The Gun Garden

For B.

Chapter One

We didn’t stay to do battle with Me 109s. I saw them before they saw us – two black minus signs against the sun-bleached sky, south-west of Sicily and just north of Cape Bon, flying straight and level in our direction. Beside me on the jump-seat, Gage saw them, too. I heard his indrawn breath and his ‘Watch it, Skipper!’ almost at the same time as I drew the stick hard back. I had a momentary glimpse of Routh, just ahead of me in the other Wellington, taking evasive action, corkscrewing upwards. Then the Mediterranean fell away from under my feet, and V-Victor began to climb towards those pillows of white cumulus with the agonising slowness of a fat woman puffing up to bed.

Once up there, it wasn’t so nice either. Like all cumulus, the good-tempered-looking bosomy white stuff was as grey as after-shave lather, full of creepy tendrils, ghostly hands that blindfolded the windscreen, sneaky upcurrents that took you this way and that, and things that went bump-bump in this artificial night. One minute we were soaring up leaving our stomachs behind in a whirligig lift, and the next we had come down to a sort of invisible earth with a smart clout in the middle of our underbelly. At the best of times with all this secret radar equipment attached to her, V-Victor wasn’t what anyone could call aerodynamically clean. Aerials and masts and antennae stuck out from her like the banderillas in a Spanish bull, one second before the coup de grâce.

‘New course to Malta’ – Jonah’s slow Welsh lilt over the intercom – ‘one two five degrees.’

Until three days ago, when Routh’s crew and mine had been posted there, Malta had been no more to me than a place where they had a funny sort of cross and which had something to do with Crusaders. I wasn’t unduly worried at first when I heard. Malta sounded a reasonable sort of place. Warm, sunny, bags of sailing and sea bathing. Not a bad place after wet and windy Ireland to acquire a smooth Mediterranean tan.

Mediterranean—

Separated, isolated, boxed in as the three Services were in 1942, so that with rigid biblical exactitude the war effort’s left arm did not know what the hell its right arm was about, the word Mediterranean did ring a bell even with me, an anti-U boat pilot in Coastal Command.

‘The Med,’ I had said to Flight Lieutenant Routh over bacon and eggs in Limavady Mess. ‘I didn’t know we had any of the Med left.’

‘We haven’t. At least not much. Malta is surrounded by the enemy… a thousand miles from the nearest friendly base.’

I remember he emanated a solemn Henry the Fifthish aura… the fewer men the greater share of honour. An aura that was heightened by my own alarmed expression as I dipped a piece of bread in the egg yolk and said, ‘You’re kidding!’

Routh wasn’t exactly the sort of person to joke about anything, let alone the war, but bearing in mind that he was a dedicated peacetime pilot, one of the leavening of professional players in this R.A.F. of Neo-Gentlemen, who logged every combat hour with the accuracy of a miser counting his gold and who read the Scotsman and the Manchester Guardian for preference, and not because the Daily Mirror was worn to shreds, I was inclined to dismiss this as another Routhism. What I couldn’t dismiss was Chambers’ Concise Atlas and the nasty position that Malta occupied on page seven. Nor the Wing Commander’s pep talk before we left Limavady. He didn’t actually say ‘Sooner you than me’. What he did say was ‘Wish I was going with you’. Which in the Language of 77 Squadron meant precisely the same.

The day we left, there was low cloud and drizzle over the grey waters and green banks of Lough Foyle. Over the intercom before we took off, Routh announced on the R/T from X-Xray, ‘Well… here we go!’ From now on we were a little flight on our own of two Wellingtons of which he was the C.O. ‘I hear they’re expecting big things from us at Malta. Let’s show ’em, chaps!’

I don’t know about his own crew, but there was a horrified silence from mine. Our job had been to stooge over the Atlantic escorting convoys and looking for U-boats. In Limavady the steaks were good and the Guinness flowed like mountain streams. Big things meant diving through flak and having a go at Jerry fighters and low-level bombing and all the stuff that the newspapers said the R.A.F. boys just dreamed all day about doing. Well, I’d woken up from my dreaming with a horrible feeling I hadn’t known how lucky I’d been in Northern Ireland.

The feeling grew on me the nearer to Malta we flew. When we landed in Gibraltar, they told us that Malta was in such an unhappy position, the island could have expected big things from a flight of seagulls that succeeded in making it across the Med. ‘They’re being shot to pieces and slowly strangled,’ an erk with big monkey ears who was refuelling V-Victor told me. ‘Starved into surrender. They’ve eaten all the goats they ever had in the flipping place. There’s no chocolate, no butter and’ – saving his ace of trumps till the last – ‘hardly any beer.’

On the strength of that melancholy news, though our night hours there were supposed to be spent sleeping, the sergeants in my crew took off into Gibraltar to buy up all the eatables and drinkables they could lay their hands on. Gage had come into the second pilot’s seat straight from munching his way through an expensive public school, and was as dedicated to his stomach as Routh was to the Air Force. He was always cadging Jonah’s flying ration chocolate off him, because Jonah doesn’t like sweets, and he always spoke as though he had a lollipop in his mouth, for which he had the micky taken out of him by Mitchell, my top gunner, who had been a crewman on the Sydney ferryboat, and Hopgood, my third Wop/ag who had been a motor mechanic in Toronto.

My navigator, Pilot Officer Jones, and Warrant Officer Priestley (who had once taught physics and was therefore my radar gen man) and I stayed dutifully on the aerodrome collecting more fearful-sounding gen. No convoy could now get through to Malta: Kesselring was obliterating the place with a thousand aircraft of Luftflotte Ten: a whole squadron of Blenheims had been wiped out last week. Not that we’d ever get to Malta, the erk with the big ears said, for the Gibraltar runway had been made out of the race-track, and was so short the betting was 5–1 against our radar-clobbered Wellingtons ever getting off it.

And if, by some miraculous chance or by some fluky wind or some other act of grace we did get airborne, worse – so Big-ears said – would inevitably follow. Did I see that wire back there, fifty yards behind the strip? Well, behind that was Franco Spain… and Franco Spain was as full of Nazi agents as the Navy was of bull. I whistled. I remember peering towards the wire, convinced that I could see square-headed men, Lili Marlenes with binoculars held to their enormous Aryan eyes. Quick as a flash, Big-ears said, news would be radioed to Italy the moment we were airborne, and out would come flight after flight of Me’s, hell-bent on intercepting us.

Which was why when we did manage to take off, Routh and I flew in close formation right down on the water just north of the African coast, keeping our fingers crossed that Big-ears was also a Big-mouth – till now, when it looked as though he was right.

‘Keep your eyes skinned,’ I said over the intercom to the gunners, as we still bumped up and down hither and yon – ‘I don’t want those bastards creeping up on us.’

We were uncomfortably near to Sicily, and God knew how many more Me 109s were behind the other two that I’d seen. A splatter of mild rain drummed lightly on the Wellington’s sides, and I jumped as if it had been machine-gun fire. My hands were sweating with the effort of keeping her steady – but not only with that. We came to a sudden clearing in the cloud, the sheltering roof of mist above gave way, and we were abruptly in the bright spotlight of the late afternoon sun. It flung a tiny black image of us on to the heads of the cumulus some two hundred feet below, and once again, I jumped in my seat, momentarily mistaking our shadow for an enemy aircraft.

There was no sign of X-Xray. I looked this way and that, meanwhile trying to think of something flippant to say. In a little while, so the thinning cauliflower tops told me, our shelter would have petered out for good and we’d be right in the clear again. I was anxious not to lose Routh. Two was company. One in this enemy-ridden corner of the Med was very lonesome. Behind me, I could hear Jonah breathing laboriously over his navigation chart. Up in the cockpit, I could smell Gage chewing his favourite mintoes. I licked my lips nervously, but all I could think of to say was an echo of Routh’s words at Limavady, ‘That was showing ’em, chaps!’, though what it showed them apart from a clean pair of heels, I hadn’t the remotest idea.

Contrary to the carefully cultivated public image, R.A.F. pilots are not long-limbed, clean-living young men with fine jaws and steady eyes, aching to get airborne and do battle with the Hun. Mostly they are about my age, which is twenty-one, and a lot of them had only left school for about a year or so, as I had, and some are, as I am, fairly nondescript-looking and of medium height and sandy hair. And though all of us like to fly, we all like to live, too. And the second by pure logic is much more important than the first. We also like to smoke too much, drink too much, and spend far too much money chasing the soft sweet girls in the little Irish towns, and the tougher, bouncier W.A.A.F. in their neat blue uniforms and their bulgy working slacks. And the Hun was a faceless hand on an ugly aeroplane, or a big grey battleship with too many guns. The war, an incomprehensible roundabout of tough speeches, contradictory news bulletins, a lot of fingers that didn’t get unstuck, and how we were doing in any other theatre of war, now Britain was surrounded, was probably clearer to the Nazis than it was to us. By some odd quirk, most of us did not relish the idea of being blown to bits or slowly drowned or burned to a crisp. Yet that was likelier to be the lot of R.A.F. aircrew than it was to make sizeable headway with the blonde behind the bar at the Limavady Arms, or the girl with the Mona Lisa smile called Esmé who was reputedly waiting for Jim Mitchell back in Aussieland. It was the law of averages. It was like a sum. Something I might have been set for mental arithmetic in my prep school days. If it takes the German war machine three months to account for half an R.A.F. Squadron, how long will it take them to account for the whole lot? Hurry up over there, Peter Forrester! No, don’t take notes, you’re supposed to do this in your head. For that you can tell me how long it would take two aircraft posted to Malta to be accounted for, where everything happens at the double.

The last of the cumulus drifted away from under our feet. The afternoon sunlight flooded the cockpit. I saw the Mediterranean below me flat and blue and seemingly empty. From my eagle’s eye view, I let my eyes travel slowly all round the arc of my visibility.

Still no sign of Routh. No sign either, thank God, of the Me 109s.

I breathed again a little more easily. Gently I eased the stick forward, lowering ourselves in a shallow curve once more to hug the deck. We were skimming over the water at a hundred knots, and it looked just like the swimming bath at school. Everyone’s morale had begun to climb when I heard a brief spurty noise just behind me, and over the intercom Priestley said, ‘Blast… that’s the A.S.V. packed in!’

I didn’t think much of it. Malta was only an hour away, and we should get there before dark. Our radar – or Anti-Surface-Vessel as it was called – was always fading out on us. It was the early prototype of airborne radar. The screen had a fuzzy green time base, measured off in miles, out of which would shoot echoes or blips like pins and needles of light. When it was working well, liners would show up at thirty miles, destroyers at twenty, submarines at eight and a big green scribble (very comforting to the eye) would announce land at a range of eighty miles or more.

Automatically I said, ‘Can you do anything about it?’

‘Nothing, Skip. You should have seen those sparks. Talk about fireworks!’

‘Oh well,’ I shrugged my shoulders. It was just one of those things you could do nothing about. No good trying to mess around with wires and valves. You just thanked your stars that up till now it had been working well. ‘Malta’s not far now. Course still 125, Navigator?’

‘Still 125, Skipper.’

And we flew on like that, a cross between a porpoise and a flying fish, chasing our shadow while the sun slipped lower and lower over the western horizon.

I should of course have realised, for in the R.A.F. things always happen in threes. First the Me’s, then the black box giving up, obviously something else was in the offing. But I’d never been superstitious, not up till then at least. I wasn’t one of those characters who won’t land without their hat on, or relieve themselves on the tail wheel before taking off, or who carry a mascot or a girl’s silk stocking around. I suppose it’s partly heredity – my father was a Shropshire bank manager who believed everything could be added up in columns to the right answer – and partly environment because for the last year before I’d joined up I was at Agricultural College in Kent where the course was designed wholly scientifically – if you didn’t spray apples with tar oil you’d get pest-eggs, if you planted rhododendrons in chalk they wouldn’t grow, if you didn’t drain you wouldn’t get a good harvest – and all against the old country saws and sayings.

So I just sat there, not expecting anything else to happen except Malta to come up over the horizon. I called up the navigator twice to see if the course was all right, but Jonah seemed quite happy with it. Then I suggested we might have a revised estimate of Malta, and he said he was working one out.

I waited – but no message chit turned up in the cockpit. On the surface of the sea, now I could see a low swell was running which might well mean a change of wind. I scanned the horizon, but I could see nothing except an empty glassy blue, slowly changing to gold as the sun started setting behind us.

‘Come on, Jonah boy!’

Over the intercom, I could almost hear the cogs of his brain creaking. Jonah’s navigation had everything about it that a best friend wouldn’t tell him. Especially they wouldn’t tell him because Jonah was such a nice guy. Easy-going, good-natured, loyal, he’d have been the most valuable member of the crew if it hadn’t been for his navigation. He’d been a bus driver in Swansea before joining up, and the rumour of 77 was that they were still looking for one of those big blue double-deckers.

‘Please hurry up!’

‘One moment, Skipper!’

You’d think I was breathing down his neck, which is what I purposely avoid doing. I waited for four more minutes, and since even when I climbed to a thousand feet just below the cloud puffs there was still no sign of an island, I said to Gage, ‘Here, you take over I’m going to see what’s going on!’

And I got out of my seat, and walked past the radio and the radar to where Jonah sat at the navigation table, his helmet pushed right back so it showed his balding forehead and frizzy brown hair.

‘Here we are, Skipper.’ His voice smiled with triumph. ‘Estimating Malta eighteen oh eight.’

‘Eighteen oh eight!’ I made a great business of raising my left wrist and thrusting my watch under his abbreviated nose. ‘Look at that! Can’t you see? Jones… it’s eighteen oh eight now!’

Thirteen years ago, coming back from a holiday in Holland, I