Piece of Cake Read online

  “How did you start it?” Cattermole asked.

  “The key was in the ignition,” Patterson said. “I just swung the handle and off she went, first time.”

  “This must have been their getaway tractor,” Stickwell said, brushing yellow powder out of his hair.

  “With a great big farm-wagon hitched on behind?” Cox said.

  “For the rest of the gang, Mother,” Cattermole explained patiently. “We’ve stumbled on a very big organization. We shall probably get a medal for this.”

  “We’ll get a colossal bollocking from the Ram if he ever hears about it,” said Cox.

  “The Ram’s in London,” Stickwell said. “God’s in his heaven and I’m damn hungry. There’s nothing like a good healthy spew in the fresh country air to give a chap an appetite.”

  Patterson climbed back onto the tractor. “Home for breakfast, chaps!” he said. But this time the tractor refused to start. They took turns winding the starting-handle; nothing came out of the engine but soft grunts and feeble puffs of black smoke. “Buggeration,” Patterson said.

  “Come on, let’s walk,” Mother Cox urged. He was growing more and more nervous as the sun rose.

  They set off. Stickwell and Cattermole began a serious conversation about the significance of becoming twenty-one; the day before had been Pip Patterson’s twenty-first birthday. “It’s a definite milestone,” Stickwell said. “Right to vote, for a start. And you can get married. Take out hire-purchase debts. Go bankrupt. Get a mortgage.”

  “Who cares about all that junk?” said Moggy Cattermole, who was only twenty. “I’m not interested in any of it. Are you, Pip?”

  “Not much.” Patterson was beginning to worry about the broken tractor and its battered trailer.

  “The big danger, as I see it, is women,” said Stickwell. “Once they know you’re twenty-one and therefore legally available, they’ll do absolutely anything to get your bags off.” Patterson looked interested. “Pure and innocent they may appear,” Stickwell warned, “but you can’t trust ’em in a dark corner on a hot night. That’s my experience.”

  “You don’t say?” Patterson was intrigued.

  “My father once told me that all women are natural predators,” Cattermole remarked. “He said they’d strip you naked and suck your blood and then send you the bill.”

  “There you are, then,” Stickwell said.

  “Mind you, he had five sisters and three daughters. And two wives.”

  “Outnumbered from the bally start, poor devil,” Stickwell said.

  “What d’you mean, Sticky: they’ll do anything to get a chap’s bags off?” Patterson asked.

  “I think we’re going the wrong way,” Cox said. Patterson looked at him with dislike. “Well, it’s no good us walking away from Kingsmere, is it?” Cox demanded. “I think we ought to find someone and ask.”

  They stopped walking.

  “What a bore you are, Mother,” Cattermole said. “I certainly shan’t invite you to my twenty-first party.”

  Heavy trampling sounds came from the other side of a hedge, and two large horses looked at them. “Hello!” Stickwell exclaimed. One of the horses blew smoke through its nostrils.

  “I think they’re trying to tell us something,” Patterson said.

  Hector Ramsay couldn’t wait. He had never had the gift of patience.

  When he was a boy his restlessness had been quite endearing, sometimes; at boarding school, or at home in Hampshire, during the school holidays, young Hector had always been the leader of the gang, not interested in explaining or persuading but so brimful of energetic ideas that he usually got his own way by sheer thrustfulness. Or, looking at it another way, obstinacy.

  As a young man he went on attacking life with a sledgehammer, as if it were some gigantic clam to be forced open. This was less attractive than his boyish gusto; it showed a relentless determination to succeed that most people found praiseworthy at first, a bit grim after a while, and frankly bloody tedious before long. If it was theoretically admirable for a seventeen-year-old to know so precisely what he wanted—he wanted to be the youngest-ever wing commander in RAF Fighter Command—in practice Hector Ramsay’s single-minded ambition was a bore. Even his father (by then retired from the Royal Navy) found him wearing, and his mother had long ago given him up, ever since the time he refused to attend his eldest brother’s wedding because it clashed with Open Day at the local RAF station. There had been the most enormous family bust-up over that. In the end Hector had gone with them to the church, slouching and silently contemptuous of the whole silly ritual; but he walked out halfway through the ceremony. He got into one of the hired cars and had himself driven to the airfield, where he spent the rest of the day happily climbing in and out of cockpits. There was an even louder family bust-up when he got home, although his mother admitted to herself that she was wasting her breath.

  Hector knew what he wanted, and he couldn’t wait to get it. She sometimes wondered why he was so impatient. Because he was the youngest son? Because both his brothers had already done well in the Navy? Was that why Hector chose the RAF? Was he self-centered because he wanted to be a fighter pilot, or did he want to be a fighter pilot because that satisfied his self-centered nature? It depressed her that he was so intensely narrow, and sometimes she even wondered about his brain. His had been a difficult birth, late and awkward and full of pain. Hector hadn’t seemed to want to come into the world at all, he’d been dragged into it; and ever since he discovered what it was like, all his energies had been spent on getting far away from it. In a fighter plane. Alone.

  So everyone was relieved when Hector Ramsay won a scholarship to the RAF College at Cranwell. He did well, got his commission, got his wings, got his posting to a fighter squadron. The family relaxed and began to treat him like a normal human being. There was even a spell when it almost looked as if Hector might get engaged.

  He was flying Gloster Gauntlets—fixed-undercarriage biplanes with twin machine-guns, pure Dawn Patrol stuff—from an airfield in Cambridgeshire. She was Australian, a diplomat’s daughter, studying at one of the art schools on the fringe of the University. Her name was Kit and she had a freckled candor—together with legs like a dancer’s and breasts like grapefruit—that surprised and captivated him. She took him to bed (in her rented cottage at Grantchester) on his third visit, and that experience made him eager to return. What on earth did she see in him? Well, he wasn’t bad-looking, he had a kind of unblinking concentration that amused her, and he was in a different class from those flannelled undergraduates, all books and bats and bicycles, who jostled for her attention: at least Hector Ramsay did something; sometimes she could even smell the engine-oil on him when he came straight from flying. But what attracted her most was his enormous need. Here was a man so isolated that he could not reach out. Kit gave him her love, or so she believed, as an act of lifesaving. He was irresistible. For a few weeks they were like a nut and a bolt: gratifying when together, useless when apart. It wasn’t even necessary for them to say very much; they knew what they thought and they knew what they wanted. Once, when they were getting into bed, she paused and sat back on her heels and said, “Presumably you’re in love.” Hector crouched with his chin on his knees and hugged his bare legs, while he thought about it. “Presumably,” he said. They looked at each other. He was thinking: Am I? How do I know? How can I tell? She saw the act of thought crease his forehead like wind ruffling water, and she laughed. He raised his eyebrows. “Tell you later,” she said. But she never did.

  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 r
eady, 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 wen
t 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.