Derek Robinson - Damned Good Show

Silk was not on standby duty the day that Flight Lieutenant McHarg was declared fit and came into the Mess.

German measles had not been kind to him. He looked gaunt and grim. Also angry. He hated waste, and that included waste of time. He had joined the RAF as a boy apprentice in 1922. In the years between the wars the Treasury kept the Armed Forces on a very tight budget. McHarg learned that the road to promotion demanded a mean and miserly grip on stores; ideally, nothing should be used. He was good at that. Even so, it was twelve years before he got commissioned: a pilot officer at the age of twenty-eight. Now he was thirty-three, and dealing with aircrew who were pilot officers at nineteen. They knew nothing of tradition. They treated his bombs as cheaply as boiled sweets. If they met a strong headwind on their way home, or if an engine began coughing, they cheerfully jettisoned their load in the sea. McHarg and generations of armaments officers had carefully guarded those bombs ever since they were stockpiled at the end of what McHarg called the Great War. The aircrew thought him an old man. That amused him. With his bare hand he could unscrew the most corroded fuse on a bomb faster than they could open a bottle of lemonade. They were children.

Silk observed McHarg from the opposite side of the Mess and decided that he didn’t look happy. It could mean anything. Silk went off to find Sergeant Trimbull in the Motor Transport Section.

Trimbull said he was fairly sure that Flight Lieutenant McHarg had not been near his Bentley since he got over the measles. Of course he couldn’t be positive.

“The car may be a bit muddy,” Silk said. “A wash and a polish would be nice.” Trimbull sucked his teeth. “My Hampden needs an air test this afternoon,” Silk said. “Can you get away for an hour or two?”

“Easily, sir. Wash and polish. As good as done.”

“Splendid.” The sun was shining. “Perfect day for stooging around England. Um… You might find the odd footprint on the back of the Bentley.”

“Don’t worry about it, sir. Will we be doing any practice gunnery?” Silk was about to say Probably not when Trimbull added, “Only I’ve always had an ambition to fire one of those machine guns.”

Silk thought of what the Bentley had been through. “This is your lucky day, Sergeant.” Neither man smiled: conspiracy was a serious business. “Not a word to McHarg, of course.”

“Of course, sir.”

The bombers were dispersed around the edge of the airfield as a safeguard against enemy attack; nobody noticed Trimbull, in borrowed flying overalls, climb into the Hampden. He had never flown before. The takeoff, twice as bumpy and ten times as loud as he expected, made his heart race with excitement. The climb was alarmingly steep; his ears popped; the countryside was shrinking into a toytown world. Trimbull was fascinated. The bomber was so narrow that when he stood behind Silk, his elbows brushed the fuselage. He began to count all the gauges and switches and indicators crammed onto the instrument panel and overflowing down the sides, reached twenty-five, saw a dozen more and gave up.

Silk found a field of cloud and made fun of it, skimming the surface, rushing down slopes, charging up hills. Then they were over the sea. It looked as if it had been spray-painted a deep metallic blue. Silk found a fluffy cloud and flew slowly around it while Trimbull, installed in the upper gunner’s position, raked it savagely with bursts of fire while the real gunner guided his arm. Trimbull enjoyed watching the tracer bullets most of all. They streaked like red devils. Silk flew home at a hundred feet, hurdling the power lines, while Trimbull gripped the pilot’s seatback and flexed his knees and silently cheered. Altogether, a successful trip.

At Clifton College, Langham had won prizes for his English essays. His sentences grew like ivy. They were rich with subordinate clauses and parentheses; his handling of the semi-colon was masterly. Often his sentences ran until they made complete paragraphs. He could qualify a statement five different ways without breaking sweat. But he couldn’t write a letter to Zoë Herrick. He tried, and immediately felt swamped by a flood of remembered lust. If he put this hunger into words, his writing became a scribble and then an exhausted scrawl. He gave up. He telephoned her. Easier. Also more dangerous.

“Darling!” she said. “How sweet of you. By the way, you forgot to take your underpants.”

“Damn… Look, chuck them out.”

“Never. I’m wearing them. Not as nice as you next to the skin, but I suppose a girl has to make sacrifices. There’s a war on. Have you been looping the loop in your sexy Spitfire?”

“Actually, there’s been a bit of a change. I’m off Spitfires. We’re flying Hampdens now. Twice as many engines, and a ton of bombs. Plus a crew to boss about. So I’m frightfully high-powered.”

“What fun. I had a dog called Harrington when I was small.”

“Not Harrington. Hampden.”

Brief pause. “Harrington. King Charles spaniel. I should know, darling, he was my bloody dog.”

He let her win. “What are you up to? Apart from my underwear.”

“If I were apart from your underwear, darling, I’d be stark naked.”

“Ah.” His loins gave a small leap. “I know a few pilots who wear their girl-friends’ silk stockings on a long flight. Keeps the legs warm.”

“Precious, you may have the pick of my lingerie the instant we’re married. Are you free a week on Wednesday? Lincoln cathedral, two o’clock. The bishop got a special license for us. He’s my godfather, he swore to protect me from the flesh and the devil but nobody said anything about Spitfire pilots.”

“That’s because we’re unspeakable.” Let her think he flew a Spitfire. What harm could it do?

Silk lay stretched on a sofa in the Mess anteroom, engrossed in a paperback called A Bullet for Your Pains. He was within a page or two of discovering whodunit when a servant presented Flight Lieutenant McHarg’s compliments and requested Mr. Silk’s presence in his office on a matter of some importance.

This had never happened before.

McHarg was at his desk. He pointed to a straightback chair without looking up. He was reading a typewritten report and following every word with his forefinger. Silk looked around the room, and saw framed photographs of McHarg and his Bentley everywhere, so he looked at the floor instead. McHarg finished reading and stapled the pages with a crash of his fist that made Silk jump. “What doesn’t grow on trees?” he demanded. His voice was still grounded in Glasgow.

“Fish,” Silk said. “Footballs. Fountain-pens. I give up.”

But McHarg had lost interest. He plucked at a hair in his left nostril until he detached it and rubbed his fingers together to dispose of it. “You carried out an air test, Mr. Silk,” he said, and sneezed so violently that his torso convulsed. “During the flight, your upper gunner expended two drums of ammunition.”

“That’s right.”

“An air test is not a gunnery exercise.”

“True.”

“So this was a case of negligent discharge of ammunition.”

“On the contrary. I authorized it, for the defense of the airplane.”

“Against which enemy machine? None has been reported over England.”

Silk relaxed. “That’s where we differ. Any fighter that comes sniffing around me is hostile, in my eyes. That’s what happened. A Spitfire pilot came too close and I told my gunner to scare him off.”

“You attacked a Spitfire.”

“Damn right I did. Didn’t you hear of the Battle of Barking Creek? Three days after the war began, a bunch of Spits went up to intercept raiders in the Thames estuary. The Huns were actually Hurricanes but that didn’t stop the Spits shooting down two of them, did it? Well, my Hampden looks a lot like a Dornier 17. I don’t trust fighter pilots.”