The Challenging Heights (2 page)

‘Which is a Service euphemism for scrap,’ Dicken commented.

Howarth shrugged. ‘I reckon the Government’s betrayed us all. Demobilisation isn’t working and there are cases of last in, first out – because, they say, industry needs ’em. In December I only got the chaps on parade by threatening to withhold their wages. They weren’t mutinous, just fed up. What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for Willie Hatto.’

When Hatto arrived, he grinned at Dicken with unrestrained pleasure. Like Dicken, like Archard, he was one of those who had survived the long months of aerial fighting and, after four and a half years of the bloodiest battles in the history of the world, was one of the few friends Dicken had left. They had come together from the opposite ends of the social scale: Dicken, brought up by a divorced mother in a row of terraced cottages in a Sussex village, had joined the army in 1914. Hatto, with Eton and Oxford behind him, part of a titled family with a crumbling country seat in Northamptonshire, was a regular officer. He was tall, monocled and languid and, despite his uniform, seemed always to be clad in the clothing of the cavalryman he had originally been. Somehow, he seemed undressed without leather patches on his elbows, a cravat and a riding whip. To the astonishment of everybody in the mess, he grasped Dicken’s hands and they went into what they had always called their gloat dance – a solemn ring-o’-roses they had always performed in France and Italy with Foote, the American who had formed with them an anarchical trinity dedicated to the pricking of balloons, the reduction of pomposity and the deriding of inefficiency in senior officers. They had performed it whenever they had been successful at anything not permitted by King’s Regulations or the chances of war, whether it was obtaining unofficial leave, routing some difficult officer from Wing, dodging a more than normally aggressive group of German aeroplanes, or merely simply surviving when by all the law of averages they ought not to have done.

When they had finished, Hatto slapped Dicken’s shoulder and grinned. ‘For a man with a pair of perforated legs,’ he said, ‘you perform remarkably well. The last time I saw you, you were lying on your back full of holes put there by Ernst Udet and his gang of graverobbers. I thought you’d be out of action for at least a year. I expect you’re now badgering everybody to let you fly.’

‘Carlin flew with a wooden leg.’

‘Not four months after he lost the original. Heard about Diplock? He fixed himself up with a job at the Air Ministry.’

They smiled at each other. Cecil Arthur Diplock, from the next village to the one where Dicken had been born, had married Dicken’s first love, Annys Toshack. There had never been much affection between them and what there was had disappeared when Diplock had turned up in France on the same airfield. His inability to screw up his courage to facing the enemy had removed him very rapidly from the scene but, a crafty and resourceful young man, from being appointed personal pilot to the Wing Colonel he had advanced to become his aide. Turning up again as squadron CO in Italy, he had managed to get rid of Dicken, Hatto and Foote, the American, every one of them men who knew his past history, and – though he knew he could never prove it – Dicken even had a suspicion that Diplock had sent him up for his last flight in the knowledge that Udet and his staffel were in the vicinity.

‘He’s applied for a permanent commission,’ Hatto said. ‘So have I. What about you?’

‘If there’s an air force.’

Before 1914 there had been no flying service and even now the RAF, the successor to the Royal Flying Corps and no more than a year old, had still not been provided with any plan for an establishment of regular officers. There were even ugly rumours that, with the politicians eager to cut expenditure now that the war was won and with the Navy and the Army fighting for funds, the RAF might even not survive.

They both avoided the subject. ‘How’s your wife, Willie?’

Hatto smiled. ‘Fine. How about that girl of yours?’

‘Which one do you mean?’

‘Either of ’em ’ll do.’

Dicken managed a smile. ‘One’s in Canada,’ he said.

‘T’other–’ He shrugged.

‘No ties?’

‘None.’

Hatto smiled. ‘Because the war isn’t over, old son. It’s still going on. In Russia. When the Russians opted out of the war in 1917, the Czechs who’d been fighting for them set off across Siberia to join the Allies in France. They were still armed and started fighting the Bolsheviks. They now practically control the whole of the Trans-Siberian Railway and it’s encouraged a lot of other people to set up anti-Bolshevik governments. Now the French, the British, the Americans, the Japanese and a few more are making it official. We’re going in.’

‘Where?’

‘A number of places. They say it’s to relieve the distress of the Russian people but my brother, at the Foreign Office, says it’s because everybody in Western Europe’s scared stiff of Communism.’

Dicken looked dubious. ‘Isn’t it a bit cold in Russia?’

‘We won’t be going to the north. We’re going to the south round Yalta. That’s different. It’s where all the Russian princes and princesses have their holiday palaces. There are a lot of them down there still enjoying life, and countesses are a penny a hundred. My brother’s been there and he says it’s beautiful.’ Hatto grimaced. ‘It’s either that or the awful bloody anti-climax of the Army of Occupation in Germany. Can you imagine it? People like Diplock in charge, and the Germans wishing you’d drop dead or break out all over in warts.’

Dicken grinned. Hatto was a forceful persuader. ‘Are you going?’

‘Not half.’

‘All right. Count me in.’

‘How about the old legs?’

‘You sit down to fly.’

Hatto vanished almost overnight and, as soon as he was discharged from hospital, Dicken expected to follow him. But the commanding officer at the camp to which he was posted was an ex-Royal Naval Air Service type transferred to the RAF who still retained the esoteric salute used by the Navy and liked to make everyone aware of his seafaring background by referring to ‘decks’, ‘going ashore’, ‘the ship’s company’ and ‘running a tight ship’. Free time became ‘off watch’ and the bus into town from the main gate became the ‘liberty boat’. He disapproved of people under his command going off to fight minor wars and, when he heard of Dicken’s decision to do so, threatened to court martial him if he tried. It seemed to call for strong measures and Dicken simply packed his kit and arranged for a taxi. As he hobbled from the officers’ mess, he was stopped by the adjutant, another ex-RNAS type.

‘Are you going ashore?’ he demanded.

‘Yes,’ Dicken snapped.

The adjutant smiled. ‘The CO thought you were. He saw you from his window.’

‘He must have nothing better to do.’

The adjutant’s smile faded and he frowned. ‘He instructed me to point out to you that the liberty boat doesn’t leave until five o’clock.’

Dicken gave him a look of contempt. ‘Tell him I don’t need a boat,’ he said. ‘I’m swimming.’

Turning up in the office of Lieutenant-Colonel Joshua Rivers, who had been his CO while flying 1½-Strutters in France and was now in charge of Personnel and Postings, he was welcomed and provided with coffee. Rivers was a moody man. He had crashed badly early in the war and now had a metal plate in his skull which, in France, had always been rumoured to be affected by rust or the heat of the sun and accounted for his changeable moods. This was one of his good days.

‘That was a splendid show you put up against Udet’s lot,’ he said. ‘What’s going to happen to you now? Are they going to ground you as they have me?’

‘No, sir. They’ve passed me fit for flying.’

‘Have they, by God? And now, I suppose, you’ve arrived here expecting me to do something for you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where are you wanting to go?’

‘Russia, sir. They say there are lots of opportunities in Russia.’

Rivers looked amused. ‘There are supposed to be lots of countesses going spare out there, too,’ he pointed out.

‘That’s what Willie Hatto said, sir.’

‘Is he going?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘God help the Russians! What about that mad American you two were always with – Foote?’

‘He’s safely in America, sir. Going in for law, I heard.’

‘Well, America’s big enough for him not to be able to do much harm. All right, I’ll see what I can do.’

Dicken was so pleased at Rivers’ reaction that when he bumped into his old enemy, Diplock, in the corridor, he didn’t turn a hair.

Diplock hesitated as he saw him emerge from Rivers’ office and seemed doubtful about his reaction.

‘Quinney,’ he said uncertainly.

‘Diplock,’ Dicken replied.

‘You working here?’ Diplock seemed worried in case he was.

‘No, thank God,’ Dicken said. ‘I hear you are.’

‘For some time now. It’s the sort of work that suits me.’

‘It would be,’ Dicken commented, but without enmity. His suspicions about Diplock had never been confirmed and never would be now so there was no point in harbouring a grudge. All the same, the observation was true enough. Diplock was never one to risk his neck when someone else could do it for him. ‘How’s Annys?’ he asked.

‘Very well. She does a lot of work for charity. Airmen’s families. That sort of thing.’

She would, Dicken thought. She went with Diplock. She’d make a good chairman of a branch of the Red Cross or something of that sort. He was glad she hadn’t wanted to marry him.

They stared at each other for a moment longer, both of them uncertain how to conclude the conversation. Diplock, Dicken noticed, was fatter than he had been and his face was beginning to develop a jowly look.

‘Well, I’d better be off,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Diplock agreed. ‘Where are you these days?’

Dicken told him and for the first time Diplock managed a trace of a smile.

‘I know the CO there. Ex-Navy type.’

‘That’s right. He’d have us all in bell-bottoms and seaboots and sleeping in hammocks if he could.’

Diplock frowned. ‘He’s a friend of mine,’ he said stiffly.

He would be, Dicken decided. ‘He disapproves of me wanting to go to Russia,’ he said.

‘Russia? Are you going there?’ Diplock shuddered. ‘That’s a dreary place to go to. They say nobody knows whose side he’s on. I should hate to go to Russia.’

Three days later, much to his ex-naval CO’s disgust, Dicken was ordered to be prepared for a posting to Russia and to go on immediate leave. The CO, who had been trying to arrange for him to be put under arrest, gave him an angry look.

‘It’s an offence to go over a senior officer’s head,’ he snapped.

‘Yes, sir.’ Dicken picked up his cap. ‘But sometimes it pays dividends.’

Dicken’s mother found it as difficult as Diplock and his CO to understand his anxiety to get involved in someone else’s war.

‘Why Russia?’ she asked. ‘That’s a funny place to want to go. It gets cold in Russia.’

‘Not in the south, Mother.’

She shook her head. ‘It might have been better,’ she decided, ‘if you’d gone to sea.’

Considering that, when he’d qualified as a marine radio operator in 1914 while still under age, it had been his mother who had refused to sign his papers so that he had joined the RFC instead, it seemed a bit unfair.

‘
Why
are you going?’ she asked. ‘Because they shot the Tsar?’

‘The Tsar doesn’t mean much to me, Mother.’

‘Because you don’t like Bolsheviks then?’

‘I’ve never met one.’

‘There must be a reason.’

But there wasn’t. The struggle going on in Russia meant little to Dicken beyond that he’d be able to go on flying when the Armistice in France had almost ended flying everywhere else.

Near the end of his leave a letter arrived from the Air Ministry telling him to hold himself in readiness. There was little else to do because Zoë Toshack was still in Canada, and a few days later a telegram arrived instructing him to report at once to the SS
Horatia
,
due to sail that same midnight from Hull.

‘They don’t grow more efficient with the years,’ Dicken snarled as he flung his belongings into a valise. ‘I’ll have to catch the afternoon train to London and the first one from there to Hull.’

Promising to write, he headed for the station and scrambled aboard the train. Passing through London, he snatched some food on the way north, and arrived in Hull late at night. Finding a taxi, he hurried to the docks and, with two hours to spare, scrambled aboard the SS
Horatia
,
a high-decked steamer with a smoke stack like a cigarette. Shown to a cabin, he immediately fell asleep and woke up the following morning to find the ship moving down the river.

There were a few soldiers – mostly NCOs going as instructors – in the ship. The captain in charge, a man by the name of Baird, had wound stripes all the way up his arm, seemed a little mad and appeared to spend most of his time holding up the bar. As the ship finally left the river and turned north, Dicken frowned. With the sun behind them, it seemed a strange direction to be taking.

‘Are we picking up more people?’ he asked the first mate. ‘At Tyneside or somewhere like that.’

The mate looked puzzled. ‘I’ve heard nothing of it,’ he admitted.

Dicken stared up at the sun. ‘Then aren’t we going the wrong way?’

The mate grinned. ‘Well, I’ve always prided myself on my navigation,’ he said, ‘and it seems all right to me. Which way were you
expecting
to go?’

‘South. Through the Mediterranean. Where are you going?’

‘Riga.’

Dicken’s jaw dropped. ‘Where in God’s name is Riga?’

‘Latvia.’ The mate grinned. ‘Any good to you?’

‘Aren’t the Germans there?’

‘Well, sort of. And sort of not. It was Russian before the war but it was invaded by the Germans and under the Treaty of Brest Litovsk the Russians renounced all claim to it. Actually, you’re lucky you’re not going to Murmansk, which is where I went last trip. That’s bloody awful. Riga’s much better.’

‘What’s happening there?’

The sailor smiled. ‘Well, it’s a bit confusing,’ he admitted. ‘During the war the Letts fought for the Russians but, when the Russians threw in the sponge after the Revolution, they fought for us. Then a group of Germans, who call themselves the Baltic Barons and want Esthonia and Latvia to be part of Prussia, liberated Riga from the Bolsheviks. Now, the Bolsheviks are back and the Letts, with allied blessing, have declared themselves a republic. Not that it does them a fat lot of good, because the Russian Imperial Army, the German Army, the Bolshevik army and finally the guerilla army have all fought across the bloody place and laid it waste. Our troops there are largely German Territorials run by a chap called von der Goltz, but the Latvian Government wants to be independent and doesn’t want ’em, while the Bolsheviks hate the Poles and the Poles are opposed to both.’