Turbulence (12 page)

It began with a dull roaring sound. At first I thought it was something to do with the mechanical felling of timber above. Then, growing much louder, it brought me running out of the cot-house – and what I saw was a thin stripe of duck-egg blue cut across the sky. The aeroplane was moving fast. I watched it swoop and curve at the end of its run. Only then did I understand it was the enemy.

Passing and turning, the plane came over several times … Good use of the throttle in a short space, I thought, watching, before becoming concerned – dully, numbly – about being shot. I scuttled back inside the cot-house.

The plane returned two weeks later. This time I really did expect its guns to open fire, so I kept under the eaves of the cot-house as I watched. Looking, though, I realised it was a meteorological reconnaissance plane, a specially converted Junkers – a Ju 290, by then the main long-range reconnaissance vehicle of the Luftwaffe. It was making the kind of low-level photographic sortie known in the RAF as a ‘dicey do', meaning an uncertain dice with death, as delivered by anti-aircraft guns.

On the plane itself, I knew, there would be telephoto lenses in the wing-tips for photographing cloud above bomb targets. I wondered why he was so low: I could actually see the psychrometer strapped to the aircraft's nose. It was an instrument used to measure humidity – along with a barometer and an air-speed indicator it was part of the fundamental equipment
used by meteorological reconnaissance flights on both sides. Geoffrey Reynolds had had one on the plane that flew me up to Scotland.

The morning after the Junkers appeared for the second time, I got up, shaved, made some porridge and tea for breakfast and went as usual to check my instrument screen. I'd had to get Mackellar to build a wooden fence around the louvred box to protect it from the cattle.

I first checked my grass minimum – that is, the temperature recorded when the thermometer is exposed to the open air on forked twigs stuck in turf, so called because the thermometer bulb is just in contact with the tips of the grass blades. Its purpose is to show the reduction of the temperature (by radiation to the night sky) of the layer of air closest to the ground. The next thing was to check the rain gauge.

I had a psychrometer of my own, or hygrometer as they are also called. It was a fiddly business, but not so much as for meteorologists of the past, who had to mess about with a human hair that expanded and contracted according to relative changes in humidity. Now we just use two thermometers, one which is kept wet, the other dry, and note the difference.

As I took the reading, I heard the clank of cow-bells in the distance, so afterwards I went up to the farm to find Mackellar, to ask him if he had seen the Junkers.

The atmosphere in the dairy was thick with the sweet, relaxing smell of milk. Mackellar's lurcher – which didn't seem to have a name – was curled up in a corner, while its flat-capped owner sat on a stool.

‘I seen it before,' he said of the plane. ‘Pass us that bucket.'

The cows shifted in their stalls. I asked if I might have a go at milking one. He sat me down by an old cow, which was likely to be more patient with a beginner. I did rather well, though I spilled some of the precious liquid on my trousers.

Later that morning I joined Mackellar as he took the milk down to the local creamery. Sitting in his trap, with the milk slopping in churns behind us and him giving the horse a little tap with the whip now and then, we wound our way through the hills that loured over the Dunoon road. Once again they were encircled with cirrus, looking this time like the eyebrow tufts of an old man.

I felt happy, with only one slight reservation. The second sighting of the plane troubled me, but I didn't know why. How could I? How was I to know it would be quite so damaging to me personally? Or that it was part of a whole dimension of weather intelligence that has largely remained secret even to this day?

There was just a niggle at the time, a suggestion from the corner of the picture, prevising me of danger through the whole. Even though it was full of preparations for war, Kilmun did not seem like the kind of place that might actually be violated by actual conflict. Yet here the war had been, flying above us, as if on an inspection. It meant something, surely; that plane was here for a reason.

The wheels of the trap crunched over the road beneath us, their rhythmic noises blending with the patterns of my thought. Beside me Mackellar's face was like a broken-up layer of rock, furrowed and dark brown, except for his lips, which were paler.

The creamery manager, an aged gentleman in blue overalls going by the name of David Rennie, said he too had seen the plane. Apparently the Home Guard had been put on alert. Rennie himself was a member. He said he was surprised the plane had not been shot down on its way westwards.

Mackellar was unruffled by all this. It was as if nothing could disturb the land for him. For this was his atmosphere, and he knew it. He knew the fields divided by thorn hedges garlanded with wild flowers. He knew the treeline where the
forestry ended. He knew the shoreline where his boat was pulled up, its interior like a scoop for air, its rowlocks winding spools for his mackerel lines.

In the wind, the feathery lures, brightly coloured, fluttered at the end of the lines: flags on a medieval battlefield. That is what I think of right now, looking out of the porthole at the star-spangled banner flying from the bridge of a United States ship that has come alongside us. It's a NOAA research ship, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel on its way from Cape Town to the Antarctic to study the forces that affect global climate variability. The opposite direction to us, in other words.

What else did Mackellar know? Let me see. Without much conviction of success, I try to conjure back that vanished atmosphere of history, which even as I sit here threatens to slip back into obscurity – or, at least, that wood-panelled corridor of time whose very varnish promises distortion of memory. But what was there …

The long windbreak of beeches that the Rymans called the beech tree walk, though Mackellar's father had planted it. Also the sound the beechmast shells made, crunching beneath our feet. He knew, too, that the cot-house compulsorily occupied by the Met Office was the oldest building in the area. And he knew that Ryman's house was built on the site of an old rabbit warren, and that now the rabbits had moved further up the hill, nearer to the beech trees.

Mackellar said he could call them closer to him in order to shoot them, by imitating their young. I did not believe him when he first told me this, but many times later I saw him on moonlit nights, hunting rabbits by the beech tree walk. Sometimes he used snares and nets, sometimes a.22 rifle and lamp. I heard shots in the night and the strange, high-pitched noises he also made up there on the hill, the sound of them
mixing in with the whistling of the wind as it passed through trees and thistles.

A week or so after our trip to the creamery I saw him strangle a rabbit he had caught in a snare. I watched, with horrified fascination, as he took out a knife to remove its intestines. He fed them to his dog, then quickly, expertly, peeled back the rabbit's skin. What was left after the unfolding was something terrible, fetal. I watched as he removed the backbone, cutting away lumps of meat.

I was glad not to be able to accept his invitation to supper that night. I had a good excuse, anyway: the Waafs from Dunoon, Joan and Gwen, had invited me to a dance.

I gunned down to Dunoon on the motorcycle, full of erotic expectation, with the tails of my greatcoat streaming out behind. The dance was being held in an ornate oriental building called the Pavilion, which was decorated with fading posters of the entertainer Sir Harry Lauder, who was a local resident, and a group of high-kicking showgirls called the Glenmorag Follies.

The girls were there to greet me, both fabulously dressed in very bright frocks and made up to the nines. We gave in our coats and I acted the cock of the walk as I strolled into the dance hall, a girl on each arm. Heads turned to look at us, I believe – there were lots of servicemen in the hall. But for all their uniforms, I felt most resplendent in my simple black suit and tie. I remember how the girls' dresses switched enticingly over their calves.

After downing a few drinks I asked Joan to dance. Pushing aside a blonde lock from her forehead, she smiled sweetly, nodding in assent, and I really thought my luck was in – for I had heroic visions of myself in the romantic department as well as the meteorological.

But as soon as we took to the dance floor, it was clear these
hopes were to be dashed. The dance orchestra was called ‘The Flying Yanks' – they were a US air-force band – and of course they played American music: jive, swing, jitterbugs and that sort of thing. I did my best, but it was hopeless. I felt stiff-armed, moving like a marionette, whereas Joan seemed to have the hang of it right away, turning with an easy grace, confident in her crossings and recrossings, as if she were as naturally cut out for the pursuit as her brightly sashaying dress.

Things went no better with Gwen, on whose toes I twice trod, and soon, clearly bored with trying to teach me the steps, she called it a day. The pair peeled off, danced with some officers, then mostly with each other. I hung round the bar consoling myself with beer, then bought a bottle of whisky to take home. I felt angry, feeling as if the girls had led me on, but the truth was I had no right to demand special treatment. The young can be so unreasonable in what they expect from the opposite sex.

Leaving the dance hall, I wandered about with the bottle of shame hidden under my coat. The whisky, I remember, was Whyte & Mackay. Eventually I elected to sit under the statue of Highland Mary, from where I watched the ship lights on either side of the boom that was stretched across the Clyde. I sucked at the neck of the bottle – sucked at it like a baby at the pap while watching the moonlit white clock face on the pier house, or casting jealous glances down at the couples emerging arm in arm from the Pavilion.

I'd had a few girlfriends in my early years at the Met Office, but none of them had turned out right. We'd had the usual hand-holding in the cinema and kisses and increasingly bold delvings, but it always seemed to peter out. Partly it was that I always went for upper-class or bohemian women, I suppose because they were furthest from my own experience and therefore most desirable. Most eventually said they found me too obsessive, which was strange because I took the view that a girl might find it attractive for someone to ramble on in a likeably boffinish way. It was still an effort for me to ‘perform' this rambling: I'd effectively been emotionally withdrawn since my parents' death.

In any case, it seemed I was inept with girls. It wasn't that I didn't have any sex. I took what was on offer (I'm ashamed to say I lost my virginity while conducting an affair with the landlady of the boarding-house I lodged in at Dunstable during my training), but at this stage the grand passion eluded me.
Though the landlady shrieked with pleasure, the moment of losing the blessed thing was unsatisfactory to me. What I remember most was the cherry-coloured curtains in the room. Afterwards she said: ‘There, you've done it now.' Or it might have been: ‘There there, you've done it now.' One would think these moments stick more firmly in the memory, but as time goes by it seems to get harder and harder to fish things out of the river.

Maybe – I remember thinking this – the problem was that I was actually in love with the weather. Most people might just exchange greetings and chat about that subject, but I have to get technical. Surely there had to be other people like me. Maybe, I thought, taking another slug, I just needed to find a woman who was like that.

Fragments of broken music rose like wisps of smoke from the Pavilion, creeping into my ears, or waiting a while before doing so to mix with the sound of the waves washing against the pier stanchions, from where a strong smell of fuel oil emanated. I felt unmoored, adrift, dogged by failure.

Wrapped in my Crombie, I sank back on the grass and stared at the woman above me. Erected in 1896, the statue remembered Mary Campbell, a locally born individual famous for becoming the tragic lost love of the poet Robert Burns. Though Burns was already married and his wife expecting twins, he and Mary exchanged vows on the banks of the River Ayr, swapping Bibles over running water. This is said to be a Scottish tradition (so long as the stream still runs and Bible stays true, the love too will hold), but it all came to naught as she died of a fever. Well, it was appropriately under this embodiment of doomed love, ten and a half feet high, surrounded by railings a year after it was built to keep off vandals, that within a few turns of the hands of the clock, I emptied that whisky bottle and drank myself into a stupor.

Freezing cold, head thumping, I woke up at dawn to see the boom boat moving aside the gate in the line of mines across the water, all under a deck of stratus, the sheet-or layer-cloud. The boom boat was admitting a grey frigate. I was watching the warship's wake, that perfect expression of turbulence in action, and wondering through the agony of my hangover what I would think in future of last night's fiasco and this whole strange situation I found myself in, when I suddenly realised there was something wrong with the way the wake was bubbling up. There was a line of extra foam down the middle of the frigate's serrated trail. What
I
saw was the retrograde fur on the back of a Rhodesian ridgeback.

For a moment I thought it was the remnant of my drunken odyssey, making me hallucinate, but then I was certain. There was something else down below: it could only be a U-boat, using the frigate as a shield to get through the boom into the network of lochs in the Cowal. Getting to my feet unsteadily, I ran as quickly as I could up Argyll Street to HMS
Osprey
and informed the sleepy rating at the reception.

‘You're drunk, man, I can smell the whisky off you,' he replied, looking at me cold-eyed. ‘Had too much of a good time at the dance, did you? You better bugger off quick or I'll have you arrested.'

‘I am
not
drunk,' I shouted across the desk, though I expect he could indeed smell alcohol as he said. ‘Come on, go tell them now. I'm in the Met, I know what I saw.'

Grumpily he went into the depths of the ‘ship' before returning a few minutes later. ‘Well, I told them, chummie. I don't see as they're going to take any notice of you, seeing as I also said you smells like a still, but I 'ave told them.'

He had hardly finished speaking when a loud explosion sounded on the water. We both ran outside to hear another explosion and see a large column of foam erupt from the river. Then another came, and another, and finally a much louder noise, shattering the windows of houses along the quay. A siren sounded and air-raid wardens with gas masks and helmets began to run about.

The rating grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, making my head – already reverberating from the boom of the depth charges – ache all the more. ‘You were right! You were right! There was an enemy craft below. We've got 'im.'

So it proved. The all clear was given. With a gathering crowd of townsfolk and naval staff emerging from
Osprey
, we watched as a large pool of oil and pieces of debris began to float up in the vicinity of the explosions. The frigate, standing by to pick up survivors from the stricken submarine, gave several blasts on its foghorn and a large cheer went up throughout the town. My hangover rapidly dispersing on account of adrenaline, I felt as if the cheer were for me in person. Visions of a medal flashed before my eyes, of congratulations from Sir Peter, of adulation from Gwen and Joan, from the whole female population of the Cowal, in fact. There was no need to return to London with the Ryman number pinned on my chest. I could just live here all my life, being bought drinks in pubs, fêted for ever as the man who saved Dunoon.

And it was beginning right now. Not so reluctant now, the rating pulled me over to meet the officer he had informed – tall, strikingly handsome Captain Scott-Clark, who shook my hand enthusiastically. ‘Very clever of you to spot that. We've
had a lot of difficulty with subs hiding from radar in the wake of ships. Now, I don't want to take anything away from what you did, but we did know the U-boat was following. It was a trap – we just had to get her far enough away from the mines of the boom before setting our charges.'

As quickly deflated as I had become elated, I slunk off and found the motorcycle where I had parked it by the Pavilion the previous night. Riding up Argyll Street, past FH Carey the tobacconist, Abel the chemist, Muirhead the grocer, and then the NAAFI run by the local scout troop, I wondered if I was ever going to distinguish myself. Mathematics? The Sheepshanks Prize felt a long way away. I certainly wasn't excelling as an amateur spy, and now my efforts as a spotter of submarines had been dashed.

Maybe, I reflected as I chugged under the hills between Dunoon and Kilmun, I would have to become a tobacconist, chemist or grocer. Or even a Scoutmaster.

I passed Kilmun church. What about a priest? I could give up all idea of sexual conquest and become a priest. A monk like my teachers at Douai. But I could hardly remember my Hail Mary in those days.

In the course of the ride home, as my hangover returned with a vengeance, the Virgin merged – across an imperceptible mental boundary – with that other Mary, she under whose statue I'd had my appointment with Messrs Whyte & Mackay.

That was a long time ago. But I can still remember that hangover coming back, borne like Satan on the clouds of my pipe smoke. It was painful. It was superfluous. It piled Pelion on Ossa. It was nasty – like a sneak thief returning to steal something that had belonged to him in the first place, left by accident at a premises he has already burgled. Yes, it was a supreme hangover, as only a spirits hangover can be.

The remainder of the month passed in a similar alcoholic fug. Alcohol and nicotine, too. My household gods. I remember looking at a piled-up ashtray of cigarette ends and bottle tops and thinking what a salad of despair it was.