Authors: Christopher Priest
I heard the servo motor begin to run, felt its vibration, as I crossed the closest edge of the dark triangle, and moments later I saw the signal light on the operating box flicker on and off, as one frame after another was exposed.
I left the camera running as the great Merlin reached its full power, and the Spitfire climbed at speed to the familiar heights of the open sky.
AN HOUR LATER I WAS ON A BEARING OF 260 DEGREES AND HAD
long ago passed safely out of Prachous air space. I was in a sky of high, billowing clouds. Below me was the sea with many islands in sight. Increasingly I saw larger pieces of land pushing out towards the islands, and I knew that before long this course would take me over the continental mass for most of the remainder of the flight. I was at just over twenty-five thousand feet, much lower than the operating ceiling at which the Spitfire reconnaissance pilots normally flew, but at this altitude the plane was cruising at high speed on a weak mixture. Because I was flying without maps, I needed to be able to see the ground from time to time. The aircraft’s cockpit heater blew warm air gently across me.
An immense column of heavy cloud lay ahead, blinding white at its anvil-shaped crest, but a thunderous dark below. I knew what it was, knew I should avoid it, but I had been trying to dead reckon from looking at the ground. The long trailing shelf of the anvil
was already above me and a stinging shower of hail was falling. It drummed terrifyingly on the Spitfire’s wings and fuselage, crashing against the canopy. The cumulonimbus stretched across the sky in front of me. My only option in the time left to me was to attempt to climb above it. Once again I raised the nose of the aircraft, but I was still climbing when I rushed against the wall of the cloud and slipped headlong into the turbulent darkness within.
I STRUGGLED THROUGH THE DENSE CLOUD FOR NEARLY HALF
an hour. Lightning streaked around me and violent up- and down-draughts battered the aircraft. The constant hailstones sounded like the impact of bullets. I was repeatedly thrown against the canopy or the fuselage – once the Spitfire acted as if it had rammed headlong into a solid obstruction. I was jerked forward in my seat against the control column, causing an unwanted dive. Any hope of maintaining my bearing was lost the moment I entered the cloud, because the internal currents were so violent and unpredictable that I could only hope the aircraft would stay in one piece and the engine would not fail or overheat. Sometimes it was impossible even to be sure the plane was still upright. This was the first and only time in all my solo flying that I felt out of control and in danger of crashing. Several times I was convinced I was going to die. The best I could do was cling on to the joystick, nursing the throttle with one hand, trying to keep the aircraft safely in the air.
I escaped from the cloud as suddenly as I had blundered into it. I flew out, more or less straight and level, moving in a few seconds from the terrifying up-draughts into calm, still air, blue and blue and blue around me. I was dazzled by brilliant sunshine.
I immediately checked my instruments, looking for any clue that the plane might have suffered critical damage, to the engine, to the flying surfaces, or to the hydraulics and fuel lines. All seemed well but it was impossible to be certain. I adjusted the mixture and the engine resumed its reassuring droning noise. The plane was still flying and it responded to my movements of the stick and rudder pedals. From the altimeter I discovered that we had ascended nearly five thousand feet while we were inside the storm cell. I let the plane descend to the former altitude. I checked my bearing, adjusted the direction, flew as calmly as I could, although I was feeling badly
shaken up by the experience. From that point on I kept a wary eye open for any more storm clouds of that sort.
The long day continued. I was flying blind, depending entirely on my compass. I had no idea where I was. The land below me was unbroken countryside, impossible from this height to pick out any features. As far as I could see in any direction there were no distinguishing marks, no mountains, urban conglomerations, coastlines, not even a river whose shape or position might tell me something. All I could cling to was the 260 degrees bearing, my only route, my only way to the place I thought of as home.
Something glinted in the sky to starboard. It happened so quickly that it vanished by the time I turned towards it for a better look. I flew on. Then it happened again and this time I saw that it was a single-engined aircraft, dark against the bright sky, but the sun was glinting from its wings as it kept swinging from side to side – that was how fighter pilots kept a watch below them. Fear gripped me again. A second fighter plane had now joined the first, zooming up from below. Were the fighters friend or foe? They were too far away for me to identify them definitely, but I knew almost beyond doubt that they must be German. I was in the most distinctive British warplane of all but it was unarmed – in any event I had no idea how one went into combat while flying, so a fight was never an option. They were backing off, taking up a position somewhere behind me, presumably gaining height so they could launch an attack on me.
Moments later a fiery trail of bullets passed above my canopy, disappearing somewhere ahead of me. Something impacted on the Spitfire, behind the cockpit. The plane lurched, but although it had been wounded and it felt less responsive to the elevators, it continued to fly. Then one of the attacking planes zoomed past me and for a couple of seconds it was clearly in sight. I recognized it at once – I had been trained to spot every aircraft known to be flying, allied or enemy. This was a Focke-Wulf 190, the only German fighter that could match the high performance of a Spitfire. I glimpsed the spotted dark green camouflage on the upper surfaces, the black Luftwaffe cross clearly visible, the swastika sinisterly painted on the fin. The Focke-Wulf roared low above my plane, and I swung the stick to one side to avoid it. The German plane then banked away from me. The second Luftwaffe plane followed it, without seeming to have fired at me.
Unable to fight I could only try to evade. The one advantage I had was the advanced flying performance of this Spitfire XI, increased
even more by the fact I was now light on fuel, and of course it lacked the deadweight of heavy machine guns buried in the wings. I threw the nose down, flung open the throttle and dived towards the ground. I turned, levelled out, dived again. My indicated airspeed was greater than 400 knots.
I lost sight of the German planes but I knew they must be somewhere around. I kept scanning the sky, but the sun was lowering in the west and the sky was too dazzling for me to see with any certainty. I saw two more aircraft – it might have been the original two, but it made no difference. They were flying at me from dead ahead and slightly to the side. I briefly saw the flickering flash of the guns embedded in their wings, but our combined speeds meant that these planes were only in sight for a couple of seconds. They swooped up and past me, one of them flying so close to my Spitfire I was certain of a head-on collision. It went just above me, though, kicking the Spitfire with the violence of its wake.
I flew on without sustaining any more damage.
The ground came closer, so I levelled the aircraft while trying to maintain the fabulous speed. Never before had I flown such a fast plane. The sheer thrill of that outweighed even my fear of being shot at by more German aircraft. High speed made me safe, made me feel safe. I went on and on, now so tired after hours at the controls that I was flying almost by instinct alone. I loved this aircraft more than I could express, even to myself. It seemed to anticipate my moves before I made them, sometimes even before I thought of making them, a sort of instinctive extension of me, a part of my consciousness that had been equipped with wings. I was still on the same bearing, somewhere over Europe, probably over the German homeland or perhaps a part of the occupied territories.
I was alone in a hostile sky, the sun sinking towards the horizon ahead of me. I wanted to be home, away from this, away from the past. I had a life ahead of me. The shore appeared suddenly and I flashed across the breaking waves. I was now flying low, at about two thousand feet. Anti-aircraft guns mounted on a ship moored offshore opened up on me as I streamed past. I saw the tracer bullets bright in the evening sky, curling up, nowhere close to me. Within seconds I was out of their range. It was getting dark – I guessed that in this summer evening there would be about an hour of subdued daylight left that would be good enough to let me fly safely. All I would need was the sight of a runway, straight and level. I took the plane down even lower, until I was only about two hundred feet
above the surface of the sea. I could not maintain this height by instruments so I watched the sea ahead as it seemed to dash towards me, hypnotic in its steadiness and sense of unstoppable rush. I was yawning. My mouth was dry, my muscles were exhausted, my eyes were sore from constant straining through the brightness of the sky. I flew on, with no idea where I was, where I was going. If I was over the wrong sea, or had drifted away from my course, I might fly forever above these waves until the last drop of fuel had been used. But then, ahead, low on the horizon, a sight of land. I took the plane up to about a thousand feet, stared ahead, saw the flat coast hurtling towards me, dark, unlit, almost unprotected. It looked so harmless, the edge of a small island at war, vulnerable in the declining twilight. I closed the throttle a little, and the Spitfire slowed. I was almost at the coast, saw the white of the waves fringing the beach, the quiet shore of Great Britain. This was the place I thought of as home, the island that had taken me in when I had nowhere else to go, the island country I had grown to love and wanted to defend. I crossed the English tideline, saw below me an area of dunes, a small town nearby, beyond there were silent fields, mature trees. I slowed my beautiful, wounded aircraft even more and flew carefully across the crepuscular countryside, looking for an airfield where I might safely land.
TIBOR TARENT WAITED UNTIL THE MEBSHER WAS NOT ONLY
out of sight, but also until he could no longer hear the distinctive high whining of its turbines. The personnel carrier had been driven away towards the east, which was the direction for the time being from which the wind was coming. For several minutes the sound of the Mebsher’s engine came intermittently to him, as the cold wind bore it across the high Lincolnshire Wolds. The further it travelled the more distorted by the wind, and to Tarent the increasing distance lent the sound an eerie, other-worldly quality. It was close to midday in full daylight, and the sun was breaking fitfully through the racing clouds, but that far off wailing made him think of night. In particular, of those nights in Turkey when people had come to the field hospital too late to be treated, had been forced to wait outside the locked compound overnight, who howled in pain as they died in the dusty, enervating heat of the Anatolian night. It was a regular task in the morning for the orderlies to retrieve the bodies of those who had not survived the hours of darkness.
The Mebsher, its turbines howling into the distance, had become a carrier of human remains, of people whose image had been doubled by death. He thought of Lou Paladin trapped inside the grey steel compartment, accompanied by people he knew were dead. Who was that she was sitting next to? That man who had the same cameras, the same face and no doubt the same name? How could he ever explain to her what had occurred?
Tarent could not think of it, or try to imagine it, because there
was no verbal or visual vocabulary to describe it.
The Mebsher finally moved out of earshot. Silence followed, the partial silence of the outdoors: wind, movement, foliage and branches. There was no birdsong in this place. The wind was edged with a deep chill, a harbinger of the early winter that threatened. Tarent felt the cold, not only from the wind.
He was alone in the quadrangle of Warne’s Farm – even the men who had been guarding the closed building were gone. With no one now to stop him, Tarent took several photographs of the concrete building where he had identified the bodies. He switched cameras, putting aside the Canon he was most attached to and taking out the Nikon. He immediately took a series of shots of the dark tower by the main gate, checked online that they were in memory at the lab, then went towards to the building and took a few pictures closer up. Pigeons had invaded the building and were squatting on the sills. Moss grew in the many crevices in the brickwork and render. For the first time, Tarent noticed that a placard had been placed on a door at the base of the building, warning that the structure was unstable and that no one should try to enter it. The area immediately around it had been designated as a hard-hat zone.
Again he checked online for the confirmation that the Nikon’s images had been received and were archived.
He walked across the quad to where he had left his bag, then moved it to a less exposed position inside a doorway. His name was shown prominently on the label, following OOR regulations.
He decided he should not attempt to leave Warne’s Farm until he had finished what he planned to do before the Mebsher arrived. Taking all three of his cameras he walked back through the lower corridor of the residential building, then followed the gravelled walkway that led to the fence. At every door or barrier he passed he made sure that his ID card was still functioning – the cavalier way in which Flo Mallinan had suddenly invalidated his passport made him wary of being locked out, but his card still worked.
Tarent passed through the main gate, checking and double-checking that his pass still functioned, then went through to the outside. He turned back, took some shots of the gate, the fencing, the notices and warnings attached. He also photographed the general view of the Warne’s Farm compound, seen from this slight rise of ground, visible through the trees.