Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse

The Station dance band had been in existence for six weeks but there had been only two rehearsals with every member present. Two of the band were working tonight. Sergeant Tommy Carter, a keen amateur saxophone player, was flying Joe for King, and a corporal who could play the piano relatively well was on duty in Flying Control. This night the fellow on the piano could only play from the singer’s line and the trumpet player was all over the place. It wasn’t his fault, for although he had studied music for two years, his instrument was the violin. The seven musicians practised together at the far end of the NAAFI, but when the canteen began to fill up they stopped playing and sat around drinking tea. The leader, an LAC clerk from Southampton, said that if they couldn’t do better than this they should tell the dance committee to bring in a civilian band for the Sergeants’ Mess dance next month. By the time the NAAFI closed they were all a little depressed.

Musically, however, Warley Fen was dominated that summer by a simple but subtle melody. Erks whistled it as they bicycled to dispersals. Fitters hummed it as they replaced the sparking plugs on the Merlins and a big-breasted blonde NAAFI girl named Veronica played it on the piano with lots of improvised vamping. A slim-hipped MT corporal with a thin moustache impersonated Al Bowlly and sang it wordperfect with every inflection of that singer’s voice. In the Officers’ Mess there was a gramophone record of it that someone had brought back from London.

Every lunchtime of that hot summer the cadences floated across the even, bright green lawns of Warley Manor and made the tea-roses tremble. The Sergeants’ Mess had the same record and it had become the custom for returning aircrew NCOs to call into the Mess for one last nightcap after leaving the tension and excitement of the debriefing. That record was always near the gramophone and usually the first arrivals would put it on. Sometimes after a grim night when there were a few missing faces they would play it repeatedly until dawn shone.

Easy come, easy go. That’s the way, if love must have its day, then as it came let it go.

No remorse, no regrets. We should part, exactly as we met; just easy come, easy go.

We never dreamt of romantic dangers

But now as it ends, let’s be friends and not two strangers.

Easy come, easy go, here we are, so darling au revoir, easy come, easy go.

A quarter of a century later, men who knew Warley Fen that summer when the bombers went out night after night remembered nothing more clearly than that little melody. It needed only the opening trumpet notes, the wire brushes and guitar to transport them back there again.

Not all spare-time occupations were musical. Flight Sergeant Bishop, the Station blacksmith, was Sergeant of the guard. He was sitting in the guardroom assembling a large picture of a galleon in full sail from sweet-wrappers and coloured paper. It was a painstaking hobby and the portrait of Joe Louis on the wall in his quarters represented nearly three hundred manhours of tearing, cutting and pasting. People who saw the pictures wondered that the clumsy muscular hands of the blacksmith could work in such meticulous detail.

Aircraftman First Class Albert Singleton, an Officers’ Mess waiter, did that evening, with the help of Aircraftwoman Janet Marsden, motor-transport driver, steal from the aforesaid Mess one seven-pound tin of butter, three seven-pound tins of marmalade, eighteen pounds of bacon and twenty-eight eggs. These stores, the property of His Majesty King George the Sixth, were taken to Peterborough in an RAF Hillman van, also the property of His Majesty. The foodstuffs were delivered to a restaurant owner against payment of seven pounds ten shillings. By ten-thirty Singleton and Marsden had visited several public-houses and consumed a considerable amount of alcohol.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when they came down the blacked-out country lane from Ramsey and parked near the perimeter fence. It was warm in the front seat of the RAF van and the windows grew misty with their breath as they kissed and cuddled in the dark. After a few minutes one of the lorries carrying aircrew came past them along the peri track. They paused to watch it.

‘It’s a new driver we’ve got,’ said ACW Marsden, nodding towards the crew bus. ‘She’s straight from the training school, talk about keen.’

‘Not like you,’ said Bert Singleton.

‘I’m keen sometimes,’ said the girl, and they kissed again. As the crew lorry got to the far corner they heard the crews shouting remarks about blackout to some house in the village but they didn’t stop kissing.

Binty Jones folded up his comic and began speaking in his mock-American accent. ‘Eleven o’clock, guys,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this little old show on the road. I’ve got me some heavy petting in Peterborough before sun-up.’

Digby zipped his flying boots and looking up in surprise said, ‘Are you still sleeping in Peterborough, you mad bastard?’

It had become fashionable among some of the crews to have their names written across the front of their flying helmets. A bottle of light-pink nail-varnish was going the rounds. Cohen was writing ‘Kosher’ on his.

‘That I am, feller,’ said Binty. ‘A quarter of an hour from billet to bedroom. That’s all it takes me on the motorbike.’

‘Quarter of an hour,’ said Lambert. ‘I’d rather fly the operation twice than go that last ten miles on your banger.’

‘Fifteen miles,’ corrected Binty. ‘Ah well, I’m a professional, you see.’

‘Professional crumpet-chaser?’ said Digby.

‘Milkmen all are,’ said Cohen, ‘aren’t they, Binty?’

‘Some of them,’ he grinned proudly. In spite of his carefully pressed clothes and shirt starched like card he was not much to look at: cropped hair, bad teeth, short stature and pockmarked face. None of which was an impediment to his frantic motorized sex-life, in pursuit of which he journeyed constantly across East Anglia. ‘It’s the bike that gets them, man, the rhythm, you see. They hear that in the middle of the night and they quiver like a jelly.’

‘You still with that married sheila?’ asked Digby. He knew the answer but he wanted to draw Flash Gordon into the discussion. He liked to hear them argue.

‘She’s a smashing piece of crackling, man.’

‘Why don’t you find yourself some piece of single skirt?’ said Flash.

‘You know why, man. All the best single crumpet in Peterborough has been taken over by the Yanks.’

‘Well, I don’t think it’s right. Her old man fighting in the desert. I just don’t think it’s right.’

‘I’m just keeping it warm for him, man.’

‘I hope he comes back and knocks the daylights out of you.’

‘No danger, I’ve seen his photo, a tiny fellow he is.’

‘A judo instructor.’

‘Sheet-metal worker with a REME unit in Alex.’

‘He’ll come back and clobber you,’ warned Flash.

The conversation had taken the same lines that it always took and after it they were silent as they always were. Binty opened his comic again. ‘What’s the time now?’ asked Digby.

‘Three minutes later than the last time you asked,’ said Cohen. Again he checked the contents of his green canvas bag: torch, rice-paper message pad, radio notes, protractor, dividers, coloured pencils, course and speed calculator, log book, target map, star tables and ruler. It was all there.

‘That’s quite a watch you’ve got there, sport,’ said Digby.

‘My uncle’s. My ma gave it to me this morning.’

Cohen returned the nail-varnish to Digby who put it on the shelf of his locker and padlocked the door. ‘Come on, Maisie,’ said Digby quietly. They looked across to the far side of the room where a line of aircrew were waiting for Maisie Holroyd to issue them with flying rations. Batters was next.

‘Four Bovrils, three coffees.’

‘Four Bovrils, three coffees,’ she said, and the clerk gave Batters the required vacuum flasks of hot drinks as well as seven packets of sandwiches, chewing-gum, boiled sweets and chocolate.

Sergeant Jimmy Grimm, the wireless operator and standby gunner, was a cheerful beardless man of twenty-three. He would have been acutely embarrassed to know that among Warley’s WAAFs he was known as ‘the blond bombshell’ for although he was married with a two-year-old child he was absurdly shy in the presence of women and was easily shocked by the sort of jokes that the crews related with such proud maturity. Sometimes, balanced over his radio, he’d write long, long letters to his wife Mollie in large looping handwriting and always in green ink.

An average wireless operator, Grimm was a dedicated amateur photographer and the billet that he shared with Digby and Cohen was a disordered muddle of enamel trays, film tins and parts of his home-made enlarger. Often both bathrooms were full of prints, with others in the washbasins. Once one had jammed in the drain and flooded four rooms.

These were group portraits of the whole crew that he was passing round. He had a little clockwork device that enabled him to rush and join them after starting the shutter. Handsome lads they all were. Relaxed and smiling like any one of a million young men. Looking at those prints now, it would be easy to say that it was the work of an amateur or that the materials were inferior or unsuitable because they were stolen from Air Ministry supplies. That wouldn’t be true. The fact is that the boys were all like that: their faces were not out of focus or over-exposed, they were bland and smooth and as yet unformed. Those grinning cherubs awkwardly placed in that wartime snapshot are a high-definition portrait of the men who that night climbed into their flying boots, adjusted their parachute harness, borrowed clean shirts, reread old letters, lost a quick hand of cards, wrote IOUs for half a crown and watched the clock so carefully. And so often.

‘Bloody good snap that, Jimmy.’

‘Us with the old Door behind.’

‘What a handsome group!’

‘Enlarge it yourself, Jimmy? Bloody good shows.’

‘Look at Dig, scowling. He’s a card.’