It was the moment that things began to go wrong, but none of us could know that, though perhaps Cliff Morgan sensed it, or again perhaps he knew his weather better than the rest of us. ‘The poor bastard!’ he murmured, and I knew he was referring to the pilot, not to the injured man.
He looked at me as the door shut behind Adams. They vary, you know,’ he said. ‘In temperament.’ And he added, ‘If it had been Bill Harrison now, he wouldn’t have hesitated. A reckless devil, Bill; but he knows his own mind. He’d never have let himself be forced into it like that.’ He sucked on the end of his pencil, hollowing his cheeks, and then with a quick, abrupt movement, he went into the back room, tore off the teleprint sheets and came back reading them. ‘This bloody evacuation, that’s what it is, man. Thinking God Almighty would arrange the weather for them whilst they got their men and equipment off the island. I warned them.’
It was the first I’d heard about the evacuation, and realising this he began to explain as we stood by the window, watching Braddock and Adams walk out to the helicopter and climb in. But I barely took in what he was saying, for my mind had room only for one thought at that moment — the certainty that Braddock was my brother. This in itself was such a staggering revelation that it was only later that I began to consider the other factors — why, for instance, he had applied for a posting to the Hebrides, why he should have been so set on Adams making the flight?
The engine started, the rotor blades began to turn and the helicopter rose from the parking apron, drifting sideways in a gust and just clearing the hangar. Almost immediately its shape became blurred; then it vanished completely, lost in the low cloud and a squall of rain. For a moment longer the engine was faintly audible. Then that, too, was swallowed up as rain lashed at the windows.
The risk they ran in attempting that flight was something I couldn’t assess; I had no experience then of the incredible malignant power of the down-draughts that come smashing down from Tarsaval and the other heights of Laerg, down into Shelter Bay. Nor was it possible for me to absorb the whole complex set-up of this military operation into the midst of which I had suddenly been pitchforked. Even when Cliff Morgan had explained to me the details of the evacuation, how Braddock had insisted on sending a detachment with towing vehicles down to the old rocket range on South Uist so that the LCTs could beach in the South Ford as an alternative to Leverburgh, the night-and-day drive to get Laerg cleared and the round-the-clock movement of landing craft, I still didn’t appreciate how vulnerable the whole operation was to the weather. I had no experience of landing craft.
Nor for that matter had Cliff Morgan. But weather to him was a living thing, the atmosphere a battleground. He had, as I’ve said, a sixth sense where weather was concerned and he was very conscious of the changed pattern. ‘A polar air stream now,’ He said to himself as though facing the implications for the first time. ‘Jesus, man!’ He lit a cigarette, staring at me over the flame. ‘Know anything about weather?’
‘A little,’ I said, but he didn’t seem to hear.
‘No imagination — that’s the Army for you. Look at Braddock. Up into the air and not a clue what he faces at the other end. And Standing — you’d think Standing would try to understand. He’s got brains. But no imagination, you see, none at all.’ He slid his bottom on to the swivel seat and drew a sheet of paper towards him. ‘Look you now, I’ll draw it for you. As I see it — in here.’ And he tapped his forehead. ‘Not the wind on my face, but a map, a chart, a picture. Imagination! But dammo di, they’re none of them Celts. Though Braddock-’ He shook his head as though he weren’t quite certain about Braddock, and then he reached for a blank sheet of paper and with his pen drew a map that included North America, Greenland, Norway — the whole North Atlantic. On this he pencilled in the existing pattern; the Azores High bulging north towards Ireland and the two Lows driving that other High, that had been over England, east towards Russia.
‘Now, the area I’m watching is down here.’ His pencil stabbed the left-hand bottom edge of the map. ‘That’s about seven hundred miles north-east of Bermuda. It’s the place where our depressions are born — the place where the cold, dry air from the north, sweeping down the east of North America, meets up with the warm, damp air of the Gulf Stream. It’s the breeding place for every sort of beastliness — hurricanes bound for the States, big depressions that move across the North Atlantic at tremendous speed to give Iceland, and sometimes the Hebrides and the north of Scotland, wind speed almost as bad as the much-publicised Coras and Ethels and Janets and what-have-yous that cause such havoc in America. Now look at this.’
He picked up a red pencil and with one curving sweep drew an arrow across to the area between Iceland and Norway. ‘There! That’s your Low now.’ He drew it in, a deep depression centred over Norway, extending west as far as Iceland, east into Siberia. And then on the other side, over towards Greenland and Canada, more isobars drawn in with long, curving sweeps of hand and pencil. A high pressure area, and between the High and the Low, in ink, he marked in arrows pointing south and southeast. ‘That’s a polar air stream for you. That’s a real big polar air stream, with the wind roaring out of the arctic and temperatures falling rapidly. Snow at first in the north. Then clear skies and bitter cold.’
He stared at it for a moment, an artist regarding his handiwork. ‘I haven’t seen that sort of weather pattern up here — not at this time of the year. But I experienced it once in Canada just after the war when I was working for the Department of Transport at Goose Bay. By Christ, man, that was something. A Low over Greenland, a High centred somewhere over the mouth of the Mackenzie River and a polar air stream pouring south across the Labrador.’
fie drew it for me then on another sheet of paper, adding as his red pencil circled in the pattern, ‘Have you any idea what a polar air stream means up there in the Canadian North in October — to the Eskimos, the prospectors, the ships in Hudson Bay?’ And when I shook my head he embarked on an explanation. I can’t remember all he said; I found myself listening to the tone of his voice rather than to his actual words. It had become noticeably more Welsh, a distinct lilt that seemed to change his personality. It was his enthusiasm for the subject, I suppose, but all at once he was like a poet, painting with words on a canvas that was one quarter of the globe. I listened, fascinated; and as he talked the red pencil was constantly moving, filling in that old atmospheric battle picture until the high pressure system over north-western Canada had become a great whorl of concentric lines.
Like an artist he couldn’t resist the picture as a whole, but as his pencil flew over Greenland and down as far as the Azores, it was this big High he talked about; the effect it had had on people, animals and crops — on transportation, particularly aircraft and ships. The High represented cold, heavy air; clean, crisp, dry-frozen stuff hugging the earth’s surface, weighing down on thousands of square miles of ocean, thousands of square miles of pack ice. The winds around this cold mass had been clockwise and wherever they had touched the periphery of the low pressure area to the east, the movement of the cold air stream had been accelerated to hurricane force. At first those gales had been blizzards, thick with driving snow as damp, humid masses of air were forced into the upper atmosphere and cooled to the point of precipitation. ‘When that High got really established,’ he said, ‘there was snow in many places that didn’t expect it for another month. Blizzards in the Middle West of Canada reaching south across the border into the States, and that High was like a young giant. It went on drawing strength into itself — like a boxer in training and working himself up for the big fight.’