Piece of Cake

Book 1: R.A.F. Quartet

by Derek Robinson

Genres: World War II; War & Military

Synopsis

From the Phoney War of 1939 to the Battle of Britain in 1940, the pilots of Hornet Squadron learn their lessons the hard way. Hi-jinks are all very well on the ground, but once in a Hurricane's cockpit, the best killers keep their wits close. Newly promoted Commanding Officer Fanny Barton has a job on to whip the Hornets into shape before they face the Luftwaffe's seasoned pilots. And sometimes Fighter Command, with its obsolete tactics and stiff doctrines, is the real menace. As with all Robinson's novels, the raw dialogue, rich black humour and brilliantly rendered, adrenalin-packed dogfights bring the Battle of Britain, and the brave few who fought it, to life.

Release date: October 6, 2011

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 666

Sample

Dawn was beginning to soften the edge of the night as the Buick convertible cruised through the Essex countryside. Its driver was a small man, so short that he had to sit on a cushion and lean forward to see over the Buick’s broad bonnet. His right leg was at full stretch; even so, only his toes pressed the accelerator. The rush of air lashed his curly hair forward.

There were three other men in the car, all asleep. Like the driver, they were young and dressed in lounge suits or blazers and grey flannel trousers. One of them, in the back seat, held an enormous stuffed golliwog, half as big as himself.

A pothole made the car lurch. “Sorry,” said the driver.

The man beside him slowly woke up. For a while he stared ahead, blinking occasionally at the curving lane in the Buick’s headlights, the rushing hedgerows, the branches flickering overhead.

“Sticky,” he said. “You’re on the right side of the road.”

“Of course I am,” Sticky said. He flinched slightly as his wheels flattened a dead hedgehog.

His passenger glanced at him uncertainly, and then looked ahead again. He held up his hands and looked at each in turn. “What I mean is,” he said, “you’re on the wrong side of the road.”

Sticky thought about that as he swung the car into and out of an S-bend.

“So I am,” he said, and crossed to the left-hand lane.

They drove for another half-mile, through a little village and over a bridge, before the passenger said: “Sticky, how long were you driving like that, for God’s sake?”

“How should I know?” Sticky sounded annoyed. “Am I supposed to keep track of everything? Bloody hell, it’s hard enough to steer this beast without remembering every bloody little detail. I mean, damn it all.”

His passenger sighed, and then belched.

“Anyway,” Sticky said, “this is an American car, and over there they drive like that all the time.”

“But you’re in England.”

“Well, so are you.”

“Yes, and I like it here, and you could have killed us all, driving –”

“You don’t like the way I drive? You don’t trust me? Is that it, Patterson? Fine! Drive the rotten thing yourself.” Sticky folded his arms. The car hit a patch of corrugations and drifted across the crown of the road. Patterson grabbed the wheel, over-corrected and had to shove it back. “For Christ’s sake, Sticky!” he cried. Sticky deliberately looked out of his side window. The car zigzagged, jostling the men in the back seat. “Hey, hey, hey,” said one. The other simply groaned and clutched his golliwog. “Stop playing the bloody fool, Sticky,” Patterson said. The road curved to the left and he made desperate adjustments to keep the car on it.

“What’s the matter?” complained one of the men in the back seat.

Sticky tipped his head and arched his body until he was looking backwards over the top of the seat. “My standard of driving does not satisfy young Pip,” he said. “I have therefore relished command of this vehicle.”

“Get your foot off the gas, damn you!” Patterson shouted. He twitched the wheel and just missed a stone wall.

“Relished?” the man with the golliwog said to Sticky’s upside-down face. “What d’you mean, ‘relished’?”

“Relinquished,” Sticky said, and choked slightly on his own saliva. “I said I relinquished whatever it was.”

“He said ‘relished,’” the man with the golliwog told the fourth passenger. “Bloody Stickwell’s pissed again. Look at him. He can’t even stand up straight.”

“Where the hell’s the ignition?” Patterson demanded, scrabbling for the key with one hand.

“I said relished and I meant relished,” Stickwell declared firmly.

“Thank God he’s not driving,” said the man with the golliwog.

Patterson’s free hand thumped Stickwell on the knees until he sat down again. A sharp turn came racing towards them, and Patterson heaved on the wheel just in time. “God damn you, Sticky!” he said hoarsely. The wheel flickered back through his fingers.

“You’re driving on the wrong side of the road,” Stickwell said. It was true. The lights of an oncoming truck glared. Patterson got the Buick into the left-hand lane and the truck flashed by in a blaze of horns. “For the love of Mike, stop the sodding engine, somebody!” he pleaded.

“Think I’ll take a little nap,” Stickwell said, and closed his eyes. As he did so, the engine started to cough. It picked up for a few seconds, then spluttered and died.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Stickwell said severely. “You’ve broken it.”

Patterson heaved a deep and trembling breath. The Buick drifted along, shedding speed, and he edged it onto the grass verge, where it jolted to a stop. The night was very still. He rested his head and looked at the stars. They shimmered with unnatural intensity, blurring and sharpening and blurring again in a rhythm that matched a slow pounding in his brain. “As I live and breathe,” he muttered, “I swear I’ll never drop another drink. Drink another drop. Whichever.”

“That black velvet did it,” said Stickwell. “You shouldn’t have had all that black velvet. I didn’t, and look at me.”

“You look bloody awful,” said Cattermole, the man with the golliwog. “You look as if you’re about to spew.”

Stickwell twisted around to face him. Stickwell had dramatically gloomy features, and in the starlight his eyes were lost in their deep sockets. He studied the golliwog and said nothing.

“I’ve spewed once tonight already,” said the fourth man, Cox. “And it wasn’t the black velvet, either. It was all those American martinis before the black velvet.”

“I don’t remember any martinis,” said Cattermole. “Where did we have martinis?”

“In that rotten club. Before the party. You remember, Moggy.”

“I do not. I certainly had no martinis.”

“You had three,” Patterson announced. “And then you spewed.”

“Our big mistake,” said Cox, “was starting off on cider. I said at the time –”

“Were those things martinis?” Cattermole asked. “You mean those funny-tasting things, with the vegetables floating around in them?”

“I think I’m going to spew now,” Stickwell said.

“There you are!” said Cattermole triumphantly.

“It has nothing to do with the drink,” Stickwell announced. He spoke with some difficulty, as if he had a mouthful of chewinggum. “It’s all this wild careering around. Very sick-making.”

“Well, get out, first,” Patterson told him.

“At this speed? Are you mad, Patterson?”

“Watch out, Pip,” Cattermole warned as Stickwell’s head began to droop.

Patterson threw open the door and half-fell onto the grass. The sound of harsh retching began. “Shit,” said Patterson.

“Highly unlikely,” Cattermole remarked. He and Cox got out. There was just enough light leaking into the sky to silhouette hedges and telephone poles.

“Where are we?” Cox asked.

“Sticky ought to know,” Patterson said.

“Sticky’s got his hands full at the moment.”

“Really? That stuff’s not worth keeping, Sticky,” Cattermole called out. “Chuck it away.”

“Why did we stop?” Cox asked.

“Ran out of fuel,” Patterson said. “Had to make an emergency landing in pitch darkness. Brilliant bit of piloting.”

Cox climbed onto a tree-stump. “Nothing but fields,” he reported. “Not much chance of getting the Buick filled up here.”

“Sounds like Sticky’s doing his best,” Cattermole said. The painful noises in the car eventually tailed off into feeble coughs and gasps. Stickwell appeared, grey-faced in the gloom, and stretched out on the grass.

“What time is it? We ought to be getting on,” Cox said. “How far to the airfield?”

“Do stop worrying, Mother,” said Cattermole. “Have you noticed, Pip …” He yawned, and closed his eyes. “… noticed that Mother always starts worrying when it’s too late to do anything?”

Nobody answered. After a while a bird started to sing in a nearby tree. Stickwell swore at it and it stopped.

“I’m in enough trouble with the Ram as it is, that’s all,” Cox said. He had a long nose, slightly crooked where he had broken it by running into a gatepost at the age of six, and this made his face look even longer and narrower than it was. “He really hates me. You should have heard him go on about it. He went on and on and on.”

“Quite right,” said Cattermole. “It wasn’t your Hurricane. It belonged to the British taxpayer. You ought to be more careful with other people’s property. You behaved abominably.”

“I got the lights confused, that’s all. I thought green meant up and red meant down. Next thing I knew the prop was chucking out great lumps of grass and the Ram was giving me hell.”

Stickwell groaned, and rolled onto his side. “Think yourself lucky,” he said. “Chap I knew did what you did, only he cartwheeled the whole bloody kite, arse over tit, right down the runway.”

“It’s those damn indicator lights,” Cox said. “I expect he got confused.”

“He certainly looked confused,” Stickwell said. “His kneecaps were all mixed up with his shoulder blades.”

Cattermole made himself comfortable against the tree-stump. He had a tall, beefy body topped with a surprisingly small and delicate head; he looked like an idealised Grecian prizefighter, which was totally misleading: he was strong but he was lazy. “Anyway, the Ram’s in London,” he said. “Won’t be back till lunch.”

Mother Cox prowled around, kicking at dandelion heads which stood white in the darkness. The seedballs shattered and vanished immediately in the still air. “We really ought to start walking, you know,” he said.

“Where did you get that damn silly golliwog, Moggy?” asked Stickwell.

“Chap gave it me at the party.”

“Jolly decent of him.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought. Mind you, I had to fight him for it.”

“That wasn’t very nice.”

“Exactly what I told him, Sticky. He wouldn’t let go of it. ‘Look, old chap,’ I said to him, ‘this golliwog’s no damn use to you any more,’ I said, ‘one of its arms has come off,’ I said. Which it had. Then he said something rather unkind so I punched him in the eye and after that he gave me the whole golliwog, arm and all, without a word.”

“Really? Not a word?”

“Not one sodding syllable, Sticky.”

“Well, it’s the thought that counts, I suppose … Hullo, here comes a bus.”

Mother Cox looked around eagerly. It was not a bus but a tractor, bellowing and backfiring as the driver gunned the engine. It slowed as it neared them and Pip Patterson shouted from the driver’s seat: “Jump up! Can’t stop! Jump up!” He was towing a farm-wagon. They scrambled aboard it and Patterson accelerated with a suddenness that jolted them off their feet. Stickwell, sprawling in a scattering of straw, saw a light waving in the roadway. Someone was chasing them. In the distance he saw a house, its upper windows lit; as he watched, more lights came on. The man with the flashlight kept chasing until they reached a downward slope and the tractor outpaced him.

Its passengers clung to the sides of the wagon as Patterson, with no headlights to guide him and with the rush of air making him blink and squint, charged down the gradient. The tractor tyres bounced on bumps and spat up a thin spray of gravel. Moggy Cattermole tried lying on his front, but the bouncing hurt too much; so he lay on his back, which hurt even more; so he got to his feet just as the wagon hit a pothole and knocked him down. “Holy hell!” he shouted. Sparks were streaming out of the exhaust.

At the foot of the hill the road funnelled into a narrow bridge over a river. Patterson caught a glimpse of shining water, scarred by the panicking flight of duck. He tightened his grip on the thin wheel and aimed for the centre. As the walls closed in he shut his eyes. The tractor rushed across, its trailer savagely whacking the stone buttresses and leaving a trail of ragged splinters.

When the rumbling ceased, Patterson looked again. They were dashing past a sleeping pub; in the past few minutes the sky had lightened and he read the sign: The Carpenter’s Arms. A crossroads lay ahead, but he couldn’t read the signpost and he had to guess, so he guessed they should turn left and at the last instant changed his mind and turned right, winding the wheel as if the tractor were a boat and feeling it lean all its weight onto one side like a boat. Shouts came from behind, desperate enough to penetrate the din, and he glanced back to see the wagon skidding, its tail drifting wide as the wheels lost their grip. A screech of metallic pain came from the towbar. The wagon strained to escape, failed, got dragged back into line. The shouts were audible as curses. Patterson waved, and settled down to master the controls.

He barrelled across the countryside for a further ten miles while the dawn gradually bleached out the night and at last the sun nudged over the horizon. They might have travelled all the way to the airfield like this if Patterson, getting too cocky, hadn’t attempted a flashy gear change while going up a steep hill. He missed the gear and had to come to a halt. He found the gear and tried to restart but released too much power. The tractor leaped forward and snapped the towbar. The wagon rolled downhill for ten yards and gently wedged itself in a hedge.

Patterson switched off the engine, set the brake and climbed down.

“You’re a maniac, Pip,” said Moggy Cattermole. He sat on the trailer, brushing straw and bits of dried dung from his clothes. His hands were filthy and his forehead was bruised. Mother Cox wore a moustache of dried blood. Sticky Stickwell had rolled in an agricultural chemical of sulphurous yellow. “You’re a raving maniac,” Cattermole accused. “Why did you have to drive like that?”

“Someone was chasing us. Had to get away. After that I couldn’t seem to get the speed down.”

“Whose is this stuff, anyway?” Cox asked.

Patterson strolled to the tail of the wagon. “Harold Hawthorn, it says here. Nutmeg Farm, High Dunning. Why?”

“Well, we pinched it from him, didn’t we? I mean, you pinched it.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe the bloke who was chasing us pinched it from Harold Hawthorn.”

“Bloody farmers,” Stickwell said. “You can’t trust them an inch.”

“Where the hell did you find it, Pip?” Cattermole asked.

“In a farmyard. Inside a barn, actually.”

“There you are, then,” Stickwell said. “Obviously a dump for hot tractors. Bloke chasing us was some sort of agricultural fence. No wonder he didn’t want us to get away. We know his guilty secret.”

“Oh, balls,” said Mother Cox.

“How did you start it?” Cattermole asked.

“The key was in the ignition,” Patterson said. “I just swung the handle and off she went, first time.”

“This must have been their getaway tractor,” Stickwell said, brushing yellow powder out of his hair.

“With a great big farm-wagon hitched on behind?” Cox said.

“For the rest of the gang, Mother,” Cattermole explained patiently. “We’ve stumbled on a very big organisation. We shall probably get a medal for this.”

“We’ll get a colossal bollocking from the Ram if he ever hears about it,” said Cox.

“The Ram’s in London,” Stickwell said. “God’s in his heaven and I’m damn hungry. There’s nothing like a good healthy spew in the fresh country air to give a chap an appetite.”

Patterson climbed back onto the tractor. “Home for breakfast, chaps!” he said. But this time the tractor refused to start. They took turns winding the starting-handle; nothing came out of the engine but soft grunts and feeble puffs of black smoke. “Buggeration,” Patterson said.

“Come on, let’s walk,” Mother Cox urged. He was growing more and more nervous as the sun rose.

They set off. Stickwell and Cattermole began a serious conversation about the significance of becoming twenty-one; the day before had been Pip Patterson’s twenty-first birthday. “It’s a definite milestone,” Stickwell said. “Right to vote, for a start. And you can get married. Take out hire-purchase debts. Go bankrupt. Get a mortgage.”

“Who cares about all that junk?” said Moggy Cattermole, who was only twenty. “I’m not interested in any of it. Are you, Pip?”

“Not much.” Patterson was beginning to worry about the broken tractor and its battered trailer.

“The big danger, as I see it, is women,” said Stickwell. “Once they know you’re twenty-one and therefore legally available, they’ll do absolutely anything to get your bags off.” Patterson looked interested. “Pure and innocent they may appear,” Stickwell warned, “but you can’t trust ’em in a dark corner on a hot night. That’s my experience.”

“You don’t say?” Patterson was intrigued.

“My father once told me that all women are natural predators,” Cattermole remarked. “He said they’d strip you naked and suck your blood and then send you the bill.”

“There you are, then,” Stickwell said.

“Mind you, he had five sisters and three daughters. And two wives.”

“Outnumbered from the bally start, poor devil,” Stickwell said.

“What d’you mean, Sticky: they’ll do anything to get a chap’s bags off?” Patterson asked.

“I think we’re going the wrong way,” Cox said. Patterson looked at him with dislike. “Well, it’s no good us walking away from Kingsmere, is it?” Cox demanded. “I think we ought to find someone and ask.”

They stopped walking.

“What a bore you are, Mother,” Cattermole said. “I certainly shan’t invite you to my twenty-first party.”

Heavy trampling sounds came from the other side of a hedge, and two large horses looked at them. “Hullo!” Stickwell exclaimed. One of the horses blew smoke through its nostrils.

“I think they’re trying to tell us something,” Patterson said.

Hector Ramsay couldn’t wait. He had never had the gift of patience.

When he was a boy his restlessness had been quite endearing, sometimes; at boarding school, or at home in Hampshire, during the school holidays, young Hector had always been the leader of the gang, not interested in explaining or persuading but so brimful of energetic ideas that he usually got his own way by sheer thrustfulness. Or, looking at it another way, obstinacy.

As a young man he went on attacking life with a sledgehammer, as if it were some gigantic clam to be forced open. This was less attractive than his boyish gusto; it showed a relentless determination to succeed that most people found praiseworthy at first, a bit grim after a while, and frankly bloody tedious before long. If it was theoretically admirable for a seventeen-year-old to know so precisely what he wanted – he wanted to be the youngest-ever wing commander in RAF Fighter Command – in practice Hector Ramsay’s single-minded ambition was a bore. Even his father (by then retired from the Royal Navy) found him wearing, and his mother had long ago given him up, ever since the time he refused to attend his eldest brother’s wedding because it clashed with Open Day at the local RAF station. There had been the most enormous family bust-up over that. In the end Hector had gone with them to the church, slouching and silently contemptuous of the whole silly ritual; but he walked out halfway through the ceremony. He got into one of the hired cars and had himself driven to the airfield, where he spent the rest of the day happily climbing in and out of cockpits. There was an even louder family bust-up when he got home, although his mother admitted to herself that she was wasting her breath.

Hector knew what he wanted, and he couldn’t wait to get it. She sometimes wondered why he was so impatient. Because he was the youngest son? Because both his brothers had already done well in the Navy? Was that why Hector chose the RAF? Was he self-centred because he wanted to be a fighter pilot, or did he want to be a fighter pilot because that satisfied his self-centred nature? It depressed her that he was so intensely narrow, and sometimes she even wondered about his brain. His had been a difficult birth, late and awkward and full of pain. Hector hadn’t seemed to want to come into the world at all, he’d been dragged into it; and ever since he discovered what it was like, all his energies had been spent on getting far away from it. In a fighter plane. Alone.

So everyone was relieved when Hector Ramsay won a scholarship to the RAF College at Cranwell. He did well, got his commission, got his wings, got his posting to a fighter squadron. The family relaxed and began to treat him like a normal human being. There was even a spell when it almost looked as if Hector might get engaged.

He was flying Gloster Gauntlets – fixed-undercarriage biplanes with twin machine-guns, pure Dawn Patrol stuff – from an airfield in Cambridgeshire. She was Australian, a diplomat’s daughter, studying at one of the art schools on the fringe of the University. Her name was Kit and she had a freckled candour – together with legs like a dancer’s and breasts like grapefruit–that surprised and captivated him. She took him to bed (in her rented cottage at Grantchester) on his third visit, and that experience made him eager to return. What on earth did she see in him? Well, he wasn’t bad-looking, he had a kind of unblinking concentration that amused her, and he was in a different class from those flannelled undergraduates, all books and bats and bicycles, who jostled for her attention: at least Hector Ramsay did something; sometimes she could even smell the engine-oil on him when he came straight from flying. But what attracted her most was his enormous need. Here was a man so isolated that he could not reach out. Kit gave him her love, or so she believed, as an act of lifesaving. He was irresistible. For a few weeks they were like a nut and a bolt: gratifying when together, useless when apart. It wasn’t even necessary for them to say very much; they knew what they thought and they knew what they wanted. Once, when they were getting into bed, she paused and sat back on her heels and said, “Presumably you’re in love.” Hector crouched with his chin on his knees and hugged his bare legs, while he thought about it. “Presumably,” he said. They looked at each other. He was thinking: Am I? How do I know? How can I tell? She saw the act of thought crease his forehead like wind ruffling water, and she laughed. He raised his eyebrows. “Tell you later,” she said. But she never did.

The trouble began when he realised he was becoming addicted to her. If they didn’t make love at least every other night, he developed a craving for sex that obsessed him until it was satisfied. Then the craving started all over again. Sex obliterated his interest in food, duty, news, smalltalk, even flying. He could be in the cockpit running-up his engine, getting ready for take-off, and in all the shudder and roar he sat brooding over a vision of Kit seen in the spinning arc of the propeller, naked and ready, while his limbs twitched and went slack and his mouth accumulated saliva. Eventually, reluctantly, he had to straighten up and swallow, forgo his lovely vision, concentrate on getting this throbbing machine up in the air.

It worried him, this addiction. There was the risk that it might affect his health. He noticed a certain lassitude on the mornings after his nights with her. It wasn’t weariness or fatigue; it was more like abstraction tinged with irritability, but that sort of thing could easily lead to carelessness. When he was flying, his reactions seemed a little slower, his senses not quite so acute: his eyesight, especially, wasn’t as sharp as it ought to be. That was a myth, of course, a tired old joke: too much sex had absolutely no effect on eyesight, none at all; everyone knew that. On the other hand, Hector couldn’t focus as quickly or as clearly on distant objects as he used to be able to do. Also there were occasional headaches.

He wanted to discuss it with her but he was afraid to. Talk might destroy everything. He tried to discuss it with the RAF chaplain, failed to find the words, and left that man puzzled and wondering. One night he wrote a painful letter to his father, asking advice, but when he re-read it next morning the facts were so appalling that he tore it up and burned the bits. His hands were trembling; his mouth was twisted sideways in despair and disgust. Before he quite knew what he was doing, his legs were taking him to the adjutant’s office. He asked to see the squadron commander, urgently. The adjutant obliged.

“I want to apply for a transfer, sir,” Hector said huskily. “Immediately.”

“Yes? What’s up?”

Hector clenched his teeth and stared at the blurred, upside-down markings on the CO’s blotter. “Bad love affair, sir,” he said. He felt sick.

The CO propped his chin on his fist and made his pencil spin on the desktop. Bloody silly reason for a posting, he thought. On the other hand it explains why he’s been looking like a constipated cow lately … The pencil skittered to a stop. He looked up and delivered his all-purpose, wry smile. “We’ll miss you, old boy,” he lied fluently.

Hector was lucky. A violent mid-air collision had suddenly created an urgent need for pilots in another Gauntlet squadron which was scheduled to give an important aerobatic display in two weeks’ time. This squadron was based outside Aberdeen. Hector was on the train to Scotland that same evening. The last thing he did before he left was send a telegram to Kit. A telegram was much easier to write than a letter, and it had a curtness that suited his state of mind. He never saw her again.

Pilot Officer H. G. Ramsay’s file followed him to Aberdeen in due course, with a handwritten note that read Emotionally immature? That uncertainty didn’t stop him getting promoted to flying officer a year later. Flying was no longer the most important thing in his life. He was hungry for promotion; flying was simply the fastest route to his goal of becoming Fighter Command’s youngest-ever wing commander. He went on courses, and passed them. He changed squadrons, changed aircraft, flew Hawker Furies, Gloster Gladiators, Mark Two Gauntlets. His eyesight was no better but it was no worse: things sometimes tended to blur a bit, that was all. It didn’t stop him getting promoted to flight lieutenant.

By now the year was 1937 and war was obviously on the way. Hector Ramsay was, naturally, impatient for it. Flying was all very well, promotion was all very well, but what he really yearned for was the chance to lead a squadron in battle, to make a score, pick up a DFC, maybe a DSO. The autumn of 1938 looked very promising. Germany marched into Czechoslovakia and everything pointed to war, what with hundreds of thousands of children being evacuated from the cities of England, trenches dug in parks, gasmasks issued, a balloon barrage over London, all leave cancelled, camouflage paint hastily slapped on the aircraft. To top it all, Hector became a squadron leader.

That was when he got his nickname. He was given a squadron – it was called Hornet squadron, nobody quite knew why – that was equipped with Furies. It was stationed at RAF Kingsmere in Essex – exactly where the German bomber fleets were expected to cross the coast. The Fury was a delightful little biplane with a top speed of 220 mph, whereas Germany’s standard bomber, the Heinkel III, could fly at nearly 250 mph. The Dornier 17 was said to be even faster.

At his first meeting with his pilots, Hector Ramsay stood on a table and said: “Gentlemen, prepare to defend your country. Our aeroplanes are too slow. We cannot catch the Hun bombers. Therefore we must ram them.”

His announcement caused a thoughtful silence. In the event war did not break out; but from then on, Squadron Leader Ramsay was known as The Ram. Secretly, this pleased him. He acted up to his image – that of a pugnacious, aggressive commander, impatient for conflict, a leader whose men would follow him into the jaws of death if he gave the order – and he worked them hard.

In June 1939 Hornet squadron exchanged its Furies for Hurricanes. The Ram was immensely pleased. He launched the most impressive training programme anyone could remember. It called for an extremely tough schedule of physical exercises to improve stamina as well as a vast amount of flying and theoretical work on engine maintenance, meteorology, gunmanship and the like. The Ram drove himself as hard as his men, and after five days he went down with a severe attack of shingles. The sores became so painful that he could scarcely move. Bitterly disappointed, he went off to a hospital in Torquay, determined to fight his way back to health in the minimum possible time. The squadron trundled on under a succession of temporary commanders, and this worried him. “Just rest and relax and forget everything for a while,” the doctors said. “Let’s face it, you’re not going anywhere like that, are you?” The Ram smiled and agreed, but inside he was a-twitch with anger and impatience. The shingles got worse before they got better.

He was released in the third week of August and went straight back to Kingsmere. Maddeningly, the squadron was on leave. “The previous CO thought it was a good idea,” explained the adjutant, Flight Lieutenant Kellaway. “I mean, what with the balloon likely to go up before very long. A chance to see their families and so on.”

“Get them back,” the Ram sa