The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

As we laughed and righted the chairs, tables, rugs, cushions, and tankards, Moaner – still panting from his exertions – said, “Must be a super-Gremlin! Isn’t room in a ‘Beau’ for all the departmental Gremlins that have been playing ME up!” And he added “Ouch! Blast you!” as another cushion caught him in the tummy.

But peace finally returned. The tankards were refuelled at Moaner’s expense – in expiation of his line-shooting. And he grinned sourly, yet amiably, and fell asleep.

An hour later he woke, yawned, and set off to bed, pausing at the door.

“If I’ve been shooting a bit of a line, chaps,” he said, “don’t blame me! Blame the beer! Must’ve been a Gremlin in it!” And off he went.

A foolish, pointless evening? Not a bit of it. A good time was had by all – and I had learned a little more of what lay behind Old Moaner’s wry humour. I was to need it. And soon.

Upon the following day Moaner and his crew set forth to dare the Gremlin again, not to mention their intention to disturb an enemy convoy which reconnaissance had located off the Dutch coast. I remember faintly dreading the job of interrogating him later. He was a touchy, strange, awkward sort of a customer to question when the exhaustion of a long and difficult operation combined with his cussed brand of humour to make things difficult for the questioner.

At such times, when a pilot and his crew are weary and suffering the inevitable reaction after prolonged strain, even the most placid of men needs and deserves the most delicate handling, and the Intelligence Officer can make use of everything he knows about each airman’s way of looking at things. They are always courteous and eager to help; but there are men who, under such stress, cannot at once recall some of the minute details which, though maybe seen only for an instant, are the stuff of which “Intelligence” is built up.

When “Moaner” and his crew came shuffling in, in their soft flying-boots, they were red-eyed and stiff with cold, and their normally pink and fresh young faces looked drawn and stubble-marked under the office lights. It appeared, to my not inexperienced eye, that the Super-Gremlin was still aboard that Beaufort.

They had been roaming the inhospitable airs over the North Sea, ploughing through the dirtiest conditions, and sampling an unseemly warmth of welcome from the enemy coasts, not to mention a bit of trouble flung at them from the skulking convoy which, even in that mucky weather, they had duly found and attacked.

“Moaner” had seen a couple of his formation go “in the drink” – and it was no time or place for bathing. His own aircraft had been shot up, and he had limped it home for the last hundred miles upon one labouring engine and with one eye on the temperature gauges all the way. But he had put a torpedo, sweet and pretty, into “a large motor-vessel strongly escorted by flak ships” – as the wireless news expressed it later on.

He was in the hell of a mood, elated by his success and yet depressed by his ordeal. He stumbled into a chair and gave me the outline of his adventures, with which his crew agreed. But, at the end of it all, I somehow sensed that there was something more. Some little point which he or they had spotted, momentarily, out there in the flak and the mucky weather, and which would not now be brought to mind. One learns to sense such things.

But neither he nor his crew could recall it, though the navigator gave me my first real clue. “There was something, sir!” said he to “Moaner”; “you called out something to me just as we jinked to avoid the flak from the little ship. I couldn’t get it. . . but you called out something!”

No answering recollection lit Moaner’s tired eyes. He shook his head wearily, slumped in his chair and then, pulling himself together, treated me to a tirade about his Gremlin.

It had summoned clouds when visibility was wanted, dispersing them when cover was the urgent need. It had fiddled with his controls so that the ruddy kite wouldn’t go where he put it. Passing lightly from the compass to the undercart control, it had jammed the wheels in the “up” position so that, to cap all, Moaner had just had the nasty job of making a belly landing on a misty evening after seven hours of the most exhausting strain, though he didn’t put it that way. “Ruined a hundred yards of perfectly good turf” was his version. The Gremlin had been having a field-day.

The crew shuffled and coughed, as though a drop of shut-eye would be welcome. I could feel their hunger in my own stomach. Their fatigue made my own eyelids ache. But still I probed to evoke that fleeting, forgotten memory which I felt sure was there.

But Moaner was getting obstinate now – due to fatigue and strain. The fact that he could not remember now strengthened his conviction that there was nothing to recall. His mind was set in the bitterness of reaction.