Turbulence Page 24

  ‘What we are doing is immensely important,’ I said, trying to ward off the deep sadness of his voice.

  ‘May I be candid with you, Meadows? I don’t think this joint way of doing it, with the three forecasting centres, is the best way of going on. It’s unscientific, over-complex – sheer madness, in fact. I should tell you I spoke to Sir Peter about it and I was stunned by what he said. He indicated to me that the reason we are doing it this way is that, if anything should go wrong with the forecast for the invasion, the responsibility could not be identified with any particular national organisation.’

  His voice hardened, his accent becoming more Norwegian. ‘You know that is why we have Stagg? Just to link up the views. Personally, I cannot see why Sir Peter appointed him even on that front, never mind the meteorological one, where he is hopeless. He is no diplomat. Not even at the most critical times of our talkings is he able to submerge his ego.’

  I felt a need to defend Stagg. He was a bit abrasive, anyone would have to agree with that, but he was also fair-minded and very intelligent. ‘Sverre, he has an unenviable task – drawing all our opinions into an agreed story, presenting it to Eisenhower, answering questions from all those formidable generals and air marshals.’

  But Petterssen would not be budged. In later years he and Stagg would go hammer and tongs at each other in letters, arguing about who had said what during these conferences. I make no final judgement, except to say somebody had to bring all these warring opinions together. Yes, Stagg got people’s backs up – he was at daggers drawn with the navy as well as Petterssen and Krick – but I am certain that would have been the case whoever had done the job.

  8

  On Wednesday evening, 31 May, the conference was still in disagreement, but again in a different mode from the previous day. Krick and Petterssen now agreed that there might be storms in the Atlantic, but Krick claimed that a finger of high pressure would by Monday extend into the Channel and protect the invasion fleet. Petterssen and Douglas still maintained that the weather would be dangerous come Monday.

  Stagg and I both found this diversity of view troubling, and he consequently sought a telephonic audience with General Bull, a senior member of Eisenhower’s staff.

  ‘Pick up your handset,’ he said to me before calling. ‘Tell me what you think.’

  I listened to him explain to Bull that the prospects for Sunday, Monday and probably Tuesday were on the poor side, but the real difficulty was that they couldn’t get the forecasting centres to agree.

  There was a pause, in which the whirr of the scrambler could be heard.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Stagg, get it sorted out!’ urged Bull. ‘General Eisenhower is a very worried man.’

  So was Stagg after that. He put down the phone and sat motionless in his chair. I suggested we eat something.

  We dined on cod, chips and peas at the mess hall, washed down with strong cups of tea. That night, the hundred or so men and women in the mess were unusually silent. There was a new tension in the air as the invasion they had spent so many months planning was about to begin. I realised everyone in the room was staring at us meteorologists, as if it were our fault the weather was not falling into line.

  Stagg also felt the pressure of all those solemn, unsmiling eyes. Things weren’t helped by him accidentally tipping up the edge of his plate with his elbow, making his peas spray up and roll over the table. When he got down on his hands and knees to pick up his fork, his long frame bent under the table, it seemed as if he was hiding.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘Let’s go.’ We took our trays to the throw-out and went back outside onto a quadrangle in front of the main building. It had been covered with gravel and was parked over with vehicles. It was about 2030 hours, but there was still plenty of light to see by. The pearl-grey sky was covered with cirrocumulus. The mackerel cloud.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow morning we’ll have a breakthrough,’ said Stagg, looking up at the coming moon and going sun. It was one of those evenings of pure luminosity.

  ‘Hey, Stagg!’ said an American voice behind us.

  It was Eisenhower, getting out of a Packard with a US flag on the bonnet. He had a female driver, a pretty Waaf with dark hair.

  Stagg straightened up and saluted. ‘Sir!’ Then he introduced me. ‘This is my assistant, Henry Meadows.’ I quickly saluted myself, realising I should I have done so when Stagg did. We stood there formally for a second, relaxing only when Eisenhower took a packet of Lucky Strikes from his pocket. Stagg declined, but I accepted.

  ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Stagg,’ said Eisenhower. ‘I’m off to London to see Churchill. We’re going to have one more little talk before the get-go. I wanted to see you first. I understand from Bull you’ve had a lot of trouble getting people to agree.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

  The American cigarette tasted very different from my usual Capstan.

  ‘Well, I want you to know that you have to follow your own instincts. Trust your gut and above all don’t feel you have to favour the American view just because I’m in charge. I just need the decision to be right – the nationality of whose brain it comes out of doesn’t matter.’

  Eisenhower’s driver was studying her lipstick in the rearview mirror. It was rumoured she shared his bed. Glancing up, she caught me looking at her. I blushed, but she just smiled and opened her compact. I thought of Joan and Gwen, wondering what had happened to them – and then of Gill Ryman. I still had not been in touch with her, and the lapse had begun to occupy my thoughts. It made me feel disgusted with myself.

  ‘Some of my colleagues would have you replaced,’ continued the commander cheerfully, ‘but I know you’re the man for the job, Stagg. So you just keep them forecasts coming. We need one good spell, that’s all. Give me as much notice as you can. At the moment, I can confirm we are still hoping to go June 5th, assuming everything has come into alignment.’

  I gulped, glancing apprehensively at the sky. It was to be Monday after all.

  Eisenhower ground his Lucky Strike under his heel and got back in the Packard. With one last look in the mirror and an expression that seemed to say, ‘I’m satisfied with that,’ the woman put away her make-up and they pulled away, the sleek car rolling over the gravel. The Snowballs waved it straight through at the checkpoint.

  ‘Maybe we’ll have happy news for Ike tomorrow,’ Stagg said without conviction.

  We watched the gate of the checkpoint come down. The chance of getting the forecast right seemed as distant as a planet yet to be discovered.

  June

  1

  At the Thursday morning conference – 1 June – Petterssen and Douglas predicted that the coming weekend’s weather would form part of a long, wandering cold front that would persist for at least a week. Krick and the others at Widewing said the bad weather would clear tomorrow. By that time, I reflected, Stagg, Yates and I would be at Portsmouth, where we were to join the rest of the staff.

  ‘Personally, I look forward to Monday with considerable optimism,’ Krick said. ‘You see how this protrusion from the Azores high will shield the Channel from the bad stuff. It’ll be like a bubble sealing the entrance. Or a finger in the dyke.’ He kept going on about this finger.

  That afternoon I drove down to Portsmouth with Stagg and Yates in an RAF staff car: three extremely worried men sitting in silence. The gravity of the situation was emphasised by the lines of war traffic, which made it an extremely long ride. On the way I suddenly realised I had organised that the old WANTAC gauges should be delivered to Bushey, not Portsmouth. I would have to make a telephone call as soon as we got there. I wondered if they had been picked up yet. I imagined the pilot – perhaps even Reynolds himself – swooping down and hooking up the line with the bag attached, then zooming up with the package under him, to be retrieved by another member of the crew.

  As we sat behind lines of military traffic – tanks, armoured personnel carriers, staff cars, and lorry after lorr
y overflowing with troops – the thought came into my head that I would now be very near to Gill Ryman. I was on my way to Portsmouth, she was on the Isle of Wight, just across the Solent. Again the fact that I had not yet written to her apologising for her husband’s death provoked a spasm of self-disgust. It might seem irrelevant, given the moment of what I was now involved in, but in my mind I could not disconnect Ryman’s death from the impending invasion. His number, meanwhile, seemed further away than ever. What stood in its place was anxiety, backed by a curious mixture of desire and admiration for Ryman’s stolen bride, as Gill strangely seemed to me.

  Panicking, I felt blood begin to prick in the bridge of my nose. Scrabbling around for a handkerchief in my pockets and not finding one, I had to ask Stagg, who whipped his out (he was a dab hand with a hankie, was Stagg) and passed it me. The blood flowed smoothly, turning the white material red. Keeping my head back I felt it drip down the back of my throat, until at last it dried.

  Feeling nauseous, I shuddered, terrified that a dizzy spell was on its way once more: a force like a thousand magnets, pulling me to the ground as soon as I stepped out of the car. For the rest of the journey, long-suppressed memories of the mudslide mixed with a picture of Ryman hanging from the balloon, head slumped like Christ in torment on the cross, face suffused, dying crimson as if draped with a red robe, with a cruel wound developing where the wire bit below.

  Was there one last chance of absolution? Answer in the negative seemed to penetrate the fleeting pane of the car window, which framed a dance of clouds over gloomy fields. Mostly nimbus, the raincloud, and nebula, the cloud of doubtfulness.

  I reflected ruefully on my lapsed faith. I had become closed up in myself, refusing love, not hearing that first rule of St Benedict which the monks at Douai taught us was key to all. Ausculta o fili, inclina aurem cordis tui … Listen, incline the ear of your heart. Something like that.

  It was drizzling as we came into Portsmouth. I had a cricked neck from looking up at the sky. By the time we entered the grounds of Southwick Park, the rain was falling a little harder, making the leaves on the many trees that grew in the park jump and dance at irregular intervals. A big Victorian country house would have dominated the scene were there not acres of tents under the trees and up into the hills beyond.

  There were some khaki-coloured caravans among the tents, one of them set back in a grove of its own.

  ‘That’s the supreme commander’s quarters,’ said our driver. ‘Mr Churchill came the other day. And Smuts.’

  A South African, Jan Smuts was Churchill’s deputy in the War Cabinet. He was an interesting if now largely forgotten man, whose book Holism and Evolution is well worth a read; no less a figure than Einstein approved it, saying that Smuts’s concept of holism, along with his own construct of relativity, would be the two main paradigms of human thinking in the new millennium.

  We were a long way off that. As it was, when we pulled up outside the house that Thursday, dark clouds were swirling above us in sun-obliterating masses. Stormy weather was on its way, no question. ‘It’s becoming critical, folks,’ Yates said as we got out of the car. ‘The big ships sail tonight, come what may.’

  He was right. The day of reckoning was tugging us towards it. The Allies’ big battleships, set to bombard the Normandy coast on Monday, would tonight slip anchor at their havens in northern Ireland and the west of Scotland – including, no doubt, some from the Cowal – and head south to converge on the Channel. Meanwhile thousands of aircraft – Hurricanes, Spitfires, Lockheeds, Lancasters and Lysanders – strained at the leash in their aerodrome kennels, and thousands of men at their sealed-off battle stations – in tents pitched across half of Kent and most of Devon and all of Sussex and Hampshire and Dorset – were still waiting for an order to move.

  We made our way to our own tents, which had already been pitched for us. Looking at the wooden pegs hammered into the ground to hold the guy ropes, I suddenly had a dreadful feeling of being pinioned by fate.

  Trying to ignore it, I threw my suitcase into my tent and went up to the main house. I found the RAF section and asked them to send an order to 518 Squadron (who did the BISMUTH track out of Stornoway), to the effect that the package from WANTAC should now come to Portsmouth not Bushey. Later on, the message came back that the instruments had been successfully recovered and were on their way. There was still the issue of how I was going to test them. I needed wind tunnels and pressure chambers. There was nothing like that at Southwick.

  Once I had organised the WANTAC redirect, I at last attended to that other communication which had been weighing on my mind. I wrote to Gill.

  We had been assigned a Nissen hut on the top of the cliff to work in and it was in there, listening to the calls of the numerous gulls that soared in the grey atmosphere outside, that I mastered my own personal weather. I did so with a very short document communicating my belated condolences and straightforwardly apologising for what I had done. There seemed no point in beating about the bush with extenuating circumstances.

  Explaining I was in Portsmouth, I suggested that we might be able to meet once my current commitments at work had lessened. There was still the problem of the address. Remembering her maiden name was Blackford and that Ryman had said her father worked at the Saunders-Roe facto ry (as, I then recalled, had the intelligence document on Ryman given to me by Sir Peter all those months ago), I addressed it Gill Ryman c/o Mr Blackford there. If he was not there, there was bound to be someone who remembered the family.

  Having sealed the envelope, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. I ran down to the main house to catch the night mail, with the letter in the tunic pocket of my uniform. I can still remember the itch today – both the itch of the blue serge and the itch to be forgiven, for my sins to be assigned to a different zone. But the fact is, they tend to return, as if finding their way back home through the gates and alleys of the atmosphere.

  2

  As I was eating my bacon and eggs at breakfast the following Friday morning, a westerly wind was blowing through the trees outside the window. Watching the boughs move, with the thought of the Saunders-Roe factory still in my mind, I suddenly had an idea. They would have a wind tunnel at the factory: I could take the instruments there. Stagg’s warning about not being able to spare me would still apply, but … it would only be a matter of being away for a day. Less than a day.

  Even that short breadth of time we could now hardly afford. The immense machine of war, wound tight in its enforced immobility, was desperate for release. On the massive momentum of the whole operation – days and weeks of complex preparation, months of planning, years of stored-up energy, not to mention the hopes for freedom of the European nations under the Nazi yoke – on all this we, the so-called weather prophets, were now the only brake.

  If we didn’t go early the following week, the next available slot in which conditions could be anything close to right was a fortnight away, by which time the Germans would surely have seen through all the various movements and deceptions that were in play and reinforced the Normandy coast.

  Even Yates, that phlegmatic embodiment of American courage and virtue, was rattled. He was already worried in case the enemy had spotted the big ships moving. ‘The element of surprise will be lost,’ he’d said yesterday. ‘And where will they scatter to if we have to postpone? If there’s a storm we could lose the whole fleet!’

  Filled with these foretales of gloom, I climbed back up the cliff with Yates to the Nissen hut to join him and Stagg for examination of the incoming Friday charts. I and those two remarkable characters. Hidden men of war, one six-foot four, Scottish and short-tempered, the other a small, dark, patient Yank, very athletic. Heroes, really, those two. With very difficult colleagues, they had to face that array of generals knowing what a forecast meant when the forecasters themselves were in dispute. Then do it again. Day after day of charts and terrifying meetings, night after night of snatched naps and coffee cups.

  The papers we spread
out on the table were covered with indications of depression. ‘That puts paid to Krick’s forecast of calm weather,’ said Stagg as we cast our eyes over the charts.

  Not so. The subsequent telephonic discussion produced the by now familiar see-saw. Douglas and Petterssen at Dunstable foresaw cloud and strong winds – strong enough to make the operation of landing craft highly inadvisable, if not catastrophic; Krick and his colleagues at Widewing wouldn’t budge. They were certain conditions would be ‘tolerable’, as Krick put it.

  ‘All we gotta do is help the house odds be better than chance,’ he added.

  ‘But what if they are not?’ I said, remembering our poker game.

  ‘If we don’t even do that we’ll be busted down to privates.’

  We all felt terrible, not just because of the disagreements themselves, but also because of the brutal forward pull of all those ships and armies. It was as if we were now expected not just to predict the weather but make it, in order that the vast ensemble of men and machines to which – let’s be clear – the United States had contributed the lion’s share could at last be released from its binds and unleashed upon the enemy. Little wonder there was so much irritability, which was no doubt made worse by all of us suffering from severe sleep deprivation.

  Unable to extract a consensus, that lunchtime Stagg was again forced to present a hybrid forecast to Eisenhower in the library at Southwick House. As he was doing so, I went to the RAF section to see if my package from WANTAC had been delivered – it was coming by motorcycle messenger from the Portsmouth aerodrome. Through the air the radio signals washed their soundless waves; and swiftly back the answer came. Not arrived. The flight from Scotland had not even landed yet, I was told by the operator. Pressing my fists together in frustration, I walked back through Southwick’s busy corridors, willing the plane to come.