Turbulence (6 page)

The Met Office had been busy in Mackellar's cot-house. As I approached the building I noticed a green motorcycle leaning against the wall by the door, its handle pressing against lichen on the stone. Inside I found my suitcase, a desk, and about five torpedo-like hydrogen cylinders. There were also a large number of labelled wooden crates, some drums of caustic soda and several new cable points. Electricity had been run up from the road on wooden poles. A stove and sink stood in one corner; in another a door opened to a small bathroom with a red-tiled floor.

On the desk was a letter from Gordon Whybrow, my immediate notional superior at the main station in Dunoon. Typewritten in a distinctive font, it listed the materials that had been delivered. The note also detailed the charting and plotting that would be required of me. It added that the motorcycle outside was for my own use as I had a balloon schedule involving releases in some quite remote locations.

Having read it, I felt a bit glum. It was all very well Sir Peter giving me a cover under which to spy on Ryman, but the cover itself would mean quite hard work. How was I going to manage it all? Still, there were compensations. I had never been on a motorcycle before.

So the first thing I did was I tuck my trousers into my socks and go back outside to try it. I fell off a few times, skidding about the field and frightening the cattle, but it was tremendous fun. I'd more or less got the hang of it after an hour.
Spattered with mud, I went back in to inspect the crates.

I read some of the labels: EDDYSTONE RADIOSONDE, ROTATABLE ADCOCK AERIAL SYSTEM, RADIO TRANSCEIVER … There was also a teleprinter for contacting the main station at Dunoon, plus an AO, an oscillator device for comparing the radiosonde transmissions against a known frequency.

I picked up a hydrogen cylinder and shook it. It was empty, which explained the drums of caustic soda. From these and other ingredients, I was to make my own hydrogen. I had never made it before, but I knew this was common practice on substations, unlike at Kew. It would have been impracticable to deliver pressurised ready-filled cylinders to observers in rural locations.

Realising the unpacking was going to be a big job, I walked down to the village shop to buy some bread, cheese and pickle and other provisions, then set to work on my return. It would take me the rest of the day to sort it all. I began splitting open the crates with a crowbar – labelled CROWBAR, in inimitable Met Office style – and I finished around midnight. The floor was covered with splinters of wood; they looked like arrows and spears left over from some terrible colonial massacre.

That night, as I lay in the darkness, with the cattle coughing around me in the field and bits of slate dust falling on my face from the roof when the wind blew, I actually found myself looking forward to plotting some charts. Brain work rather than brawn work. But, having unpacked the equipment, I still had to prepare it.

The next morning, after doing my ablutions, I went up to Mackellar's farm to scrounge some milk. The gruff old farmer – pipe sticking out of his mouth even at that early hour – gave of it freely, taking me to the dairy and dipping a steel jug into a bucket.

‘You keep that jug and come here in the mornings, do the same thing yersel'. Never you mind if my wife comes bawling. Tell her you have the permission.'

‘Righto,' I said cheerfully, and made my way back down the grassy hill, carefully holding the milk-slopping jug in front of me with both hands.

I had some breakfast, then began testing the audio oscillator. The regular sounds it produced were compared with the altering transmissions from the radiosondes that hung beneath each balloon, which I could pick up on the high-frequency radio set. The signals varied in pitch according to the height of the balloon, thus enabling me to get a fix on its position as it recorded meteorological phenomena.

The oscillator was quite loud – it made a series of pips – and could be heard outside, even though it was standing on the desk in the cot-house. It soon attracted the attention of the cows in the field. They gathered round the building in a circle, which made me vaguely uneasy. The sight of them provoked a memory.

As a young man I once helped round up cattle on a farm somewhere on the earth road between Blantyre and Zomba, where one of my father's friends had tried his hand at dairy. Those animals, feeding on yellow grass amid clusters of native huts, were a cross between Friesians and African zebu and they were pretty lively. These Scottish beasts, spikily horned, impishly black, seemed far less tractable. They regarded me moodily, with a certainty of interspecies difference that reminded me of the way baboons would face up to lions. Where was Vickers when I needed him, to give them a nip?

By the end of my first full day in the cot-house I had got the HF set playing big-band music from the Home Service and the teleprinter, switched into receive mode, churning out observations and forecasts. Combined with other readings from the
local area, my own information would be telexed from Dunoon to Met Office operational headquarters and fed into the general weather picture. This, in turn, would be the basis of briefings to the Allied forces all over the world.

The teleprinter made a
chuh-chuh
noise as its keys hit the paper, which jerked out off the roll and snaked to the floor. It was heartening to think of all those Met observers and Waafs and Wrens punching in their messages. The meteorological realm presided over by Sir Peter Vaward was very well organised. It had to be. Consider just for a moment how the constant changeability of the weather had to be gauged, now and in the future, against a background of the chaos and upheaval of war.

But having global weather information is one thing; using it is quite another. If your measurement is even slightly wrong – as we now know it always will be – there's a danger of the data degrading very rapidly. There's also a more basic problem of measurements (which are mental artefacts) being taken on certain sizes of eddies (which are physical artefacts) and not others. There are always scales and dimensions that are being ignored. And this is dangerous because the whole point is that all these sizes of turbulence are interconnected; they are both separate and continuous, feeding energy from large to small then back again.

Each scale must be viewed as information that contributes to understanding the likely pattern of the whole; and they don't last long anyway, these eddies, even when you do spot them. New information, yes, but now it's changing, now it's gone – and what have you understood?

Ryman's method did not solve the missing dimensions problem but it went closer to doing so than anything done before. But the Ryman number was clearly not something one could tick off on one's fingers. So although it was frustrating to
have to wait a week before I could see him, I was grateful for an interval in which to marshal my thoughts and try out his techniques as best I could, using Channel weather as a proving ground.

I spent the second night in the cot-house, as I would many over the forthcoming four months, doing calculations – sometimes in my head, sometimes with a wooden slide-rule, notched and ink-stained, which I still possess. Squeezing precision out of continuous domains in a mustering tumult of differential calculus – such was my life in that strange time.

Lying on the bed doing calculus. Sitting on the crapper doing calculus. Shaving doing calculus. Doing calculus while listening to the radio, hearing what was going on in the war or, for preference, some classical music. Doing calculus while eating. Doing calculus while squeezing the toothpaste tube.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. I am sure I even did it while I was sleeping. Sometimes that can happen. You can go to bed with a problem in your head and wake up with it solved.

But not this problem: how to supply, on the strategic scale and with enough lead time, a safe weather forecast that would allow thousands of men to land by sea and air on a stretch of the French coast on a single day at the optimum time.

Early on my third day I set off on the motorcycle to Dunoon, in order to report to Whybrow, my notional superior there. I had left it rather late, telling myself the important thing was to ready myself for the encounter with Ryman. Presumably Sir Peter had given Whybrow some indication that I was also doing work other than local observations.

Feeling the wind-chill on my face and hands, I rode alongside the water, past the row of large loch-front houses which constituted Kilmun itself, passing an old church with a tower in its graveyard. I then turned left under bumpy green hills, travelling for several miles (and at one point falling off) until I reached Dunoon.

It was a busy place. As well as local residents there were an awful lot of people in one sort or uniform or another. Colonial troops and Americans as well as British servicemen. On asking where I might find HMS
Osprey
, where Sir Peter had said Whybrow was based, I found it to be one of the shore-based establishments – in this case a former convalescent home – which the navy insists on calling a ship. The floor is referred to as the deck, right starboard and left port. Even to leave by the front door is to take a liberty boat.

As I arrived, a flag-raising ceremony was taking place outside the building, complete with buglers and ratings in blue and white uniforms. The event was unpopular with the townsfolk as it brought the main road to a standstill.

We stood waiting and watching, our way barred by sentries
with rifles. At the crucial moment, much to the amusement of civilian onlookers, an old fellow in a blue jersey, who was selling fish and oysters from a wheelbarrow, shouted out ‘Loch Eck herrings, fresh Loch Eck herrings!'

Once the performance was over, it turned out my wait had been for nothing, as on gaining entrance I learned that the Met station at Dunoon was actually inland rather than on
Osprey
itself. Yet even this second site was still conceived as part of the ‘ship'.

I remounted my motorbike and eventually found, on the outskirts of the town, a group of Nissen huts dotted around an old white-painted farmhouse. There was a cookhouse and a washhouse and a hydrogen shed (formerly a grain barn), some dormitories and not much else. The conditions were quite primitive. There was mud everywhere. The sight of it made me shudder.

Gordon Whybrow was bald and short-sighted, with a pair of thick-lensed spectacles balanced on the end of his long, thin nose. I first found him in the Ops Room, as the farmhouse drawing room had been rechristened. He was wearing RAF uniform, like all Met staff who have been conscripted, even if they're actually working in another branch of the services, as he was on
Osprey
. I was still a civilian employee at this stage.

Bent over a desk bearing the large typewriter on which, I presumed, his letter to me had been written, he was studying another machine, or part of it. I recognised it as the switching mechanism on a new type of radiosonde.

Three inflated red balloons bumped on the ceiling of the room, their strings draping over Whybrow as he peered at the device. Behind him, on a large board on the wall, a Waaf was plotting combined readings. A slight brunette, she was reaching up for strings – held in place by brass ‘mice' – which showed the directional lines of balloons released from different stations.

Little red flags marked the positions of weather ships in the Atlantic, the Channel and the North Sea, while lines of green flags marked the tracks of the met recs, the meteorological reconnaissance flights which took off from airfields all over Britain each morning.

Another Waaf, plumpish with short fair hair, was kneeling on the floor, reading data to her colleague as the teleprinter roll spilled down. Her chubby face was dotted with freckles. She was the only person in the room to notice my entrance, smiling pleasantly and brushing a hand against her skirt as if doing so would compensate for the awkwardness of kneeling.

‘You have to set the switch sequence before you put on the windmill,' I said to Whybrow's bald head. He looked up with a face full of surprise, swiftly followed by irritation, whether at my remark, which I suppose was a bit know-it-all, or simply my arrival I could not tell.

‘Henry Meadows. The director probably mentioned …'

‘Ah,' said Whybrow, straightening. ‘There you are at last. Our man of mystery. I noticed you had hooked up the teleprinter yesterday. Why has it taken you so long to report in?' He seemed to speak through his long nose.

‘I wanted to get myself established first,' I replied. ‘Seeing as the equipment was all there … And as I'm sure you know, Sir Peter has given me some other duties, too.'

He blinked through the spectacles. ‘Other duties, eh? How about that? Yes, the director did say you had a special project you were working on for him.' He turned to the two Waafs. ‘A special project. How about
that
, girls?'

‘Allow me to introduce Gwen Liss and Joan Lamb,' said Whybrow, pointing at each in turn. ‘I say, he should have come here first of all, shouldn't he, girls?'

I ignored him. One of the women giggled. It was Gwen, the thin brown-haired one, whose cheeks were rather drawn in.
This gave her a look of passionate austerity. Joan, meanwhile, was fair and broad, Germanic or Scandinavian in appearance if one had to put a label on it, but with dark eyes. With her blonde hair and freckles, the combination was also rather striking.

Whybrow waved a dismissive hand at the Waafs. ‘Give us a minute, will you.' He gestured peremptorily at the red balloons on the ceiling. ‘Send up one of those and get me a cloud height estimation.'

Without saying a word, Joan tugged on one of the strings, Gwen seizing the balloon as it came down. It more or less filled the doorway as she took it out, holding it before her as if she were a waitress with a tray. Joan followed.

Once they had left, Whybrow turned to me, folding his hands on his RAF tunic with the air of someone about to make a speech. ‘I don't quite understand why a Type 3 outstation need be set up in Wallace Ryman's garden, but who am I to reason why? Apparently you are a “bright young thing” who needs careful handling. A real scientist, Sir Peter said, as if the rest of us aren't. Well, young man, I'll be expecting the very best from you, as from any other observer.'

‘Of course, sir,' I said, putting a deliberate meekness into my voice. Whybrow was more or less irrelevant so far as my true task was concerned, but there was no point in antagonising him for the sake of it. And there could, after all, I thought then, be some way in which I might need his help.

‘Right, then. Let's get down to brass tacks. Have you sent up any sondes yet?'

‘I haven't any hydrogen.'

‘We sent over all the requisites.'

‘I have never made it before. The tanks came ready supplied at Kew.'

He laughed abruptly, as if pleased to discover I wasn't such a
know-it-all after all. ‘Then you had better come with me.'

Leaving the farmhouse, we walked through the mud that divided the Nissen huts, all of which were of uniform height. The hydrogen shed was much bigger. From a kind of gable at one end of it, the tower of the cloud searchlight rose, giving the whole complex the air of a makeshift airfield.

‘Gwen! Joan!' shouted Whybrow.

He called again. A red balloon appeared from behind one of the huts. Eventually the balloon entered the cloud.

‘Three hundred and ten feet, sir,' said Joan emerging from the hut, followed shortly afterwards by Gwen.

They both, I would later learn, came from landed families in Norfolk. The sort of stylish women to whom everything came easily, they seemed odd candidates to be stuck up in this backwater. But then, war did that to all of us, moving us around its chessboard in ways we never expected.

‘Jolly good,' said Whybrow nasally. ‘Now, I'd like you, one or other of you, or both, to show our new arrival how to make hydrogen. Then send him to Mr Pyke up at Loch Eck.'

He turned to me. ‘Sir Peter said I was to introduce you to someone from Combined Ops' Experimental Section who is up here. Strange fellow, Pyke. Very hot to use science for war, and clever with it. Anyway, good luck!'

On this oddly cheery note, Whybrow made his way back to the Ops Room, his square back framed in the rectangle of light between two Nissen huts. Without saying anything to me, the two women began walking in the direction of the tall hydrogen shed.

Falling into pace behind them, I couldn't help noticing their fine shoes were covered in mud. They were court shoes, but fine ones, not the standard, pump-like things that most of the Waafs wore, which looked like comical black frogs.

‘Shame to cover such nice shoes in mud,' I said to their
backs. ‘They look rather expensive. You ought to be in wellies, with this lot.'

‘Not likely,' said Joan over her shoulder. ‘We wouldn't be seen dead in wellies.' It struck me as odd that she should speak for them both.

‘Hydrogen shed,' Gwen announced bluntly. They both spoke in this clipped, staccato manner. She pushed against the door and I followed them inside.

The lights flickered on to reveal a large warehouse-like space. At one end were some stairs leading up to the gable, out of which a mezzanine floor projected. There was a balcony there with something vertical behind, just showing in the darkness above the lights: a suspended row of aluminium-shaded lamps, looking like soldiers' helmets hanging from wires. The floor space below, empty in the centre, was lined with steel drums of caustic soda and piles of cylinders for storing hydrogen.

‘This is the generator,' said Joan. She indicated another drum, smaller and thicker than those in which the caustic soda was stored. It was sealed with a screw-down lid, out of which projected a black rubber tube.

I stubbed my toe on something and swore. The women laughed maliciously. I peered down to see what had injured me: a lozenge of lead. ‘That's the safety weight,' explained Gwen, her tone kinder than before. ‘We're always doing that. We have a whale of a time doing that.'

She pulled on some rubber gloves and fetched a lump of caustic soda, holding it up to the light as she walked back towards me. It looked like a cake of salt. ‘You don't want to get this horrid stuff on your skin.' She put it in the generator, along with some water. ‘Fill to two-thirds.'

‘Add a cupful of iron filings,' said Joan, leaning over.

‘Ferrosilicon, really,' said Gwen, watching Joan pour the
catalyst into the cylinder. Then, as Gwen moved quickly to screw down the lid, Joan picked up the lead weight next to my foot. She placed it on the rubber tube where it emerged from the lid. Steadying herself by putting out a hand to Gwen's shoulder, Joan stood on the weight, first with one foot then the other.

‘You have to do this or the weight can come off,' she said, as the reaction began. Balancing, arms outstretched, she looked like an outsize Christmas fairy. Next to her, inside the cylinder, the recipe for hydrogen fizzed and gurgled.

The reaction came to a peak. Gwen produced an empty balloon from her tunic, knelt down beside the canister and began rolling the nozzle over the stubby tube. ‘You have to thread it on quite carefully,' she said.

‘Or it can all go wrong,' added Joan from her pedestal.

I watched the balloon begin to inflate.

‘Hydrogen,' said Gwen, holding the sides of the balloon with her palms as it filled up. ‘Lightest element in the universe, ta-ra ta-ra.'

‘And the most abundant,' said Joan, stepping down from the lozenge as the reaction came to equilibrium. ‘Fifteen pounds of it in every human body.' They sounded like music-hall comedians, limbering up for a punchline.

Gwen unrolled the nozzle of the balloon from its umbilical tube, knotted it and let go. It danced up past the row of lights, rising to the apex of the ceiling.

‘How will you get it down?' I wondered aloud, watching.

‘We'll show you,' said Joan. ‘Come on.'

I stood in the centre of the shed. ‘Isn't it highly explosive? It could burn on those lights.'

‘Only if there's a spark,' said Gwen. ‘Come along.'

I followed them across the cavernous shed and up some narrow stairs that led to the gable end and the balcony.
Climbing up through an open trapdoor, I saw there were several steel sheets bolted to the wooden floor as foundations for some kind of structure. It was quite dark up there, but I made out the base of the cloud searchlight tower. Beneath it were two thin mattresses side by side, with pillows and blankets. I was surprised, my mind raced … they surely hadn't brought me into a bedroom?

‘We sometimes take turns to have a nap up here while on duty,' Gwen said, by way of explanation. She turned on a little lamp: just a bare bulb fixed to one of the wooden rafters.

In the new light I saw two little bowls of make-up on the floor and a full-length mirror draped with clothing. Under the mirror was a small pile of shoes. There was also an easel and a stack of canvases, together with a palette covered with hardened oil paint of various hues, jam jars full of paintbrushes, and a wooden tray of half-squeezed tubes of paint.

‘We paint up here too,' said Gwen. ‘We're artists, you see.'

Even more surprised, I looked at the picture on the easel. It showed a long yellow beach with rolling breakers curved along a bay. Among puddles of seawater in the sand, a couple of black dogs jumped about, chasing salt-wet tails. The dogs' tails and the curling breakers mirrored each other, as if the intention was to convey a relationship between them. Behind the dogs, blues and yellows and greens of varying relationships blended into the glow of the horizon.

‘That's pretty good,' I said, aware of them looking at me in expectation of an opinion.

‘Not good enough,' said thin Gwen, and I wondered for a second if she was referring to my response rather than the painting itself.

‘Never is,' said Joan. ‘Would you like some tea?'