Turbulence Part 4

As I arrived, a flag-raising ceremony was taking place outside the building, complete with buglers and ratings in blue and white uniforms. The event was unpopular with the townsfolk as it brought the main road to a standstill.

We stood waiting and watching, our way barred by sentries with rifles. At the crucial moment, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of civilian onlookers, an old fellow in a blue jersey, who was selling fish and oysters from a wheelbarrow, shouted out "Loch Eck herrings, fresh Loch Eck herrings!"

Once the performance was over, it turned out my wait had been for nothing, as on gaining entrance I learned that the Met station at Dunoon was actually inland rather than on Osprey Osprey itself. Yet even this second site was still conceived as part of the 's.h.i.+p'. itself. Yet even this second site was still conceived as part of the 's.h.i.+p'.

I remounted my motorbike and eventually found, on the outskirts of the town, a group of Nissen huts dotted around an old white-painted farmhouse. There was a cookhouse and a wash-house and a hydrogen shed (formerly a grain barn), some dormitories and not much else. The conditions were quite primitive. There was mud everywhere. The sight of it made me shudder.

Gordon Whybrow was bald and short-sighted, with a pair of thick-lensed spectacles balanced on the end of his long, thin nose. I first found him in the Ops Room, as the farmhouse drawing room had been rechristened. He was wearing RAF uniform, like all Met staff who have been conscripted, even if they're actually working in another branch of the services, as he was on Osprey Osprey. I was still a civilian employee at this stage.

Bent over a desk bearing the large typewriter on which, I presumed, his letter to me had been written, he was studying another machine, or part of it. I recognised it as the switching mechanism on a new type of radiosonde.

Three inflated red balloons b.u.mped on the ceiling of the room, their strings draping over Whybrow as he peered at the device. Behind him, on a large board on the wall, a Waaf was plotting combined readings. A slight brunette, she was reaching up for strings-held in place by bra.s.s 'mice'-which showed the directional lines of balloons released from different stations.

Little red flags marked the positions of weather s.h.i.+ps in the Atlantic, the Channel and the North Sea, while lines of green flags marked the tracks of the met recs, the meteorological reconnaissance flights which took off from airfields all over Britain each morning.

Another Waaf, plumpish with short fair hair, was kneeling on the floor, reading data to her colleague as the teleprinter roll spilled down. Her chubby face was dotted with freckles. She was the only person in the room to notice my entrance, smiling pleasantly and brus.h.i.+ng a hand against her skirt as if doing so would compensate for the awkwardness of kneeling.

"You have to set the switch sequence before you put on the windmill," I said to Whybrow's bald head. He looked up with a face full of surprise, swiftly followed by irritation, whether at my remark, which I suppose was a bit know-it-all, or simply my arrival I could not tell.

"Henry Meadows. The director probably mentioned..."

"Ah," said Whybrow, straightening. "There you are at last. Our man of mystery. I noticed you had hooked up the teleprinter yesterday. Why has it taken you so long to report in?" He seemed to speak through his long nose.

"I wanted to get myself established first," I replied. "Seeing as the equipment was all there...And as I'm sure you know, Sir Peter has given me some other duties, too."

He blinked through the spectacles. "Other duties, eh? How about that? Yes, the director did say you had a special project you were working on for him." He turned to the two Waafs. "A special project. How about that that, girls?"

"Allow me to introduce Gwen Liss and Joan Lamb," said Whybrow, pointing at each in turn. "I say, he should have come here first of all, shouldn't he, girls?"

I ignored him. One of the women giggled. It was Gwen, the thin brown-haired one, whose cheeks were rather drawn in.

This gave her a look of pa.s.sionate austerity. Joan, meanwhile, was fair and broad, Germanic or Scandinavian in appearance if one had to put a label on it, but with dark eyes. With her blonde hair and freckles, the combination was also rather striking.

Whybrow waved a dismissive hand at the Waafs. "Give us a minute, will you." He gestured peremptorily at the red balloons on the ceiling. "Send up one of those and get me a cloud height estimation."

Without saying a word, Joan tugged on one of the strings, Gwen seizing the balloon as it came down. It more or less filled the doorway as she took it out, holding it before her as if she were a waitress with a tray. Joan followed.

Once they had left, Whybrow turned to me, folding his hands on his RAF tunic with the air of someone about to make a speech. "I don't quite understand why a Type 3 outstation need be set up in Wallace Ryman's garden, but who am I to reason why? Apparently you are a 'bright young thing' who needs careful handling. A real scientist, Sir Peter said, as if the rest of us aren't. Well, young man, I'll be expecting the very best from you, as from any other observer."

"Of course, sir," I said, putting a deliberate meekness into my voice. Whybrow was more or less irrelevant so far as my true task was concerned, but there was no point in antagonising him for the sake of it. And there could, after all, I thought then, be some way in which I might need his help.

"Right, then. Let's get down to bra.s.s tacks. Have you sent up any sondes yet?"

"I haven't any hydrogen."

"We sent over all the requisites."

"I have never made it before. The tanks came ready supplied at Kew."

He laughed abruptly, as if pleased to discover I wasn't such a know-it-all after all. "Then you had better come with me."

Leaving the farmhouse, we walked through the mud that divided the Nissen huts, all of which were of uniform height. The hydrogen shed was much bigger. From a kind of gable at one end of it, the tower of the cloud searchlight rose, giving the whole complex the air of a makes.h.i.+ft airfield.

"Gwen! Joan!" shouted Whybrow.

He called again. A red balloon appeared from behind one of the huts. Eventually the balloon entered the cloud.

"Three hundred and ten feet, sir," said Joan emerging from the hut, followed shortly afterwards by Gwen.

They both, I would later learn, came from landed families in Norfolk. The sort of stylish women to whom everything came easily, they seemed odd candidates to be stuck up in this backwater. But then, war did that to all of us, moving us around its chessboard in ways we never expected.

"Jolly good," said Whybrow nasally. "Now, I'd like you, one or other of you, or both, to show our new arrival how to make hydrogen. Then send him to Mr Pyke up at Loch Eck."

He turned to me. "Sir Peter said I was to introduce you to someone from Combined Ops' Experimental Section who is up here. Strange fellow, Pyke. Very hot to use science for war, and clever with it. Anyway, good luck!"

On this oddly cheery note, Whybrow made his way back to the Ops Room, his square back framed in the rectangle of light between two Nissen huts. Without saying anything to me, the two women began walking in the direction of the tall hydrogen shed.

Falling into pace behind them, I couldn't help noticing their fine shoes were covered in mud. They were court shoes, but fine ones, not the standard, pump-like things that most of the Waafs wore, which looked like comical black frogs.

"Shame to cover such nice shoes in mud," I said to their backs. "They look rather expensive. You ought to be in wellies, with this lot."

"Not likely," said Joan over her shoulder. "We wouldn't be seen dead in wellies." It struck me as odd that she should speak for them both.

"Hydrogen shed," Gwen announced bluntly. They both spoke in this clipped, staccato manner. She pushed against the door and I followed them inside.

The lights flickered on to reveal a large warehouse-like s.p.a.ce. At one end were some stairs leading up to the gable, out of which a mezzanine floor projected. There was a balcony there with something vertical behind, just showing in the darkness above the lights: a suspended row of aluminium-shaded lamps, looking like soldiers' helmets hanging from wires. The floor s.p.a.ce below, empty in the centre, was lined with steel drums of caustic soda and piles of cylinders for storing hydrogen.

"This is the generator," said Joan. She indicated another drum, smaller and thicker than those in which the caustic soda was stored. It was sealed with a screw-down lid, out of which projected a black rubber tube.

I stubbed my toe on something and swore. The women laughed maliciously. I peered down to see what had injured me: a lozenge of lead. "That's the safety weight," explained Gwen, her tone kinder than before. "We're always doing that. We have a whale of a time doing that."

She pulled on some rubber gloves and fetched a lump of caustic soda, holding it up to the light as she walked back towards me. It looked like a cake of salt. "You don't want to get this horrid stuff on your skin." She put it in the generator, along with some water. "Fill to two-thirds."

"Add a cupful of iron filings," said Joan, leaning over.

"Ferrosilicon, really," said Gwen, watching Joan pour the catalyst into the cylinder. Then, as Gwen moved quickly to screw down the lid, Joan picked up the lead weight next to my foot. She placed it on the rubber tube where it emerged from the lid. Steadying herself by putting out a hand to Gwen's shoulder, Joan stood on the weight, first with one foot then the other.

"You have to do this or the weight can come off," she said, as the reaction began. Balancing, arms outstretched, she looked like an outsize Christmas fairy. Next to her, inside the cylinder, the recipe for hydrogen fizzed and gurgled.

The reaction came to a peak. Gwen produced an empty balloon from her tunic, knelt down beside the canister and began rolling the nozzle over the stubby tube. "You have to thread it on quite carefully," she said.

"Or it can all go wrong," added Joan from her pedestal.

I watched the balloon begin to inflate.

"Hydrogen," said Gwen, holding the sides of the balloon with her palms as it filled up. "Lightest element in the universe, ta-ra ta-ra."

"And the most abundant," said Joan, stepping down from the lozenge as the reaction came to equilibrium. "Fifteen pounds of it in every human body." They sounded like music-hall comedians, limbering up for a punchline.

Gwen unrolled the nozzle of the balloon from its umbilical tube, knotted it and let go. It danced up past the row of lights, rising to the apex of the ceiling.

"How will you get it down?" I wondered aloud, watching.

"We'll show you," said Joan. "Come on."

I stood in the centre of the shed. "Isn't it highly explosive? It could burn on those lights."

"Only if there's a spark," said Gwen. "Come along."

I followed them across the cavernous shed and up some narrow stairs that led to the gable end and the balcony.

Climbing up through an open trapdoor, I saw there were several steel sheets bolted to the wooden floor as foundations for some kind of structure. It was quite dark up there, but I made out the base of the cloud searchlight tower. Beneath it were two thin mattresses side by side, with pillows and blankets. I was surprised, my mind raced...they surely hadn't brought me into a bedroom?

"We sometimes take turns to have a nap up here while on duty," Gwen said, by way of explanation. She turned on a little lamp: just a bare bulb fixed to one of the wooden rafters.

In the new light I saw two little bowls of makeup; on the floor and a full-length mirror draped with clothing. Under the mirror was a small pile of shoes. There was also an easel and a stack of canvases, together with a palette covered with hardened oil paint of various hues, jam jars full of paintbrushes, and a wooden tray of half-squeezed tubes of paint.

"We paint up here too," said Gwen. "We're artists, you see."

Even more surprised, I looked at the picture on the easel. It showed a long yellow beach with rolling breakers curved along a bay. Among puddles of seawater in the sand, a couple of black dogs jumped about, chasing salt-wet tails. The dogs' tails and the curling breakers mirrored each other, as if the intention was to convey a relations.h.i.+p between them. Behind the dogs, blues and yellows and greens of varying relations.h.i.+ps blended into the glow of the horizon.

"That's pretty good," I said, aware of them looking at me in expectation of an opinion.

"Not good enough," said thin Gwen, and I wondered for a second if she was referring to my response rather than the painting itself.

"Never is," said Joan. "Would you like some tea?"

"Oh, yes please," I replied. "Which of you did it?"

"We do them together," Gwen said proudly.

"That's unusual."

"Maybe. It's our thing. We hope to apply to the Slade, if this horrid war ever ends."

"What do you think we should call it?" Joan asked me.

I looked again at the painting. "Dogs in Foam?" I ventured, and they both laughed, hooting loudly.

On a low table next to the mirror was everything needed for brewing tea. Joan put a small kettle on. The three of us stood slightly awkwardly, waiting for it to boil.

"What does Whybrow think?" I asked.

"What about?" said Gwen.

"You two having this little den."

"Oh, he doesn't mind," said Joan, pouring hot water into a teapot.

"He daren't," Gwen said. "We think he's scared of us."

"Really?"

"He says we make him anxious," said Joan, pouring, then handing me a mug.

"Why?"

Neither replied. As we drank our tea, I studied the metal-grid pylon-like tower which rose out of the floor towards the roof, where-bolted on either side of the pitch-there were two more trapdoors. The gla.s.s of the searchlight and some meteorological gauges were suspended on a trackway in the middle of the grid, which was raised by a geared winding system.

"Can I see it work?" I asked.

"It's not worth turning on in the day," said Gwen. "And at night it attracts bombers, but basically we undo these..." She climbed onto the grid of the tower and unbolted one of the trapdoors, which fell down with a bang. Cold air rushed down. I could see the sky-and Gwen's calves.

All in a pickle, I quickly looked down again, trying not to catch the eye of Joan, who was standing next to me. I didn't quite succeed. I was sure she was smirking. The suspicion began to grow in me that the whole thing had been done for my benefit. Or theirs. Had I been had? I was beginning to see how Whybrow might find them perturbing. They seemed to be the kind of women who could turn men round their little fingers, and enjoy the sport of doing it.

There was another bang as Gwen let down the second trapdoor. Joan grasped a metal handle and began winding the worm gear which raised the tower. It ascended like a theatrical device. I watched as Gwen rose further with the tower until her head poked out of the roof. Her silk-stockinged ankles were now level with my face. I felt overcome by simple l.u.s.t.

"Jeepers it's nippy up here," she called.

I stared. There was something hypnotic about the way-like a graph curve, like a continuous function-the material followed the flow of skin and bone.

Things were made worse by Joan's hand brus.h.i.+ng my back as she reached for the handle of the worm gear. "You could help," she said, starting to wind. "This thing hurts my wrist."

So I wound the tower-and Gwen-down again. Joan was right. It was quite hard, in spite of the gear.

"In summer," said Joan, "we can smell jasmine up there on the wind."

"Very romantic," I said.

"Whereas in winter we get chilblains," said Gwen crisply, climbing down beside us. "Joany, we'd better get that balloon."

I looked over the balcony to the balloon on the ceiling. The suspended lights shone a peculiar red through the rubber, like torchlight through fingers. Gwen appeared, holding a pole with a hook on the end-like a boat gaffe-and Joan leaned out over the balcony to deftly hook the balloon.

"Yes," said Gwen, as she and I descended to the ground floor. "No, hand it down. I'll do it."

She took the other end of the pole from Joan, who then climbed down herself.

Gwen opened the door of the shed to let the gas out of the balloon, sounding a long, slow exhalation. I imagined the molecules of hydrogen spreading out into the atmosphere and combining with other elements.

"Whybrow mentioned seeing Pyke from Combined Ops at Loch...Loch..." I said, frowning and moving my weight from one foot to another as I tried to remember the name.

"Eck. I'll show you where to drive," said Joan. "It's not far. Pyke is usually on the loch at this time. If he's not there he'll be at the Argyll Hotel in town."

I was pleased it was her. For I have to admit, it was Joan who (in the midst of my ignorance) was stirring my pot then, more than Gwen, despite the business with the stockings. How they will laugh if they ever read this!

We walked through the mud and the old farmyard towards the gate.

"How will I recognise Pyke?" I asked.