Love and Duty

My first memory of my Gran was over the barrel of a pistol, and she knifed me shortly thereafter.

That seems unlikely, I know, but my family was unusual, even by the standards of Scotland's career military. Gran had gone missing in action when my mother was still a child, and resurfaced after the war, repatriated out of a POW camp. She and my mum weren't close to begin with, and Gran had been damaged by her years in the camp, having little use for people any longer. She had disappeared from our lives when I was very young, so I had no memory of her. I was involved in my own life, so it wasn't until my flight was doing E&E courses (editors note: Escape and Evasion, standard training for air cadets) at a decommissioned base in the Orkneys, that we met so memorably. Standing in for a POW camp, now, this outpost had helped defend a small wind farm during the last war, before being turned to other uses.

The five of us that had stayed free up to this point had done so by wading (flight suits and small-clothes bundled on our heads) to a tiny islet off the tip of the main island. Rising less than forty feet above the waves at high tide, less than five acres in area, with no more than a dozen dwarfed and twisted pines surrounding its rocky peak, and scattered clumps of gorse and broom as the only other cover, it was an unlikely retreat. With a stiff current through the gap at all but slack tide discouraging search parties, I'd marked it as my destination early in our captivity, and considered the risk and frigid swim worthwhile. Our little group had laid a convoluted knot of overlapped and backtracked scent trails for the hounds, running a hundred yards at a time in wet sand, well away from our intended destination, before trotting barefooted, ankle deep in the surf, a mile back down the beach to our jump off point, and stripping for the crossing. We did our best to keep most of our clothing as dry as possible, since we didn't dare count on being able to light a fire later. We expected that two pairs of heavy wool socks would provide enough protection from the barnacles on the spit of underwater rock I anticipated finding between the two islands, keeping our boots at least, dry. In my observations while gathering seaweed and shellfish during work parties before our escape, and based on the riffles during tide changes, I'd hoped the ridge was not far below the surface at full low tide, and we'd timed our arrival at its shoreline end to take advantage of the lowest water, slack tide, and the first glimmers of light in the east.

We had been able to wade to our destination, up to our chests in icy water only a briefly, but we were blue and shivering before we reached the islet and were able to dress, too miserable to to even trade jests about the shriveled state of our equipment. At a trot, once again ankle deep in the rising tide to erase our footprints, we moved to the far side of the island, facing the miles of open water between us and the next land in the distance, and began our search for cover. Protection from the wind was an urgent priority, so, taking care to leave no tracks in any sand, beach grass or mud that might be visible from the sea, or through a telescope on the main island, we trotted on. If our pursuers sent a boat and dogs out, they'd have us, but we'd not make it easy for them. By this time, it was becoming light enough to see clearly, and we sought shelter in earnest.

It was sharp eyed "Flounce" McNaughton who spotted the cleft in the rocks along the island's spine, and investigation proved that with few rocks moved, we could pull together a passable shelter, out of the wind, and hidden from view from sea, land or air. That done, and judging that a hot fire wouldn't make enough smoke to be visible yet, and any scent would be blown away from the main island, we got a fire going, and began to dry socks and warm ourselves, chewing on ration bars and sipping water from canteens as we discussed our next move.

It was obvious that the small stack of dry driftwood we'd gathered on our way here would soon run out, so three of us set out to collect as much as could be found nearby. The mass "escape" would be discovered at morning inspection, in less than an hour, and we'd best stay well hidden after then, so wood was urgent, even if we dared not keep a fire going after dark.

We 'd been able to escape while carrying enough water to last three days with care, and with several other groups included in last night's mass breakout, we hoped to be the last group captured, earning prime bragging rights and privileges thereby. If we stayed free more than four, we'd run out of water, so a still and/or rain collection were high priority, since I had hopes to beat the camp's current evasion record of four days. Our "captors", cadets from a rival battalion, were well motivated to recapture us, for if we took the record on their watch, they'd lose a great deal of face.

Establishing a watch over activities on the main island, and another on the sky, would give us some warning of searchers, and more hours of open movement on this side of the islet, so that was established next. Keeping carefully out of view of the camp, we gathered and laced sprigs and branches of broom into two rough capes, using cordage unraveled from our web belts, and placed two sentries, their human appearance well obscured by the capes ( and hats of similar construction) in a jumble of stone overlooking the main island.

It was during a watch here, near dusk on the fourth day into our escape, soon after I'd handed over the field glasses to my partner and rolled over to watch the sky, that I'd suddenly found myself looking down the barrel of a pistol held by a slight figure in a ghillie suit. The cool grey eyes, in a lined face capped by a short pelt of wiry silvered hair, held not a hint of mercy, but strangely... a glimmer of humor? I must have voiced something, for my partner rolled suddenly and crouched, ready to take down the unexpected threat, but with a soft thump, took a round in the chest. Staring in disbelief at the red splatter left by the grease paint soaked sponge ball, she sank to her knees and collapsed in her best "death throes". In that brief moment, I'd noted that the pistol was an ancient single shot, not even double barreled, and launched my own attack... to no avail, her hand to hand skills were far better than mine, and I shortly felt the cold kiss of the blade on my neck.

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"Tell me, cadet, what do you think of the old girl?"

"Sir! I would have said this was a a Grendel's Bane MK II A, other than it has the turret mount of a MK III, in addition to the MK II's usual axial two inch recoilless rifle, and that the turret appears to mount two Banshees instead of the MK III's usual one. The manuals don't list that combination for any version of the armed wind harvesters, sir."

"Very good, cadet. Anything else?"

"Yes sir. Someone has fitted wet sump enclosures around the gear trains, and what appear to be filter cartridges to the sumps...type 45's, I think, but those require high pressure for function, even using... sperm oil, from the color and smell? Oh, I see... you've fitted cams to the lay shaft, actuating plunger pumps....these are accumulators, with the springs?... and those taps let you swap out filters without losing oil or pressure, which is registered on these gauges...very nice! Gear train losses aren't high on these marks to start with, how much output do you gain compared to the standard open trains?"

"How did you learn so much of obsolete armed wind machines, cadet? Surely your instructors don't expect you to be familiar with equipment fifty years out of service? This is one of less than a score of 'Banes still fully operational, and yes, it is a non standard variant of my own. Truthfully, most of this is just to keep my hand in, and reduce maintenance time; climbing around the catwalks is harder than it was when I was your age. Spares are scarce now, as well."

"The Grendel's Banes are a particular interest of mine, sir, since childhood...I recently discovered that my father was the designer."

My father was the most self contained man I've ever met. His response to this was no more then a searching look, and a gentle...

"Ah...she's told you then, has she? I did write, you know...many times."

" I do. Mother let me read your letters just a year ago, as I was enlisting. Until then, she had said she didn't know if my father was alive, or even who he was, with certainty."

He gave me another of his probing looks, asking...

"Why were you so fascinated by the armed harvesters, then, before you were told of our connection? I knew who you had to be when you first knocked at my cottage, your resemblance to your mother is striking."

" I don't know. Perhaps my uncle or aunt encouraged my interest in some way? I was never aware of any nudges in that direction."

I had lived with relatives for much of my life, as was common with children of career officers with no civilian parent. After the war, when Mother left active duty, she'd been so different than I remembered... it was impossible for us to find peace with one another, for years. When I enlisted, giving me my father's letters had been her best effort, and it had helped a great deal to heal our relationship, though I didn't yet understand why she had hidden my father's identity for so long.

When given a chance to visit one of the last operational 'Banes, under the care of its original designer as part of the national historic register, I'd jumped at the chance, not sure what I'd do when we came face to face.

"Why did you two never marry?"

That question had bothered me nearly as much as my mother's denial of my father's existence until so recently. She had been unable, or unwilling, to give me a satisfactory answer.

"Was I an unintended consequence of a brief assignation?"

Poorly put, but I was in pain...and I did get a reaction, though it amounted to no more than a sad look in his eyes, and a sigh.

" Not at all, young lady. We were separated by our wartime jobs, and your mother didn't tell me she'd had a child...she simply stopped replying to my letters, after one that implied our age difference had become unacceptable to her, even though we'd been seeing each other for years by that time. That hurt, though there are more than three decades between our ages, so it was a reasonable excuse. I found out later, through friends in the war office, of your existence. I can only imagine that she felt that both of us were so necessary to the war effort that a child would be a distraction, or handicap us in some other way. I suppose that if her mother had been identified, in that POW camp, as related to the spouse of one of Scotland's designers of war machinery, the enemy might have tried to use that leverage. I think you mother may have felt that both of us were too wrapped up in our jobs to be good parents. When I wrote her to say that I'd heard she'd had a child, she made me promise not to contact you directly. I'm very glad you sought me out, I hope it's not to late for me to become part of your life."

"Please, Father.... my name is Brae."

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Hustled back to camp at gunpoint, carefully not touching the thin red line left by Gran's knife, with my watch mate displaying her "bullet wound", we were met with with a mix of pride, defeat, and relief... we'd set a new camp record, but we'd been captured at last. Rations had been tight the last day or so, so we were ready for hot showers and real food. All that turned to disbelief when our captor informed us that we were going to capture the entire camp and free the remaining "prisoners"... just the five of us.

This endeavor turned out to be much less absurd than it would appear on the face of it. Our captor showed us that our current hidden camp was atop a subterranean, last ditch outpost, constructed in case the base had been overrun during the war. Connected to the larger island by an underwater tunnel though the spit we'd walked, opening into hidden passages in the walls of the main base, we had both weapons and easy access... all unknown to the cadets manning the " prison camp".

Gran explained all this, and told us she was taking responsibility for the "commando rescue force"...our little group...but that she would not be participating. Her involvement must be limited to showing us the concealed access point to the hidden base, and that the rest was down to us.

Maps of the other base ( found in the ready room we entered below ground ) showing the walls laced with tunnels, hidden doors, and observation points, convinced us that we could pull off the capture, given good timing and surprise.

Our observations indicated that the several search parties in the field at this point must contain most of the camp personnel, leaving few in control of the prisoners, so if we could get weapons to our recaptured mates, and disable the few guards still behind the walls while the search parties remained outside the gates, we stood a good chance of making the camp ours. This would be an unprecedented coup, and we'd all dine out on the story for years. After a tour of our hidden base, and taking advantage of brief hot showers (a small coke fired smokeless boiler was among the hideout's amenities) and hot ( though canned) food, we timed our arrival in the camp walls for an hour before dusk, hoping the searchers, desperate to catch us, would stay out that late, and that boredom would make the guards inside less alert. Failing daylight would aid us as well.

Armed with converted carbine paint markers ( I never did learn how Gran had managed that, or why) and each of us carrying three more to arm whoever we freed, we slipped into the camp and dispersed to our assigned positions. All the guards were swiftly subdued, with only one of our party shot by a particularly lucky guard, in the washroom when his mess was overrun. We released and armed as many prisoners as we could, dressed several of them in guard uniforms, and ambushed each search party as they entered the gates. Some of the freed prisoners may have been a bit wasteful with their fire on their erstwhile captors, all of the defeated guards seems stunned by their reversal of fortune... it all seemed too real by this point.

The only rough bit was when two search parties entered the base together, with another just behind. We were able to gun down the first two groups inside the gates, losing only a couple of our people, but the third would have escaped into the night if we hadn't already placed a platoon in gillie suits, hidden in the ditches along the road and against the base walls, as a hedge against just such an occurrence. Invisible in the failing light, they were able to drop all of the third group, and the base was ours.

With the guards and prisoners now reversed, we were ready to celebrate, but our instructors, with no precedent for this set of circumstances, couldn't use the usual end of exercise ceremonies. There was some argument that we had cheated by using the tunnels and arms, but it was pointed out that we might have found the hidden access without help..and we HAD stayed free longer than any group in the camps history, entirely on our own.

When I told Mum this story, she got a strange look in her eye.

"She's never spoken of her time in the camp, ever. I wonder what it meant to her... to help you capture your camp, and free your people, I mean"

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"Father, I'd like to see the tin ears that were used to detect incoming air fleets, before we had RDF."

"Certainly, Brae! They're a fascinating bit of old ironmongery and copper beating. I've kept the bearings greased, and the bronze waxed and oiled as best I can. Did you know that it was your great grandfather's studies and drawings of bat ears that were used to come up with the things? A distant cousin of yours designed the originals,decades before the war. I just made them easier to manufacture, and tuned them to resonate to modern air screw frequencies."

"No, but none of that surprises me."

The hammered copper ears, reminiscent of those of a bat, twice a man's height and nearly that wide, mounted and heavily braced on a circular wheeled platform, all running on bronze tracks bedded in a massive circular cement platform, with reference marks for degrees, minutes and seconds around the rim... impressive just to view, but imagine standing watch here. In the tiny, insulated sentry box, resembling a phone box, where a padded high backed chair placed a person's head in the space where the sound guides from both ears terminated in a set of headphones. How would that feel, in the dead of a foggy night, straining for the sound of aero engines as you scanned the invisible horizon with the focus of the ears, cranking the azimuth and altitude wheels, hoping this wouldn't be the night you'd hear the rumble of engines, and tread the pedal that launched your rocket flares. That would signal the base aircrews to scramble, ready for launch.

Then you'd search for the loudest engines, note the altitude and azimuth, and telegraph those numbers to the launch site, where your numbers, and those of other listening stations, would be fed through the high speed pneumatic Babbage engines that would render altitude, distance and direction of the approaching air fleet. Those numbers, in turn, would be used to calculate pressure and duration of the air charges used to launch aerial mine clusters, from the huge two foot bore air cannon emplacements tunneled into the headlands. The winches for the interceptor launch elastics would be powered up... and people would begin to die.

"What was it like, knowing your designs would be used for killing, more easily and efficiently? I know, as an airman, that I'll be responsible for people's deaths. Send a dreadnought down in flames, roasting fliers much like myself, but your work was on a different scale; some of your machines killed hundreds... thousands, when you multiply by how many there were in service."

He suddenly looked much more his age, weary and sad.

"That was why I put so much effort into the armed wind harvesters, Brae...they were strictly defensive. Unless you attacked the community they served, you'd never fall to their guns. We felt we had to help our cousins to the south, in spite of our differences; it was a matter of standing together or being conquered separately. The Prussian empire in control of Britain would have been the end of Scottish freedom, sooner or later. If we'd thought we could stand alone, I think we might have tried to stay neutral. Our air raids on the yards of Bremen and Hamburg forced them to come to grips with us, on our own terms, taking a great deal of pressure off England. Yet, all those deaths do haunt my nights, even now. I have to believe it was better than the alternative, yet it weighs on me still."

At that point, I had to step closer, and take him in my arms...this was a man I could love, and proudly claim as my father.

He stiffened for a moment, then wrapped his arms around me, and I felt silent tears wetting my hair. A few minutes later...

"Speak to your Mum for me, would you, Brae? I dearly wish to see her again. It has been a great deal too long."