DAVID FIDDIMORE
The Silent War
PAN BOOKS
For the National Service veterans of Suez
. . . and of Korea, Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and all those other dirty little wars they were led into by ungrateful governments that should have known better.
God bless you boys.
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PART TWO
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
PART THREE
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
PART ONE
This Is Not a War
Chapter One
Straighten up and fly right
David Watson had been a squadron leader and a drunk the last time I had seen him in 1947. Now it looked as if someone had cleaned him up again, and the silver bars doing the ‘Beer barrel polka’ on his shoulders said that the silly buggers upstairs had made him a wing commander. Bollocks. I was in a scruffy office in a seedy part of North London, and he was asking me, ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’
I probably sniffed: I had a cold. ‘Would it matter if I was . . . or had been?’
‘Yes. You couldn’t come back to the Service.’
‘I don’t want to come back to the Service. All that bullshit’s behind me now.’
‘No it isn’t. You are still in the Reserve even if you haven’t attended any of your obligatory annual parades, so you’re liable to be called up at times of national emergency.’
‘In that case yes I was, and am. Can I go home now?’
‘Can you prove it?’
‘Yes. I’ve got a CP membership card somewhere – it was an accident by the way, but lucky for me. You can’t have me back.’
He leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Yes I can, because we happen to want men with your old-fashioned skills at the moment. I forgive you for being a Communist. Welcome back to the RAF, Charlie, and start calling me sir, there’s a good fellow. Care for a snifter?’
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: bollocks.
The last national emergency I’d danced in had been the Berlin Airlift. It didn’t like me one bit, and tried to kill me in a Dakota smash. I didn’t like it back, and consequently didn’t return to the Fatherland. To be strictly honest I had little choice in the matter: the War Office banned me. It’s a long story, and one that might amuse you one day. For once the Germans and the Brits had agreed about something: neither wanted me to set foot in Germany again. I never imagined that the RAF would want me back after that.
Watson had been my last proper RAF senior officer, although the word proper is probably on a shoogly peg, because at the time he was heading up a radio station in a halfway house between the old Empire Code and Cipher School, and the GCHQ it later became. In those days he was all tweed jackets, leather elbow patches and pipes. It had been meant to be a cushy number for my last few months in blue, but hadn’t turned out that way. Four years later he called me up, and told me to report to an office over Woolworths on Kentish Town High Street . . . and here I was, feeling like a snake which has been picked up by the tail. I wanted to lash out and bite someone. The bastards couldn’t do this to me again. He picked up a green telephone hand set and told it, ‘The bottle and two glasses please, Daisy. You’ll remember Mr Bassett. He’s coming out to play with us again.’ As he replaced the receiver he asked me, ‘You do remember Daisy? I had her at Cheltenham.’
‘If she’s still with you she’s even madder than you are.’
‘Sir. Madder than you are, sir.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes you bloody do, Charlie. Bloody done and bloody dusted . . . so not so much of the bloody lip from now on.’
Daisy walked in with a nice bottle of Dimple and two cut-glass tumblers on a silver tray. My favourite kind of woman is the type I see walking towards me carrying my drink. She’d even remembered that I watered my whisky, and had brought a small glass jug of the stuff. It was the first time I’d seen her in uniform, and uniforms do something for a woman.
She smiled. ‘Welcome back, Mr Bassett; we’ve all missed you.’
It did occur to me to wonder who we were. Watson poured, I watered and we clinked glasses – I thought I might as well get a drink out of him, because I’d already worked out that this could only be a bad dream. He said, ‘We can relax now, Charlie . . .’
Even although the word curdled in my mouth I called him sir.
‘I’ve already got a job, sir, running a cuddly little airline down on the South Coast. It’s where you phoned me. I’m sure that my boss will argue it’s in the national interest to leave me exactly where I am.’
‘Your cuddly little airline is in the same state as all of the other cuddly little airlines, Charlie: practically skint. The government is handing out precious few contracts these days, and the big outfits are hoovering up the freight work before you even have time to offer. Hard times are upon us, Charlie: that was a book title once, wasn’t it?’
‘Dickens. Unreadable.’ What did I know? ‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘Your Mr Halton has already been spoken to. He’ll be glad for us to
