“If it did even half what you say,” he remarked gently, “you wouldn’t be here to say it. You’d have hit the deck so hard that you’d come up in Australia – like a ruddy bulb!”
And Moaner sat there, looking at us all with a provocative eye. The scar on his cheek twitched as an impish grin stirred his sallow features. A lock of dark hair hung down over his forehead. A can of beer dangled by its handle from his thumb.
His bitter disappointment egged him on to shoot a yet bigger line about his Gremlin. Fortified by another pint, he proceeded to justify his stupendous claim.
“Even though you chaps are pretty ham-handed,” he said, amidst cries of “Oh!” “you can most of you recognize genius when you see it! So you’ll know that I
“Course it has, you line-shooting bus-driver!” said somebody. But Moaner would not have his “patron saint” denied.
“’S a Gremlin!” he mumbled into his tankard. “One colossal, stinking, evil-minded, all-powerful Gremlin!” And he eyed the lot of us, under that lock of hair, deliberately provoking somebody to argue the point.
Somebody did. Moaner’s chair, Moaner’s beer and Moaner himself went over backwards and, in a split second, a rough-and-tumble was on – in which six “attached” pilots of the Fleet Air Arm instantly joined. I saved the radiogram and a table full of cups and beer-mugs and withdrew out of range before my glasses got smashed. Moaner fought gallantly but was much outnumbered, and soon succumbed.
As we laughed and righted the chairs, tables, rugs, cushions, and tankards, Moaner – still panting from his exertions – said, “
But peace finally returned. The tankards were refuelled at Moaner’s expense – in expiation of his line- shooting. And he grinned sourly, yet amiably, and fell asleep.
An hour later he woke, yawned, and set off to bed, pausing at the door.
“If I’ve been shooting a bit of a line, chaps,” he said, “don’t blame
A foolish, pointless evening? Not a bit of it. A good time was had by all – and I had learned a little more of what lay behind Old Moaner’s wry humour. I was to need it. And soon.
Upon the following day Moaner and his crew set forth to dare the Gremlin again, not to mention their intention to disturb an enemy convoy which reconnaissance had located off the Dutch coast. I remember faintly dreading the job of interrogating him later. He was a touchy, strange, awkward sort of a customer to question when the exhaustion of a long and difficult operation combined with his cussed brand of humour to make things difficult for the questioner.
At such times, when a pilot and his crew are weary and suffering the inevitable reaction after prolonged strain, even the most placid of men needs and deserves the most delicate handling, and the Intelligence Officer can make use of everything he knows about each airman’s way of looking at things. They are always courteous and eager to help; but there are men who, under such stress, cannot at once recall some of the minute details which, though maybe seen only for an instant, are the stuff of which “Intelligence” is built up.
When “Moaner” and his crew came shuffling in, in their soft flying-boots, they were red-eyed and stiff with cold, and their normally pink and fresh young faces looked drawn and stubble-marked under the office lights. It appeared, to my not inexperienced eye, that the Super-Gremlin was still aboard that Beaufort.
They had been roaming the inhospitable airs over the North Sea, ploughing through the dirtiest conditions, and sampling an unseemly warmth of welcome from the enemy coasts, not to mention a bit of trouble flung at them from the skulking convoy which, even in that mucky weather, they had duly found and attacked.
“Moaner” had seen a couple of his formation go “in the drink” – and it was no time or place for bathing. His own aircraft had been shot up, and he had limped it home for the last hundred miles upon one labouring engine and with one eye on the temperature gauges all the way. But he had put a torpedo, sweet and pretty, into “a large motor-vessel strongly escorted by flak ships” – as the wireless news expressed it later on.
He was in the hell of a mood, elated by his success and yet depressed by his ordeal. He stumbled into a chair and gave me the outline of his adventures, with which his crew agreed. But, at the end of it all, I somehow sensed that there was something more. Some little point which he or they had spotted, momentarily, out there in the flak and the mucky weather, and which would not now be brought to mind. One learns to sense such things.
But neither he nor his crew could recall it, though the navigator gave me my first real clue. “There
No answering recollection lit Moaner’s tired eyes. He shook his head wearily, slumped in his chair and then, pulling himself together, treated me to a tirade about his Gremlin.
It had summoned clouds when visibility was wanted, dispersing them when cover was the urgent need. It had fiddled with his controls so that the ruddy kite wouldn’t go where he put it. Passing lightly from the compass to the undercart control, it had jammed the wheels in the “up” position so that, to cap all, Moaner had just had the nasty job of making a belly landing on a misty evening after seven hours of the most exhausting strain, though he didn’t put it that way. “Ruined a hundred yards of perfectly good turf” was his version. The Gremlin had been having a field-day.
The crew shuffled and coughed, as though a drop of shut-eye would be welcome. I could feel their hunger in my own stomach. Their fatigue made my own eyelids ache. But still I probed to evoke that fleeting, forgotten memory which I felt sure was there.
But Moaner was getting obstinate now – due to fatigue and strain. The fact that he could not remember now strengthened his conviction that there was nothing to recall. His mind was set in the bitterness of reaction.
“I tell you, there was nothing else . . . nothing of importance. If there had been I’d have remembered it, or one of the boys would.” He rose to his feet and stifled a soul-deep yawn. “We’re going to beat it . . . we’re all-in. See me to-morrow if you must go on yapping!” And he headed for the door towards which, after an instant’s hesitation, his crew began to follow him.
My last chance was going. By to-morrow, maybe, sleep would have cleaned the slate of his mind from every trace of the incident I sought. Would a change of subject release his brain from the worn channels of fatigue?
“O.K.,” said I. “I reckon you had some beer on board!”
He stopped dead, his brow creasing irritably as he sought some connection between my idiotic remark and our previous conversation.
“Beer?” he said. “What the hell are you suggesting?”
“Beer!” I said. “With a Gremlin in it, to make you talk like that!” And the trick was done.
His tired mind was jerked backward to the previous night, to the warm fireside, to the chaffing of his friends, to that comradeship which linked even my plodding duties with his valiant adventure. The strain was relaxed and I ceased to be a pestilential official who sat safely on his bottom while better men went a-flying. I became, instead, to his refreshed outlook, a cog – small but vital – in the pattern of service of the R.A.F. A bloke, in short, who was trying to do his job.
Moaner raised a smile . . . wan and weary . . . but still a smile. “Sorry, old boy,” he said, “but there really isn’t anything else . . . not a thing! You don’t mind if we push off? We’ve had quite a party out there!”
“I’m sure you have,” I answered, “and thanks for being so patient – all of you. Good night!”
But, even as the sergeants chorused “Good night, sir,” the shutter clicked in Moaner’s brain.
“Gosh!” he cried. “There
And out it came.
It was flashed to Group, to Command, to the Air Ministry, Admiralty and War Office. A mere scrap of “gen”, photographed on to Moaner’s mind in that perilous instant while he fought for control of his machine over the enemy ships. Yet it fitted, like a lost piece of a jig-saw, into a picture which “Intelligence” had been struggling to complete for months. A night’s intervening sleep might have lost it for ever.
At the first opportunity I stood Moaner a pint of beer – Gremlin or no Gremlin. And he winked over the tankard’s edge as he said “Cheers” in the accepted style.
