Attack Alarm (19 page)

I was one of the six detailed to help pitch tents. We were outside the orderly room by seven-thirty. The whole Station Headquarters was a complete wreck. The burnt-out remains of the troop lorry were strewn across the road. Behind us was the square, littered with broken glass and rubble. And all around it was a shambles of blasted and gutted buildings. But at the far side the fiag-pole, its white paint now blackened, still stood, and from the top of it the R.A.F. flag drooped in the still evening air.

The tents were being pitched on the edge of the flying field nearest the camp. Hundreds of men—R.A.F. and Army—were on the job. The ground was hard as iron and the tents stiff with camouflage wash. We worked like niggers till ten o’clock. And in the fading evening light I wandered back to the camp with Kan. I can’t remember how we got on to the subject. It’s immaterial. The point is that jokingly I
looked behind me. And suddenly the fear I had felt when I realised that somebody must have deliberately fired at me returned. I don’t know why, except that there was somebody behind me when I looked round. He was a vague shadow in the half light flitting in and out among the bomb craters. It wasn’t that I thought I was being followed. It was just the fact that someone was behind me, I suppose.

We went straight to bed. But it seemed I had barely got to sleep before the sound of running feet woke me. It was a Take Post all right. Before the five of us had got into our clothes the sirens were going. It was just twelve. The alarm was short, however, and by twelve-thirty I was alone in the pit, it being my turn for guard.

I didn’t enjoy the half-hour before the next detachment took over. Strange how dependent one’s nerves are on one’s mood. Up till then night guards hadn’t worried me at all. The site was not an isolated one. It was in a well-guarded camp, and any one I had seen moving about I had regarded automatically as friendly. Now, because of that dent in the back of my tin hat, I found myself listening, tensed, to every sound. And it was strange how many sounds there were I had never noticed before. And when any one moved by the Guards’ pill-box or came down the road I found myself gripping my rifle hard.

But nothing happened. It was just that I was tired and my nerves were frayed. The sirens were giving the All Clear as my relief came out.

The next day, Saturday, dawned with a promise of more heat. The air was sultry with it. Shortly after eight-thirty a lorry from Battery brought us dry rations and a big tank of water. We managed to shave, but there was no water to spare for washing. Water is a thing that in England one takes very much for granted. There is something very unpleasant
about being so short of it that you can’t wash. I can think of few things so shattering to morale.

Two alarms took up most of the morning. Marion did not show up, and after lunch I wandered down to the square in the hope of seeing a Waaf I knew from whom I could find out what had happened to her. The raid had made my confinement to the site seem such a small matter that I knew Langdon would not object.

But I was out of luck. I saw no Waaf I knew. The camp seemed full of workmen, demolishing the wreckage and piling the rubble into lorries. I could not help thinking that if every station was bringing in civilian labour to clear up the mess after a raid, they must be full of fifth columnists. It was so simple. And I went back to my site feeling very uneasy.

And then occurred something that thoroughly scared me. It may have been just an accident. It had happened before on the ’drome. But that it should happen so that it nearly caused my death seemed significant.

I was just passing the first dispersal point, about two hundred yards short of the site. There were Hurricanes in it. I remember noticing that because one had its tail badly shot up. I had just taken a cigarette out of my case and I stopped suddenly to light it.

And as I did so there was a rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire and a stream of tracer bullets flashed past me. They were so close that I am certain that if I had put out my hand it would have been shot away.

The noise ceased as abruptly as it had begun and I found myself staring at nothing in a dazed kind of way. I was brought to my senses by the match burning my fingers. I dropped it and looked quickly at the dispersal point. Everything was as it had been. There were the two Hurricanes, wing tip to wing tip, and the
air shimmering in the heat from the tarmac. Nothing had moved.

Yet that stream of tracer bullets had come from the dispersal point. And suddenly a cold sweat broke over me as I realised that if I had not stopped abruptly to light that cigarette I should be lying in the roadway riddled with bullets.

I had an intense desire to run then. At any moment the chatter of the gun might start again and this time I was a static target. Unwillingly I forced myself to walk into the dispersal point. There was no one there. There was no one in either of the ’planes. I was puzzled. Guns don’t usually go off by themselves, however hot it is.

An A.C.2 suddenly appeared in the exit at the back of the dispersal point. He was rubbing his eyes stupidly. “I thought I heard a noise,” he said vaguely.

I told him what had happened. “Funny!” he said, and examined the leading edge of the wings of the nearest machine warily. “Here we are,” he said, and showed me the blackened port-hole of one of the guns. “Can’t understand what made it go off, though. There’s nobody here at the moment but myself and these were all left at safe.”

I never did discover what made that gun go off. But there was no doubt in my own mind that it was deliberate and that it had been meant to kill me.

I was feeling very shaken by the time I got back to the site. “What’s the matter with you?” asked Chetwood. “Seen a ghost?”

“No. Why?” I asked.

“Cor, tell ’im, somebody,” said Micky.

“You’re as white as a sheet,” said Kan.

I told them what had happened. “You ought to report it, mate,” said Micky. “It’s only bloody carelessness. Same thing happened to a bloke called Tennyson in May. Only just missed him.”

“Hallo,” said Hood. “Jones is with us again.” Micky had been back at his post on the gun that morning, but he had been silent and morose, which was definitely out of character.

“I don’t want no vulgartisms from you nor anybody,” said Micky. He hated being called by his surname.

“Vulgartisms!” echoed his faithful stooge, Fuller, with a hoarse cackle, and every one laughed.

“Take post!”

We scrambled out of the hut just as Tiger Squadron, which had been revving up for the last five minutes, left their dispersal points for the runway.

We were on the gun for nearly two hours that time, and though we saw a dog-fight over towards Maidstone, nothing came our way. Swallow-tail Squadron followed Tiger Squadron into the air, and I caught a glimpse of John Nightingale as he flashed by in his little green sports car. I wondered anxiously whether he had remembered to see about those maps. It was the third time he had been up to-day. It hardly seemed likely that he could have found either the time or the energy to go routing out maps for crazy-seeming gunners.

But this did not worry me for long, because fear returned to oust all other thoughts from my head. The preliminary air-raid warning had not then been given. Three workmen were engaged in repairing the telephone line between our pit and the dispersal point to the north of us. I became conscious after a time of the fact that one of them, a small, sharp-featured little man with steel-rimmed glasses, kept on pausing in his work to gaze at us. At first I just wondered why he found us so interesting. And then I found myself watching them, waiting for him to look up. Once it seemed that our eyes met, though it was quite impossible for me to tell at that distance. But after that
he did not look in our direction again. He seemed consciously to avoid doing so, and it was then that I began to feel uneasy.

I tried to argue that my nerves were frayed with all that had happened during the last few days and that I was badly in need of sleep. But it was no good. I could not argue myself out of that sense of unease, which was so like the feeling I had experienced on guard the previous night when I had jumped at all the common sounds that I had never been conscious of before. I remembered only too clearly the sharp jerk of my neck as that bullet struck the back of my tin hat, and the stream of tracer bullets that had flashed past me only an hour ago.

When the preliminary warning went on the Tannoy, now in full working order again, the three men laid down their tools and hurried along the tarmac past our pit on their way to the station shelters. I watched him closely as he passed us. He had pale eyes set too close together above a thin nose, and it seemed to me there was something furtive about him. Not once did he glance in our direction. He had a smooth loping walk and he did not talk to either of his mates.

I tried to forget about him. And for a while I succeeded as I watched the dog-fight high in the blue bowl of the heavens to the south-east of us.

And then suddenly I caught sight of him standing by the dispersal point between us and the camp—the one from which I had been nearly killed. I don’t know why, but my heart leaped into my mouth as I saw him standing there. He was gazing in our direction. It seems amazing that I should recognise him at that distance. But I did. I confirmed his identity by borrowing Langdon’s glasses, ostensibly to look at an imaginary ’plane.

I never did discover whether he was a fifth columnist. I never saw him again. But whether or not he was
watching me, he certainly had me scared. And when I looked up and found he was no longer standing by the dispersal point—was, in fact, nowhere in sight—my sense of uneasiness increased. I found myself watching furtively, afraid lest any one in the pit should see that I was nervous, all the vantage points from which a shot could be fired into the pit. It is an unpleasant feeling to be waiting for the impact of a bullet that may come from anywhere at any moment. I felt chilly despite the glare and the palms of my hands were wet with the sweat of my fear.

The alarm seemed interminable. We watched ’plane after ’plane come in, looking at them eagerly through the glasses to see if the canvas coverings of their gun ports had been shot away—sure sign that they had been in action.

A pilot officer whom Langdon knew came and chatted with us for a few minutes. He had been in the dogfight over Maidstone and had shot down two Me. 109’s. He was with Swallow-tail Squadron and told us that he had seen Nightingale bale out after diving his machine, which was on fire, into a German fighter. But the news that upset me most was that Crayton Aerodrome had been the target, and that two more fighter stations had been attacked in the morning. It all seemed to fit so easily into the German plan as I had envisaged it.

It was then that I realised that I had to get out of Thorby. I tried to kid myself that I had come to this conclusion because more fighter stations had been attacked and I was the only person who realised the significance of these raids. But all the time I knew that it was because I was afraid. I wonder how many people have been really afraid in their lives. The sensation is a horrible one. I was cold yet the sweat poured off me. My knees felt weak and I dared not look any one in the face for fear they should see what
I knew was mirrored in my eyes. I had lost all confidence in myself. The sense of being caged in Thorby was more acute than ever. I could just see the barbed-wire boundary half-way down the slope between our hut and the trees at the bottom of the valley. It seemed such a slender line to mark the boundary between death and safety. Yet I knew that I should not be safe until I was on the other side of it. There had been two attempts on my life, and by the grace of God I was still alive. The next time—the third time—I might not be so fortunate. I had to get out of Thorby. I just had to get out of the place. The urgency of my fear drummed the phrase through my head to the beat of the blood in my ears.

“Come on, wake up!” I came suddenly out of my absorption to find Blah offering me a cigarette.

“Sorry,” I said and took one.

He produced his lighter which had been given to him on his birthday earlier in the week. It was a heavy silver one and he was still rather proud of possessing it. He snapped it open. There was a spark, but nothing happened. He tried again and again whilst the detachment watched with sly amusement. But it wouldn’t light. At last, exasperated, he exclaimed, “You anti-Semitic swine,” and put the thing in his pocket.

It was a little thing, but it changed my whole mood for the moment. I couldn’t help laughing at the way he said it. And after I had laughed, Thorby seemed somehow less hostile. And when I looked about me again it was at any aerodrome baking peacefully in the sunshine and not at a prison with barbed-wire bars.

It was nearly five before we were allowed to stand-down. As soon as we had finished tea I got Kan to play a game of chess with me. Anything to keep my mind occupied. But I couldn’t concentrate. We hadn’t been playing more than ten minutes before he had taken my Queen. In a fit of annoyance I swept
the board and gave him the game. “It’s no use,” I said. “I’m sorry. I can’t concentrate.”

Chetwood took my place. I went over to my bed and began to make it. The loss of my Queen seemed so symbolic. Everything seemed to be going wrong. Marion hadn’t turned up. Nightingale had baled out—God knows when he would be able to produce the maps I wanted. And I had to get out of the place. I just had to, before I was murdered. I felt very near to tears as I unfolded my blankets. How was I to get out? The main gate was out of the question. And there were Guards all round the barbed-wire boundaries, patrolling night and day. The only way was to slip through the wire at night and take a chance that I shouldn’t be seen. But it was a big risk. Almost as big a risk as staying. And there were Guards in the woods at the bottom—automatically I was considering the wire below the hut as the best place to get through. But I couldn’t leave until I knew where Cold Harbour Farm was and when the plan was due to break. “But I must get away. I must get away,” I found suddenly that I was muttering this to myself over and over again, my eyes filling with tears because of my tiredness and my frustration. My mind was uncontrolled, incoherent—full of nameless terrors that would not exist if I could only think the matter out calmly.