Goodbye Mickey Mouse
Len Deighton
In Goodbye Mickey Mouse Len Deighton has written his best novel yet: a brilliant, multi-dimensional picture of what it is to be at war… and what it was to be in love in the England of 1944.Goodbye Mickey Mouse is Deighton’s fourteenth novel and a vivid evocation of wartime England, the story of a group of American fighter pilots flying escort missions over Germany in the winter of 1943-4.At the centre of the novel are two young men: the deeply reserved Captain Jamie Farebrother, estranged son of a deskbound colonel, and the cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse, well on his way to becoming America’s Number One Flying Ace. Alike only in their courage, they forge a bond of friendship in battle with far-reaching consequences for themselves, and for the future of those they love.
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
Len Deighton
Copyright (#ulink_bddca4cb-1a65-5d34-bb71-92cca31da9dc)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1982
Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1982
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009
The author and publisher would like to thank The Big 3 Music Ltd and United Artists Music Co. Inc. for kind permission to quote from ‘For All We Know’ by Sam M. Lewis and J. Fred Coots (© 1934 Leo Feist Inc.), and Famous Chappell and Chappell Music Canada Ltd for kind permission to quote from ‘That Old Black Magic’, from the film Star Spangled Rhythm, music by Harold Arlen and words by Johnny Mercer (© 1942 Famous Music Corp.)
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EBook Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007347735
Version: 2017-08-10
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Mickey Mouse, US Military Slang. Anything that is unnecessary or unimportant. (Named for the Walt Disney animated cartoon character, in allusion to its childish appeal, its simplicity, triviality, etc.)
The Barnhart Dictionary of New English
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u0f127027-6563-5c93-8ed8-8c24d9817ec5)
Title Page (#u702c3c3f-3844-5e1c-ae42-fe3f19e95f56)
Copyright (#uab81f090-b76a-5dc9-9337-147bda7dfae8)
Epigraph (#u8fe6d3ad-21df-539f-a6a9-fba93852ea46)
Introduction (#uc34a3a3c-d312-5d9e-8088-ca9293787f49)
Prologue (#u1c6eedb3-cb11-5590-bcf6-6be48bdb85f1)
1 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen (#udf17b521-1b62-5176-8719-6486e57aae3a)
2 Captain James A. Farebrother (#u7d69fc4d-0cbc-5f24-9829-c4fce93139e9)
3 Staff Sergeant Harold E. Boyer (#uca6e8869-97bf-5b9f-acf7-3afc5f4c670e)
4 Lieutenant Z. M. Morse (#ua3aed8e7-9047-586f-8791-b91d36cb8bd1)
5 Captain Charles B. Stigg (#ucfc52250-eb58-53f9-b7af-4c248f33d88e)
6 Captain James A. Farebrother (#u50b22131-d847-5093-bb0a-e0358053b54f)
7 Victoria Cooper (#uc40aef9c-2f87-5019-8659-c9492dc6882d)
8 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen (#ub142dccf-6457-59af-aca5-11e2037e8af5)
9 Captain James A. Farebrother (#u895da37c-6db8-5ced-9ae9-b6f37f3f6f64)
10 Colonel Daniel A. Badger (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Captain James A. Farebrother (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Dr Bernard Cooper (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Captain Vincent H. Madigan (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Captain James A. Farebrother (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Victoria Cooper (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Lieutenant Stefan ‘Fix’ Madjicka (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Henry Scrimshaw (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Vera Hardcastle (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Major Spurrier Tucker Jr (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Captain Vincent H. Madigan (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Dr Bernard Cooper (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll (#litres_trial_promo)
25 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Captain James A. Farebrother (#litres_trial_promo)
27 Colonel Daniel A. Badger (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Major Spurrier Tucker Jr (#litres_trial_promo)
29 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Captain Vincent H. Madigan (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Victoria Cooper (#litres_trial_promo)
32 Captain Milton B. Goldman (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About The Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_82e03025-1fb3-5463-87ae-43701d141924)
‘Never before; never since and never again,’ said a US Eighth Army Air Force veteran when I was researching this book.
He was describing one particular moment in the final months of the war. RAF Bomber Command was operating in the daytime, and flying in loose formations of squadrons instead of in the ‘stream’ it had used previously in night bombing. The RAF heavy bombers were returning across the English Channel at the same time as seemingly endless squadrons of American air force bombers were setting out in tight formations. ‘The sun glinted on them,’ said the American flyer. ‘There must have been a thousand of those RAF heavies. I was in the turret; we were leading the low squadron. All around me and behind and ahead there were over a thousand of our ships. Everywhere I looked, the sky was filled with planes.’
Perhaps he was exaggerating but other flyers remarked upon such awesome sights. The missions of ‘Big Week’ frequently comprised 800 aircraft and this short period of intense air activity was one of the most decisive battles of the war. Certainly there were times when two thousand British and American four-engined bombers shared the sky, and the men who saw these vast, futuristic fleets of aircraft never forgot. Neither did the people—British and German—who with pride and apprehension watched them from the ground.
Goodbye Mickey Mouse was rooted in a failure. I had abandoned a half-completed story about the air fighting in Vietnam when the fighting there ended. To prepare for that Vietnam book I had spent several weeks on a US Air Force base. They gave me a chair in the ready room, a physical exam with jabs, a flight suit with all the paraphernalia and a bed; and let me join the day-to-day life of the aircrew on the base. I ate with the flyers, drank with them, went to their barbecues and flew backseat in the F-4 Phantom. We dropped bombs, flew in formation and did air-to-air refueling. My assigned pilot was Captain Johnny Jumper, a young Vietnam veteran who not only became a life-long friend but also became a General and eventually the US Air Force Chief of Staff.
Writers hate waste. My vivid experience with the US Air Force nagged me and eventually became a starting point for reconstructing the 1944 US Army Air Force base in England where Goodbye Mickey Mouse takes place. Malcolm Bates, a resolute amateur historian in Porlock, persuaded me to look again at the war fought by the US air forces in Europe. Malcolm had read my book, Bomber, and wanted me to write about the American side of the air war. He sent me long letters, carefully chosen books and useful pictures. His enthusiasm fired me. I had visited American bases in England in 1944 and the structure I envisaged for the book came into my mind easily. I had always been intrigued by the degree of self-sufficiency that military bases achieved. Metal-working shops and pharmacies, libraries and prison cells, dental surgeries and chapels, ice cream parlours, movie theatres and tailor shops. There was no need to go anywhere for anything. American bases were more all-inclusive than the RAF ones I had visited, for there was a prevailing order that the British economy should not be taxed with American demands for food and supplies.
When, in the postwar world, the air force veterans of the 91st Bombardment Group returned to their old base at Bassingbourn to revive memories and exchange yarns, I was infiltrated into the party by one of the organizers: Wing Commander ‘Beau’ Carr. I spent an inspiring week with these remarkable men. ‘That was my bed,’ one elderly ex-navigator told his wife as he slapped its blanket in a barrack room now occupied by young soldiers. He looked around the room, turning his head slowly: ‘And this was my home.’
To emphasize this ‘little town’ concept I decided to allot one character to each chapter so the story was told through the eyes of technical specialists, clerks and tradesmen as well as the flyers. I had tried this before in a very simple way. In Only When I Larf chapters were provided for the first person narrative of three different people. One of them was a woman. Such a construction requires unrelenting attention to dialogue and detail. Every sentence, in fact every word, must be scrutinized carefully to establish, distinguish and maintain the integrity of the separate characters. And for that book the accounts varied according to the memory and motives of each person.
Editors can sometimes be important to the process of writing a book. It was a very fine American editor, Georgie Remer, who gently advised me to drop this ‘one first-person character per chapter’ idea. Georgie usually edited top level political and military memoirs and she had taken me, a fiction writer, on as an experiment. From my point of view her help was wonderful and she taught me the first principles of editing. A dozen or more American regional speech patterns and accents would be a big problem even for a well-travelled American writer, Georgie said. She would not advise anyone to try such a device. I was convinced that it could be done but Georgie was an extraordinary woman and her warning was apt; it would add months of extra work and pitfalls galore. So Georgie and I compromised. I tell the story from different viewpoints but I would look over the shoulder of each participant rather than relate the episode in their voice.
When I wrote Bomber, a book about an RAF strategic bombing raid in 1943, I devoted a large part of the story to the life and day-to-day activities of the Germans. Goodbye Mickey Mouse was a fundamentally different project. For this book I wanted to examine the social life of the ‘Little America’ that was the air base, and the mixed reactions of the English civilians living nearby. Because I have found that conversation is the finest basis of research I spent a long time with veterans in America. Despite the lengthy research I was determined to keep the story line clear and well structured.
A simple plot demands complex characters. I have never been lucky enough to have my characters fortuitously emerge from the keyboard, speak to me from blank pages or drift into my dreams. Like some latter-day Count Frankenstein, I have to fashion my characters to fit the needs of my story but not fit readily to each other. To give you a crude idea of what I mean: Victoria is a part of an old, over-confident, expiring world, while being young female and vulnerable. Jamie is strong and assured but feels uncertain about the foreign world in which he finds himself. Mickey Morse is a wild card; an alarming, unpredictable representative of the sort of social revolution that war brings. Equally important to me was the father and son relationship; the General and his son Jamie are separated by the love they have for each other. It is a generational gap that neither man can bridge or reconcile.
Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a love story. Almost every fiction book I have written is to some extent a love story; I suppose I must be some sort of closet romantic. This story is a somewhat prosaic tale. It depicts desperate wartime romances and the cruel anguish they bring to all concerned.
Len Deighton, 2009
Prologue, 1982 (#ulink_3f1e215a-5e4c-571f-858e-15dd246a2ecb)
Three buses moved with almost funereal slowness through the narrow winding country lanes. Overhead the sky was dark with rain clouds. The passengers stared out at the meadows and the pretty villages, defaced by advertising, TV antennas and traffic signs, and at the orchards and streams drained of colour by the long months of winter.
The buses did not stop until they reached one large ugly field disfigured by the rusting metal skeletons of old Quonset huts and brick remains. Slashed across this huge field, like some monstrous sign of plague, there was a concrete X. Here and there strenuous attempts had been made to remove this disfigurement, but only tiny pieces had been nibbled from the great cross.
Cautiously the passengers disembarked into the chilly winds that scour the flat East Anglian farmlands. Huddled against the weather, palms outstretched to detect rain in the air, zipped and buttoned to the neck, they formed into small silent groups and wandered dejectedly through the ruined buildings.
They were Americans. They wore brightly coloured windcheaters and tartan hats, they carried cameras and tote bags, none of them was equipped with the heavy sweaters and thick overcoats that England’s climate demands so early in the year. They were white-haired and they were balding, they were florid and they were ashen, they were fat and they were frail, but, apart from a few young relatives, they were all in that advanced stage of life that we optimistically call middle age.
The nervous clowning and the determined laughs of the men demonstrated the tense anxiety behind their movements. Wives watched knowingly as their men frantically searched in the workspace of the echoing old hangar, paced out the shape of a long-vanished barrack hut, peered into dark corners or scratched upon dirt-encrusted windows to find nothing but ancient farm machinery. They’d waited a long time; they’d paid hard-earned money; they’d come a long way to find the man they sought. Sometimes it became necessary to consult an old photo for identification purposes, at other times they listened for half-remembered voices. But as the group grew quieter and, in deference to the cold, returned to the warm buses, it became evident that none of them had discovered the man they all so clearly remembered.
One couple separated from the others. Holding hands like young lovers, they followed a potholed tarmac road that, like a huge ring, surrounded the field, touching the extremities of the crossed runways. The man and woman talked as they took a shortcut along a farm track. They unhooked themselves from blackberry bushes, stepped over cow dung, and picked a wood violet to be pressed flat into a diary and kept as a souvenir. They spoke about the weather and the crops and the colours of the countryside. They spoke about anything except what was uppermost in their minds.
‘Look at the cherry blossom,’ said Victoria, who had not lost her English accent despite thirty years in San Francisco. They both stopped at the orchard gate which once marked the end of Hobday’s Farm and the edge of the airfield.
‘Why did Jamie stay in the bus?’ said the man. He rattled the farm gate. ‘Isn’t he interested in seeing where his father flew from in the war?’
Victoria hugged him. ‘You’re his father,’ she said. ‘You tell me.’
1 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen (#ulink_5f4421f5-bcb8-5f41-87ef-350b2c9adf10)
Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen’s large office overlooked Grosvenor Square. The furniture was a curious collection of oddments: two lumpy armchairs from the American Embassy’s storeroom smelled of mothballs, his desk and a slab-sided table, loaded with box files, bore the markings of Britain’s Ministry of Works. The antique carpet and a Sheraton china cabinet were air-raid salvage that Bohnen had bought cheaply in a London saleroom. Only the folding chairs, six of them stacked tidily behind the door, were American in origin. But it was December 1943 and London was very much at war.
The clouds were dark and low over the bare trees of the square. The soft silvery grey barrage balloon wore a crown of white and there were patches of fresh snow on the grass. But elsewhere the snowflakes died as they reached the ground and the hut that sheltered the balloon’s operating crew was shiny and wet. Smoke from the stove twisted with every gust of wind, and chased the snow flurries. For once there was no sound of aircraft. Little chance of a German air raid today; nature was providing its own barrage.
Colonel Bohnen, US Army Air Force, was a tall man in his middle forties. His uniform was well cut and he had buffered his appearance against the onset of age by a daily routine of exercise, aided by expensive dentists, hairdressers, masseurs and tailors. Now, with the same waistline he’d had at college, and nearly as much wavy hair that was only slightly greying, he could have been mistaken for a professional athlete.
His visitor was an elderly American civilian, a sober-suited white-haired man with rimless spectacles. He was older than Bohnen, a friend and business associate. Twenty years before, he had been part owner of a small airline and Bohnen a trained engineer with contacts in the banking world. It was a relationship that permitted him to treat Bohnen with the same sardonic amusement with which he’d greeted the overconfident youngster who’d pushed past his secretary two decades earlier. ‘I’m surprised you settled for colonel’s rank, Alex. I thought you’d hold out for a star when they asked you to put on your uniform.’
Bohnen knew it was a joke but he answered earnestly. ‘It was a question of what I could contribute. The rank means nothing at all. I would have been content with sergeant’s stripes.’
‘So all that business about your expecting a general’s star at any moment is just moonshine, huh?’
Bohnen swung round sharply. His visitor held his stare a moment before winking conspiratorially. ‘You’d be surprised what you hear in the Embassy, Alex, if you wear rubber-soled shoes.’
‘Anyone I know there last night?’
The old man smiled. Bohnen was still the bright-eyed young genius he’d known so long ago: ambitious, passionate, witty, daring, but climbing, always climbing. ‘Just State Department career men, Alex. Not the kind of people you’d give dinner to.’
Bohnen wondered how much he’d heard about the excellent dinner parties he hosted here in London. The guests were carefully selected, and the hostess was a titled lady whose husband was serving with the Royal Navy. Her name must not be linked with his. ‘Work keeps me so busy I’ve scarcely got time for a social life,’ said Bohnen.
The man smiled and said, ‘Don’t take the Army too seriously, Alex. Don’t start reading up on the campaigns of Napoleon or translating Thucydides. Or practising rifle drill in your office, the way you used to practise golf to humiliate me.’
‘We’ve got too many businessmen walking around in khaki just because it’s a fashionable colour,’ said Bohnen. ‘We’re fighting a war. Any man who joins the service should be prepared to give everything he’s got to it. I mean that seriously.’
‘I believe you do.’ There was a steel lining to Bohnen’s charm, and he pitied any of Bohnen’s military subordinates who hesitated about giving up ‘everything’. ‘Well, I’m sure your Jamie will be green with envy when he hears you got to Europe ahead of him. Or is he here too?’
‘Jamie’s in California. Flying instructors do a vitally important job. Maybe he doesn’t like it, but that’s what I mean about the Army—we all have to do things we don’t like.’
‘His mother thinks you arranged that instructor’s job.’
Bohnen turned to glance out of the window again. The old man knew him well enough to recognize that he was avoiding the question. ‘I don’t have that kind of authority,’ said Bohnen vaguely.
‘Don’t get me wrong—Mollie blesses you for it. They both do, Mollie and Bill. Bill Farebrother treats your boy as if he was his own, do you know that, Alex? He loves your boy.’
‘They would have liked a son, I guess,’ said Bohnen.
‘Yes, well, don’t be mulish, Alex. They don’t have a son, and they both dote on your Jamie. You should be pleased that it worked out that way.’
Bohnen nodded. There was virtually no one else who would have dared to speak so frankly about Bohnen’s first wife and the man she’d married, but they’d been good friends through thick and thin. And there was no malice in the old man’s frankness. ‘You’re right. Bill Farebrother has always played straight. I guess we were all pleased that Jamie was assigned to instruction.’
‘I suspect you had a hand in Jamie’s assignment,’ said the man. ‘And I suspect that Jamie is every bit as clever as his father when it comes to getting his own way. Don’t imagine he won’t find a way to get into the war.’
‘Has Jamie written to you?’ Bohnen was alert now and ready to be jealous of this man’s friendship with his son. ‘This is important to me. If the boy is being assigned to combat duty I have a right to know about it.’
‘I only know that he visited his mother on leave. He sold his car and cleared out his room. She was worried that he might have been sent overseas.’
The old man watched Bohnen as he bit his lower lip and then moved his mouth in exactly the same way he’d seen young Jamie do when working out a sum or learning to take the controls of a tri-motor plane. Bohnen looked at his wristwatch while he calculated what he could do to check up on his son’s movements. ‘I’ll get on to that,’ he said, and pursed his lips in frustration.
‘You can’t keep him in cotton wool for the rest of his life, Alex. Jamie’s a grown man.’
Bohnen got to his feet and sighed. ‘You don’t understand me, you only think you do. I don’t give myself any easy breaks, and if you were under my command I’d make sure no one ever accused me of going soft on old buddies. If Jamie’s looking to his old man for any kind of special treatment he can think again. Sure, I put in a word that helped assign him to Advanced Flying training. I know Jamie; he needed more time before flying combat. But that’s a while back, he’s ready now. If he comes here, he’ll take his chances along with any other young officer.’
Bohnen’s visitor stood up and took his coat from the hook on the door. ‘It’s not a sin for a man to favour his son, Alex.’
‘But it is a court-martial offence,’ said Bohnen. ‘And I don’t quarrel with that.’
‘You’ve fallen in love with the military, Alex, the same way you’ve fallen in love with every project you’ve ever taken on.’
‘It’s the way I am,’ admitted Bohnen, helping the old man into his overcoat. ‘It’s why I’m able to get things rolling.’
‘But in wartime the Army has a million lovers; it becomes a whore. I don’t want to see you betrayed, Alex.’
Bohnen smiled. ‘What was it Shelley said: “War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.” Is that what you have in mind?’
The visitor reached for his roll-brim hat. ‘I envy you your memory even more than your knowledge of the classics, Alex. But I was thinking of something Oscar Wilde said about the fascination of war being due to people thinking it wicked. He said war would only cease being popular when we realized how vulgar it was.’
‘Oscar Wilde?’ said Bohnen. ‘And when was he a reliable authority on the subject of war?’
‘I’ll tell you next week, Alex.’
‘The Savoy, lunch Friday. I’ll look forward to it.’
2 Captain James A. Farebrother (#ulink_aa903b7a-0260-5fcd-917f-7f8df470d810)
‘You’re the luckiest guy in the world, I’ve always told you that, haven’t I?’
‘So what happened to the man who was going to be the richest airline pilot in America?’ replied Captain James Farebrother, made uncomfortable by the note of envy in his friend’s voice.
Captain Charles Stigg pulled back the canvas flap to see out of the truck. London’s streets were dark and wet with rain, but even in the small hours there were people about. There were soldiers and sailors in fancy foreign uniforms. There was a jeep with British military police wearing red-topped caps, and some civil defence personnel wearing steel helmets. There must have been another air-raid warning.
‘Nearly there now,’ said Farebrother, more to himself than to his friend. Separation from Charlie would be a bad wrench. They’d been together since they were aviation cadets learning to fly on old Stearmans, and it was easy to understand why they’d become such good friends. Both were calm, confident young men with easy smiles and quiet voices. More than one member of a selection board had said they were not aggressive enough for the ritual slaughter now taking place daily in the thin blue skies above Germany.
‘Why didn’t I bring my long underwear?’ said Charlie Stigg, letting the flap close against the chilly air.
‘It’s nearly Christmas,’ said Farebrother.
‘I guess almost anything will be better than teaching Cadet Jenkins to land an AT-6.’
‘Almost anything will be safer,’ said Farebrother. ‘Even Norwich on a Saturday night.’
‘You know why I stopped going to the Saturday-night dances?’ said Charlie Stigg. ‘I couldn’t face another of those girls telling me I looked too young to be an instructor.’
‘They didn’t mean anything by that.’
‘They thought we were ducking out of the war—they figured we volunteered to be flying instructors.’
‘The kind of girl I met at the dances didn’t even know there was a war on,’ said Farebrother.
‘Norwich,’ said Stigg. ‘So that’s how you pronounce it; I guess I’ve been saying it wrong. Yeah, good. Come over there and see me, Jamie, it sure will cheer me up.’ The truck stopped and they heard the driver hammering on his door to signal that this was Stigg’s destination, the Red Cross Club.
‘Good luck, Charlie.’
‘Look after yourself, Jamie,’ said Charlie Stigg. He threw his bag out onto the ground and climbed down. ‘And a merry Christmas.’
It wasn’t fair. Charlie Stigg had been hardworking and conscientious enough to master the complications of flying multi-engined aircraft, so when they finally let him go to war they turned down his application for fighters and sent him to a Bomb Group. Farebrother deliberately flunked his conversion to twins and got the assignment that Charlie so desperately wanted. It wasn’t fair, war isn’t fair, life isn’t fair.
He suffered a pang of guilt as he watched Charlie staggering up the steps of the club under the weight of his pack, and then, with the heartlessness of youth, dismissed the feeling from his mind. Farebrother was going to be a fighter pilot; he was the luckiest guy in the world.
‘Is this the truck for Steeple Thaxted?’ a voice called from the darkness.
‘That’s the way I heard it,’ said Farebrother.
An officer in a waterproof mac followed by half a dozen enlisted men climbed into the truck. Realizing that Farebrother was an outsider, they drew away from him as if he were the carrier of some contagious disease. The truck started and the officer lit a cigarette and then offered one to Farebrother, who declined and then asked, ‘What’s it like at Steeple Thaxted?’
‘Ever been in the Okefenokee Swamp when the heating was off?’
‘That bad?’
‘Picture an endless panorama of shit with tents stuck in it and you’ve got it. Whenever I meet a new dame at a dance, the first thing I ask her is if she’s got a bathroom with hot water.’ He drew on his cigarette, well aware of his audience of EMs. ‘Of course, this being England, she usually hasn’t got a bathroom.’ One of the men chuckled.
‘You’re living in tents in this weather?’ said Farebrother.
The officer prodded Farebrother’s bag with the toe of his shoe and pushed at it until he revealed the stencilled lettering on the side. ‘A fly-boy, are you?’ He tilted his head to read the name.
‘I’m a pilot,’ said Farebrother.
‘Captain J. A. Farebrother,’ the officer read aloud. ‘A captain, eh? This is a second tour, or have you been in the Pacific?’
‘I’ve been an instructor back home,’ said Farebrother apologetically.
The officer sniffed and wiped his nose with a dainty handkerchief obviously borrowed from a lady friend. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ he said as he put it away. ‘My name’s Madigan, Vincent Madigan. I’m a captain—Group Public Relations Officer. I guess you’re assigned to Colonel Badger’s 220th Fighter Group?’
‘Right.’
‘If you’re a flyer, you’ll be all right. That son of a bitch Badger has no time for anyone who isn’t a flyer.’ There was a soft growl of agreement from one of the other men.
‘Is that right?’ Farebrother looked round at the huddled figures. There was the odour of warm bodies in wet overcoats and the pungent smell of sweet American tobacco. The men were obviously coming back from pass and would go straight to their duties in the morning. They were waiting for Madigan to stop talking so they could catch up on their sleep.
‘Mud, shit and tents,’ reaffirmed Madigan. ‘And the local Limeys hate us more than they hate the Krauts.’
‘Hold it there,’ said Farebrother. ‘My mother was English. The way I see it, we’re in the war together; no sense in partners feuding.’
Madigan nodded and puffed at his cigarette. ‘They gave you the lecture, then.’ A sergeant sitting next to Madigan rested his head back against the canvas side of the truck. There was a cigarette in his mouth and, as he inhaled, the light from it illuminated a face with a large blunt moustache, a soft garrison cap tipped down to his half-closed eyes, and the collar of his overcoat wrapped around his ears. He pulled the collar tighter to close out Madigan’s voice, but Madigan didn’t notice. ‘You’ll find out,’ he promised. ‘You’re still on the crusade. Most of us started out that way. But you get Colonel Badger chewing your ass out. You get the Limeys screwing your last dollar out of you and then spitting in your eye. You get memos telling you how the top brass are figuring new ways to get us all killed…Suddenly maybe you’ll start thinking the Krauts aren’t so bad.’
The truck jolted as it went over some bomb-damaged road surface. Through the open canvas at the back they saw a British soldier with a flashlight waving the traffic past. Behind him there was a large red sign: ‘Danger. Unexploded Bomb.’
‘Watch out, mate,’ the soldier called. ‘The red alert is still on.’ The driver grunted his thanks.
‘Even if things are as rotten as you say, what can we do about it?’ said Farebrother.
Madigan threw his half-smoked cigarette into the darkness, where it made a sudden pattern of red sparks. He leaned forward and Farebrother smelled the whisky on his breath. ‘There are ways, Farebrother, my boy,’ he said flippantly. ‘There are Swedish airfields packed wing tip to wing tip with Flying Fortresses and B-24s. There must be room there for a factory-fresh Mustang fighter plane.’ He leaned back in his seat, watching Farebrother catch the effect of his words. ‘Some flyers out there over the sea get a sudden hankering to make a separate peace. They steer north to the big blonde girls, farm butter and central heating. You’ll be tempted, Farebrother, old buddy.’
Nervously Farebrother reached for his own cigarettes and lit one. He took a long time doing it. He didn’t want to talk any more with this drunken officer.
But when the cigarette was lit, Madigan said, ‘You’ve got a nice lighter there, Captain. Mind if I take a closer look?’ When it passed to him Madigan silently read the engraved ‘To Jamie from Dad’ and then clasped it tight in his hands.
‘Women are all the same,’ said Madigan. He was speaking more quietly now and with a fervour his earlier conversation had lacked. ‘I was in love this time. Ever been in love, Farebrother?’ It was not a real question and he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I offered to marry her. Last night I dropped in unexpectedly and I find her in the sack with some goddamned infantry lieutenant.’ He tossed the lighter into the air. ‘She’s probably been two-timing me all along. And I was in love with the little whore.’
Farebrother murmured sympathetically and Madigan tossed the lighter to him.
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Madigan. ‘Your reflexes are okay for three o’clock in the morning. And any guy who goes to war carrying a solid-gold lighter is well motivated for survival. From Dad, eh?’
Farebrother smiled and wondered what Captain Madigan would say if he knew that Dad was one of the top brass who were figuring new ways to get them all killed.
Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll was the Group Administrative Executive Officer. He was a fussy thirty-nine-year-old who made sure everyone knew he’d graduated from West Point long before most of the other officers were out of high school. The Exec dressed like an illustration from The Officer’s Handbook. His wavy hair was always neatly trimmed and his rimless spectacles polished so that they shone.
‘What time did you arrive, Captain Farebrother?’ His eyes moved quickly to look out of the window. Two aircraft were parked on the muddy grass, their green paint shiny with the never-ending rain. Some men were huddled against the control tower, the outer walls of which were patchy from a half-finished paint job. Behind it the airfield was empty, its grass darkened by the sunless weeks of wintry weather.
‘A little after eight o’clock this morning, sir.’
‘Transport okay? And you got breakfast, I trust.’ The Exec was bent over his desk, his hands flat on its top, reading from an open file. There was no solicitude apparent in the questions. He seemed more interested in double-checking the motor pool and the mess staff than in Farebrother’s welfare. He looked up without straightening his body.
‘Yes, thank you, sir.’
The Exec banged a hand down on the bell on his desk, like an impatient hotel guest. His sergeant clerk appeared immediately at the door.
‘You tell Sergeant Boyer that if I see him and the rest of those lead swingers goofing off just once more, he’ll be a buckass private in time for lunch. And you tell him I’m looking for men to do guard duty over Christmas.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant clerk doubtfully. He looked out of the window to discover what the Exec could see from here. ‘I guess the rain is pretty heavy.’
‘The rain was heavy yesterday,’ said the Exec, ‘and the day before that. Chances are it will be heavy tomorrow. Colonel Badger wants the tower painted by tonight and it’s going to be done by tonight. The Krauts don’t close down the war every time it rains, Sergeant. Not even the Limeys do that.’
‘I’ll tell Sergeant Boyer, sir.’
‘And make it snappy, Sergeant. We’ve got work to do.’
The Exec looked at Farebrother and then at the rain and then at the papers on his desk. ‘When my sergeant returns he’ll give you a map of the base and tell you about your accommodation and so on. And don’t kick up a fuss if you’re sleeping on the far side of the village in a Quonset hut. This place was built as an RAF satellite field, it wasn’t designed to hold over sixteen hundred Americans who want to bathe every day in hot water. The Limeys seem to manage with a dry polish—they think bathing weakens you.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve got over three hundred officers here. I’ve got captains and majors sleeping under canvas, shaving in tin huts with mud floors and cycling three miles to get breakfast. So…’ He left the sentence unfinished.
‘I understand, sir.’
Having finished his well-rehearsed litany, Colonel Scroll looked at Farebrother as if seeing him for the first time. ‘The commanding officer, Colonel Badger, will see you at eleven hundred hours, Captain Farebrother. You’ve just got time enough to shave, shower and change into a clean class A uniform.’ He nodded a dismissal.
It seemed a bad moment for Farebrother to tell him that he had already showered in the precious hot water, shaved, and was wearing his newest and cleanest uniform. Farebrother saluted punctiliously, and then performed the sort of about-face that was said to be de rigueur at West Point. The effect was not all he’d hoped for; he lost balance performing what the Basic Field Manual describes as ‘…place the toe of your right foot a half foot length in rear and slightly to the left of your left heel. Do not move your left heel.’ Farebrother moved his left heel.
Everything good or bad about the base at Steeple Thaxted during those days was largely due to the Group Exec. It was Duke Scroll who—like all executive officers throughout the Air Force—made life a pleasure or a pain, not only for the flyers but also for the sheet-metal workers, the parachute packers, and the clerks, cooks and crew chiefs who made up the three Fighter Group squadrons, and the Air Service Group, which supplied, maintained, policed and supported them.
The Exec stood behind Colonel Daniel A. Badger, station commander and leader of the Fighter Group. They were a curious pair—the prim, impeccable Duke and the restless, red-faced, squat Colonel Dan, whose short blond hair would never stay the way he combed it and whose large bulbous nose and pugnacious chin never did adapt easily to the strict confines of the moulded-rubber oxygen masks the Air Force used.
Colonel Dan rubbed the hairy arms visible below the shortened sleeves of his khaki shirt. It was a quick nervous gesture, like the few fast strokes a butcher makes on a sharpening steel while deciding how to dissect a carcass. In spite of the climate he never wore long sleeves and only put on his jacket when it was really needed. His shirt collar was open, ready for his white flying scarf—‘ten minutes in the ocean and a GI necktie will shrink enough to strangle you.’ Colonel Dan was always ready to fly.
‘Captain Farebrother!’ The Exec announced him as if he were a guest at a royal ball.
‘Yeah,’ said Colonel Dan. He went on looking at the sheet of paper that the Exec held before him, as if hoping that some more names would miraculously appear there. ‘Just one of you, eh?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Farebrother, restraining an impulse to turn round and see.
Colonel Dan ran a hand across his forehead in a movement that was intended both to mop his brow and to push back into position his short disarranged hair. ‘Do you know what I’ve had to do to get this Group equipped with those P-51s out there?’ He didn’t wait to hear the answer. ‘No officer on this base has tasted whisky in weeks! Why? Because I’ve used their booze ration to bribe the people who shuffle the paperwork at Wing, Fighter Command, and right up to Air Force HQ. In London a black-market bottle of scotch can cost you four English pounds. You can figure the money, I suppose, so you can figure what it’s cost to get those ships.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Farebrother. He’d understood the British currency ever since parting with two pounds to get his travel-creased uniform sponged and pressed in time to wear it at this interview.
‘I was hanging around Wing so much,’ went on Colonel Dan, ‘that the General thought I was dating his WAC secretary.’ He chortled to show how unlikely this would be. ‘I bought lunches for the Chief of Staff, and had my workshops make an airplane model for the Deputy’s desk. When I finally discovered that the guy who really makes the decision was only a major, I spent over a month’s pay taking him to a nightclub and fixing him up with a girl.’ He grinned. It was difficult to decide how much of all this was intended seriously, and how much was an act he put on for newly arrived officers.
‘So I get my airplanes, and what happens? I lose six jockeys in a row. Look at this manning table. One of them’s got an impacted wisdom tooth, one’s hurt his ankle playing softball, and one’s got measles. Can you beat that? The Flight Surgeon tells me…’ He tapped the papers on the table as if to prove it. ‘He tells me this officer’s got measles and can’t fly.’ He looked at Farebrother. ‘So just when I get three squadrons of Mustangs here ready to fly, I’m short of men. And what do they send me? Not the eleven lieutenants the T/O says I’m supposed to have from the replacement depot, but one lousy flying instructor—’ He raised his hand. ‘No offence to you, Captain, believe me. But goddamn it!’ He banged on his desk in anger. ‘What do you think they want me to do, Duke?’ The CO twisted round in his swivel chair to look up at his Exec. ‘Do they want me to set up Captain Farebrother in a dispersal hut on the far side of the field and have him train a dozen pilots for me? Could that be the idea, Duke?’
Colonel Dan scowled at Farebrother and tried without success to stare him down. Finally it was the CO who looked down at his paperwork again. ‘Fifteen hundred flying hours and an unspecified amount of pre-service flying,’ he read aloud. ‘I suppose you think that’s really something, eh, Captain?’
‘No, sir.’
‘We’re not flying Stearman trainers in neat little patterns over the desert, following the train tracks home when we get lost, and closing down for a long weekend whenever a cloud appears in the sky.’ He stabbed a finger at the window. ‘See that pale grey shit up there? It’s two thousand feet above the field and it’s ten thousand feet thick. And you’re going to be flying an airplane up through that stuff…an airplane you never dreamed existed even in your worst nightmare. These P-51 Mustangs are unforgiving s.o.b.s, Captain. No dual controls on these babies…just a mighty big engine with wings attached. For the first few rides they’ll scare you half to death.’
Colonel Dan banged the file shut. ‘We’re stood down right now, as you can see. Plenty of airplanes for you to try your hand on. Most of my pilots are on pass—flat on their faces drunk in some Piccadilly gutter, or trying to buy their pants back from some Cambridge whore. Am I right, Colonel Scroll?’
‘Most probably, sir,’ said the matronly Exec, moving one lot of papers away before placing a new pile in front of the CO. His face was expressionless, as if he were playing the role of butler to a playboy he didn’t like.
‘Get yourself a helmet and a flight suit, Captain,’ said Colonel Dan. ‘And take my advice about logging some hours on a P-51 before the Group’s assigned to its next mission.’ He scratched his arm again. ‘One of my flight commanders is still waiting for his captain’s bars, and that boy has five confirmed kills. How do you think he’s going to feel when he sees you practising wing-overs with those shiny railroad tracks on your collar? Having you turn up means he’ll wait even longer for promotion. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The Colonel touched the edges of the papers the Exec had placed in front of him. Then, as he looked up, his eyes focused upon Farebrother and dilated with amazement. ‘Captain Farebrother,’ he said in a voice which suggested that all the foregoing had been part of some other conversation, ‘may I ask what, in God’s name, you are wearing? Is that a pink jacket?’ His voice croaked with indignation.
‘At my previous assignment it was customary for instructors to have jackets made up in tan gabardine, like the regulation pants.’
‘I swear to you, Farebrother,’ said the Colonel with almost incoherent vehemence, ‘that if I ever see you wearing that pansy oufit again…’ He rubbed his mouth as if to still his own anger.
‘You make sure you wear the regulation pattern uniform, Captain,’ said the Exec. ‘The enlisted men have been getting tailors’ shops to make up all kinds of cockamamie “Ike blouses” and the Colonel will not tolerate it.’
‘One of my top sergeants had a uniform custom-made in Savile Row,’ added Colonel Dan. His voice was not entirely without a note of pride.
‘We stamped on it all pretty hard,’ said the Exec. He picked up the cardboard folder and nodded, to show that the interview was coming to an end.
‘Good luck, Captain Farebrother,’ said Colonel Dan. ‘Get yourself somewhere to sack out and make sure you report to the orderly room of the 199th Squadron sometime this afternoon. The Squadron Commander is Major Tucker—he’ll be back tomorrow.’
Captain Farebrother saluted but this time did his own, modified, version of the about-face.
It was still raining when a sergeant—his name, Tex Gill, stencilled on his fleece-lined jacket—helped Farebrother strap into one of the P-51s parked on the apron. The aircraft smelled new with its mixture of leather, paint and high-octane fuel. On its nose a brightly painted Mickey Mouse danced, and stencilled in yellow, under the cockpit, was the name of its regular pilot: Lt M. Morse.
‘Parking brake on, sir?’
‘On,’ said Farebrother. He plugged in the oxygen mask and microphone and checked the fuel and the switches.
‘Did I see you on the truck from London last night, sir?’ His voice was low and leisurely with the unmistakable tones of Texas in it.
‘That’s right, Sergeant Gill.’
‘Take it real easy, sir. These airplanes are a handful, even for someone who’s had a full night’s sleep.’
‘Is she a good one?’
‘She’s not my regular ship, sir. But she’s a dandy plane, and I’ve got to say it.’ Gill smiled. He was a big muscular man with a black square-ended moustache that drooped enough to make him look mournful. ‘Mixture off, pitch control forward,’ he prompted.
‘It’s okay, Sergeant Gill,’ said Farebrother. ‘I have a few Mustang flights in my log.’
‘You don’t want to listen to what people tell you,’ Gill said. ‘This place is no better and no worse than any other unit I’ve been with.’
Farebrother nodded. The rain continued to drizzle down from the grey stratus. Its droplets made a thousand pearls on the Plexiglass canopy. He almost changed his mind about flying up into such an overcast, but it was too late now. He grinned at Sergeant Gill, who seemed reassured by this but remained on the wing watching the whole cockpit check.
When Farebrother set the throttle a fraction forward and switched on the magnetos and battery, the instruments sprang to life. Gill used his handkerchief to wipe the rain from the windshield, and then raised the side of the canopy and thumped it home with the heel of his hand. It was a gesture of farewell. He jumped down. Farebrother looked round to be sure Gill was clear and then hit the fuel booster and starter.
There was a salvo of bangs from the engine, and the four-bladed propeller turned stiffly and halted. To the south sunlight lit the cloud. The rain was lighter now but still coming into the cockpit. He closed the side panel.
Sergeant Gill’s jacket collar was up high round his neck, but his knitted hat and fatigue trousers were dark with rain. He put his fist in the air and swung it round. Farebrother tried again. The big Merlin engine fired, stuttered, almost stopped, and then after some faltering picked up and kept going. At first not all the cylinders were firing, but one after the other they warmed up until all twelve combined to produce the ragged but unmistakable sound of a Merlin engine.
Farebrother checked the magnetos one by one before running the power up. He left it there for a moment. Sergeant Gill gave a thumbs-up and Farebrother throttled back to fifteen hundred revs and looked at his instruments once more. She seemed okay, but the Merlins were notoriously susceptible to water vapour and he let her warm up until she was very smooth.
The rain stopped and a beam of sunlight spiked through the overcast. By now there was someone on the balcony of the control tower and the men painting it had paused in their work to watch the Mustang taxi out to the runway. The engine cowling obscured his view and Farebrother steered a zigzag course along the perimeter track to make sure he didn’t let the wheels go into the muddy patches on each side. At the runway he stopped. The figure on the balcony waved an arm and Farebrother ran the engine against the brakes before letting the plane slip forward and gather speed.
She lifted easily off the ground and he brought the wheels up quickly. The cloud was lower than he’d thought; even before he was turning into a gentle circuit there were tiny streaks of grey cloud rippling across his wings.
A man has to be very young, very stupid, or very angry to do what Farebrother did that December afternoon in 1943. Perhaps he was a little of all three. First he went up to find out how low the overcast was, and then he took her on a circuit to test the controls and look over the local terrain. He treated her gently, just as he had treated the ones at Dallas every time Charlie Stigg had been able to persuade his test pilot brother that two hardworking air force instructors needed the taste of real flying once in a while.
Farebrother decided that, by luck or judgement, the unknown Lieutenant Morse had chosen a fine machine. Mickey Mouse II responded to every touch of the controls and had that extra agility the Mustang has when its main tank is more than half empty.
He pulled back the stick and eased up into the overcast. A few wisps of dirty cotton wool slid over the wings, then suddenly the cockpit was dark. The wet rain cloud swirled off the wing tips in curly vortices but the Merlin gave no cough or hesitation. It drank the wet cloud without complaint. Contented, Farebrother dropped out of the lower side of the stratus in time to see the crossed runways of Steeple Thaxted just ahead of him. He levelled off and slow-rolled to a flipper turn that gave turning force to the elevators. Then he went higher, banked steeply, and came back. This time he dived upon the field to gain speed enough for a loop. As she came up to the top of the loop, belly touching the underside of the stratus, he rolled her out and snaked away, tearing little pieces from the underside of the cloud base.
He had their attention now. Men had come out of the big black hangars, and others stood in groups on the parade ground. There was a crowd outside the mess tents and Farebrother saw their mess kits glint in the dull light as he made a low run across the field. There were people in the village streets too, and some cars had pulled off the road so the drivers could watch. Farebrother wondered whether Colonel Dan and the Exec were among the men standing in the rain outside the Operations Building.
By now he had enough confidence in the plane to move lower. He made another pass—this time so low that he had to ease her up to clear the control tower, and only just made it. The men working there threw themselves onto the wet ground, and on his next run he saw pools of spilled white paint that made big spiders on the black tarmac. He went between the hangars that time, and did a perfect eight-point roll across the field. For a finale he half-rolled to buzz the runway, holding her inverted until the engine screamed for fuel, and then split-essed in for a landing that put her down as soft as a caress.
If Farebrother was expecting a round of applause as he got out of the plane, he was disappointed. Apart from the amiable Sergeant Gill, who helped him unstrap, there was no one in sight. ‘Everything okay, sir?’ said Gill, deadpan.
‘You’d better change the plugs, Sergeant,’ said Farebrother. He noticed that Gill had put on a waterproof coat, but his face and trousers were wet with rain.
‘She’s due for a change. But I figured she’d be okay for a familiarization flight,’ Gill said in his Texan drawl.
‘You were quite right, Sergeant Gill.’
‘You can leave the chute there. I’ll get one of the boys to take it back.’
Gill walked back to the dispersal hut with Farebrother. There was a primitive kitchen there and some coffee was ready in the percolator. Without asking, Gill poured coffee for the pilot.
‘She’s a good ship, and well looked after.’
‘She’s not mine,’ said Gill. ‘I’m crew chief for Kibitzer just across the other side of the hardstand. That one belongs to a crew chief named Kruger.’
‘But he allows Lieutenant Morse to fly it once in a while?’
‘That’s about the way it is,’ said Gill without smiling.
‘Well, I hope Kruger and Lieutenant Morse won’t mind my borrowing their ship.’
‘Lieutenant Morse won’t mind—Mickey Mouse they call him—and he’s mighty rough with airplanes. He says planes are like women, they’ve got to be beaten regularly, he says.’ Gill still didn’t smile.
Farebrother offered his cigarettes, but Gill shook his head. ‘Kruger, he won’t mind too much,’ said Gill. ‘It don’t do an airplane any good to be standing around in this kind of weather unused.’ He took off his hat and looked at it carefully. ‘Colonel Dan now, that’s something else again. Last pilot who flew across the field…I mean a couple of hundred feet clear of the roofs, not your kind of daisy-cutting—Colonel Dan roasted him. He was up before the commanding general—got an official reprimand and was fined three hundred bucks. Then the Colonel sent him back to the US of A.’
‘Thanks for telling me, Sergeant.’
‘If Colonel Dan gets mad, he gets mad real quick, and you’ll find out real quick too.’ He wiped the rain from his face. ‘If you ain’t heard from him by the time you’ve unpacked, you ain’t going to hear.’
Farebrother nodded and drank his coffee.
Sergeant Gill looked Farebrother up and down before deciding to give him his opinion. ‘I don’t reckon you’ll hear a thing, sir. See, we’re real short of pilots right now, and I don’t think Colonel Dan’s gonna be sending any pilot anywhere else. Especially an officer who’s got such a good feel for a ship that needs a change of spark plugs.’ He looked at Farebrother and gave a small grin.
‘I sure hope you’re right, Sergeant Gill,’ said Farebrother. And in fact he was.
3 Staff Sergeant Harold E. Boyer (#ulink_4f3b60f4-a6c4-5efc-b2f1-a98c8facd2ba)
Captain Farebrother’s flying demonstration that day passed into legend. Some said that the men on duty at Steeple Thaxted exaggerated their descriptions of the flight in order to score over those who were on pass, but such attempts to belittle Farebrother’s aerobaties could only be made by those who hadn’t been present. And Farebrother’s critics were confuted by the fact that Staff Sergeant Harry Boyer said it was the greatest display of flying he’d ever seen. ‘Jesus! No plane ever made me hit the dirt before that. Not even out in the Islands before the war when some of the officers were cutting up in front of their girls.’
Harry Boyer was, by common consent, the most experienced airman on the base. He’d strapped into their rickety biplanes nervous young lieutenants who were now wearing stars in the Pentagon. And no matter what aircraft type was mentioned, Harry Boyer had painted it, sewn its fabric, and probably hitched a ride in it.
Harry Boyer not only told of ‘Farebrother’s buzz job’, as it became known, he gave a realistic impression of it that required both hands and considerable sound effects. The end of the show came when Boyer gave his fruity impression of Tex Gill drawling, ‘Everything okay, sir?’ and then, in Farebrother’s prim New England accent, ‘You’d better change the plugs, Sergeant.’
So popular was Boyer’s re-enactment of the flight that when he performed his party piece at the 1969 reunion of the 220th Fighter Group Association, a dozen men crowding round him missed the exotic dancer.
Staff Sergeant Boyer’s reputation as a mimic was, however, nothing compared to his renown as the organizer of crap games. Men came from the Bomb Group at Narrowbridge to gamble on Boyer’s dice, and on several occasions officers turned up from the 91st BG at Bassing-bourn. It was his crap game that got Boyer into trouble with the Exec.
Although Boyer and the Exec had carried on a long, bitter and byzantine struggle, the sergeant’s activities had never been seriously curtailed. But whenever it leaked out that some really big all-night game with four-figure stakes had taken place, Boyer frequently found himself mysteriously assigned to extra duties. So it was that Staff Sergeant Boyer had found himself in charge of the detail painting the control tower that day.
At the end of Farebrother’s hair-raising beat-up, Boyer looked over to the Operations Building, expecting the Exec and Colonel Dan to come rushing out of the building breathing fire. But they did not come. Nothing happened at all except that Tex Gill finally rode over to the tower on his bicycle, laying it on the ground rather than against the newly painted wall of the tower. ‘And how did you like that, Tex?’ asked Boyer. ‘On those slow rolls he was touching the grass with one wing tip while the other was in the overcast. Did you see it?’
‘He’s clipped the radio wires off the top of the tower,’ said Tex Gill.
Determined not to rise to one of Tex Gill’s gags, Boyer pretended not to have heard properly. ‘He’s what?’
‘He clipped the radio wires on that low pass.’ Tex Gill was a deadpan poker player who’d frequently taken money from the otherwise indomitable Boyer, so, still suspecting a joke, the staff sergeant would not look up at the antenna.
Tex Gill held out his fist and opened his hand to reveal a ceramic insulator and a short piece of wire attached to it. ‘Just got it off his tail.’
‘Does Colonel Dan know?’
‘Even the guy who just flew those fancy doodads don’t know. I figured that you and me could rig a new antenna right now, while your boys are finishing up the paint job.’
‘That’s strictly against regs, Tex. There’d have to be paperwork and so on.’
‘That captain just arrived,’ said Tex Gill. ‘I was with him on the truck from London last night. We don’t want to get him in bad with the Colonel even before he’s unpacked.’
Staff Sergeant Boyer rubbed his chin. Tex Gill could be a devious devil. Maybe he figured there was a good chance that the new pilot would take Kibitzer, in which case Tex would be his crew chief. ‘Well, I’m not sure, Tex.’
‘If someone reports that broken antenna, the Exec is going to come over here, Harry. And he’ll see your paintwork is only finished on the side that faces his office, and he’ll see that some clumsy lummox has spilled two four-gallon cans of white on the apron…’
Boyer looked at the flecks of spilled paint on his boots and at the insulator that Tex Gill was holding. ‘You got any white paint over there at your dispersal?’
‘I’d be able to fix you up, Harry.’ Tex Gill threw the insulator to Boyer, who caught it and winked his agreement. By the end of work that day the tower was painted and the antenna was back in position. Captain Farebrother never found out about it and neither did the Exec or Colonel Dan.
4 Lieutenant Z. M. Morse (#ulink_8fba0a0d-7297-5f18-94d1-9431007eb8a2)
Lieutenant Morse returned from four days in London with a thick head and a thin wallet. He desperately wanted to sleep, but he had to endure two young pilots sitting on his bed, drinking coffee and eating his candy ration and telling him all about the fantastic new flyer who’d been assigned to the squadron. ‘What the fuck do I care what he can do with a P-51?’ asked Morse. ‘I was happy enough with my P-47, and if I’d been Colonel Dan I wouldn’t have been so damned keen to re-equip us with these babies. Jesus! They stall without warning, and now they tell us the guns jam if you fire them in a tight turn.’ Morse was sprawled on his bed, his shirt rumpled and tie loose. He grabbed his pillow and punched it hard before shoving it behind his head. A large black mongrel dog asleep in the wicker armchair opened its eyes and yawned.
Morse, who’d grown so used to being called Mickey Mouse, or MM, that he’d painted the cartoon on his plane, was a small untidy twenty-four-year-old from Arizona. His dark complexion made him seem permanently suntanned even in an English winter, and his longish shiny hair, long sideburns and thin, carefully trimmed moustache caused him to be mistaken sometimes for a South American. MM was always delighted to act the role and would occasionally try his own unsteady version of the rumba on a Saturday night, given a few extra drinks and a suitable partner.
‘They say it was terrific,’ said Rube Wein, MM’s wingman. ‘They say it was the greatest show they ever saw.’
‘In your ship,’ added Earl Koenige, who usually flew as MM’s number three. ‘I sure would have liked to see it.’
‘How old are you jerks?’ said MM. ‘Come on, level with me. Did you ever get out of high school?’
‘I’m ninety-one going on ninety-two,’ said Rube Wein, Princeton University graduate in mathematics. There was only a few months’ difference in age between the three of them, but it was a well-established vanity of MM’s that he looked more mature than the others. This concern had led him to grow his moustache—which still had a long way to go before looking properly bushy.
‘I see you guys sitting there, Hershey bars stuck in your mouths, and I can’t help thinking maybe you should be riding kiddie cars, not flying fighter planes to a place where angry grown-up Krauts are trying to put lead into your tails.’
‘So who gave the new kid the keys to your car, Pop?’ said Rube Wein. This broody scholar knew how to kid MM and was prepared to taunt him in a way that Earl Koenige wouldn’t dare to.
‘Right!’ said MM angrily. ‘Why didn’t he take Cinderella or Bebop? Or better, Kibitzer, which is always making trouble. Why does he have to go popping rivets in my ship? That son-of-a-bitch Kruger is paid to look after that machine. He should never have let this new guy fly her.’
‘Why didn’t he use Tucker’s plane?’ said Rube Wein, who strongly disliked his Squadron Commander. ‘Why didn’t he take that fancy painted-up Jouster and maybe wreck it?’
‘Colonel Dan’s orders,’ explained Earl Koenige, a straw-haired farmer’s son who’d studied agriculture at Fort Valley, Georgia. ‘Colonel Dan told this guy to go out and fly a familiarization hop. Of course it’s only scuttlebutt, but they say Farebrother asked was it okay to fly it inverted.’ Meeting the blank-eyed disbelieving stares of the others, he added, ‘Maybe it’s not true but that’s what they say. The Group Exec is furious—he wanted Farebrother court-martialled.’
‘There should be a regulation about taking other people’s airplanes,’ said MM. ‘And inverted flying is strictly for screwballs.’
Earl Koenige tossed back his fair hair and said, ‘Colonel Dan said the new pilot hadn’t been in the base long enough to make himself familiar with local regulations and conditions. And the Colonel said that the especially bad weather that day created a situation in which low flying in the vicinity of the base was a necessary measure for any pilot new to the field about to attempt a landing in poor visibility.’ Earl laughed. ‘Or put it another way, Colonel Dan needs every pilot he can get his hands on.’ Having related this story, Koenige looked at MM. He always looked at his Flight Commander for approval of everything he did.
MM nodded his blessing and put another stick of gum into his mouth. It was his habit of chewing gum and smoking at the same time that made him so easy to impersonate, for he’d roll the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other with a swing of the jaw. Anyone who wanted an easy laugh at the bar had only to do the same thing while flicking an imaginary comb back through his hair to create a recognizable caricature of MM. ‘Sure! Great!’ MM shouted, clapping his hands as if summoning hens out of the grain store. ‘And beautifully told. Now cut and print. Get out of here, will you! I’m not feeling so hot.’
Rube Wein leaned over MM where he was sprawled out on the bed and said, ‘It’s chow time, MM. How would you like me to bring you back some of those greasy sausages and those real soggy french fries that only the Limeys can make?’
‘Scram!’ shouted MM, but the effort made his head ache.
‘Rumour is that this new guy is going to get Kibitzer, and that means he’ll be flying as your number four, MM,’ said Rube Wein.
MM threw a shoe at him, but he was out of the door.
Winston, MM’s dog, looked up to see if the thrown shoe was intended for him to bring back, decided it wasn’t, growled unconvincingly, and closed his eyes again.
Not long afterwards there was a polite tap at the door, and without waiting for a response, a tall thin captain put his head into the room. ‘Lieutenant Morse?’
‘Come in, don’t just stand in the draught,’ said Morse, stubbing out his cigarette in the lid of a hair-cream bottle.
‘My name’s Farebrother, Lieutenant. I’m assigned to your flight.’
‘Kick Winston off that chair and sit down.’ MM’s first impression of the newcomer was of a shy stooped figure in an expensive non-regulation leather jacket, wearing a gold Rolex watch and with a fountain pen that was leaking through the breast pocket of his shirt to make a small blue mark over his heart. His captain’s bars had been worn long enough to become tarnished. It was a nice conceit and MM noted it with admiration.
‘I’m going to be flying Kibitzer, I understand.’
MM recognized the slight eastern accent.
‘So you’re the bastard who popped rivets in my ship.’
‘You’ve got a beautiful bird there, Lieutenant. She ticks like a Swiss watch,’ said Jamie diplomatically. MM purred like a cat with a saucer of cream. ‘But I didn’t pull enough G to pop any rivets.’
‘Where are you from, Captain?’ said MM. ‘New York? Boston? Philly?’ These rich eastern kids were all alike; they treated the rest of the nation as if they were just off a farm in Indiana.
‘I live in California, Lieutenant. But I went to school in the East.’
‘You want a drink, Captain? I’ve got scotch.’
Farebrother held up a thin hand to indicate that he wouldn’t. MM settled back in the pillows and looked at him—a poor little rich boy. Junior figured that singleseat fighters might be a way he could fight the war without rubbing shoulders with the riffraff.
Farebrother said, ‘Are we going to fight the entire war with me calling you Lieutenant and you calling me Captain?’
MM turned and held out a hand that Farebrother shook. ‘Call me Mickey Mouse like everyone else does.’
‘My friends call me Jamie.’
‘Take the weight off your legs, Jamie, and throw me a pack of butts from that carton on my footlocker.’ Morse opened a book of matches to make sure it wasn’t empty. ‘Are you fixed up with a room?’
‘I’m sleeping downstairs—sharing with Lieutenant Hart.’
‘Then you’re on your own. Hart got some kind of ulcer. He won’t be back. If you take my advice you’ll leave his name on the door and try to keep the room all to yourself, like I have this one. No sense in sharing if you can avoid it.’
‘Why are we living in these little houses?’
‘The RAF built them to house officers and their families. That narrow storeroom downstairs, where they fix sandwiches and fry stuff, used to be the family kitchen.’ Farebrother looked round the smoke-filled room. Lieutenant Morse had left no space for anyone else to move in with him. The second bed had been upended and a motorcycle engine occupied its floor space. Parts of the engine were strewn round the room; some were wrapped up in stained cloths and some were in a shallow pan of oil on the floor. In the corner there were Coca-Cola bottles piled up high on a milk crate and on the walls were pinup photos from Yank and a coloured movie poster advertising Dawn Patrol. Above the bed MM had hung a belt with a holstered Colt automatic clipped to it, and above that there was a beautiful grey Stetson.
‘And that old civilian sweeping the hall?’ said Farebrother.
‘We have British civilian servants, batmen they call them. They’ll fix up your laundry and bring you tea in the morning—well, you can make a face, but it’s better than British coffee, believe me. If you want coffee, fix it yourself.’
‘I hear you’re the ranking ace here.’
MM lit his cigarette carefully and then extinguished the match by waving it in the air. ‘You don’t have to be any Baron von Richthofen to be best around here. Most of these kids should still be in Primary Flight School learning how to do gentle turns in a biplane.’
‘Does that go for the pilots in your flight too?’
MM inhaled on his cigarette, closing his eyes as if in deep thought. ‘Rube Wein is my wingman—sad-eyed kid with jug ears, rooms downstairs. He’s no better, no worse than most as a flyer. He’s a brainy little bastard whose idea of a good time is to sit through an evening of Shakespeare, but he’s got eyes like an Indian scout and reaction times as good as any I’ve seen. And don’t let all that book learning fool you, he’s a tough little shit. When he’s on my wing I feel good.’ MM fiddled with his cigarette and tapped some ash into the tin lid. ‘You’ll probably fly wing for Earl Koenige—better pilot than Rube, he’s got that natural feeling for it, but he’s a shy kid and he just won’t get in close enough to get kills. Earl likes airplanes, that’s his trouble. He’s always frightened of bending something or damaging his engine by using full power. He flies these goddamn Mustangs like he was paying the maintenance out of his own pocket.’
Winston sighed and slid gracelessly off the wicker chair, which creaked loudly. Farebrother, who had been standing, sat down on the dog’s cushion and put his feet up on a hard chair. It gave MM a chance to admire Farebrother’s hand-tooled high boots.
‘When do you think we’ll go again?’ Farebrother asked.
‘After that Gelsenkirchen foul-up I thought we’d never go again. I had a hunch we’d all be transferred to the infantry.’
‘What happened?’
MM shook his head sadly. ‘Track in to Colonel Dan leading us to the rendezvous with the Bomb Groups at Emmerich, near the Dutch frontier. We’re tasked to give them close support all the way to the target, and then back as far as Holland again. We’re all tucked in nice and tight behind Colonel Dan. It was like an air show except that the stratus is under us and no one could see anything.’
‘Not even the bombers?’
‘What bombers?’ MM waved an arm to indicate that he could see nothing. ‘I never saw any bombers.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I’ll tell you what happened—nothing happened, that’s what happened. The bombers never found the target. The little magic black boxes that are supposed to see through cloud went on the blink, and the B-17s went miles north of our route. Cut to Colonel Dan, who’s taking us round and round Gelsenkirchen—at least he insists it’s Gelsenkirchen—but all we see is cloud. Then we fly back to England in a nice tight formation, do some low passes over the field to show what split-ass aces we are, and there’s plenty of time for drinks before dinner. Jesus, what a fuck-up!’
‘The mission didn’t bomb?’
‘Oh, they bombed. They bombed, “targets of opportunity”, which is a cute name the Air Force dreamed up for shutting your eyes, toggling the bombload, gaining height, and getting the hell out.’
‘I heard the Bomb Groups were having a tough time,’ said Farebrother. ‘I saw replacements by the truckload heading for the bombers.’
‘Slow dissolve to the Bremen mission one week later,’ said MM. ‘Seems like the target-selection guys at High Wycombe have some kind of private feud with the inhabitants of Bremen.’
Farebrother nodded politely. ‘It’s accessible; it’s near the ocean,’ he said. He reached into his shirt pocket for a packet of Camels and flicked a cigarette up with his fingernail. MM watched him light it. His hands were as steady as a rock. These rich kids are all the same—maybe it’s the school they go to on the east coast. Keep it cool, never laugh, never fart, never shout, never cry. MM admired it. ‘So what happened?’ said Farebrother.
MM realized he’d been daydreaming. He was tired and hung over—he should have told Farebrother to go away and leave him alone, but he didn’t. He told him about Bremen. He told him about the one that got torn in half.
‘We found the rearmost task force miles behind their briefed timings,’ MM said, and stopped. He’d never told the others about that midair collision, not even Rube, his closest buddy. So why tell this guy? Maybe because it was easier to tell a stranger. ‘Thank God we weren’t escorting those B-24s. They call them banana boats; they say they were flying boats that leaked so bad they put wheels on them and christened them bombers.’
Farebrother smiled, but he’d heard the joke before. He could tell that MM was stalling.
‘Those ships need a lot of babying. By the time they were above the cloud cover they were skidding all over the sky. The pilots couldn’t hold formation.’
‘It’s that Davis wing,’ said Farebrother. ‘It wasn’t designed for high loading at that altitude.’
‘Sure, something like that,’ said MM. ‘It was a bad start, flying past those banana boats, and they’ve taken so many casualties over the weeks that by now the pilots are mostly replacements who’ve never flown a tough one before.’ He flicked ash into the lid that was still resting on his chest. ‘You say Bremen’s easy because it’s on the coast, what you don’t know is that the Kraut radar chain goes right along that coast. Anything coming in over the sea comes up clear on their screens. So the fighters were waiting—hundreds of them. Did we have the shit beat out of us!’ MM found that his hands were sweating and he knew his face was flushed. ‘I drank too much last night,’ he explained.
‘You engaged the enemy fighters?’
‘Hey, Jamie! Where’d you pick up that kind of talk? You training to be a general or a reporter or something? Sure, we engaged the enemy—we engaged him good and proper. Another engagement like that and our parents are going to insist we get married.’ He puffed his cigarette vigorously in silence for a moment. ‘Colonel Dan is leading Red—Red is always nominated as the troubleshooters, so Colonel Dan likes to take Red—and I’m leading the second element. We’ve passed the B-24s and found our Forts and we’re keeping real close to them just like it says in the book. But while we’re watching that we don’t get so close the trigger-happy gunners shoot us down, the Messerschmitt 110s come up on the horizon and suddenly they’re loosing off rockets.’
‘No one goes after them?’
‘By the time anyone guessed they were going to fire long-range rockets it was too late, the Krauts were away and heading for their beer ration. Then the Messerschmitt 109s come roaring through the formation—and all this time we’re still over the sea, we’re nowhere near the target—they dive down through the bombers and lift their noses for a second go at their undersides. Colonel Dan goes for them and a few of us get some shots in before they’re diving away. It’s while we’re wrestling with these babies that the withdrawal support group arrives. They’re the Thunderbolts, and those guys think anything with square wings is a Messerschmitt. So who should be surprised when the T-bolts come out of the sun and clobber two of our boys in the first pass? We lost two good pilots that day and we didn’t get one confirmed kill. Then just as we’re getting ready to form up and go home I see some lunatic Kraut come sneaking back toward the bombers. I did a wing-over and chased him, but he was going fast, really fast. I got a couple of squirts at him, but he just flies straight on, no evasive action. For a minute I think maybe the pilot is dead or out of action, then I realize what this crazy bastard is going to do. He’s picked himself one of the Forts in the low box and he just drives straight into its side.’
Farebrother said nothing.
MM dashed his hands together and held them locked. ‘I was right behind him. I saw everything. He ripped the whole side out of that bomber. I could see the guys flying her. I could see the seats and the equipment, the wiring and the bright aluminium interior. I was so close that I could have touched those guys. I saw their faces as the whole thing broke up. Shit! It wasn’t a million laughs.’ MM stubbed his cigarette hard into the tin lid and forced a smile. ‘Pour yourself a drink if you want one. Loosen up.’
‘I’m loose enough already,’ said Farebrother. The chair creaked as he shifted uncomfortably. ‘Do you know what the flying schedule is likely to be over Christmas?’
‘Hell, Jamie, you ain’t been here five minutes. Are you looking for a pass already?’
‘I have a close friend stationed near Norwich. We said we’d try to get together over Christmas.’
‘You’re not thinking of visiting a Bomb Group, are you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, sure. You’ll have a good time. The bomber guys love us, Little Friends they call us on the radio, right? They’ll buy you beers and sing songs around the piano. And headquarters encourages all that bullshit.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Sure, it’s swell. Me and Rube and Earl used to go across to Narrowbridge. B-17s, easy to recognize them, red diamond on the tail plane, white letter A inside it. I met this guy who knew my brother. His family had a restaurant near Phoenix, and I’m from Arizona myself. It was great talking to him about places and people we knew. He’s got his navigator there and we’re talking about home and showing each other photos of girls and mothers and kids, all that family shit, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Farebrother. He could see the rest of it in MM’s eyes. ‘And he was in the ship…’
‘I could see him. The side of that ship opened like a sardine can. He was sitting at the controls, but there was only half of him left, Farebrother.’ MM was flicking at his stubbed-out cigarette just to keep from discovering if his hands were trembling ‘Slow dissolve. No partying at Narrowbridge, right?’
‘It would upset anyone, MM.’
‘Sure it would, I don’t need you to tell me that. Screw the bomber Joes. I didn’t tell them to join the lousy Air Force. It’s not my fault that Colonel Dan wants us to keep tight cover. I can’t help it if Göring tells his fighter jocks to go after the heavies and avoid us…’
‘Is that the time?’ said Farebrother. ‘I’d better get out of here and let you get some sleep.’ He got to his feet and the wicker armchair creaked. Winston looked out from under the bed.
‘You go to hell, Captain goddamn Farebrother! You don’t have to look down your thin white nose at me. You’re heading there, too, Captain, and that eastern schooling won’t mean a thing when the Krauts are putting lead into your ass.’
Farebrother nodded politely and went out, closing the door quietly. Farebrother knew how to be rude in a really high-class way.
‘And keep your lily-white hands off my goddamned ship!’ MM yelled at the closed door.
5 Captain Charles B. Stigg (#ulink_3f5bfa9d-dd78-5df5-a57f-e13112438eb4)
Officers’ Club
280th Bombardment Sq. (H)
Cowdrey Green
Norfolk, England
Dear Jamie,
You get your five bucks! I’ve never been happier in my life. These guys are friendly and the Group Commander (‘Call me Porky the way the rest of them do’) plays the trumpet in the dance band. He also slams his B-24 down onto the runway with the kind of bang that reminds me of Cadet Jenkins, but it’s just his style, I guess.
This Group has taken a beating, and there are plenty of hair-raising stories told when the beer flows. But they’re good boys—I feel so old! We’ve got kids here who only shave once a week, but good guys. No backbiting and none of that gossip that the staff of you-know-where enjoyed so much. And I got a great crew—instead of duds from the replacement pool I took over a ready-crewed ship when they lost their pilot. He got VD (in Norwich, the Flight Surgeon says, and we got a tub-thumping lecture complete with colour slides that made two or three of the guys go outside for air!).
Good ship too. Nearly new and the crew all like her, which is a plus. Top Banana she’s called, so look out for us over Hunland.
It looked like we were going today, but while we were all trundling round the perimeter track it was scrubbed. Can’t think why it took them so long to decide. I could hardly see the red flare from where the Banana was sitting—five hundred yards away. What an anticlimax! And two ships damaged when wing tips touched on the taxiway. Porky put up a notice saying, ‘Goosing big birds on the apron is a privilege restricted to officers of field grade.’ Of course all the guys love him.
Tomorrow I take my crew for ditching practice in the unheated water of the municipal swimming pool. In December? War is hell. So today I’ve spent the unexpected leisure improving my bridge game at a cost of four and a half pounds and putting a little scotch into my bloodstream as protection against tomorrow’s swim. And writing drunken letters (like this) home. I sure wish you were with us, Jamie, it would make everything perfect. What’s happening at Christmas? Looks like I won’t be OD or get any duties. How are you fixed?
Your pal,
Charlie
6 Captain James A. Farebrother (#ulink_471c9f27-6fe4-5416-97d3-882c28be29e4)
Jamie Farebrother read Charlie’s letter for the fifth time. Then he folded it, together with the five-dollar bill that was inside the envelope, and placed it in his billfold like an amulet that would protect him, not from evil, but from misery.
What could he write in reply? How could he describe this tent city in the monsoon season, and the red-nosed, rheumy-eyed bums clad in ragged oddments of GI uniforms? What was there to say about the overworked comedian who was in command, or the unfriendly Exec, or MM, the Flight Commander, who seemed to be twitching himself into a nervous breakdown? Perhaps it would all come right when the sun came out, and these mud-spattered planes began operations, but it wasn’t easy to visualize.
Flying the well-worn Mustang Kibitzer provided Jamie’s only happy moments and there weren’t many of them. The weather did not improve. The big black hangar doors were shut and clanking mournfully in the wind. Flyers sat for hours in the Club, and got in each other’s hair, bickering like children kept in after school. There were only a few brief breaks in the monotonous grey days. Apart from some local flights MM had arranged to make sure that his new flyer was able to take off in pairs, keep formation, and get down in one piece, there had been only one scheduled flight in seven days. The group went in formation across country to Yorkshire but encountered unpredicted thunderstorms that couldn’t be penetrated. The Mustangs came back to the base from all points of the compass. There were no casualties, but two pilots landed at other airfields.
Kibitzer had engine trouble on the return. Farebrother nursed her home carefully, and MM, Rube and Earl stayed with him, but when Tex Gill ran her up that night she purred sweetly for him.
‘She’s a whore!’ Tex said of Kibitzer. ‘A heart of gold, but you can’t depend on the old bitch.’
Colonel Dan was not pleased with the group’s crosscountry flight. He assembled the pilots in the briefing room that afternoon and chewed them out for nearly an hour. The Exec sat on the rostrum with his arms folded and head up, his eyes focused on some far corner of the ceiling. It was a pose meant to be both heroic and contemplative.
Colonel Dan was never still; he went striding up and down, hugging himself and flailing his arms, shouting, whispering, threatening and promising, and stabbing his finger angrily at his resentful audience.
MM sat behind Farebrother at the back of the room, with Rube and Earl on either side of him. ‘More training,’ said MM in disgust. ‘I can smell it coming.’
‘That’s only Yorkshire,’ said Rube. ‘With long-range tanks we’ll be trying to find our way back from Austria. Imagine the chaos!’
‘We’ve got to get Farebrother a new ship,’ said MM. He put a flying boot against the back of Jamie’s seat and nudged it hard to make sure he was listening. ‘One jalopy like that in the flight could get us all written out of the script.’
There was a Betty Grable movie being shown on the base that evening and the house was packed. There wasn’t much drinking at the Officers’ Club bar. Highly coloured accounts of the chewing out Colonel Dan had given his pilots soon reached the senior NCOs, and in the Rocker Club the sergeants argued bitterly about the merits of their charges. There was a fistfight outside the Aero Club and a jeep was stolen. The Exec sighed; these were all signs of lowering morale. Colonel Dan agreed.
‘I came over here to fight a war,’ sang a pilot named ‘Boogie’ Bozzelli, playing the piano at the club that evening. He improvised a tune to carry his words. ‘All I’ve done since getting here is duck the weather. Can I have a rain check, Colonel, and come back next summer?’ Colonel Dan was not amused. He picked up his drink and moved away from the piano.
The feelings of frustration were not relieved when, in the small hours of the next morning, the sound of aircraft engines—synchronized Merlins—circled the base ceaselessly until the Duty Officer switched on the runway lights. The noise woke everyone up. Farebrother opened the blackout shutters of his bedroom and saw Rube and MM fully dressed outside. The eastern sky was streaked with the pink light of dawn. The night air blew in like a gale. Farebrother closed the window and went back to sleep.
Next morning there was an RAF Lancaster parked on the apron. It was a big matt-black four-engine bomber. A noisy crowd of GIs were gawking at it and taking photos. Its crew—seven sergeants—were treated like visitors from Mars. Thaxted’s only aircrew mess being in the Officers’ Club, the RAF men were eating breakfast there when Farebrother arrived. MM waved to him and he took a seat at MM’s table, chosen to provide a close look at the British flyers.
Perhaps the sergeants were uncomfortable at being cast adrift on an ocean of officers, for they were shy and uncommunicative. They’d been to Berlin that night and lost a section of tail plane and a chunk of wing over the target. The pilot was a grey-faced boy of about twenty, and the rest of them looked like undernourished schoolboys. These flyers who fought by night were pallid and withdrawn by comparison with the noisy suntanned extroverts which US Army selection boards seemed to prefer as crews.
Mickey Mouse never stopped fidgeting with the salt and pepper and tapping his fork against the tablecloth. ‘Look at those guys,’ he said, indicating the bomber crew with his fork. ‘The British have been fighting too long. They’re tired and low.’
‘Maybe you’d be tired and low after a night over Big B without fighter escort and half your tail missing,’ said Farebrother.
MM gave him a sly grin. ‘We’ll be finding out soon,’ he said. ‘With these new external gas tanks we’ll be able to fly our ships to Cairo if the brass dream up a reason for it.’ He used the tip of his tongue to search out a piece of ham stuck between his teeth. ‘Paper gas tanks. Sounds like they’re carrying the metal-saving campaign too far, right?’
‘Will they come off the shackles when I jettison?’ said Farebrother.
‘You’ve got something there, pal.’ MM turned in his seat for a better view of the RAF men. ‘One of the topkicks asked the Limeys to stick around. There’s some kind of celebration in the Rocker Club tonight.’
‘And?’
‘They want to grab some gas and get back to their squadron. Look at those kids, will you? Are we going to look like that by the time we are home again?’
‘Did you hear the radio this morning? The RAF lost thirty heavy bombers over Germany last night. Thirty crews! Sure they want to get back, to see if their buddies made it.’
Lieutenant Morse got to his feet and said, ‘I’m going into Cambridge on my motorcycle, want to come?’ Morse’s black mongrel, Winston, crawled out from under the table and shook itself.
‘I’ve got some letters to write.’
‘So can you lend me five pounds?’ MM drained his coffee cup while standing up. Farebrother passed him the money and MM nodded his thanks. ‘So they went to Berlin last night,’ he said enviously. ‘You get headlines going to Berlin. No one wants to know about the flak at Hannover or the fighter defences at Kassel. But go to Berlin and you’re a headline.’
‘And you want to be a headline?’
‘You bet your ass I do. A kid at school with me was on a sub that sank a Jap ship. The town gave him a parade. A parade! He was a hashslinger on a pigboat. He never even finished high school.’
The Officers’ Club bar was a gloomy place, most of the blackout shutters permanently fixed over the windows. Farebrother found a corner of the lounge, and despite the noise of the men fixing up the Christmas tree in the hallway, he began writing a letter to his mother.
‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’ It was one of the British waiters, a completely bald, wizened man, bent like a stick and flushed with that shiny red skin that makes even the most dyspeptic of men look jolly.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Farebrother.
‘You won’t be flying today, sir,’ he coaxed. ‘The rain is turning to sleet.’ Farebrother looked up to see wet snow sliding down the window glass fast enough to obscure the view across the balding lawns to the tennis courts. Over the loudspeakers came a big-band version of ‘Jingle Bells’ on a damaged record that clicked.
‘It’s too early for booze, Curly. The captain wants a cup of coffee.’ It was Captain Madigan—Farebrother recognized him from the night journey on the truck from London. ‘None of that powdered crap, real coffee, and a slice of that fruitcake you sons of bitches all keep for yourselves back there.’
The bald waiter smiled. ‘Anything for you, Captain Madigan. Two real coffees and two slices of special fruitcake, coming right up.’
Madigan didn’t sit down immediately. He threw his cap onto the window ledge and went across to warm himself at the open fire. When he turned round he kept his hands behind him in a stance he’d learned from the British. ‘My God, but this must be the most uncomfortable place in the world.’
‘Have you tried the Aleutians or the South Pacific?’
‘Don’t deny a man his right to grouse, Farebrother, or I’ll start thinking you’re some kind of Pollyanna.’ He bent over to remove the cycle clips from his wet trousers. ‘I suppose you’re sleeping in a steam-heated room here in the club?’
‘I’m in one of the houses across the road.’
‘Well, buddy, I’m in one of the tents that blew down last night. There’s clothing and stuff scattered over three fields. The mud’s ankle deep in places.’
‘There’s a spare bed in my room.’
‘Whose?’
‘Lieutenant Hart.’
‘The one who was shot down over Holland?’
‘Lieutenant Morse told me Hart had an ulcer.’
Madigan looked at him for a moment before replying. ‘Then let’s keep it an ulcer.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Lieutenant Morse isn’t really a fighter pilot,’ said Madigan. ‘He’s a movie star, playing the role of fighter pilot in this billion-dollar movie Eisenhower is producing.’
‘You mean he doesn’t like talking about casualties?’
Before Madigan could reply the loudspeaker was putting out a call for the Duty Officer.
Farebrother said, ‘It’s room 3 in house number 11. Dump your things in there and wait till you’re kicked out. That’s what I would do.’
Madigan slapped Farebrother on the shoulder. ‘Farebrother, you are not only the greatest pilot since Daedalus, you’re a prince!’ Madigan repeated this to the waiter when he arrived with the coffee and cake. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Captain Madigan,’ said the waiter. ‘And thanks for the toy planes.’
‘Aircraft-recognition models,’ Madigan explained when the old man had gone. ‘What do I need them for in the PR office. He’s giving a party for the village children next week.’
‘You’re a regular Robin Hood,’ said Farebrother. He gave up the attempt to write to his mother and began to drink his coffee.
Madigan remained standing, searching his pockets anxiously as if he was looking for something to give Farebrother. ‘Look,’ he said as he relinquished the search. ‘I can’t find my notebook right now, but you haven’t made any plans for Christmas, have you?’
‘I figured we might be flying.’
‘Even the sparrows will be walking, Farebrother. Look at that stuff out there. You don’t need to have majored in science to know that the Eighth Air Force birdmen are going to be having a drunken Christmas.’
‘And what about the public relations officers? What kind of Christmas are they going to be having?’
‘London is a dump,’ said Madigan, sitting down on the sofa and giving Farebrother enough time to consider this judgement. ‘And over Christmas, London will be packed with big spenders. Not much tail there for a captain without flying pay.’ Self-consciously he touched the top of his large bony head. There wasn’t much hair left there and he pushed it about to make the most of it. ‘I’ve got the use of a beautiful house in Cambridge over the holidays. See, Farebrother, I was determined to get out of this hellhole.’ He smiled. It was an engaging smile that revealed large perfect white teeth and emphasized his square jaw. ‘You stick with me, pal. I’ll fix us up with the most beautiful girls in England.’
‘What about your engagement?’ said Farebrother, more to be provocative than because he wanted to know.
‘The other night…what I said on the truck, you mean?’ He leaned forward and smiled at his mud-caked shoes. ‘Hell, that was never really serious. And like I say, London is too far to go for it.’ He drank some coffee and patted his lips dry with a paper towel—a delicate gesture inappropriate to a two-hundred-pound man built like a prizefighter. ‘I fall in love with these broads, I’m sentimental, that’s always been my trouble.’
‘I’m glad you told me,’ said Farebrother. ‘I would never have figured that out.’
Madigan grinned and drank more coffee. ‘Two of the most beautiful broads you ever saw…’ He paused before adding, ‘And fuck it, Farebrother, you can pick the one you want.’ He looked up as if expecting Farebrother to be overcome by this selfless offer. ‘One thing I’ll say, buddy, you’ll never be sorry you fixed me up with a decent place to sleep.’
Farebrother nodded, although he was already having doubts.
It took Captain Vincent Madigan the rest of the day to move into 3/11. He had water-soaked possessions stored all over the base as well as an electric record player and a small collection of opera recordings that he brought from his office. The musical equipment was placed on the floor to make room for a chest of drawers Madigan had obtained in exchange for cigarettes. The top of the chest was reserved for Madigan’s photographs. Apart from a picture of his mother, they were all of young women, framed in wood, leather, and even silver, and all inscribed with affirmations of unquenchable passion.
Farebrother re-examined Vince Madigan. He was a burly, amiable-looking man with thin hair, His nose was blunt and wide like his mouth. Although seldom seen wearing them, he needed spectacles to read the print on his record labels. Was this really the man who had won declarations of love from such beautiful young women? And yet who could doubt it, for Vince Madigan did not treat the photos like trophies. He never boasted of his exploits. On the contrary, it was his style to tell the world how badly the opposite sex treated his altruistic offers of love. By Vince’s account, he had always been unlucky in love.
‘I’m just not any good with women,’ he told Farebrother that evening while turning over a record, and totally disregarding the pounding noises coming from the unmusical occupants of the next room. ‘I tell them not to get serious…’ He shrugged at the perversity of human nature. ‘But they always get serious. Why not just be friendly, I say, but they want to get married. So I say okay, I want to get married, and wham—they change their mind and just want to be friends.’ He used a cloth to clean the record. ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never understand women. Sometimes I think these goddamned homos have got something, buddy.’
‘Is that right,’ said Farebrother, who hadn’t been listening. He’d been reading and rereading the same passage of the P-51 handling notes. Under it there was tucked a thick wad of regulations, technical amendments, orders and local restrictions. Reading it all through and committing it to memory would be a daunting task. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be through learning all this stuff by Christmas, Vince.’
‘You’re too darn conscientious, buddy. Who else in this Group, except maybe Colonel Dan, has waded through all that junk?’
‘I’m a new boy, Vince. They’ll be expecting me to screw it up.’ He riffled through the pages. ‘And to think I quit law school to get away from this kind of reading!’
‘Man can’t escape his fate, Farebrother.’
‘How’s that?’ said Farebrother, puzzled by the tone of Madigan’s voice.
‘Man can’t escape his fate,’ said Madigan. He was smiling, but in his eyes there was a look that told Farebrother that this was the kind of joke that isn’t a joke. ‘Isn’t that what Mozart is saying in Don Giovanni? Every one of us is trying to be some other kind of person—your pal Morse, for instance—in fact, half the guys who joined the Army just wanted to escape from themselves.’
‘What have you got against MM?’
‘Aw, he’s just a pain in the ass, Jamie.’ He put the record on the turntable but didn’t start the music. ‘Each new officer who checks in, I give him a questionnaire so I get parents’ names and addresses and details of any relatives who work in newspapers or radio. It also has spaces marked “Education”, “Hobbies” and “Civilian occupation”. You know, you filled one out. It’s only so I can use it for publicity. Morse fills his out to say he’s got a degree in engineering from Arizona State. You’ve only got to talk to the guy to know he never finished college…’
‘He knows a lot about engines.’
‘Sure. His folks have a filling station.’
‘Okay, but…’
‘I don’t give a damn about where he went to college. I’m no kind of snob, Farebrother. A girl helped to pay my way through college…a woman she was, really, married and all. Ten years older than me. We ran away to New York and lived in a tenement on Tenth Street on her alimony while I got my degree in English at NYU.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I paid her the money back eventually, but I guess she thought we were going to get married and live happily ever after.’
‘So you suspect MM didn’t finish college, so what?’
‘So why the hell can’t he say so? And if he tells lies about that, why does he get mad when the Intelligence Officers question his claims?’
‘Now wait a minute, Vince. The board decides claims on the basis of the film he brings back.’
Madigan put up both hands in a placatory gesture and changed the nature of his complaints. ‘I take a cockpit photo of every new pilot, right? I send a glossy to his hometown paper and a release to anyone who might be remotely interested. I did that with you last week—my sergeant already sent a pile of junk off. In a few weeks’ time one of your friends or neighbours, or your folks, will send you some cuttings. You’ll show them around, and before you’ve got them back in the envelope MM will be in my office asking why you’re getting the publicity and he isn’t. Can’t you see how that pisses me off?’
‘Take it easy, Vince.’
Madigan gave the record a flick of his cloth and checked the needle for dust. ‘Morse is a Mozartian character,’ he said while bending down to look along the surface of the record. ‘Running away from himself, searching for something he can’t even describe.’
‘Let’s hear more of The Abduction, Vince.’
For the first time Madigan heard a note of annoyance in his roommate’s voice. He should have known better than to talk about Morse; these pilots always stuck together against the rest of the officers. He smiled and read the label again. ‘Listen to the way Constanze’s recitative builds up to the word Traurigkeit and Mozart goes into a minor key to change the mood. To me, this is one of the most moving arias in opera. It’s wonderful!’
‘How did you learn so much about opera, Vince?’
Madigan folded his arms and looked up at the ceiling as he thought about it. ‘My first newspaper job after leaving college, they sent me to interview this girl who’d won a scholarship to Juilliard. She was a wonderful girl, Jamie.’ Madigan turned on the music and sat down to listen, eyes closed.
Farebrother went back to reading his papers and for almost another hour Madigan played his records, sorted through his newly assembled possessions, and said hardly anything. Farebrother decided he was deeply offended, but eventually Madigan’s spirits revived enough for him to say, ‘I’ve just had a thought, old buddy. How’s about this one for you?’ He was wearing his glasses and holding up a photo for Farebrother to look at. ‘A tall brunette with big tits, gets drunk on lemonade.’
‘You don’t owe me anything, Vince.’
‘Very loving, Jamie. Very passionate.’ He looked at the photo to help him remember her. ‘Unattached; no husband or boyfriends to worry about.’
Farebrother turned the page in the P-51 handbook to find that ‘Ditching Procedure’ was headed with the warning that the aircraft could be expected to sink in ‘approximately two seconds’, and shook his head.
‘What about her for your pal, the banana boat captain?’
‘Charlie would like her, yes.’
‘I invited the PX officer too. Is that okay with you? See, we’ll need the liquor and candy and cigarettes.’
‘It’s not my party, Vince.’
‘Our party, sure. You don’t have to do a thing except be there.’ He put the record away in its proper sleeve. ‘I invited Colonel Dan too, just out of politeness, but I don’t imagine he’ll turn up.’
‘How many people are you expecting?’
‘I should have kept a list.’
‘Maybe I’ll volunteer for OD.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ said Madigan. ‘This is going to be the greatest party of all time.’ He slid the record into the carrying case in which he stored his recordings. ‘Victoria Cooper!’ he said suddenly, and snapped his fingers in the air. ‘Intellectual, Jamie. Very English, very upper-class. Dark hair and a beautiful face. Exactly your type—tall and a wonderful figure. Victoria! You’ll be crazy about her.’
‘Is she another one of your sentimental indiscretions?’
‘I’ve hardly said a word to her, she’s a friend of Vera’s. I told you about Vera, didn’t I?’
‘Take it easy, Vince,’ said Farebrother nervously.
‘You could be the first person there, Jamie. Victoria Cooper—I’m sure Vera could swing a double date for us.’
‘Knock it off, Vince, will you? I go along with the opera and all that, but stay out of my private life, huh?’
‘You said there were no women in your life…What do you mean, you “go along” with the opera? You’re not telling me you don’t like Mozart?’
‘I can take him or leave him, Vince. I’ve always been a Dorsey fan myself.’
‘That’s dance music.’ Madigan’s mouth dropped open and he seemed truly shaken. ‘Christ, I thought at last I’d found a real pal in this dump, a guy I could talk to.’
‘Only kidding, Vince.’
Madigan recovered from his state of shock. ‘Jesus, I thought you were serious for a minute.’ He smiled to show his perfect teeth. ‘You wait until you see this Victoria Cooper…and she’ll go for you too. She lives with her parents, that’s why I’m not interested.’ He took off his glasses and put them into a leather case. ‘My dad practically threw me out of the house because of my girlfriends. Mom never seemed to mind. It’s funny that women never seem to mind their sons tomcatting around. It’s almost like they get some kind of kick out of it.’
7 Victoria Cooper (#ulink_2664e8bc-6e67-5505-8b4b-3caaa4dc15a3)
Victoria was private secretary to a newspaper owner. The newspaper was a local one, appeared only once a week and, since newsprint was scarce and rationed, consisted of only eight pages, but she enjoyed this job that gave her access to the teleprinter news and the excitement of meeting men who’d come from far-distant battlefronts. She was updating the wall map when Vera came in. ‘American forces, supported by Australian warships, have secured a firm beachhead on the south coast of New Britain.’ She found an appropriate stretch of Pacific coastline and inserted a pin.
‘I’ve brought your tea, Miss Cooper.’
‘That’s kind of you, Vera.’ Her visitor was a small vivacious woman with short curly hair dyed blonde. She was no longer a girl and yet her freckles and snub nose gave her a youthful tom-boy look that appealed to men, if the reaction of the office staff was anything to judge by.
‘I had to come upstairs anyway.’ Vera brandished a handful of press photos before dropping them into the tray on the desk, rearranging some papers there to make a reason for delay. ‘A friend of mine has been lent a wonderful flat for Christmas. It’s in Jesus Lane. You should see it—central heating, carpets, and little table lights everywhere. It’s the sort of place you see in films…romantic, you know.’
‘Lucky you, Vera.’
‘He’s an American, a captain. Drink your tea, Miss Cooper. Captain Vincent Madigan, Vince I call him. He’s tall and strong and very handsome. He looks like Pat O’Brien, the film star…and talks like him too.’
‘It sounds as if you’re smitten.’
‘Nothing like that,’ said Vera hastily. ‘Just friends. I feel sorry for those American boys, so far away from their homes and families.’ She picked up some photos and pretended to look at them. ‘I said I’d take a few friends along to their party at Christmas. You told me your parents will be away, so I wondered…’
‘I don’t think so, Vera.’ She’d been introduced to the American friend once, picking Vera up at the office, and wondered whether Vera had forgotten that or if she just enjoyed describing him again.
‘It’s Christmas, Miss Cooper,’ Vera coaxed. ‘I’m calling in to see them on my way home. Since it’s only round the corner I thought you might come with me—I’d rather not go on my own. They have wonderful coffee, and gorgeous chocolate—candy, they call it.’
‘Yes, so I’ve heard,’ said Victoria. It was a patronizing remark and Vera recognized it for what it was. Hurriedly, she gathered up some pay slips she was delivering to the cashier and turned to go. And since Victoria didn’t want to be rude to this genial woman, who would think it was because of her accent, or because she hadn’t been to college, she said, ‘I’ll go with you, Vera—I’d enjoy a break. But I mustn’t be too late home, I have to wash my hair.’
Vera gave a little shriek of delight, a sound borrowed no doubt from some Hollywood starlet. ‘Oh, I’m so pleased, Miss Cooper. It will be nice—he’ll have a friend with him…to help with the decorations and that,’ she added too quickly.
‘Am I what they call a “blind date”, Vera?’
Vera smiled guiltily but didn’t admit as much. ‘They’re ever so nice…real gentlemen, Miss Cooper.’
‘I hope you won’t go on calling me Miss Cooper all evening.’
‘See you at six o’clock, Victoria.’
Victoria could see why Vera was so impressed with the flat the Americans were using. It was both elegant and comfortable, furnished with good, but neglected, antique furniture, well-worn Persian carpets, and some nineteenth-century Dutch water-colours. The bookcases were empty except for the odd piece of porcelain. She guessed the place belonged to some tutor or fellow of the university, now gone off to war. The current tenancy of the Americans was unmistakable, however. There were pieces of sports equipment—golf clubs, tennis rackets, even a baseball glove—in various corners of the room and brightly coloured boxes of groceries, tinned food and cartons of cigarettes on the hall table.
She had arrived at Jesus Lane with some misgivings, half expecting to meet the predatory primitives her mother believed most American servicemen to be. She wouldn’t have been greatly surprised to find half a dozen hairy-chested men sitting round a card table in their underwear, smoking cheap cigars and playing poker for money. The reality couldn’t have been more different.
Captain Madigan and his younger friend were wearing their well-cut uniforms, sitting in the drawing room listening to Mozart. Both men were sprawled in the relaxed way only Americans seemed to adopt—legs stretched straight in front of them and heads sunk so low in the cushions that they had difficulty getting to their feet to greet their visitors.
Vincent Madigan acknowledged that they’d met before, remembering the time and place with such ease that she had little doubt that the invitation had originated with him. ‘I’m glad you dropped by,’ said Madigan, keeping to the pretence that Victoria was there only by chance. He stopped the music. ‘Let me introduce Captain James Farebrother.’ They nodded to each other. Madigan said, ‘Let me fix you ladies a drink. Martini, Vera? What about you, Miss Cooper?’ He leaned over to read the bottle labels. ‘Scotch, gin, port, something called oloroso—looks like, it’s been around some time—or a martini with Vera?’ His voice was unexpectedly low, contrived almost, and his accent strong enough for her to have some difficulty understanding him.
‘A martini. Thank you.’
James Farebrother offered them cigarettes and then asked permission to smoke. It was all so formal that Victoria almost started giggling. She caught Farebrother’s eye and made it an opportunity to smile. He grinned back.
Farebrother was a little taller than his friend but not so broad. His hair was cut very short in a style she’d seen only in Hollywood films. She guessed him to be about her own age—twenty-five. Both men were muscular and athletic, but Madigan’s strength was that of the boxing ring or football field, while Farebrother had the springy grace of a runner.
‘You must be the Mozart lover?’ she said.
‘No. Vince is the opera buff. I just beat time.’
His uniform was obviously made to order and she noticed that, unlike Vince Madigan’s, his tie was silk. Was it a gift from girlfriend or Mother, or a revelation of some secret vanity?
‘We’ll eat at a little Italian spot down the street,’ Madigan announced as he served the drinks. ‘They do a great veal scaloppine…as good as any I’ve had back home in Minneapolis.’
It was a bizarre recommendation and the temptation to laugh was almost uncontrollable. Madigan mistook Victoria’s amusement for indignation. Self-consciously he ran a hand over his bony skull to arrange his hair and backed away, almost spilling his drink as he blundered into the sofa. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. I know what you British think about Mussolini and all that, and you’re right, Victoria.’
‘It’s not that,’ said Victoria. She glanced at Vera who was rummaging through the sports equipment. It was all right for her, she had short curly hair that always looked well but Victoria was appalled at the thought of going to a smart restaurant wearing the dowdy twin set she often wore at the office, and with her hair in a tangle.
‘Look at all this equipment,’ said Vera, waving a baseball-gloved hand. ‘Have you boys come over to fight a war, or just for the summer Olympics?’
‘We’ll go to the Blue Boar,’ said Madigan. ‘That would be much better.’
‘No…please,’ said Victoria. ‘Keep to your original plan, I’m sure it will be wonderful, but I really do have to get home.’
‘Please don’t go, Victoria,’ said Farebrother. ‘There’s plenty of food right here in the apartment. Why don’t we all just have some ham and eggs?’ His accent was softer and less pronounced than Madigan’s.
‘Oh, Victoria!’ said Vera. ‘You don’t really hate Italians, do you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Victoria. She watched her friend silently acting out tennis strokes with one of the new rackets she’d taken out of its cover. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her eyes—Vera loved restaurants; she’d often said so. ‘You and Vince go—don’t let me spoil your evening.’
‘We won’t be long,’ Vera promised softly. She became a different person in the company of men, not just in that way all women do, but animated and amusing. Victoria looked at her with new interest. She was older than Victoria, thirty or more, but there was no denying that she was the more attractive to most men. Her critics at the office, and there was no shortage of them, said Vera fed the egos of men, that she was doting and complaint, but Victoria knew that this wasn’t so; Vera was challenging and contentious, ready to mock the priorities and values of a masculine world. And certainly the war provided her with ample opportunities to do so.
Now she looked in a mirror to pat her curly yellow hair and pout long enough to apply lipstick. ‘We won’t be long,’ she repeated, still looking in the mirror. It was an appeal as much as a declaration—she wanted Vince Madigan all to herself across that restaurant table. She turned to exchange glances with Victoria and saw that the idea of an hour with James Farebrother was not unattractive to her; the alternative was going home to her parents’ chilly mansion in Royston Road.
‘I’ll cook something here,’ said Victoria. The promise was to Vera as well as to James Farebrother.
‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘Let me freshen that drink and I’ll show you the kitchen.’
The other two left with almost unseemly haste, and Victoria began to unpack the groceries the officers had bought from the commissary. It was a breathtaking sight for anyone who had spent four long years in wartime Britain. There were tins of ham and butter, tins of fruit and juice, biscuits, cigarettes and cream. There was even a dozen fresh eggs that Madigan had obtained from Hobday’s Farm near the airfield. ‘I’ve never seen so much wonderful food,’ said Victoria.
‘You sound like my sister opening her presents on Christmas morning,’ said Farebrother. He started the music again but lowered the volume.
‘The ration is down to one egg a week. And that tin of butter would be about four months’ ration.’ He smiled at her and she said, ‘I’m afraid we’ve all become obsessed with food. When the war’s over, perhaps we’ll regain a sense of proportion.’
‘But meanwhile we’ll feast on…’ He picked up some tins. ‘Ham and eggs and sweet corn and spaghetti in Bolognese sauce. Unless, of course, your embargo on things Italian is all-embracing, in which case we’ll ceremonially break Captain Madigan’s Rigoletto recordings.’
‘I don’t hate Italians…’
He put his hand on her arm and said, ‘Strictly between you and me, Victoria, the Italian cuisine in Minneapolis is terrible.’
She smiled. ‘I really don’t have any…’
‘I know. You simply don’t have a thing to wear and you think your hair is a mess.’
She put up a hand to her hair.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was kidding, your hair looks great.’
‘How did you guess why I didn’t want to go?’
‘Vicky, I’ve heard every possible excuse for being stood up.’
‘I find that difficult to believe.’ No one had ever called her Vicky before, but coming from this handsome American it sounded right. ‘Can you find a tin opener and cut up some ham?’
While she warmed the frying pan and sliced the bread, she watched him opening tins. He hurt his finger; clumsiness was a surprising shortcoming in such a man. ‘You’re a flyer?’
‘P-51s, Mustang fighter planes.’ He reached across her to get a knife from the drawer, and when his hand touched her bare arm, she shivered.
‘Escorting the bombers?’
‘You seem well informed.’ He used the knife to loosen the ham from the tin.
‘I work in a newspaper office.’
‘I didn’t know the British newspapers ever mentioned the American air forces.’ He looked up. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound that way.’
‘Our papers do give most attention to the RAF—it’s only natural when so many readers have relatives who…’ She stopped.
‘Sure,’ he said. He shook the tin of ham violently until the meat slid out onto the plate.
‘How many raids have you been on?’
‘None,’ he said. ‘I just arrived. I guess I was a little premature in feeling neglected.’
‘The weather’s been bad. How many eggs may I use?’
‘Vince gets them by the truckload. Use them all if you like.’
‘Two each then.’ She cracked the eggs into the hot fat.
‘We need clear skies for daylight bombing. The RAF have magic gadgets that help them to see in the dark, but we only fly by day.’ He arranged the sliced ham on the plates.
‘But in daylight, with clear skies…doesn’t it make it easy for the Germans to shoot you down?’ She pretended to be fully involved in spooning fat over the frying eggs, but she knew he was looking at her.
‘That’s why they have us fighters.’
‘What about the anti-aircraft guns?’
‘I guess they’re still working on that problem,’ he said, and grinned. Abruptly the music from the next room came to an end. He reached out to her. ‘Victoria, you’re the only…’ He gently took her shoulders to embrace her. She gave him a quick kiss on the nose and ducked away.
‘I’ll turn Mozart over,’ she said. ‘You bring the plates to the table.’
They sat in the cramped kitchen to eat their meal. He poured two glasses of cold American beer and was amused to encourage Victoria to spread butter thickly on her crackers. He hardly touched his food. Victoria told him about her job and about her silver-tongued cousin who had recently become personal assistant to a Member of Parliament. He told her about his wonderful sister who was married to an alcoholic bar owner. She told him about the caraway-seed cakes with which her mother won annual prizes at the Women’s Institute competition. He told her about Amelia Earhart arriving at the Oakland airport in January 1935, solo from Honolulu, and how it made him determined to fly. At the age of fourteen he’d been permitted to take over the control wheel of a huge Ford tri-motor, owned in part by a close friend of his father.
There’s so much to say when you’re falling in love, and so much to listen to. They wanted to tell each other everything they had ever said, thought, or done. Their words were in collision. Victoria was overwhelmed by the magic of a bewildering people who dressed their humblest officers like generals, ate corn while leaving eggs and ham untouched, invented nylon stockings, and allowed their children to fly airliners.
‘Vince says every one of us has two faces; he keeps trying to prove that everything Mozart wrote is based on that idea.’
What had he been about to say, she wondered. Victoria, you are the only one for me. Victoria, you are the only girl I could ever marry. Victoria, you are the only girl in England who can’t fry four fresh eggs without breaking the yolks of two of them. She coveted the ones abandoned on his plate and wished she’d kept the unbroken ones for herself.
‘Not just the dressing-up they do in the operas, but the music that comments on each character.’
‘Are you both opera fans?’
‘If anyone could turn me off, it would be Vince.’
She smiled. ‘He’s intense, Vera told me that. Does everyone in Minneapolis have that sort of accent? At times it’s hard for me to understand just what he’s saying.’
‘Vince has moved around—New York, Memphis, New Orleans. He says that women like men with low, slow-speaking voices.’
She looked at the clock. Time had passed so quickly. ‘I must go. My parents are away and there’s so much I have to do before Christmas.’
‘Vince and Vera will have gone dancing.’
She stood up; she knew she had to leave before…and suppose Vera came back and found her here.
‘Don’t go, please,’ he said.
‘Yes, or it will spoil.’
‘What will spoil?’
‘This. Us.’
In the hallway she resisted his embrace until he pointed to the huge bunch of mistletoe tied to the overhead light. Then she kissed him and hung on as if he was the only life belt in a stormy sea. She was desperate that he wouldn’t ask when he might see her again, but just as she was on the point of humiliating herself with that question, he said, ‘I’ve got to see you again, Vicky. Soon.’
‘At the party.’
‘It’s not soon enough, but I guess it’ll have to do!’
Such mad infatuations don’t last for ever. The greater the madness, the shorter its duration—or so she told herself the following morning. Was she already a little more level-headed, and was this a measure of the limited enchantment of the handsome young American man who had come into her life?
‘It’s all right for you,’ said Vera trenchantly when Victoria made a harmless joke about the lateness of her return. ‘You’re young.’ She smoothed her dress over hips that a stodgy wartime diet had already made heavy. ‘I’m twenty-nine.’
Victoria said nothing. Vera pouted and said, ‘Thirty-two, if I’m to be perfectly honest with you.’ She fingered the gold chain she always wore round her neck and twisted it onto her finger. ‘My hubby is much older than me.’ She always referred to her absent husband as her ‘hubby’. It was as if she found the word ‘husband’ too formal and too binding. ‘Who knows when I’ll see him again, Victoria.’ She ignored the possibility that her husband might be killed. ‘It will be ages before they’re back from Burma. Do you know where Burma is, Victoria? It’s on the other side of the world. I looked it up on a map. What am I supposed to do? I might be forty by the time Reg gets back. I’ll be too old to have any fun.’
Victoria wondered how long she’d keep pretending that Vince Madigan was no more than a good friend. She sympathized. How could she tell poor wretched Vera to cloister herself for a husband who might never return? Yet she could never encourage her to betray him either. ‘I can’t advise you, Vera,’ she said.
‘It’s unbearable being on my own all the time,’ Vera said, almost apologetically. ‘That’s why I married my Reg in the first place—I was lonely.’ She gave a croaky little laugh. ‘That’s a good one, isn’t it?’ She twisted the gold chain until it was biting into her throat. ‘Little did I know I was going to be left all on my own within two years of getting hitched. I was in service when I was fifteen. With the Countess of Inversnade. I started as a kitchen help and ended as a ladies’ maid. You should have seen the shoes she had, Victoria. Dozens of pairs…and handbags from Paris. I was happy there.’
‘Then why did you leave?’
‘The government said domestics had to be in war jobs. Not that I know what I’m doing to win the war here, helping the cashier with the wages and getting tea for all those lazy reporters.’
‘Don’t be sad,’ Victoria said. ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’
Vera nodded and smiled, but didn’t look any happier. ‘You’re coming with me tonight, aren’t you?’
‘I have to go home to change first.’ She tried to keep her voice level—she didn’t want to reveal how eager she was to see Jamie again—but Vera’s shrewd eyes saw through her.
‘What are you wearing?’ Vera asked briskly. ‘A long dress?’
‘My mother’s yellow silk, I had it altered. The sister of that girl in the personnel office did it. She shortened it, made big floppy sleeves from what she’d taken off the bottom, and put a tie-belt on it.’
‘Vince must be sick of seeing me in that green dress,’ Vera said. ‘But I’ve got nothing else. He’s offered to buy me something, but I’ve got no ration coupons.’
‘You look wonderful in the green dress, Vera.’ It was true, she did.
‘Vince is trying to wangle me a parachute. A whole parachute! Vince says they’re pure silk, but even if they’re nylon it would be something!’ She picked up the outgoing mail from the tray as if suddenly remembering her work. ‘Victoria,’ she asked in a low voice as if the answer was really important to her. ‘Do you hate parties?’
‘I’m sure it will be lovely, Vera,’ she answered evasively, for the truth of it was that she did hate parties.
‘They’ll all be strangers. Vince has invited lots of men from the base and they’ll have girls with them. There’s no telling who might see me there…and start tongues wagging.’
‘Cross that bridge when you come to it,’ Victoria advised. So Vera didn’t realize that her extramarital associations were already a subject for endless discussion in the typing pool downstairs. Vera wears the new Utility knickers, Victoria had overheard a girl say; one Yank and they’re off. The others had laughed.
Vera stood in the doorway looking at her friend quizzically. ‘You never cry, do you? I can’t imagine you crying.’
‘I’m not the crying type,’ Victoria said. ‘I swear instead.’
Vera nodded. ‘All you girls who’ve been to university swear,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I won’t wait for you tonight, I’ll go on ahead. I know what Vince is like. If I’m not there and he sees some other girl he fancies, he’ll grab her.’
Victoria could think of no reassuring answer.
The noise could be heard from as far away as the river. There were taxis outside the door as well as an RAF officer holding a fur coat and handbag for some absent girl.
Victoria didn’t have to knock at the door. She’d raised her hand to the brass knocker when the caretaker swung the door open, spilling some of his whisky as he swept back the curtain. ‘Quickly, miss, careful of the blackout.’ He said it carefully, but his smile and unfocused eyes betrayed his drunkenness.
The house was packed with people. Some of the table lights had been broken, others shielded with coloured paper, but there was enough light to see that the drawing room had become a dance floor. Couples were crowded together too tightly to do anything but hug rhythmically in the semi-darkness.
Among the American uniforms she could see a few RAF officers and some Polish pilots. Men without girls were seated on the stairs, drinking from bottles and arguing about the coming invasion and what was happening ‘back home’. There were low wolf whistles and appreciative growls as Victoria climbed the stairs, picking her way between the men. More than one fondled her legs under the pretence of steadying her.
She found Jamie and Vince Madigan on the landing, trying to revive a female guest who’d lost consciousness after drinking too much of a mixture that had cherries and dried mint floating in it. Described as fruit punch, it smelled like medicinal alcohol sweetened with honey. Victoria decided not to drink any of it.
‘She needs air,’ Vera said, appearing from another room. ‘Take her downstairs and out into the street.’ Vera seemed to be in command. Although she was always saying how she hated crowds and parties she thrived on them.
‘She’s Boogie’s girlfriend,’ explained Jamie. ‘He’s a pilot…the one playing the piano downstairs.’ Victoria took his arm, but he seemed too busy to notice. Vera smiled to indicate how much she liked Victoria’s very pale yellow dress, and both women watched dispassionately as two officers in brown leather flying jackets carried the limp girl downstairs with more enthusiasm than tenderness. The men on the stairs hummed the Funeral March as the unfortunate casualty was bundled away.
‘Did you invite all these people?’ Victoria asked.
Jamie shook his head. ‘They’re mostly friends of Vince, as well as a few who wandered in off the street. What are you drinking?’
‘Not the fruit punch.’ Was it too much to expect that he would notice her hair, swept back into a chignon, and the high-neckline dress with its standing collar and the tiny black bow?
‘Whisky, okay?’ He was pouring it before she could answer, and then he stuck the bottle back into the side pocket of his uniform jacket. His eyes were bright and restless as he kept looking round to see who else was there. He wasn’t drunk, but she guessed he’d started drinking early that day. ‘How’s that?’ He held up the half-filled glass of whisky.
Victoria had never drunk undiluted whisky before, but she didn’t want to give him any reason for leaving her. Even while they stood there, she was continually being patted and stroked by men who passed, looking for food or drink or the bathroom. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, and brought the whisky to her lips without drinking any. It had a curious smell.
He noticed her sniffing at it. ‘Bourbon,’ he explained. ‘It’s made from corn.’
He was watching her; she tasted her drink and thought it smelled remarkably like damp cardboard. ‘Delicious,’ she said.
‘I can see that you go for it,’ Jamie mocked.
Victoria smiled. He still hadn’t kissed her, but at least there was no sign of any other girl with him. He pulled her closer to make way for an American naval officer who was elbowing his way to the bathroom. Finding it locked, he hammered on the door and yelled, ‘Hurry up in there! This is an emergency!’ Someone laughed, and a man sitting on the next staircase said, ‘He’s got a girl in there with him. I’d try the one upstairs if you’re in a hurry, Mac.’ The sailor cursed and hurried upstairs past him.
Victoria looked at Jamie, trying to enjoy the party. ‘Are most of them from your squadron?’
‘That’s Colonel Dan over there. He’s the Group Commander, the big cheese himself.’
Victoria looked round to see a short cheerful man with a large nose and messy fair hair talking earnestly to a tall dark girl with a floral-patterned turban hat and a black velvet cocktail dress.
‘Is that his wife?’
‘She’s one of the chorus from the Windmill Theatre. They gave a show on base last month—before I got here.’
‘Was it an American general who said war is hell?’
‘And that’s Major Tucker.’ The Major was standing near the stairs drinking from his own silver hip flask and scowling disapproval. Victoria felt a common bond with him but did not say so.
Jamie tightened his hold on her shoulder, but only in order to pull her aside to make way for a middle-aged sergeant who was carrying a crate of gin upstairs and into a room that was being converted into a bar. ‘Thanks for the invite, Captain,’ said the sergeant, out of breath.
‘Good to see you here, Sergeant Boyer,’ said Jamie.
Harry Boyer’s arrival with the gin was greeted by loud cheers. Downstairs, Boogie and the musicians he’d collected for the night began to play ‘Bless ’Em All’, to which the dancers jumped up and down in unison.
‘You hate it, Vicky. I can tell by your face.’
‘No,’ she yelled, ‘it’s really fun.’ By now the whole house was shaking with the vibration of the dancers downstairs. ‘But is there anywhere to sit down?’ Her yellow shoes had never been particularly comfortable, and she’d slipped them from her heels for a moment.
‘Let’s try upstairs,’ Jamie said, and plunged into the crowd. She tried to follow, but with drink in one hand and shoes loosened she couldn’t keep up with him. One shoe came off and only with some difficulty could she get everyone to stand back far enough for her to find it again. When she did, there was the black mark of a boot across the yellow silk, and one strap torn loose. They were the last pair of pre-war shoes in her wardrobe. She told herself to laugh, or at least keep her sense of proportion, but she wanted to scream.
‘If you hate it, say so,’ said Jamie sharply as she reached him at the bottom of the stairs.
She wondered what would happen if she did tell him how unhappy she was, and decided not the take the chance. ‘Why don’t we dance?’ she said. At least she’d feel his arms around her.
If she was trying to find the limit to James Farebrother’s skills and talents, inviting him to dance provided it. Even in that crush, with the tireless Boogie playing his own dreamy version of ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, Jamie trod on her toes—especially painful as she’d decided to dance in stockinged feet rather than risk the final destruction of her shoes.
‘I’m no great shakes at dancing,’ he said finally. ‘Maybe we should call it quits.’
He found a place on the sofa, but they’d only been sitting there a few minutes when a lieutenant arrived with a message asking Jamie to go upstairs to help Vince. Jamie offered her his apologies, but she feared he was secretly pleased to get away from her. She regretted her flash of bad temper, but she’d so wanted the evening to be perfect.
‘Promise you won’t move?’ Jamie squeezed her arm. She nodded and he planted a kiss on her forehead as though she were a docile infant.
The newly arrived lieutenant dropped heavily into the place Jamie had vacated beside her. ‘Known Jamie long?’
She looked at him. He was a handsome boy trying to grow a moustache. He had a suntanned sort of complexion, with jet-black wavy hair and long sideburns that completed the Latin effect for which he obviously strove. ‘Yes, I’ve known Jamie a long time,’ she said.
He smiled to reveal flashing white teeth. His battered cap was still on his head, but he pushed it well back as if to see her better. He was chewing gum and smoking at the same time. He took the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it towards the fireplace without bothering to look where it went. ‘Jamie only just arrived in Europe,’ he said. ‘My name’s Morse, people call me Mickey Mouse.’
Victoria smiled and said nothing.
‘So you’re a liar. Slow dissolve.’
‘And you’re no gentleman.’
He slapped his thigh and laughed. ‘Are you ever right, lady.’
They were crushed tight together, and although she tried to make more room between them, it wasn’t possible.
‘Gum?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Where did Jamie meet a classy broad like you?’ he asked. ‘You’re not the kind of lady who hangs around the Red Cross Club on Trumpington Street.’
‘Really?’
‘Rilly! Yes, rilly.’
‘I’m surprised you’ve never noticed me there,’ said Victoria.
MM grinned and tore the corner from a packet of Camels before offering them to her. She never smoked, but on impulse took one. He lit it for her. ‘You Jamie’s girl?’
‘Yes.’ It seemed the simplest way of avoiding further advances. ‘What’s happened to Captain Madigan?’
‘Nothing’s happened to Captain Madigan, lady, and nothing is going to happen to him. Vince is smart—he’s a paddlefoot. He stays on the ground and waltzes the ladies. We’re the dummies who get our tails shot off.’
‘I mean what’s happened now?’ said Victoria. ‘What does he want Jamie for?’ She inhaled on the cigarette and it made her cough.
‘Madigan needs close escort,’ said MM vaguely.
Victoria got to her feet and looked for the door.
‘Lights! Action! Camera!’ said MM, holding thumbs and forefingers as if to frame a camera shot. ‘Where are you going, lady?’
‘I’m going,’ said Victoria, ‘to what you Americans so delicately call the powder room.’
‘I’ll save the place here for you.’
‘Please don’t bother,’ said Victoria. MM chuckled.
She made her way past the musicians and started up the stairs. A lot of drinking had taken place since the last time she’d struggled up through the people sitting on the staircase. They were mostly couples now, locked in tight embraces and oblivious to her pushing past them.
On the upper landing there were two officers sprawled full-length and snoring loudly. A girl was going through the pockets of one of them. She straightened up when she saw Victoria. ‘I’m just trying to find enough for my taxi fare home, honey,’ she announced in the broad accent of south London.
Victoria stepped past without replying. The middle-aged man whom Jamie had called Sergeant Boyer was leaning against the wall inside the first room. He was in his shirt sleeves and wore no tie. He was watching Colonel Dan about to throw a pair of dice against the wall. There was a huge pile of pound notes on the floor and as her eyes became accustomed to the gloom Victoria could see that there were other men there too, all holding wads of money.
‘Come on, baby,’ Colonel Dan yelled into the confines of his clenched fist before throwing the dice. ‘Snake eyes!’ he screamed as they came to rest. There was pandemonium all around, and Victoria was almost knocked off her feet as the Colonel stooped to pick up the dice and lost his balance to fall against her. ‘Oops, sorry, Ma’am.’
She found Jamie on the next floor. He was holding tightly to the bare upper arms of a brassy-looking girl in a shiny grey dress that was cut too low in the front and too tight across the bottom. ‘You’ve got to be sensible,’ Jamie was telling her. ‘There’s no sense in making a scene. These things happen, it’s the war.’
The girl’s eye make-up had smudged with her tears and there were streaks of black down her cheeks. ‘For Christ’s sake, spare me that,’ she said bitterly. ‘You bloody Yanks don’t have to tell me about the war. We were bombed out of my mum’s house years before Pearl bloody Harbor.’
She noticed Vince Madigan was wearing a short Ike jacket complete with a row of medals and silver wings. He too was trying to reason with the tearful girl. ‘Let me walk you to Market Hill…we’ll find a cab and get you home.’
The girl ignored him. To Jamie she said, ‘You think I’m drunk, don’t you?’
From downstairs there came some spirited rebel yells, and the piano struck up the resounding chords of ‘Dixie’. Suddenly Jamie noticed Victoria watching them. ‘Oh, Victoria!’ he said.
‘Oh, Victoria,’ parroted the girl. ‘Whatever have you done with poor Prince Albert?’ She gave a short bitter laugh.
Jamie let go of the girl and turned to Victoria, smiling as if in apology. ‘It’s one of Vince’s friends,’ he explained quietly. ‘She’s threatening to tear Vera to pieces.’ From downstairs came a chorus of joyful voices: ‘In Dixie land, I’ll take my stand, to live and dieeee in Dixie…’
Vince Madigan moved closer to the girl in the grey dress and began talking to her softly, in the manner prescribed for an excited horse. Now that the light was on her she looked no more than eighteen, younger perhaps. The desperate stare had gone now; she was just a sad child. She raised a large red hand to stifle a belch.
‘Or was it you who invited one girl too many?’ said Victoria coldly.
‘She’s not my type,’ said Jamie amiably.
Over Jamie’s shoulder Victoria saw Madigan take the girl in a tight embrace and caress her hungrily. Victoria turned to avoid Jamie’s kiss. ‘Not now,’ she said, ‘not here.’
‘I think I need a drink,’ Jamie said, standing back from her. ‘I’ve had about as much as I can take for one day.’
‘You have!’ said Victoria angrily.
‘I didn’t mean enough of you.’
‘Would you take me home?’
‘Wait just a few minutes more,’ said Jamie. ‘My buddy Charlie Stigg still might get here. I told you I’d invited him.’
‘Then I’ll go home alone,’ she said. Jamie took her arm. ‘You’d better help Captain Madigan,’ she said, pulling herself free. ‘I think his lady friend is about to vomit.’
The girl was holding on to the balustrade and bending forward to retch at the stair carpet.
Victoria pushed her way downstairs and found her coat where it had fallen to the floor under a mountain of khaki overcoats. She glimpsed Vera standing with MM to watch the men who had climbed on top of the piano. One of them, Earl Koenige, was waving the Confederate flag. ‘Look awaay, look awaay, look awaay, Dixie laand!’
She tried to catch Vera’s eye to tell her she was leaving, but Vera had eyes for no one but her newfound lieutenant. She was cuddling him tightly. That was the trouble with Vera; for her, men were just men, interchangeable commodities like silk stockings, pet canaries, or books from a library. Any man who would give her a good time was Mr Right for Vera. She wasn’t looking for a husband, she had one already.
Victoria had no trouble finding a taxi—they were arriving at the house in Jesus Lane every few minutes, bringing more and more people to the party.
She got back home just as the rain began. It was an old Victorian mansion, elaborate with neo-Gothic towers and stained-glass windows. Its dark shape behind the wind-tossed trees did little to raise her spirits as she hurried down the gravel path in the quickening rain. The house was cold and empty, but she closed the carved oak door behind her with a thankful sigh. Sometimes she almost envied Vera those histrionic sobs, lace handkerchief delicately applied to her face without smudging her make-up. Vera always seemed so completely revived afterwards—a release which tonight Victoria needed as never before. But still she didn’t cry.
She walked through the hall and up the grandiose staircase. She would go to the place where she always had to be when unhappy, her sanctum at the very top of the house. She passed the door of her parents’ bedroom and the storeroom that had once been her nursery. On the next floor, she passed the maid’s room, empty now that they no longer had living-in servants. She passed the locked door of her brother’s room and the doors of the toy cupboard, their pasted-on flower pictures now faded and falling.
From the top corridor window she looked down at the dark garden and the tennis court, covered for winter. She couldn’t get used to the emptiness of the house and found herself listening for her mother’s voice or her father’s clumsy cello playing.
Thankfully she went into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Here at least she could be herself. A pretty row of dolls eyed her from the chest of drawers where they sat among her hairbrushes, but the balding teddy bear had fallen, and was sprawled, limbs asunder, on the floor. She picked him up before running a bath and undressing with the same studied care she gave to everything. She put her dress on its hanger and fitted trees in the battered yellow shoes before placing them in the rack.
‘A museum’ her mother called it derisively, but Victoria refused to let any of it go. She would keep it all—the butterfly collection in its frame on the wall, the doll’s house and her box of seabirds’ eggs. She ran her finger along the children’s books. Enid Blyton to Richmal Crompton, as well as her huge scrapbooks. She was determined to keep it all for ever, no matter how they teased her.
She switched on the electric fire, took off the rest of her clothes, and wiped off her make-up before getting into the hot bath. Sitting in the warm, scented water, the taste of bourbon on her tongue and too much cold cream on her face, she tried to remember everything he’d said to her, searching for implications of love or rejection. The wireless was playing sweet music, but suddenly it ended and the unmistakably accented voice of the American Forces Network announcer wished all listeners a happy Christmas and victorious New Year. ‘Go to hell,’ Victoria told him, and he played more Duke Ellington.
She was drying herself when the doorbell rang. Carol singers? Party-goers looking for another address? It rang again. She put on a dressing gown and ran downstairs. Immediately she noticed the envelope that had been pushed into the letter box. Caught by its corner, the envelope was addressed to a military box number and had been opened and emptied. She turned it over and found scribbled on the back, ‘I’m sorry, darling. Jamie.’
She pulled the robe round her shoulders and opened the door. It was dark in the garden and raining heavily—the trees were loud with the sound. ‘Jamie?’ She thought she saw a man sheltering under the holly trees. ‘Is it you, Jamie?’
‘It all went wrong tonight, darling. My fault.’
‘You’d better come inside.’
‘I couldn’t get a cab. I was going to borrow MM’s motorcycle, but he went off somewhere with Vera.’
‘You’re soaking wet. Hurry, the blackout.’
‘I always forget about the blackout,’ he said. The water was running off the leather visor of his cap and down his face. She could feel the rain from his coat dripping onto her bare feet. ‘I waited in Market Hill, but once the rain started everyone wanted cabs.’
‘You walked? You fool!’ She laughed with joy and embraced him, cold and wet as he was.
‘I think I love you, Vicky.’
‘A note of doubt?’ she teased. ‘Have you learned nothing from Vince?’
He laughed. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you, Jamie. Let’s never quarrel again.’
‘Not ever. I promise.’
They were childish promises, but only childlike pledges are proper to the simple truth of love. She loved him with a desperation she’d never known before, but she took him to her bed for the same prosaic reason that has motivated so many other women—she could not bear to dispel the image of herself in love.
Afterwards he said nothing for what seemed an age. She knew he was staring at the ceiling, his body so still that she could hear his heartbeats. ‘Are you awake?’ she said.
He stretched out his arm to hold her closer. ‘Yes, I’m awake.’
‘It’s Christmas Day.’
He leaned over and greeted her with a gentle but perfunctory kiss.
‘Are you married?’ she asked, making it as casual as possible.
He laughed. ‘Lousy timing, Victoria,’ he said. Then, aware of her anxiety, he held up hands bare except for a class ring. ‘Not married, nor engaged, not even dating regularly.’
‘You’re making fun of me.’
‘Of course I am.’
‘That girl…’
‘She was very sick. It was the fruit punch, it put a lot of people out of action. Vince threw everything he could find into it.’
‘Who was she?’
‘Vince met her last week. She works in the laundry. He made me promise not to tell you she was there, he knew you’d feel bound to tell Vera.’ He turned over to look into her eyes. ‘You must guess what Vince is like by now. He’s everything a girl’s mother warns her about.’
‘He’s not a flyer, is he?’
‘No. He’s the PRO, the Public Relations Officer. He buys drinks for reporters and takes them round the base and sends them press handouts.’
‘He told Vera he’d flown twenty missions over Germany.’
‘He keeps that blouse with the wings and stuff in his suitcase. He tells his girls they have to be nice to him, he might never come back from the next one.’ He laughed.
Victoria laughed too, but it was unconvincing laughter. She held Jamie very tight and wondered what it would be like enduring the strain of knowing that Jamie might not come back. Why wasn’t Jamie a PRO, or someone else who didn’t have to risk his life?
‘Did you see Earl Koenige?’ asked Jamie. ‘Straw-haired kid with a you-all accent and big incredulous eyes?’
‘The one you’re going to be flying with? He looks no more than sixteen.’
‘He can handle his ship pretty well,’ said Jamie. It was not the sort of compliment he gave freely. ‘But he fell off the piano just after you left. He was trying to tap-dance and wave the Stars and Bars at the same time.’
‘Did he hurt himself? He looked drunk.’
‘I don’t think Earl’s ever tasted whisky before. His folks are teetotal, church-going farmers. No, he bounced up okay and said he hoped he hadn’t hurt the piano.’
‘And did your friend Charlie arrive?’
‘He sent a message. His navigator had to stay on base, so the whole crew stayed with him. Say, do you have an aspirin?’
‘On the table under the light.’
He tore open the packet and swallowed two tablets without water. ‘I thought he’d cracked his skull at first, but Earl’s always falling off his bicycle or spilling hot coffee down himself. He writes to his folks every day and I guess without his accidents he’d have nothing to tell them.’
‘Well, he should have no lack of material for his next letter,’ said Victoria. ‘Was that really your Commanding Officer! He was playing dice with a sergeant, and calling him Harry, and passing a bottle of whisky back and forth. There were wads of five-pound notes changing hands on one roll of the dice.’
Jamie frowned. ‘The Colonel’s not an easy man to understand,’ he said. ‘Vince nearly ran afoul of him tonight.’
‘Vince?’
‘He was wearing that damned jacket when Colonel Dan got there. I thought we were heading for a real showdown. “What uniform are you wearing, Captain Madigan?” the old man said. Vince saluted smartly and said, “The one with the Christmas decorations, sir.” The Colonel smiled and took the drink Vince offered him. “If the provost marshal comes in here tonight, Madigan,” said Colonel Dan, “they’ll throw us both in the cooler.” Vince grinned and said, “That’s just the way I figured it, Colonel…” That Vince can talk his way out of anything. He told me he ran off with some married woman when he was still a kid in high school.’
‘Poor Vera.’
‘Poor Vera nothing! She was sitting on the stairs petting with MM after Vince took off.’
‘Is it the war that’s made us like this?’
‘Don’t be so female,’ said Jamie. ‘People grab a little happiness while there’s a chance. All I’m saying is, don’t let’s worry about Vera or Vince. Let them work out their own lives. Who knows when MM will buy the farm, who knows when I will.’
‘Buy the farm?’
‘Collect our government insurance.’
‘Don’t say things like that, I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you!’ She buried her head under the bedclothes.
‘Come out of there, you crazy girl.’ He pulled the blanket down and admired her bare body. ‘Are you sure your parents won’t come back?’
Her head was under the pillow; she grunted a negative.
‘How can you be so sure?’
She threw off the pillow and turned over to laugh at his nervousness. ‘Because they’re with my grandparents in Scotland. They phoned this morning. You can relax.’
‘You didn’t want to go?’
‘We were working. My father said I shouldn’t ask for extra time off—the war comes first.’
‘Your father’s right,’ he said, caressing her. ‘Fathers are always right.’ She watched him. He hadn’t looked so tanned before, but now, compared with her own skin and the white sheets, he seemed like a bronze statue.
‘Was your father always right too?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know anything about my father,’ he replied.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘He’s not dead. My parents were divorced when I was only a kid. I stayed with my mother, and she got married again to a man named Farebrother. I guess a bridegroom gets a little tired of checking into a hotel and explaining why his kid has a different name.’
‘What’s your father’s name?’
‘Bohnen. Alexander Bohnen. His family came from Norway originally. They were boat-builders.’
‘Was your father one too?’
‘Not enough money in that, I guess.’ He was still staring at the ceiling. ‘Give me a cigarette, will you, sweetheart?’
‘You sound like Vince when you say “sweetheart”.’ She gave him the packet of cigarettes he’d put on the bedside table and the gold lighter that was balanced on top.
‘My father is an investment consultant in Washington DC. Or rather was. Now he’s become a full colonel—a chicken colonel they call them—in the Army Air Force. He went from civilian to colonel over night, and naturally he’s a staff officer, the difference between a staff officer and an investment consultant being largely sartorial.’
‘Naturally? I don’t know what an investment consultant does.’
‘I don’t either,’ Jamie admitted. ‘But I guess he tells people who need a million dollars where to get them cheaply.’
Victoria laughed. It was just another glimpse of this crazy American world. ‘He sounds like a man who works miracles.’
‘You took those words right out of my father’s mouth.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘He’s tough and practical and successful. My father works twenty-four hours a day, drinking with the right people and dining with the right people. My mother had to play hostess in a town where entertaining is a highly competitive sport, and my father’s a harsh critic. He never married again—he didn’t need a wife, he needed a professional housekeeper.’
‘And your mother’s happy?’
‘She’s always been quiet and easygoing. My stepfather isn’t a genius, but he makes enough dough for them to sit in the sun a lot and take it easy. Santa Barbara is a great place for taking it easy.’ Jamie lit a cigarette. ‘My father should have been a politician. He’s a Mr Fixit. I guess he figured Uncle Sam would lose the war unless he got into uniform and told the Army what to do.’
‘Don’t you ever write to him?’
‘I get a monthly bulletin—mimeographed, but with my name inserted in his own handwriting—the same chatty little newsletter that he sends to all his important business contacts. That’s how I know he’s with the Air Force here in England.’
‘You never write back?’
He drew at his cigarette. ‘No, I never write back. You’re not going to start chewing me out already, are you?’
‘It is Christmas, Jamie. He’s your father, you could phone him.’
‘My father will not have noticed it’s Christmas.’ He’d only taken a couple of puffs at the cigarette, but he decided he didn’t want it any more and stubbed it out on the back of Victoria’s powder compact, tossing the stub into a flower vase. Victoria was appalled but decided not to ‘chew him out’. Instead, she leaned across and switched the light off again. When she’d snuggled down into the bedclothes he put his arm around her. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone him in the morning.’
She cuddled closer to him and pretended to be asleep.
8 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen (#ulink_7b0a995a-b0f5-5fb5-9b93-ecd824146798)
Even the Savoy Hotel’s youngest waiter could tell at a glance which men were Americans. They toyed with their food, holding forks in their right hands, and they distanced themselves from the table, turning their chairs sideways, and sometimes pulling back so they could sit with crossed legs. Only the British guests kept their knees under the table and addressed themselves wholeheartedly to the food.
Colonel Bohnen knew most of the men lunching in the private room that day, and even those he’d never met weren’t strangers, for he’d spent all his life with men like these—businessmen and civil servants and diplomats, even though so many of them now wore military or naval uniform. His white-haired companion was one of his closest friends. ‘If I live to be one hundred years old,’ Bohnen was telling him, ‘I’ll never equal the bang I got out of hearing my son’s voice on the phone.’
‘I’m glad he called, Alex.’
‘P-51s! He’s a captain assigned to the 220th Fighter Group. He’ll be flying fighter escort missions over Germany.’ Colonel Bohnen put his fork down and abandoned his meal.
‘You’ve arranged everything for him, no doubt,’ said the older man, with just a trace of mockery in his voice.
‘It’s my only son!’ said Bohnen defensively. ‘Certainly I had one of my assistants phone his commanding officer and mention that headquarters had a special interest in this newly assigned captain.’ Bohnen scratched his face. ‘He got a rather insubordinate response. To tell you the truth, I’m beginning to have misgivings about Jamie’s CO.’ His voice trailed away.
‘Don’t leave me in suspense, Alex.’
‘His Colonel’s efficiency rating is “excellent”; that’s the Army’s way of saying he stinks. His efficiency reports are larded with words such as “unorthodox” and “overconfident”, and “reckless”; fine and dandy for a young lieutenant who’s going places but not the kind of language I want applied to a colonel leading a Fighter Group.’
‘With your son in it, you mean. Is he an Academy man?’
Bohnen shook his head. ‘A West Pointer I could swallow, but this guy is a down-at-heel pilot who joined the Air Corps when barnstorming got too tough for him.’
‘Is this young Jamie’s opinion?’
Bohnen was alarmed. ‘My God, don’t let Jamie ever find out I’ve been checking up on his commander! You know how prim and proper Jamie always is.’
‘I’d never even recognize the boy after all this time. I haven’t seen Mollie for nearly three years.’
Bohnen frowned at the sound of his ex-wife’s name and tapped cigar ash. ‘Jamie was a gentle child, careful with his toys, considerate to his friends, and trusting his parents—too trusting, maybe. Mollie poisoned the boy’s mind against me. But as terrible as that sounds, I’ve never allowed myself to become bitter about it.’
‘Mollie’s father was a tough man to do business with. She gets it from him.’
‘He inherited a going concern,’ said Bohnen. ‘What did old Tom have to be so tough about? He inherited a fortune and poured it down the drain. He died nearly penniless, I’ve heard. His grandfather must be turning in his grave. Look at any picture book of America’s history and you’ll find a Washbrook harvesting machine or tractor. When old Tom Washbrook gave me permission to marry his daughter, I was walking on air. I loved Mollie dearly and I was sure I could make her father see what had to be done to save the factories, but he would never listen to me—I was too young to give him advice. Sometimes I think he deliberately did the opposite of anything I suggested. And Mollie gave me no support, she always sided with Tom. He has a right to make his own mistakes, she liked to tell me.’
‘Mollie loved her father, Alex. You know that. She doted on him.’
‘She watched him run that giant corporation right into the ground. What kind of love is that?’
‘So you never hear from Mollie?’
‘Mollie is a one-man woman, always was and always will be, I guess. Once she’d turned her back on me she didn’t want to even think about me again. A clean break she said she wanted, and I went along with that, even when it meant losing my son. I knew someday he’d find his way back to me and I thank the good Lord that he chose this Christmas to do His will.’
Bohnen’s companion looked at his watch. ‘I wish I could hang on here and see the boy again, Alex.’
‘He tells me he’s met a wonderful girl,’ said Bohnen, ‘and he’s giving me the chance to meet her.’
‘The British trains are all to hell, Alex. Does he have to come far?’
‘I sent a car,’ said Bohnen.
The other man smiled. ‘I’m glad to see you’re not letting the war cramp your style, Alex. Do you think I should get myself a khaki suit?’
‘Running an air force is no different from running a corporation,’ Bohnen told him solemnly. ‘The fact is, running an air force in wartime is easier than running a corporation. As I told my boss, the opportunity to threaten a few vice-presidents with a firing squad would have done wonders for Boeing and Lockheed when they were having their troubles.’
‘You can say that again, Alex!’
‘And what about that damned airline you sank so much good money into? A few executions in that boardroom would have worked wonders.’
‘Military life obviously suits you.’
‘It’s fascinating,’ said Bohnen. ‘And it’s a big job. There are now more US soldiers in these islands than British ones! And our planes outnumber the RAF by about four thousand!’
‘What’s the next step, Alex, Buckingham Palace?’
‘Think big,’ Bohnen said, and laughed.
‘Must go.’ He looked round the room and then back at Bohnen. ‘Who is hosting this feast?’
‘Brett Vance. You know Brett—made a fortune out of cocoa futures just before the war…the big gorilla with glasses, over there in the corner, tearing blooms out of the flower arrangement. No need to overdo the grateful thanks. He just persuaded the Army to put his candy bars on sale at every PX in the European Theatre.’
‘Nice work, Brett Vance!’ said the old man sardonically.
‘Can you imagine how many candy bars those soldiers will consume? Countless divisions of fit young men, hiking and digging and so on, night and day in all kinds of weather.’
‘Does that mean you’re buying stocks in candy bars?’
Bohnen looked shocked. ‘You know me better than that. Let others play the market if they want, but while I’m in the Army there’s no way I could be a party to that kind of thing.’ He saw his companion smiling and wondered if he was being tested.
‘You’re becoming a kind of paragon, Alex. I think maybe I prefer that wheeler-dealer I used to know back home.’
‘I missed the first war. I feel I owe something to Uncle Sam, and I’m going to give this job all I’ve got.’
The older man could think of no response to Bohnen’s passionate declaration. From the other end of the room there was laughter as guests took their leave. ‘Give my love to Jamie. I look forward to hearing your opinion of his girl.’
‘Jamie’s too young to marry,’ said Bohnen.
‘And how about his CO—are you going to let him get married?’
‘Very funny,’ said Bohnen. ‘I suppose you think I interfere too much.’
‘Let the boy live his own life, Alex.’
‘See you next week,’ said Bohnen. ‘You could take a couple of messages for people in Washington.’
‘Go easy on the boy, Alex. Jamie doesn’t have that hard cutting edge that we grew back in 1929.’
‘He’ll get no preferred treatment. He’s a soldier, and this is war.’
‘It’s serious, Dad. We’re in love.’ He found it difficult to talk to his father after so many years apart.
‘And when exactly do I get a chance to meet the young lady?’ Colonel Bohnen consulted his watch.
‘Three fifteen. She thought we’d like to have some time together. She’s downstairs right now, having lunch with her aunt.’
‘That’s most considerate of her,’ Bohnen said, and wondered whether it was intended as an opportunity for Jamie to get his blessing for an intended marriage.
‘You’ll like her, Dad. It was her idea that I phone you.’
How like Mollie the boy looked, the same mouth and same wide-open earnest eyes and the same nervous manner, as if he expected Alex Bohnen to bite his head off. What did the boy expect—a paternal chat about the unhappiness that can follow a hasty marriage? Or the senior officer lecture about the socio-medical consequences of casual relationships? He would get neither. ‘Sure, I’m going to like her,’ said Bohnen, pouring more of the Château Margaux. ‘Eat the lamb chops before your meal gets cold.’ Jamie had let his father choose the food and wine, knowing how much pleasure that would give him. He was right; Bohnen had been through the room-service menu with meticulous care and questioned the waiter at length about the temperature of the wine and the locality in which the lamb had been reared.
‘It’s a fine meal,’ said Jamie.
‘It’s better to have it served up here in my suite. I would have eaten with you but I had an official lunch.’
‘It’s a fine claret too.’ Bohnen noted his son’s Britishism and wondered if he’d been tutored by old Tom Washbrook, who kept a legendary table, or by his no-good brother-in-law who was drinking away the profits of the bar and grill he owned in Perth Amboy.
‘The Savoy cellars go on forever. This is the finest hotel in the world, Jamie. And the management know me from way back before the war.’
‘1934,’ said Jamie, turning the bottle to examine the label. ‘So you’re still very busy?’
‘We’re in the middle of the biggest expansion programme in history, and now Doolittle has arrived to take over from General Eaker.’
‘What’s the story behind that one?’
‘Go back to last October and read about the Schweinfurt raid, the way I’ve been doing to prepare a confidential report. It was a long ride through clear skies, our bombers punished all the way there and all the way back again. No escorting fighters, and the Germans had plenty of time to land and refuel before slaughtering more of our boys. Twenty-eight bombers were lost on the outward leg, and by the time formations reached the target, thirty-four had turned back with battle damage or mechanical failure. The return trip was even worse!’
‘I’m listening, Dad.’
Bohnen looked at his son. He didn’t want to frighten him, but he knew that a son of his would not be readily frightened. ‘If the truth of it ever gets out, Congress will tear the high command to pieces. Any chance of America getting a separate air force will have gone for good. Even now we’re not publishing the whole truth. We don’t tell anyone about our ships that crash into the ocean on the way back, or the ones that land with dead and injured crew. We don’t say that for every three men wounded in battle there are four crewmen hospitalized with frostbite. And we don’t tell anyone how many bombers are junked because they’re beyond economical repair. We don’t talk about the men who would rather face a court martial than go back into combat, or about the psychiatric cases we dope up and send home. We don’t let reporters go to the bases where we’re having trouble with morale, or admit to the decisions we’ve had to make about not sending unescorted formations back to those tough targets again.’
‘It sounds bad.’
‘We never released the true Schweinfurt story and my guess is we never will.’
‘With the Mustangs we’ll escort them all the way.’ Jamie had forgotten how intense his father always became about his work. He wished he could see him relax, but he never did.
‘I spent last month pleading for long-range gas tanks. We’re using British compressed-paper ones, we can’t get enough. Then on Friday I got a long report from Washington telling me it’s impossible to make drop tanks from paper. That’s what we’re up against, Jamie, the bureaucratic mind.’
‘The Mustang is the most beautiful ship I ever flew.’
‘And everyone knew it last year except the “experts” at Materiel Division who seemed to resent the fact that she needed a British-designed engine to make her into a real winner. The Air Force lost months due to those arguments, and all the time the bomber crews paid in blood.’
‘Will things be better under Doolittle?’
‘New machines, new ideas, new commander. I sure hope he’ll get tough with the British. That’s the most urgent thing at present.’
‘The British?’
‘Churchill wants us to fly at night on account of the casualties we’re suffering.’
‘Doesn’t night bombing just mean area bombing—just tossing bombs into the centre of big towns? There’s no industrial plant in town centres, so how could his policy ever end the war?’
‘Night raiding would mean taking more advice and equipment from the RAF. First we take advice from them, then lessons, and eventually we’ll be taking orders.’
‘But Eisenhower’s been appointed Supreme Commander of the Anglo-American invasion forces.’
‘It sounds pally,’ said Bohnen. ‘It sounds like the British are resigned to taking orders from us. But wait until they announce the name of Ike’s deputy, and he’ll be a Britisher. It’s one more step in the British plan to absorb us into RAF Bomber Command. Churchill is using the slogan “round-the-clock bombing” and is suggesting that we coordinate it under one commander. Get the picture? Only one commander for the Army, so only one commander for the Allied bombing force. And who’s the most experienced man for that job? Arthur Harris. If we squawk, the British are going to remind us that Eisenhower’s got the top job. And that’s the way it’s going, the British will get all the powerful executive jobs while reminding us that they’re serving under Eisenhower.’
Jamie was sorting through his vegetables to set aside tiny pieces of onion that he wouldn’t eat. Bohnen remembered him doing the same thing when he was a tiny child; they’d often had words about it. Fastidiously Jamie wiped his mouth on his napkin and took another sip of wine. ‘The British are good at politicking, are they?’
‘They excel at it. Montgomery can pick up his phone and talk with Churchill whenever he feels like it. Bert Harris—chief of RAF Bomber Command—has Churchill over for dinner and shows him picture books of what the RAF have done to Germany. Can you imagine Eaker, Doolittle, or even General Arnold having the chance to chat personally with the President? The way it stands now, Montgomery, via Churchill, has more influence with Roosevelt than our own chiefs of staff have.’ Bohnen drank a little of the Château Margaux and paused long enough to relish the aftertaste. ‘1928 was the great one, but this ’34 Margaux is a close contender. One day I’ll retire and devote the rest of my life to comparing the ’28s and ’29s.’
‘I guess we’ve got to keep hitting strategic targets,’ said Jamie quietly. He hadn’t wanted to get into this high-level argument that his father so obviously relished.
Bohnen shook his head. ‘We’re going after the Luftwaffe, Jamie. There’s no alternative. There’s not much time before we invade the mainland—we have to have undisputed air superiority over those beaches. General Arnold’s New Year orders will make it public record: destroy German planes in the air, on the ground, and while they’re still on the production lines. It’s going to be tough, damned tough.’
‘Don’t worry about me, Dad.’
‘I won’t worry,’ said Bohnen. His son looked so vulnerable he wanted to grab him and hug him as he used to when he was small. He almost reached across the table to take his hand, but fathers don’t do that to their grown-up fighter pilot sons. In some ways mothers are lucky.
Victoria arrived on time, and Bohnen was surprised by the tall, dark confident girl who greeted him. She was obviously well bred, with all those old-fashioned virtues he’d seen in Jamie’s mother so long ago.
‘You have a suite on the river, Colonel. You’re obviously a man of influence.’
‘How I wish I were, Miss Cooper.’
‘Charm, then, Colonel Bohnen.’
‘I’m not even a real colonel, just a dressed-up civilian. I’m a phony, Miss Cooper. Not one of your gilt or electroplated ones either. I’m a phony all the way through.’
She laughed softly. Bohnen had always said that a woman, even more than a man, will reveal everything you need to know about her by her laugh—not just by the things she’ll laugh at, or the time chosen for it, but by the sound. Victoria Cooper laughed beautifully, a gracious but genuine sound that came from the heart rather than from the belly.
‘You look too young to be Jamie’s father,’ she said.
‘Who could argue against a compliment like that?’ said Bohnen.
She went across to the table where Jamie was finishing his meal, and they kissed decorously.
‘Can I order some tea or coffee for you, Miss Cooper?’
‘Please call me Victoria. No, I’ll steal some of Jamie’s wine.’ Jamie watched the two of them; already they seemed to know each other well enough to spar in a way Jamie had never done before.
Bohnen brought another wineglass from his liquor cabinet. ‘Jamie tells me his mother is English,’ said Victoria.
‘Mollie likes to say that. The truth is, she arrived a little earlier than the doctor anticipated and her parents were in England. Tom was setting up a tractor plant near Bradford. Mollie was born in a grand house in Wharfedale, Yorkshire, delivered by the village midwife, so the story goes, with old Tom boiling up kettles of water and only an oil lamp to light the room.’
‘How romantic.’ She looked at Jamie, who smiled.
‘Do you know that part of the world, Victoria?’
‘I’ve passed through it on the train to Scotland.’
‘What a crime,’ said Bohnen. ‘I’ve ridden to hounds there more times than I can count. Marvellous countryside. Do you like horses?’
‘Not awfully,’ she admitted.
‘Well, I knew you had to have one major flaw, Victoria.’ He smiled. ‘Luckily it’s one my son will happily put up with. I remember the first time I put Jamie on a horse. He was very small, and he yelled enough to shake the stables down. The master of foxhounds came running out to see if I was beating the child to death.’ He turned to Jamie. ‘Remember that time at your uncle John’s farm in Virginia?’
‘Airplanes for me,’ said Jamie with some embarrassment.
‘He knows how to avoid questions he doesn’t like,’ said Bohnen. ‘He learned that from his mother.’
Jamie poured a little wine and said nothing.
‘My son has a mind of his own, Victoria. Perhaps you’ve already discovered how stubborn he can be.’ It was said in fun, but there was no mistaking the admonition behind it.
Victoria put a hand out to touch Jamie. His head was lowered but he raised his eyes to her and smiled.
‘Wouldn’t go to Harvard. Instead he went to Stanford.’
‘They let me start a year early,’ Jamie said.
‘And a lot of good that did,’ said Bohnen, smiling to show that he was no longer annoyed by it. He turned to Victoria. ‘He graduated a year early and started his law studies a year early…then he throws it all away to join the Air Force. You could have been practising law by now, Jamie. I could have placed you in the office of some of the smartest lawyers in Washington or New York.’
‘I wanted to join the Air Force.’
‘You would have been a colonel in the Judge Advocate’s corps.’ Getting no response to this he added, ‘But I suppose that wouldn’t be much substitute for flying P-51s over Germany.’
‘No, sir, it would not be.’
‘I have to admire him, Victoria. But he’ll never take my good advice.’ Bohnen laughed as if at his own failings.
‘And how much advice did you take from your father?’ asked Victoria. She had endured the same sort of criticism from her mother, always cloaked in geniality. And so often it was done like this, through a third party.
Her point was not lost on Bohnen. ‘I hope we Americans aren’t too brash for you, Victoria.’
‘My fortune-teller told me I’d meet two dark handsome forceful men.’
‘You don’t believe in fortune-tellers, Victoria? A sensible modern young woman like you?’
‘I believe in what I want to believe in,’ she said with a smile. ‘Surely you understand that?’
‘Exactly the way my analysts treat the strike photos. I understand that all right.’
Jamie was fidgeting with his wineglass, obviously getting ready to leave. ‘Finish the wine, Jamie. Don’t go before you finish the Margaux.’
Victoria heard a note of anxiety in Bohnen’s voice and felt sorry for him now. She could see how desperately he wanted his son to stay.
Jamie drank his wine slowly and got to his feet. ‘I’m taking Vicky to a show tonight. Then I have to go back to the base.’
Bohnen did not ask him which show, in case it was just a polite fiction. His son wanted his girl to himself, and why not? ‘Have a good time, Jamie.’
‘Good to see you again, Dad.’
‘Take care of yourself, Jamie. And you, Victoria.’ She gave him a kiss on the cheek. The girl understood, thought Bohnen. Children stop being children, but parents never stop being parents, doting parents. That’s the tragedy of it.
Bohnen picked up a heavy briefcase and opened it. ‘I’ve got a whole lot of reading to do in the next two hours,’ he told them. ‘It’s just as well you have to leave. The car is at your disposal—he’ll take you wherever you want to go. The driver is used to late nights.’
‘Take care of yourself,’ Jamie said.
Bohnen pretended to be fully occupied with the contents of his case. ‘Don’t get into trouble out there at Steeple Thaxted,’ he said without looking up from his papers, ‘or my general will take it out of my hide.’
He still hadn’t looked up when they went out. Jamie closed the door gently so as not to disturb him.
9 Captain James A. Farebrother (#ulink_826f9287-d085-5221-8cfc-c3b0d1ea05bc)
One of the disadvantages of sharing a room with Vince Madigan was the way in which he spread his possessions about him. Farebrother seldom saw his bed under the array of magazines, opera records, sports gear, lotions, unguents, hair restorers, half-completed love letters, and beribboned little packages of nylons or canned fruit that were a fundamental part of Vince Madigan’s love affairs.
It was Mickey Mouse who woke them the first morning after the 1943 Christmas stand-down. He was looking for a cigarette. ‘What’s been going on in here?’ said MM, looking at the stuff that Vince had strewn around the room. ‘Looks like you just took a hit from a 105.’
Winston came in and sniffed at Madigan’s footlocker.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Farebrother. ‘I went to London yesterday. I didn’t get back here until five this morning.’
‘I went to Cambridge,’ said MM. ‘My motorcycle’s out of action. I missed the liberty truck and it cost me seven pounds for a taxi.’
‘Jesus,’ said Vince, climbing out of bed. ‘Seven pounds! A cab driver will take you to London and find you a piece of tail for a carton of Luckies.’
MM said, ‘That’s just the kind of dumb remark you can expect from a PRO.’ He grimaced. ‘I didn’t have a carton of Luckies, dummy!’
Madigan yawned and pushed Winston away from his secret hoard of candy bars. ‘Where did you get to after the party, Jamie? I saw you picking Earl Koenige off the floor and then you and Vicky had disappeared.’
‘Hey,’ said MM. ‘That Vicky! She’s some dish!’ He described an hourglass with his outstretched hands.
‘You sure left me in a jam,’ Madigan complained. He had one of his socks on but couldn’t find the other. ‘The little dark girl came back after you’d left. Vera went crazy. If MM hadn’t been there she would have hospitalized me. Right, MM?’
‘Vera’s okay,’ said MM quietly.
‘Vera’s not just okay,’ said Vince Madigan indignantly. ‘She’s the goods. I told you she’s a sure thing, MM.’
MM didn’t want to hear that Vera was a sure thing. ‘Colonel Dan was looking for you yesterday, Jamie,’ he said to change the subject.
‘In person?’ said Farebrother.
MM nodded. ‘Well, that’s fame,’ said Vince Madigan.
‘I guess he figured you’d gone over the hill,’ said MM. He found Winston quietly gnawing a sock and tossed it back onto the bed without Madigan noticing.
‘My pass didn’t expire until roll call this morning,’ said Farebrother.
‘He said to be sure you knew you were on the board,’ said MM.
Farebrother nodded. It was no surprise to find that he was scheduled to fly. The shortage of pilots was such that Colonel Dan and the rest of the Group HQ officers were flying almost every mission that came along. ‘Operational?’
‘We’re not practising for a fly-by,’ said MM. ‘Who’s coming to eat?’
Farebrother ate with MM—they left Vince Madigan still searching for his sock—and after breakfast they played cards. Farebrother said something about Vera, but MM didn’t encourage further questions. He didn’t want anybody thinking that he had to make do with Vince Madigan’s cast-off girlfriends. There were too many jokes told about Madigan’s women lining up at the main gate, red-eyed and fat-bellied and asking to see the chaplain.
The pilots spent all morning waiting. The bombers were attacking the naval base at Kiel. It was a heavily defended target, but the 220th Fighter Group was assigned to the role of withdrawal support force and wouldn’t be needed until the bombers were on their way home.
The relaxed postures of the flyers were deceptive. Like amateur actors in a bad play, they held books and magazines without reading them, smoked without inhaling, and spoke without listening. Colonel Dan, wearing the short-sleeve khaki shirt he favoured, was standing in the corner, nervously scratching his upper arms, his fingernails leaving red weals. Major Kevin Phelan, Group Operations Officer, was with him. They were having a conversation they’d had many times before.
‘Last year Notre Dame had the greatest football team it’s ever had…begging your pardon, Kevin.’
Major Phelan fingered the nose he’d broken playing for the Fighting Irish, grinned and said, ‘Second greatest.’
‘But I’m not talking talent, I’m talking tactics. I’m talking about Clark Shaughnessy, and what he did for those University of Chicago kids, back in the thirties.’ The Colonel took a quick look at his watch before going on. ‘You’re too young to remember them winding up in the Rose Bowl, having won every last game on the schedule.’
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