Piece of cake. Trouser-filling piece of cake, but a piece of cake all the same. Randall seemed to take for ever to make height in lazy circles over Lydd, but eventually we were up there, and it was time to go. I was so cold I didn’t care.
If you ask me now why I did it, I would have to answer that it was something to do with the power of command. It’s what they teach NCOs. Once Hickman and his man had begun to boss me about, it never occurred to me to question what I was being told to do. It’s all about the way an order is framed, and how it’s delivered. Once you understand that, you’ll understand how they convinced millions of Tommies in the First Lot to get up out of their trenches, walk on to the German machine guns and commit suicide – because suicide is what it was. Power of command has a lot to fucking answer for.
Let me tell you a bit about making a parachute jump. What it isn’t is a gentle sailing down to earth under a silken canopy wafted on the zephyrs of a peaceful sky. It’s actually a controlled bleeding fall. When I made my first jump in France I wasn’t scared, because I didn’t know what to expect. This time I knew what to expect, and the only reason I didn’t shit myself on the way down was because my buttocks were clenched so tightly with fear you couldn’t have got a whistle between them. I fell out of the Oxford without clouting it, screamed, and of course dropped the grab handle from my mouth. There followed a couple of nervy seconds with the pull drifting around in front of my face, and dodging out of the way each time I grabbed for it. Then it gave up and let me catch hold of it. I was upside-down when I pulled the ’chute. Then I screamed again, because the opening canopy wrenched both my arms from their sockets, and my man’s favourite bits were pulled north to somewhere above my belly button. You’d scream too. Believe me, you would.
Oddly enough I touched down exactly as Hickman had shown me. Knees bent, and a single roll. It was just like jumping off a table. If the table was at five thousand feet, and moving forward at about 100 mph, that is. And I hadn’t a fucking clue where I was, either.
I hit the deck on shingle, which, curiously, cushioned my fall, and between the largest and silliest concrete sculptures I had ever seen in my life. They were enormous. One must have been at least two hundred feet across and twenty feet high. It looked like one of those curved flat radar scanners you can see on the mast above the bridge of a warship. That was odd: radar was the first word to pop into my mind. Concrete radar? Bloody silly.
There were two others, both circular dishes angled slightly back from vertical – maybe twenty or thirty feet across. All three were grouped together, and faced across the Channel. Maybe they were new beam weapons focused on France; that thought cheered me up no end. I hadn’t seen them until the last minute, and somehow I’d managed to avoid the lot. I leaned back in the small depression in the shingle that my arrival had caused, popped the parachute straps, and got my breath back. The khaki silk parachute immediately rolled away on an on-shore breeze which had sprung from somewhere, and wrapped itself around one of the dishes.
That’s when a voice said, ‘I’ll have that if tha’ don’t want it.’ An old man was sitting close to a line of scrubby gorse bushes, which is why I’d not seen him at first. One of his companions barked at me, and another baa-ed. A mangy collie dog and three sheep: a shepherd then.
‘I think I’ve used it all I want,’ I told him.
He was smoking a curved pipe, and looked a very contented old shepherd. Maybe he was so old that John Clare had once written a poem about him. I turned towards him, and felt inside my breast pocket to find out if my fall had broken my own straight briar.
It hadn’t, and my new friend said, ‘Tha’ wants a fill?’
‘I’ll exchange one for the parachute. OK?’
He took his pipe from his mouth, and lit up his face with a huge toothless smile. I guessed it was going to be OK. Then Randall flew over at about a hundred feet. Ivy waved at me through the missing cabin door, and then her face was lost under her skirt again. I knew exactly where the two instructors would be looking.
I asked the old fellow, ‘Is there an airfield near here?’ as I handed him back his tobacco pouch.
‘Ten minutes. Over tha’.’ He used his pipe to gesture over his shoulder. The red Oxford came round again. I was able to wave because my hands had stopped shaking. Ivy’s skirt was still over her head. I could imagine her delighted shrieks.
My new friend scowled and said, ‘Noisy beggars.’ He wasn’t wrong.
I sat with him for ten minutes before I moved. His dog came over and sniffed at me. I could see the fleas moving in its coat. Then it went over and lifted its leg against the base of one of the concrete dishes. I asked the old man, ‘What the hell are these things?’
‘They call them “The Listening Ears” these days, son. They wuz secret when they built them. They collect sounds from across the Channel and force them altogether like.’
‘So you can hear people speaking in France?’
‘No. Aeroplanes. So
