Damned Good Show (4 page)

Silk shook his head.

Langham poked him with his boot. “Why not?”

Silk shook his head again. Langham poked him harder. “Speak up, dummy.” Silk turned away. Langham said, “If you won't speak up, you can cough up. Five bob.” Another prod.

A rush of rage overcame self-pity. Silk jumped up and punched Langham just below the breast-bone. Langham crumpled and sat,
too badly winded to speak. Silk was astonished, then afraid, then—as Langham slowly revived—proud of his strength.

Langham wheezed and spat. “Bloody hell,” he whispered. Threads of saliva fell from his lips.

“You started it.” Silk was beginning to regret that punch. It would have been nice to have had Langham as a friend. Now he was an enemy.

“Half a crown would do,” Langham said, still wheezing.

“What's it for?”

“Buy an airplane.”

Silk laughed. The more he looked at Langham, the funnier he was. Langham couldn't laugh but he grinned a bit. In the end they went off together and contrived a letter to Silk's mother, all about a broken fountain-pen and imminent exams. A postal order for ten shillings came back. They bought a model kit of an SE5a and spent the change on ice-cream sundaes.

Building the plane took three weeks. The SE5a was one of the best fighters flown by the Royal Flying Corps, a single-seat biplane with a machine gun fitted on the upper wing so that its fire would clear the propeller arc. The kit was ambitious. The frames and stringers for the fuselage, the ribs and spars for the wings, every part of the tail unit, had to be cut from sheets of balsa. Bits broke. Silk and Langham argued over the meaning of the plans. They cut their fingers; ran out of glue; assembled items wrongly and had to start again. But when the fighter was finished—doped, painted, gleaming—its making had built a bond between them. For the first time in his life, Silk felt worthwhile.

On a day when the rest of the school was watching a cricket match, they sneaked out with the SE5a. There was a perfect place to fly it nearby: the Downs, a mile or more of parkland. “Here?” Silk said, but Langham was carrying the model and he kept saying there was a better place further on.

After fifteen minutes he stopped at the edge of the Downs, where the Avon Gorge fell sheer for a couple of hundred feet. “This is a fat lot of good,” Silk said. He had to look over the wall, it was irresistible, and his guts clenched at the depth of this huge, airy canyon, with seabirds wheeling far below. “Watch!” Langham called. As Silk turned, Langham launched the plane into space.

The image stayed with Silk for the rest of his life: that splendid little fighter, bright in the sunlight, whirring away into the terrible
void, sometimes bucking as the breeze caught it but always sailing the air, as balanced as a bird. He watched every dip and turn the SE5a made until it crashed into an old quarry face a quarter of a mile away. When he looked around, Langham was watching him with a small, crooked smile.

Silk chased him until his lungs burned and he stumbled and fell. Langham sat on his heels a safe distance away and made a daisy chain.

Eventually Silk said. “You can't do things like that.”

“Yes you can. Anyone can do anything. You can do something about your rotten haircut, for instance.”

“Three weeks' work. And you deliberately crashed it.”

“Didn't it look marvelous? A mile high, it looked. I'm going to learn to fly.”

“You're potty. You're cuckoo.”

“Well, cuckoos fly.”

“Mine's a perfectly good haircut.”

“It looks like a perfectly good lavatory brush. And your shirts don't fit and you can't tell jokes and whenever a girl comes in sight you go cross-eyed. I bet you can't dance.”

“Go to hell.” It was a word Silk had never used aloud before.

“You can't swear properly, either. Look: come and stay with me in the holidays and my sisters will teach you the foxtrot.”

This was all too much and too fast for Silk. “Why?” he asked.

“Oh … because. I'm thirsty. Let's get some ice cream.”

Langham, and Langham's sisters, showed Silk how to live. He discovered a taste for good clothes. He discovered a sense of humor. He discovered that girls were no threat, which doubled the pleasures of life at a stroke. And above all, he discovered that almost nothing was worth taking very seriously because he was intelligent enough and handsome enough to stroll through life with little effort.

After Clifton, he had strolled into the Royal Air Force, into a commission, into Bomber Command, and now into a war. No doubt it would be risky but it would also be fun. And there was always Tony Langham for good company.

Perfect.

Langham got on the phone and found a dance band: Joe Buck and his Buckaneers. “Can't do this week,” the bandleader said.

“Are you all booked up?”

“All canceled, is more like it. Bloody government's gone and shut down the dance halls because of the emergency. That'll teach Hitler a lesson, won't it?”

“But if you're canceled, why aren't you available?”

“Sax, trumpet and bass are working night shift in the munitions factory. Clarinet's gone to Sheffield for his medical. Trombone's on ARP duty. I can do you piano and drums.”

“No, I want the lot. How about next week?”

“Maybe. I'll need some petrol for my van. This rationing's bloody murder.”

Langham went to tell Silk and found him very chipper. “Sergeant Collins has a brother-in-law who's a theatrical agent,” Silk said. “I've booked a troupe of Russian jugglers and a comedian and a hypnotist. What have you got?” Langham told him. “Bugger,” Silk said. “No dances, by order? We'd better go and see the group captain.”

Rafferty let them talk while he signed letters.

“Where is your band coming from?” he asked.

“Bury St. Edmunds, sir,” Langham said.

“And who will the men dance with?”

“We thought nurses from the hospital—”

“Definitely not. The country is in a state of national emergency. This airfield is at a state of high alert. Security is paramount. The last thing I need is hordes of civilians wandering around here.”

“Suppose we find a hotel, sir,” Silk suggested. “Book the ballroom.”

“And suppose the Hun attacks while half my personnel are elsewhere, doing the Gay Gordons. What then?”

“How about a variety show here, on the station?” Silk said. “With performing artistes?”

“Such as?”

Silk checked his notes. “Um … well, Boris Blatsky, sir. He's a hypnotist.”

“He's a Russian.”

“Oh. Is he?”

“No Bolshevik is going to infiltrate this base.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, sir,” Langham said, “but it appears that you won't allow outsiders in, and vice versa.”

“You got that right,” Rafferty said. “Goodbye.”

Silk reported this development to the Wingco. Someone had just
landed a Hampden and retracted the undercarriage when he meant to pull up the flaps. It was easily done; the two levers were next to each other; but still, it meant a very bent bomber. “Don't bring me your little problems,” Hunt snapped. “I've got enough of my own.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Use your brain. You'll find it underneath all that Brylcreem. And for Christ's sake don't go pestering the group captain. There's a war on.”

Silk and Langham found a quiet corner of the Mess and got some beer and made a list of entertaining ideas that would not conflict with the war. Spelling bee. Whist drive. Boxing match. Amateur dramatics. Chess tournament. Guess-the-weight-of-the-cake competition. “That's gambling,” Langham said. “Illegal on an RAF station.”

Silk crossed it out. “LAC Barber had an idea. Debates on important issues of the day.”

“Such as what?” Langham said. They drank some beer while they wondered about that. “The most important issue for me is my popsy,” Langham said, “and will she or won't she let me have my wicked way with her.”

“Well, we could debate that.”

“The Wingco might not like it.”

“The Wingo's not going to get it.” They clinked tankards to celebrate the old joke. “LAC Barber does the
Telegraph
crossword every day,” Silk said. “He reckons he knows lots of important issues. I'll tell him to go ahead and arrange a debate. I can't organize it, I'm flying tomorrow.”

It was a routine training flight. They took off at noon, the Hampden roaring and creaking under a full load of fuel. Not a bad day. Plenty of cloud, mostly high, and a steady wind from the southwest. They stooged around the North Sea for an hour and a half. An air pocket was waiting for them like an open manhole. The first Silk knew of it was when the Hampden dropped five hundred feet, hit the bottom of the down-draft and found clean, reliable air. Everyone got badly shaken. The compass was spinning slowly, endlessly, as if searching for something that was always escaping. The fuel gauges registered zero. Silk climbed above the cloud. Now they could see the sun. He flew toward it until his observer reckoned they were over the East Coast. He went down and everyone saw surf and sand and the unmistakeable beaky shape of Flamborough Head. Evidently the winds had not been steady; the Hampden had been blown far to the north. “Find me a railway line and I'll Bradshaw us home,” Silk said.

Bradshaw published train timetables. Since flying began, lost pilots got out of trouble by Bradshawing: flying low enough to read the names of railway stations. But before anyone found a line, AC1 Connell reported smoke in the upper gun position. Silk landed at the first airfield he saw: RAF Staxmere. He was taxying toward the hangars when a tire burst.

The smoke turned out to be a short circuit, easily mended, but the wheel had suffered when the tire burst, and replacing it took time. The light was fading when they took off, and the night was black when they landed at base. Silk—weary, sweaty, hungry, and ripe for a large drink—was given a message. Wing Commander Hunt wished to see Pilot Officer Silk in the camp cinema as soon as possible.

LAC Barber, a tall, red-haired pay clerk, was making his final speech in favor of the motion when Silk got there. The place was packed. Langham was standing at the back. “This chap's hot stuff,” he whispered. He gave Silk a duplicated slip of paper.
The motion is: This House believes that Nazi tendencies at home are a greater threat to English democracy than Nazi aggression abroad.

“… are tantamount to powers of slavery,” LAC Barber said, and was warmly applauded. “Rights which the ordinary Englishman won with Magna Carta and which he has preserved ever since, at risk of life itself, have suddenly been swept away by a government that panics at the first whiff of gunshot!” The audience liked that too. Silk looked around: all the airmen and NCOs seemed to be present, and a few officers. “Now we have imprisonment without trial!” LAC Barber cried. “Who killed habeas corpus? Not Hitler!” The cheers made Silk flinch. “The State can arrest anyone for doing anything the State dislikes! The State can seize any property it wants! The State can suspend any law it finds inconvenient! Search any home! Commandeer any goods! For any reason it thinks fit! And we can do nothing, for we have no rights. Don't take my word for any of this. After all, I might be a Fifth Columnist.” Loud laughter. “Read it for yourself! It's all in the Emergency Powers brackets Defense close brackets Bill, as a result of which you cannot go to a theater, you cannot go to a concert, you cannot go to a dance hall, because that Bill has closed them down! Now that I come to think of it, even holding this debate is probably contrary to the Emergency Powers brackets Defense close brackets Bill. If Mr. Chamberlain gets to hear about it, we shall all be in the Tower tomorrow!” That produced a
barrage of cheering. “To fight a war against tyranny and fascism, this government has given itself all the powers of a tyrant and a fascist. Therefore I urge you to vote for the motion: that Nazi tendencies at home are more dangerous than Nazi aggression abroad.”

LAC Barber sat down to thunderous applause.

Someone tugged at Silk's arm. It was the Wingco. “Come with me,” Hunt said. They went outside. “Is this your idea of entertainment?” It wasn't a question; it was a charge.

“They seemed to be enjoying it, sir.”

“That display is probably treasonable. It's certainly contrary to good order and discipline. You're not an Entertainment Officer, Silk, you're a disaster. You're sacked.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And where the hell have you been all day?”

“Yorkshire, sir. We had a flat tire.” There was a pause. In the darkness, Silk realized the Wingco suspected he was being facetious. “Honestly, sir. You see—”

“I don't care. There was a time, Silk, when I thought you were a prat. I see now that I flattered you.” The Wingco strode away.

Silk had a quick bath and got dressed and went to the Mess. Tony Langham was drinking with a bunch of pilots and observers. “The motion was carried,” he told Silk, “by a hundred and seventeen votes to three.”

“Good God. Well, Pixie's taken the job away from me. Was all that stuff true? What LAC Barber said?”

“Every word. Where've you been all day?”

“Oh,
bollocks,”
Silk said.

Langham shrugged. “You always were a bad loser, Silko. Remember the maiden flight of the SE5a? You behaved very badly then, I thought.”

The Wingco appointed another Entertainments Officer. The government grudgingly allowed cinemas, theaters and dance halls to
reopen. Bomber Command discovered the reasons for its heavy losses in ops on the second day of the war. The pilots were at fault. Their attacks had been too low and too near the flak batteries on the docks at Wilhelmshaven and Brunsbüttel. Therefore crews should fly higher and concentrate their attacks on ships at sea. It was noticeable that no aircraft had been lost to German fighters. If all crews kept a close formation so as to coordinate their gunnery, British bombers would be more than a match for any fighters.