The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 67

Being an undergraduate again brought back memories.

Memories of Vincent, mostly.

Of better times.

When World War Two broke out and I was called up, I managed to get myself assigned to military intelligence. By 1943 I was working on Allied deception plans, agonising about whether cardboard tanks needed to be fully three-dimensional scale models, or if a well painted cut-out, adjusted for the position of the sun, could do the job of confusing a reconnaissance pilot. By 1944 I was so involved with my work that my heart would genuinely skip a beat whenever I heard rumours of a scout plane which had made it over the Kent coast before we could fully deploy our models, or which had come a little too low over one of our fake camps. Vincent was briefly forgotten about until in April 1944 a group of visiting Americans, come to inspect one of our phoney landing strips, asked me entirely casually if I had any models of the new jet fighters ready to deploy.

The question caught me so by surprise that it was one of the few moments when I actually doubted my own memory. A jet fighter this early? I knew the jet engine was under development, and tests were being conducted on the technology, but for actual deployment in battle? If such a thing had been even considered, it was in no record of the war I’d read, nor in no life during the war that I had lived, and I had dabbled in some senior positions with access to sensitive information in my time. I made some vague remarks and quickly took our visitors on to explain to them how our radio operators were working round the clock to generate as much radio traffic as possible in Kent between the large numbers of fictional units we’d stationed there, and how we’d be grateful if the US Army could issue us with a wider range of suitable call signs. The meeting done, the visitors adjourned, and I was left to ponder the great mystery of the throwaway question. In the guise of an eager official seeking to do a good job, I sounded out a few contacts in the American air force, looking for information on this new jet engine so that I might better deceive our enemy into thinking we had it, or didn’t have it, or whatever it was government policy dictated was the lie of the moment. A few replies drifted back from the ether. Yeah, it was a project some of the boffins were working on, wasn’t it? Sorry, Harry, not really my thing. Had I talked to any of the chaps down in Portsmouth? Maybe they’d have something more. Getting nowhere, I nearly let the matter drop altogether, until in December 1945, visiting a friend in hospital in Folkestone, he shook me warmly by the hand, exclaimed how pleased he was to see me and asked me if I’d heard about his new kidney. He even showed me the scar from the operation, which impressed me greatly not least as the first organ transplant operation wasn’t due to happen for another five years.