Piece of Cake (3 page)

The trouble began when he realized he was becoming addicted to her. If they didn't make love at least every other night, he developed a craving for sex that obsessed him until it was satisfied. Then the craving started all over again. Sex obliterated his interest in food, duty, news, smalltalk, even flying. He could be in the cockpit running-up his engine, getting ready for takeoff, and in all the shudder and roar he sat brooding over a vision of Kit seen in the spinning arc of the propeller, naked and ready, while his limbs twitched and went slack and his mouth accumulated saliva. Eventually, reluctantly, he had to straighten up and swallow, forgo his lovely vision, concentrate on getting this throbbing machine up in the air.

It worried him, this addiction. There was the risk that it might affect his health. He noticed a certain lassitude on the mornings after his nights with her. It wasn't weariness or fatigue; it was more like abstraction tinged with irritability, but that sort of thing could easily lead to carelessness. When he was flying, his reactions seemed a little slower, his senses not quite so acute: his eyesight, especially, wasn't as sharp as it ought to be. That was a myth, of course, a tired old joke: too much sex had absolutely no effect on eyesight, none at all; everyone knew that. On the other hand, Hector couldn't focus as quickly or as clearly on distant objects as he used to be able to do. Also there were occasional headaches.

He wanted to discuss it with her but he was afraid to. Talk might destroy everything. He tried to discuss it with the RAF chaplain, failed to find the words, and left that man puzzled and wondering. One night he wrote a painful letter to his father, asking advice, but when he re-read it next morning the facts were so
appalling that he tore it up and burned the bits. His hands were trembling; his mouth was twisted sideways in despair and disgust. Before he quite knew what he was doing, his legs were taking him to the adjutant's office. He asked to see the squadron commander, urgently. The adjutant obliged.

“I want to apply for a transfer, sir,” Hector said huskily. “Immediately.”

“Yes? What's up?”

Hector clenched his teeth and stared at the blurred, upside-down markings on the CO's blotter. “Bad love affair, sir,” he said. He felt sick.

The CO propped his chin on his fist and made his pencil spin on the desktop.
Bloody silly reason for a posting,
he thought.
On the other hand it explains why he's been looking like a constipated cow lately
… The pencil skittered to a stop. He looked up and delivered his all-purpose, wry smile. “We'll miss you, old boy,” he lied fluently.

Hector was lucky. A violent mid-air collision had suddenly created an urgent need for pilots in another Gauntlet squadron which was scheduled to give an important aerobatic display in two weeks' time. This squadron was based outside Aberdeen. Hector was on the train to Scotland that same evening. The last thing he did before he left was send a telegram to Kit. A telegram was much easier to write than a letter, and it had a curtness that suited his state of mind. He never saw her again.

Pilot Officer H. G. Ramsay's file followed him to Aberdeen in due course, with a handwritten note that read
Emotionally immature?
That uncertainty didn't stop him getting promoted to flying officer a year later. Flying was no longer the most important thing in his life. He was hungry for promotion; flying was simply the fastest route to his goal of becoming Fighter Command's youngest-ever wing commander. He went on courses, and passed them. He changed squadrons, changed aircraft, flew Hawker Furies, Gloster Gladiators, Mark Two Gauntlets. His eyesight was no better but it was no worse: things sometimes tended to blur a bit, that was all. It didn't stop him getting promoted to flight lieutenant.

By now the year was 1937 and war was obviously on the way. Hector Ramsay was, naturally, impatient for it. Flying was all
very well, promotion was all very well, but what he really yearned for was the chance to lead a squadron in battle, to make a score, pick up a DFC, maybe a DSO. The autumn of 1938 looked very promising. Germany marched into Czechoslovakia and everything pointed to war, what with hundreds of thousands of children being evacuated from the cities of England, trenches dug in parks, gasmasks issued, a balloon barrage over London, all leave canceled, camouflage paint hastily slapped on the aircraft. To top it all, Hector became a squadron leader.

That was when he got his nickname. He was given a squadron—it was called Hornet squadron, nobody quite knew why—that was equipped with Furies. It was stationed at RAF Kingsmere in Essex—exactly where the German bomber fleets were expected to cross the coast. The Fury was a delightful little biplane with a top speed of 220 mph, whereas Germany's standard bomber, the Heinkel III, could fly at nearly 250 mph. The Dornier 17 was said to be even faster.

At his first meeting with his pilots, Hector Ramsay stood on a table and said: “Gentlemen, prepare to defend your country. Our airplanes are too slow. We cannot catch the Hun bombers. Therefore we must ram them.”

His announcement caused a thoughtful silence. In the event war did not break out; but from then on, Squadron Leader Ramsay was known as The Ram. Secretly, this pleased him. He acted up to his image—that of a pugnacious, aggressive commander, impatient for conflict, a leader whose men would follow him into the jaws of death if he gave the order—and he worked them hard.

In June 1939 Hornet squadron exchanged its Furies for Hurricanes. The Ram was immensely pleased. He launched the most impressive training program anyone could remember. It called for an extremely tough schedule of physical exercises to improve stamina as well as a vast amount of flying and theoretical work on engine maintenance, meteorology, gunmanship and the like. The Ram drove himself as hard as his men, and after five days he went down with a severe attack of shingles. The sores became so painful that he could scarcely move. Bitterly disappointed, he went off to a hospital in Torquay, determined to fight his way back to health in the minimum possible time. The squadron trundled on under a succession of temporary commanders, and this worried him. “Just
rest and relax and forget everything for a while,” the doctors said. “Let's face it, you're not going anywhere like that, are you?” The Ram smiled and agreed, but inside he was a-twitch with anger and impatience. The shingles got worse before they got better.

He was released in the third week of August and went straight back to Kingsmere. Maddeningly, the squadron was on leave. “The previous CO thought it was a good idea,” explained the adjutant, Flight Lieutenant Kellaway. “I mean, what with the balloon likely to go up before very long. A chance to see their families and so on.”

“Get them back,” the Ram said.

“Now?”

“Instantly.”

The telegrams went off. It was three days before the last man turned up. Pilot Officer Cattermole had been salmon-fishing in a remote corner of Ross and Cromarty. He brought a couple of fifteen-pounders, which he donated to the mess. The Ram was not impressed. “I don't like fish,” he said stiffly, “and I don't like pilots who take foreign holidays when Hitler's about to go on the rampage.”

“Not foreign, sir,” Cattermole said. “I went to Scotland.”

“Scotland's bloody foreign,” the Ram growled. Cattermole widened his eyes. “I've been there,” the Ram told him. “I know where it is, and it's not in England, which is the country you're paid to defend, laddy!”

“Britain, actually,” said Cattermole, whose mother was Scottish.

“You leave the political geography to me. Now get out of that damned silly fancy-dress.” Cattermole was wearing a Norfolk jacket, heather-mixture breeches with knee-length stockings of purple plaid, and hill climber's shoes. “You look like the Hound of the Baskervilles.”

Cattermole blinked. “Are you sure you've got that right, sir?” he said.

“I'm the squadron commander,” the Ram said, smiling grimly. “I don't
have
to get it right. I just have to say it, and it
is
right. Now I want you flying in half an hour.”

Cattermole turned to go, but hesitated. “My Hurricane's having some new bits put into it,” he said. “The fitters didn't expect me back so soon.”

“Then take somebody else's Hurricane.” The Ram waved at a machine that was coming in to land. “Take that one.”

“That's a Battle, sir.” They shared the airfield with a squadron of Battle bombers: single-engined monoplanes, sadly underpowered. The Ram squinted at it. “Well, what d'you expect me to do?” he demanded. “Turn it into a pumpkin?”

He kept them training all that day, using every available aircraft. They went up in sections of three to practice interceptions on civil airliners heading for Croydon airport. It was at the end of one of these flights that Mother Cox suffered from confusion.

Cox was an average-to-good pilot most of the time. Unlike some, he had a bird-like sense of how and why the airplane flew. Where the power came from was a sweet mystery to him: by some magic the twelve cylinders in the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine made the propeller spin at a highly satisfactory speed as long as he followed certain rituals involving magnetos and boost and radiator shutter and various other conjuring tricks in the cockpit; but—despite attending many lectures on the Merlin—he never really knew what made it go. On the other hand he understood instinctively what made a Hurricane fly. As soon as he released the brakes and let it roll for takeoff, Mother Cox began to sense the wash of air over and under the wings, the hint of lift in the tailplane, the hurrying stutter of the wheels, and then that vast invisible rush that rewarded the whole machine with the gift of flight.

For Mother Cox it was all as natural as swimming in the sky: he
knew
how his Hurricane felt when he made it bank, or dive, or side-slip; every throb and twitch was a message to his hands and feet and the seat of his pants. The feel of speeding air on his wings was as real to him as the touch of rushing snow to a skier.

All of which made it the more unfortunate that Mother Cox's brain had a design fault. Once in a while it failed to perform some very elementary job, like remembering the difference between left and right, or knowing which way clockwise goes.

On this day he had finished an hour of practice interceptions and he was ready for a spot of tea. He lost height on his approach to Kingsmere aerodrome; turned where he usually turned, just beyond the village church; watched his airspeed drift down from 130 to 120 to 110; and lowered his flaps. The sudden drag checked the Hurricane. Its speed fell away and the great humped nose lifted
itself. He could see very little of the airfield ahead but directly below him the rusty tangle of the barbed-wire perimeter fence came into view. He left the wire behind, carefully saving height until the speed was down to 90, and as it slipped into the eighties he let the plane sink and sink, groping for the grass, still holding that last-second balance between lift and gravity until the wheels could meet the ground and run to a safe standstill: another flight, another landing, another scribbled entry in the logbook. The tail-wheel touched and raced. The Hurricane sank onto its belly and hurled Mother Cox against his straps as its gaping air-scoop rammed into the turf and hacked out a brief trench before it got ripped off and flattened, by which time the great two-bladed propeller was digging its own grave with appalling speed and a noise like a thousand circular saws gone berserk, a racket which ceased as the blades thrashed themselves to splintered death and the engine abruptly cut out. Mother Cox had done that. He was frightened and bewildered but he had just enough sense left to do that. The mutilated Hurricane skidded along with its nose in the dirt while Mother Cox wondered what the holy hell had gone wrong. It couldn't be his fault. The undercarriage was locked down. The red lights proved that.

Or should they be green?

Oh Christ.

The Ram was sitting at his desk, leafing through an Air Ministry publication, when Mother Cox reported to his office ten minutes later. He did not look up.

“Hitler has two thousand bombers,” the Ram said. He spoke so softly that Cox had to lean forward. “We have fewer than five hundred fighters. Now some of our fighters are biplanes, so they have two wings. Does that make them twice as fast?” He looked up. His stare was intense and unblinking.

“No, sir.”

“Half as fast?”

Mother Cox didn't know what to say. He could hear himself breathing; it sounded heavy and deliberate, like a sleeping animal; after a couple of seconds he sniffed sharply, just to break that awful rhythm. “Our biplanes aren't much good, sir,” he mumbled. A fear was forming at the back of his mind: the Ram was going to have him transferred to some bloody old Gladiator squadron.

“Not much good,” the Ram murmured. “Not much good … That's far too vague, Cox. It really is. War is a precise and calculated business. You shoot to kill. If you miss a Hun, would you say that you are not much good?” Again, the rigid stare. Cox briefly shook his head. “Would you say that you are bloody awful?” the Ram asked. His voice was rising. Cox just looked, his expression as flat as his spirits. “Would you say that you are sickeningly lousy?” the Ram demanded. He threw the Air Ministry publication into a desk drawer and kicked it shut; the bang made Cox jump. “Would you say that you are a sodding disgrace to the Royal Air Force in general and a stinking menace to Fighter Command in particular?” The Ram stood up. “Would you say that you are acting as a collaborator and fifth columnist for the benefit of Nazi Germany,” he shouted, “and therefore a traitor, a filthy despicable traitor to your own
country?”
He hit that last word with a passion that made the clerks in the next room stop typing.

“Sir, that's not fair,” Cox protested. “Damn it all, I only bust the undercart and—”

“Not fair?” the Ram roared. “Not fair? What if Hitler sends his two thousand bombers against us tomorrow? What if his entire bloody air force is on its way here
now?
How do you plan to shoot them down, Cox? Are you going to run into the wind with your arms flapping and a Colt revolver gripped between your tiny teeth? Because you've made very damn sure that
one
Hurricane won't fly, haven't you? Plowed up my nice field with its poor suffering belly, didn't you? Bust the prop, gave the engine a hernia, and dragged the airplane's guts through the dirt while you sat in the cockpit picking your nose and listening to Ambrose and his Orchestra on your radio, and don't tell me I'm wrong because the control tower kept screaming at you throughout your approach but
you weren't bloody well paying attention!”