The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

It has never been my way to take any part in the flying talk which, of a winter evening, takes place around the anteroom fire. Such talk is for flying men only, and not for earth-bound Intelligence Officers like me. Should the conversation turn to aircraft recognition, the flak positions down the enemy’s coastlines or the location of targets in German-occupied territory, then I speak my piece in my due turn. But flying “shop” – no! My modest thirty hours in a “Moth”, in peace-time, do not entitle me to swap yarns with boys who have flown their fifty, sixty or hundred sorties against the enemy. No, sir!

But, though I lie low, I keep an ear cocked when the chaps are talking shop, for it is often helpful when I have to interrogate the crews on their return. By quietly listening one gains an insight into a pilot’s reactions at awkward moments; one gleans a few more words of technical jargon and a scrap or two of flying “gen”. And these things go to make the interrogator sound less of an amateur and gain for him acceptance as a well-informed, professional collaborator from the flying personnel.

Sometimes the talk is not so technical. As, for instance, that night a year ago when there arose a lively argument upon the subject of Gremlins. Once again I said little, but listened with interest as well as amusement, for even these wild speculations enhanced my knowledge of the men who made them.

The existence of Gremlins is tacitly admitted by all R.A.F. air crews. Nobody has seen one, though many have felt their influence. It has fallen to my lot to paint their portraits upon the aircraft of superstitious pilots – in propitiation of the imps believed to haunt them.

A Gremlin, then, is an imp or sprite whom pilots blame when things go wrong. One type, for example, lives at the aircraft’s centre of gravity and only hurls himself forward when the machine is about to land, thus making it nose-heavy at an unfortunate moment. Others stiffen the controls, jam rudder, undercart or ailerons, dispel cloud cover when most urgently needed, or spread it plentifully between aircraft and target, thus foxing the bomb-aimer at a vital time. Yet another type – “with a long nose and wings like a bat” – as the experts assure me, spins the compass like a teetotum the moment it becomes the aircraft’s sole navigational aid.

“Old Moaner” set the ball rolling. For weeks he had been suffering from the filthiest luck which defied even his exceptional skill. And he had long adopted a comical “defeatist” line of talk to cover his disappointment. Hence his nickname. That night, by the fire, he startled us by declaring that a super-Gremlin had taken up its abode in his Beaufort within the last few days and that this was not to be confused with any common-or-garden Gremlin “such as other types have”. It was, if you please, a Universal Gremlin! It put all others in the shade, for it mucked up everything – compass, maps, ailerons, rudder, the “R.T.” undercart, oxygen, and even Moaner’s own thermos flask – all at the same time.

There was a silence while his friends absorbed this extreme claim. Somebody at last was moved to speak.

“If it did even half what you say,” he remarked gently, “you wouldn’t be here to say it. You’d have hit the deck so hard that you’d come up in Australia – like a ruddy bulb!”

And Moaner sat there, looking at us all with a provocative eye. The scar on his cheek twitched as an impish grin stirred his sallow features. A lock of dark hair hung down over his forehead. A can of beer dangled by its handle from his thumb.

His bitter disappointment egged him on to shoot a yet bigger line about his Gremlin. Fortified by another pint, he proceeded to justify his stupendous claim.

“Even though you chaps are pretty ham-handed,” he said, amidst cries of “Oh!” “you can most of you recognize genius when you see it! So you’ll know that I never make a floater! Yet, the last week or two, every bit of dirt that’s flying about has stuck to ME!

“Course it has, you line-shooting bus-driver!” said somebody. But Moaner would not have his “patron saint” denied.

“’S a Gremlin!” he mumbled into his tankard. “One colossal, stinking, evil-minded, all-powerful Gremlin!” And he eyed the lot of us, under that lock of hair, deliberately provoking somebody to argue the point.

Somebody did. Moaner’s chair, Moaner’s beer and Moaner himself went over backwards and, in a split second, a rough-and-tumble was on – in which six “attached” pilots of the Fleet Air Arm instantly joined. I saved the radiogram and a table full of cups and beer-mugs and withdrew out of range before my glasses got smashed. Moaner fought gallantly but was much outnumbered, and soon succumbed.