directly to the modal variety I ought to employ in calculating the forecast. I would have to keep shifting between Ryman's, Krick's, Douglas's and Petterssen's methods to get the required promiscuity of perspective. Effectively this was what we had been doing, but no one had tried to turn the to-and-fro of the conferences into an active programme.

Exhilarated, I returned to the hut with new vigour. My hand moved quickly under the desk lamp, covering the blank sheets. I solved calculation after calculation, working methodically forward through the charts, through tomorrow to expected conditions on Tuesday.

Sitting south of Iceland, on the eastern flank of a major deepening low south of Greenland, was a small parcel of warm air thrown up by the motion of the main surface low. It was this parcel that WANTAC had been reporting. By about 8.30 a.m. tomorrow, I calculated, the Atlantic parcel would develop into a higher-pressure ridge at 300 mb. Within an hour and a half the ridge would intensify at 500 mb. It was heading east, at a rate fast enough to cause, from early on Tuesday morning, a small temporary block in the Channel from the prevailing bad weather. There would be rough seas, heavy rain and gale-force winds later on Monday, but after that (I was as sure of it as I have ever been of anything) would come an invasion-friendly haven: a brief time of immunity from storms.

Perhaps only a mathematician can understand how suddenly the treasure can come. It is as if a key has been deftly turned
and a casket sprung open, revealing contents within more precious than could be thought possible.

I stared at the lamp. At the paper. At the lamp. The filament of the electric light burned in its bulb, like the sun filling an arch of sky. The filigree of black figures grew, rising against the white sheet. It was as if they were the rigging of a ship setting forth on a voyage of validation, a voyage in which vessel and sail carried on into the future, somehow leaving the spars of mast and yards behind.

Night decayed, morning came, the sentries changed their station. A beam of dawn light descended through the hut window, beating rose-red on the page. Did the tree promise forgiveness? For killing Ryman, hanged from his balloon, arms collapsed? For damaging Gill, stranded widowed and childless in Seaview? For making myself a monomaniac, subject to an idea of change and flux that actually fixed me like a butterfly on a pin?

I could not say ‘yes' to any of these. But in that moment, which seemed to win to my side both chaos
and
order, I think I came close to an ideal of life. Recognising its mutability, I experienced a moment of freedom.

As for the final calculation, it's hard to explain: you just
know
it is right. Ryman was a big reason why. What he had taught me, I realised then, was the importance of intermittency. Not just scientific intermittency, but mental
and
emotional intermittency, too. How, in a world of disintegration and endless renewal – a continuum, a world of flow – one must find one's own rhythm exactly by recognising the incompleteness of the melody.

It was a great gift, because incompleteness is what points to that ideal of the whole. It shows the way to whatever is emergent at the limits of any system, from an ant-lion's nest in Nyasaland to the ever-expanding edges of the universe.

I sat for some time with the full calculation of the Ryman numbers for all the adjoining areas of weather between Iceland and the Channel in front of me – along with the lamp, the piles of brass numbers relating to each quadrant, and the shell cases standing like statues on the table. Looking behind at every step was like peering into a dream of becoming – watching something inspire, move, breathe, awaken …

There was a danger in savouring the showing of the thing like this, I knew that. I was cautious of ecstasy, but the highest branch of the tree – God's mercy! what a stroke was there. It was not just the one forecast I saw emanating from that twig-tip but something larger, something more glorious. The jubilant intimation of a new era in meteorology, affecting not just D-Day but the whole empire of the atmosphere.

I looked at my watch. It was 9.05 a.m. and I was starving.

With a whoop of triumph I grabbed the papers on which I had done the sums and burst out of the hut, startling the new sentry, who was already dozing. I laughed into the brightening air, took a gust of it into my lungs, then ran down the hill to the main house. On the gravel outside, Don Yates was consoling Stagg about the non-arrival of the bad weather which had caused the postponement of the next day's plans. They were quite oblivious to my revelation, still worrying about the bad weather in which I believed I had spotted a future chink.

‘We're in a wood, chum. We're sheltered from the wind and a cold front has definitely been measured in Ireland,' Yates was saying, rubbing the dark hair on the top of his head. The Irish cold front confirmed that the decision to postpone had indeed been correct.

‘Anyway, look!' Yates's hand extended into the air. Stagg and I followed the American's pointing finger. I was breathing hard from running down the hill.

Sure enough, in the west the tree tops were swaying. Wind was bearing cloud along in threatening armadas. The clouds were of the heaped, turreted, galleonish type that often spells thunderstorms. Altocumulus castellatus. ‘But it sure feels weird to be celebrating a non-invasion, however successful the forecast,' Yates continued.

‘Better safe than sorry,' Stagg said.

‘It's going to be all right,' I said, breathlessly. ‘I've found it!'

‘Found what?' said Stagg crossly.

‘There
will
be an intermezzo. I finally worked out the Ryman numbers down from WANTAC to the Channel. It is going to be a very stormy night, and the bad weather will continue through to Monday morning. Nothing can stop that cold front coming through now, but it will be followed by a short space of more settled weather. And that means, once the cold front has passed through the Channel, that we will be clear for an invasion on Tuesday.'

I wanted to tell them how I had come to my conclusion by deliberately subduing the complete mathematics in the way Gill had suggested, and allowing in a simulation of randomness. I wanted to tell them that it was all to do with thin layers between adjacent weather systems, just as Ryman had said. But neither of them was interested in the theory.

So I explained in more detail that WANTAC, which Stagg and the others had lost faith in, was in fact the key. Its apparently discontinuous data (discontinuous with the context) was in fact a sign of a small-scale, good-weather pattern within the large-scale and extraordinary bad-weather pattern. It didn't mean Krick's generalised optimism was right – the worst summer storm series in twenty years was about to whip the
Channel and would continue to do so for a day – but it meant we had a chance.

‘There will be a gap,' I said. ‘I'm certain there will be an opening. WANTAC isn't wrong, it is just reporting a movement on a different scale to those we were focusing on. If the Germans see only the main depression and not the high ridge on its flank, then we will actually have a tactical advantage. Our counterparts will see only the general panorama of bad weather, not the interval in it.'

At the end of my speech I didn't get quite the heroic reception I was hoping for. Stagg looked uncertain after listening to what I had to say, but Yates's face broke into a grin. ‘I hope you're right. C'mon, let's go eat.'

Over breakfast we heard that Allied troops had begun to enter Rome. It would be the first European capital to be prised back from the Nazis, but it did not stay long in our minds. We were all thinking about the D-Day assault. I confirmed to Yates and Stagg that I wanted to go in with the American weathermen as had been suggested. I told them I was sick of sitting with the telephone at my ear and that, meteorologically as well as personally speaking, it indeed would be interesting to see how local weather related to the synoptic forecasts for large areas that we had been doing.

‘Maybe not interesting enough to get killed for,' drawled Yates, who was the closest thing to a man of action among us.

‘You're absolutely sure?' said Stagg. ‘You should feel no compulsion.'

‘I am sure,' I said confidently. ‘I want to see for myself whether my theory is right. The ratio I worked out, the Ryman number, it's what Sir Peter sent me to find in Scotland. And I think I have, by applying a strange avoidance of elaboration. I want to see the results for real.'