Derek Robinson - Damned Good Show

“Can you say something about that to the pilot?”

“He knows already.”

“Well, tell him anyway.”

Rollo filmed the navigator, full figure, hard at work; then head and shoulders, turning his intercom switch, saying: “Hello, skip. We’d better fly a zigzag course, to miss the places where we know Jerry’s got a lot of flak batteries and searchlights.”

“What a bloody boring idea,” Silk said. “I think I’ll go down and strafe a few hospitals.”

“Don’t worry,” Kate told Woodman. “We can edit that out.”

“Now point at the map,” Rollo said. “Follow the zigzag with your finger. Slowly.” He filmed the navigator’s hand in close-up.

Another little sequence in the can.

Every few minutes, Woodman gave Silk a change of course. Rollo went to the cockpit a couple of times. He saw searchlights in the far distance and what might have been flak twinkling, but he knew it would be a waste of film. A lot of cloud was building up, white as cauliflower in the moonlight. The flak would look like stars and the searchlights would look like cracks in somebody’s blackout. He went back to the bed. His feet were cold and he was afraid to stamp them. The cookie was only inches beneath his boots.

He could feel this opportunity slipping away from him. No chance to film the enemy coast, or the belt of lights and guns behind it. Unable to film the all-important faces of the crew. Not allowed in the gun turrets. What was left? Flak over Hanover: presumably that would be highly filmable, unless Silk desynchronized again. As for the climax, dropping the cookie, he suddenly realized he wouldn’t see it leave Dog, wouldn’t see it fall, might not see it explode if a wing obscured his view. Then what? A long trudge home, also in blackness. Rollo felt cramp in his left calf. His parachute harness was too tight in the crotch. The awful truth came to him: bomber ops were not necessarily exciting. They were endlessly threatening and frightening and difficult, but the drama was all in the danger and the danger was hidden by the night. You had to fly on ops to know the fear of sudden death, and he couldn’t film fear. With everyone wearing oxygen masks, he couldn’t even film the look of fear. He’d drawn a double blank. That was when Chubb, in the rear turret, said: “Fighter behind.”

Silk said, “Which side?”

“Port quarter, a thousand feet below. Five hundred yards away. He’s climbing, in and out of cloud, skip.”

“Wireless op to the astrodome,” Silk said. “Search starboard, Mac”

“On my way, skip.”

Silence for half a minute. Silk had dropped the left wing a bit to give the rear gunner a better view. “Lost him, skip,” Chubb said, and immediately shouted, “Fighter! Turn starboard!” but before Silk could swing the Wellington, Chubb was firing and the harsh chatter of his guns cut through the engine-roar. Then nothing. Rollo stood and cursed. Here was battle, behind closed doors. “He’s buggered off, skip,” Chubb said. “Dived away. I scared him.”

“Where there’s one, there’s two,” Silk said. “Keep searching to starboard, Mac”

Campbell was standing on a box, with his head in the astrodome, just like the dome on top of the flare-path caravan. All it needs is a tiny spotlight on his face , Rollo thought. Make a hell of a shot. Also a hell of a target. Another example of Blazer’s Law of Bomber Ops. If it’s worth filming, you can’t see it.

“Some bastard’s out there, skip,” Campbell said. “Maybe one of ours, maybe not. He’s following us. Starboard quarter.”

“Don’t like it,” Silk said. “We’ll run away and hide.”

He turned toward a sprawling, top-heavy cloudbank. He put the nose down a touch, opened the throttles an inch, and drove into a bleak and gloomy fog. Now he was flying on instruments alone. He sent Campbell back to his radio.

Woodman kept feeding course adjustments. “Twenty-five minutes to target,” he said. Silk thanked him. Kate, lying on the bed and dreaming of hot soup, was impressed by everybody’s calmness. They were as matter-of-fact as if they were delivering coal in Camberwell. Rollo stood and watched the nav draw neat lines and make tidy calculations. There was nothing else to watch. The floor suddenly slanted and he fell to his knees. Kate rolled off the bed. Woodman was grabbing his pencils and maps. In the cockpit, Silk and Mallaby were flung against their straps as the Wimpy plunged into a hole, hit bottom and was kicked sideways. Silk labored and won back some control but she still kept bouncing and plunging. They knew what was wrong. Cumulo-nimbus cloud was full of tortured air. The Met man had predicted a risk of electrical storms over the North Sea. He’d got the risk right but the place wrong: the storms were still over Germany. Lightning flashes were making the cloud bright. The electrical discharge swamped Dog from end to end and filled her with a pale glow. This was St. Elmo’s Fire, and the crew had experienced it before, but never so intensely. A blue flame danced from every external point. The propellers were brilliant with multicolored light; they spun like Catherine wheels. The gunners were looking at flames a yard long sparking between their sights. In the cockpit the instruments were drunk and incapable. That was when lightning struck Dog.

Kate, flat on the floor, was convinced the bang and the flash had broken the Wimpy in half. But when she could see again, Dog was still in one piece, still being bucked and kicked by the cu-nim. Parts of the radio were red-hot and Campbell was beating out a small fire. Just when Rollo’s brain told him he should be filming this, the flow of St. Elmo’s Fire vanished. Silk had flown the bomber out of cloud and into clean air.

He tried to do an intercom check and nobody answered. The intercom was dead. He sent Mallaby to make a tour of Dog. He came back and said everyone was intact. Bruised and scraped, but intact.

Two problems.

The compass was spinning, reversing, chasing its tail. It needed time to recover its wits. And the port engine was surging. Its revs climbed and fell, climbed and fell. The lopsided pull sent Dog wandering about the sky. Silk kept her out of cloud and nursed the engines back to health and harmony. Recovery took many minutes, and Dog lost much height. In the end she was down to six thousand feet, and Silk was lost.

He got unstrapped and slid out of his seat and let Mallaby take the controls. Silk clambered over the spar and had a shouted conference with the navigator. They were off oxygen, so talk was easier. Woodman had tried to keep track of all the twists and turns, but without a compass it was an impossible task. What he needed was a good pinpoint. He went forward. Silk peered at the smoking radio and had a few words with Campbell. Then he spoke to Rollo and Kate.

“Awfully dull, isn’t it?” he bawled. “You should have brought a book.”

Rollo felt useless. He had to do something, so he touched the goggles on Silk’s forehead. “Why wear these?”

“In case we get a brick through the window. Shocking draft.” He went back to his office.

Rollo tried to picture a pilot sitting in the hurricane blast that would rage through a smashed windscreen. His imagination was too good, and he turned it off. The nav hadn’t returned. Rollo could see he wasn’t in the cockpit. It didn’t take long to work out that Woodman must be in the bomb-aimer’s position. No flak, no searchlights, so Dog wasn’t over the target. Woodman was looking for it. The nav was peering through the window, trying to find Hanover. Silk was stooging around Germany, totally lost, and what’s more the gunners couldn’t call him if they saw a fighter, because the intercom was kaput. Rollo was about to tell all this to Kate when he saw that she was being sick into her paint tin. He decided that she didn’t need to know. He gave her his handkerchief, to wipe her face.