Speed Kings (36 page)

The first thing he did was arrange to have dinner with Ben Bathurst, a friend of his at the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, which controlled the Cresta Run. They met at the Savoy on Thursday evening, September 7. Bathurst was a
barrister, like Bushell, but he was a little older than the rest of Billy's St. Moritz crowd, and a little more influential too. His father was Viscount Bledisloe, who had been the governor-general of New Zealand. Ben had been an artillery officer in the First World War, and he was already in service again, as a squadron leader in the RAF. He promised to set up an interview between Billy and William Elliott, who was assistant secretary of the War Cabinet Secretariat, and Chief of Air Staff Cyril Newell. It was all fixed for that coming Sunday. The trouble was, the only paperwork Billy had with him was his passport, which was no good, since it showed he was a US citizen. So he and Bathurst concocted a story together. “I would have to make a very passable pretense at being Canadian and of Canadian parentage,” Billy wrote. “I had to make up some very watertight answers for any questions they might be expected to ask me.”

Billy spent most of Friday trying to think up his alibi. “I remember going out to Roehampton to play a little golf to try and get a healthy look on my face to survive the ordeal,” he wrote. “Needless to say, for once I had a quiet Saturday night—I didn't want to have eyes looking like bloodshot oysters the next day.” Looking back, he added, “It might appear that I rather over-emphasized the importance of me being accepted. Perhaps I did a bit. It was largely a matter of pride and the terrific desire to be doing something.” He was desperately worried that he would be sent back to the US, humiliated. “I had walked out of my very good job on two hours' notice. So far as my family were concerned, I had disappeared completely.”

In the end, the meeting passed easily enough. The main thing the officials seemed to want to know was whether it was true that Billy's former employer, Clarence Dillon, had really once signed a check for $150 million to buy General Motors. “Yes,” Billy told them, “he did.” They just couldn't quite seem to get their heads around the sum. He was accepted into the RAF that same day, on the lie that—as it says on his service record—he was born in Montreal. That evening he went to the Bath Club to celebrate. But first he sat down and penned that letter to Peggy, explaining what he had done and why he had done it. His feelings were so fervent that he even offered to help Peggy and Jennison volunteer too. “Please let me hear from you sometimes,” he wrote. “Let me know if Jen wants to come over as I can fix it all right if he does. As I was the first volunteer American accepted I had to go and see the Chief of Air Staff who runs the whole show, so I know the ropes. Rose is forming an ambulance corps of 40 drivers and 20 ambulances so if you want something to do and could leave the house with the family, there is your chance.”

The first step was basic training. It wasn't quite the glamorous life Billy had imagined when he was talking to the 601 lot back in St. Moritz. He was sent up to camp at Cambridge for six weeks. “I must admit that I never thought eight years ago I should be returning to Cambridge, going to lectures, and being told to be in by 10pm. Although I will admit the curriculum is a bit different,” he wrote. He told Peggy, “I'm learning how to kill them instead of how to take their money—I don't know if there is much choice except one's slow and the other's quick.” It was all drill and discipline, then ground training: “navigation, photography, gunnery, wireless, etc.” He had been put in a flight along with “a lot of crazy continentals, from places as far afield as St. Helena, New Zealand, Africa, Ceylon, Seychelles Islands, Papua, and Canada. It was, he readily admitted, a tedious life. “We live on straw, high tea at 5.30pm, up at 6 in the morning. And it's bloody cold. But needless to say we've never been healthier.” He hated the drills, the marching, and learning how to form fours. “I'd just got it right, when they go and decide that from now on we must only form threes.” They had only been there a fortnight when they had their first deserter. “They brought him back today and he went straight off to the loony bin. Maybe he wasn't so crazy!”

Rose arrived in London in the middle of October. As Billy said, she had vague notions about starting a volunteer ambulance corps. But she soon found that the idea was wildly impracticable, because there were so many bureaucratic hoops to jump through. On top of which, of course, she hadn't the slightest shred of relevant experience. “To be an ambulance driver,” she noted pithily, “is very much like putting one's son down for Eton, you have to do it the day he is born.” And besides, only “a few wounded soldiers have come back, but most of those who have returned had some other illnesses, such as dysentery, skeptic [
sic
] wounds—nothing to do with actual fighting.” All the other volunteer corps were, “as far as I can see, literally just sitting on their fannies doing nought.” Worse still, those friends of hers who had signed up as volunteers had been promptly posted to the other end of England from wherever it was their husbands were stationed. “Another typically British habit. Not for me.”

By now, Billy had been moved on to elementary flying training school at Yatesbury in Wiltshire. They were let up, at last, in Tiger Moths. He got leave each weekend and would always race up to see Rose at Claridge's, where she was staying.

Billy always had a couple of his new comrades in tow. They were, Rose said, “all 18 year olds from Australia, Canada and South Africa. Such babies. They all looked up to Billy, told him all their troubles, everything from their debts to
their blind dates.” Her plan, as explained in a letter, was this: “I am organizing my own Corps, called ‘The SLOTTS'—“Sex Life of the Troops!” Actually, I am trying to arrange amusement and places to stay for poor unfortunate Colonials, who are training and are dependent on their pay, and do not know one solitary soul in England, and just sit at various training camps twiddling their thumbs—thumbs, I said. I shall most probably end up being ‘the Madame' for the troops.” She was as good as her word: she launched a volunteer corps with the rather more sober, and suitable, name the Western Counties RAF Hospitality League.
Tatler
even ran a feature on them. “As I say,” Rose wrote, “a man can't do his best unless he's happy!”

Which Billy was, roving around the south of England in his Tiger Moth, practicing his barrel rolls and Immelmann turns, learning, in short, the difference between flying for fun and flying to fight. These were strange days in Britain, as her citizens endured the phony war, wondering when the fighting would start in earnest, and how long it would last when it did. In the autumn of 1939, Billy's biggest worry was that the war might be over before he'd even had a chance to get into the action. “It is quite plausible,” he wrote, “that it will all be over before I am fit for anything. There seem to be very diversified opinions here although I think everyone feels it will either all be over by Xmas or go on for five years or so.” Much as he would have liked to hold forth his own opinions, he couldn't, by letter at least, since “the censors and the head beak would have me in irons.” He felt able only to hint that, as far as he could see, it all depended on the Russians. “Since their entry, I think mostly the ‘longs' have it by a pretty safe margin, although many people qualify that by saying it will go on as long as the Russians want it to.”

In the weeks while Billy was away, Rose whiled away the days in London. She and Billy had spent $10 on a car, “a 1930 Austen [
sic
] which looks very much like an antiquated London taxi,” which they'd nicknamed Annie, so she could get down to see her mother in Glynde, back near the church where she had married Warwick all those years before. Otherwise, Rose was camped out at Claridge's. She wrote one long letter and had it copied out so she could send it on to her group of friends. It provides a fine portrait of life in the capital at the time.

Life goes on pretty much the same, except everyone is in the country. And London looks awfully bare—so many of the houses are hermetically sealed and boarded up. All the restaurants and night clubs are wide open
and packed jammed every night—women no longer have to dress, men of course nearly all in uniform. Every now and again one sees a man in a tail coat, and he looks positively incongruous! Bill has not got his uniform yet, but is about to be measured for one any minute—big excitement. The “black-outs” really are fantastic. Unless it's a pretty clear night, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face.

Bond Street consists chiefly of sandbags on both pavements, so that walking there three abreast is out of the question, because one is perpetually catching a toe or heel on the corner of a sandbag, and I don't mind telling you, that a sandbag is as hard if not harder than a piece of concrete. All the shop windows have paper tape stuck all over them to avoid splintering etc. Some very chichi ones have their names written in the tape, or a picture of the type of things they sell inside!

I shall never know how taxi drivers know where the hell they are going, as honestly, if they used a torch they could see much more than with the regulation lights they have now, and of course one can never tell if it's a free cab or not, so that if one is trying to get one not off a rank, one is liable to become quite hoarse and worn out screaming at those already with fares.

Even in the country, one is only permitted to use either side-lights, or else a black metal contraption on the head lamp, with a hole a quarter of the size in the middle, and that pitiful ray of light is all one is allowed—so somehow I feel I won't be tearing around at night very frequently.

Down at my mother's house, in the depth of the country, where I stay during the week, all the curtains have been heavily interlined with black material, and not a crack of light is supposed to show from anywhere. We are not even allowed to put the light over the front door on, which, heaven knows, is no arc light, when anyone arrives. Bloody silly, I think . . .

The news we get is pretty sparse, but at least it's official and on the level. As far as the war in the air is concerned, I think we are doing pretty bloody well. The Germans, over the radio, are trying to make us believe it was the British who tried to blow Hitler up—whoever did try was a man of iron. About six times a day the Germans broadcast, one of the announcers is supposed to be a man called Baillie-Stewart, who went to jail here about three or four years ago for selling secret documents to the Germans, and apparently when he was released a few months ago, stamped out of prison, saying he would never see this country again, and
if there was any way he could do us down he would, and rushed back to Germany: another announcer is known as “Lord Ha Ha,” because he has such a pompous voice. They are all English. They have such a ridiculous way of putting over their propaganda, that even an infant in arms could do nothing but rock with laughter. Every time any of our statesmen make a speech, especially Winston Churchill, whom they loathe, the next day that poor unfortunate individual really takes a beating. He's a liar, war mongrel, and decadent illiterate. They don't care what they say, and if they have nothing to pick on, they tell us what we all refer to as a bedtime story, rather like an Aesop fable, with Chamberlain or someone as the fox and piece of cheese, or one like it. It's too fantastic, I wouldn't miss listening in for anything. It has almost made up for not having Charlie McCarthy and Jack Benny.

Even our announcers on the BBC, who as you know are very prim and circumspect, are making “digs” at them every so often. The impatience of waiting for a German talk, after one of our men has been speaking is terrific!

Gosh how I miss the central heating. I am permanently freezing cold, and I have had to take to my woolen underwear! Horrors.

I don't think I can think of anything else. I know you would love to hear something really worthwhile, but a) I don't know any and b) my masterpiece of a letter would be thrown away by the censors. So you will have to take what I can give.

We are both very well & Bill sends all love, so do I,

Rose.

The novelty of it all—the blackout and the sandbags and the radio broadcasts—wore off as winter wore on. The days dragged into weeks, then into months. Christmas came and went. Soon those who had reckoned it would all be over by the New Year lost their bets. The only thing Billy was fighting was boredom. The winter was one of the coldest and most unpleasant he had ever known. “Freak weather,” he wrote, “I've never seen anything like it before.” The first week of February was all rain, but it was so cold the water froze before it could run away. “Every single thing was covered by 2 to 3 inches of ice. That was true down to each single blade of grass, wire fences, telephone wires, and of course, all buildings. It was as though someone had wrapped everything in a thick coat of cellophane.” On the weekend of January 27–28 he had been up in
London as usual, with Rose, but it had taken him twelve hours to get back to Yatesbury, by road and rail. “And when I got back I found all the pipes had burst, no food was getting through, and practically no heat as coal couldn't get through on the roads.” The weather was so bad that the pilots had been grounded. There was nothing to do other than indulge in that most English of pastimes, talking about the weather. “It's been the only and predominant factor in our lives since I last wrote to you,” Billy told his parents.

What fighting there was seemed so remote, so far removed from his life. The first German bomber had been shot down by British forces, at Whitby, a few hundred miles away on the northeast coast. Billy was heartened by that. “They will soon begin to realize the nice hot reception waiting for them if they persist in poking their noses in unwelcome places!” And from the far side of Europe, where Russia had recently signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis and then promptly invaded its neighbor Finland, came more news that made him feel optimistic: the Finns were finding the so-called winter war against the Russians to be “some of the finest shooting in the world, rather like a nice low-flying pheasant.” “As for our own little war, it seems to be taking much clearer shape now and I still think it's going to be over well before the end of this year.”