The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

A Gremlin in the Beer

Derek Barnes

Location: RAF North Coates, Lincolnshire.

Time: January, 1942.

Eyewitness Description: “The 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 Gremlin was still aboard the Beaufort.”

Author: Derek Barnes (1904–78) grew up on the outskirts of London and in his teens developed a passion for flying. After working for several years as a journalist, he became a PR in London. In his spare time he trained to fly a Tiger Moth and had almost a hundred hours in his logbook when war was declared. Barnes was called up into the RAF, but instead of being allowed to fly was trained as an Intelligence Officer to debrief crews after operations. He was stationed in Lincolnshire with a squadron of Beauforts when he first heard stories about Gremlins, mysterious and malicious spirits apparently set on causing as many mishaps as possible to pilots. According to some accounts, the phantoms had first been detected in 1918 by the newly constituted RAF, but were now back with a vengeance. Barnes’ account for The Spectator was written at the same time as a certain Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl was creating his first children’s story, “The Gremlins” for Collier’s magazine in America in May 1942. Unfortunately for Barnes, of course, it was to be Dahl’s account that would lead the writer to fame and fortune.

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.

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.

“I tell you, there was nothing else . . . nothing of importance. If there had been I’d have remembered it, or one of the boys would.” He rose to his feet and stifled a soul-deep yawn. “We’re going to beat it . . . we’re all-in. See me to-morrow if you must go on yapping!” And he headed for the door towards which, after an instant’s hesitation, his crew began to follow him.

My last chance was going. By to-morrow, maybe, sleep would have cleaned the slate of his mind from every trace of the incident I sought. Would a change of subject release his brain from the worn channels of fatigue?

“O.K.,” said I. “I reckon you had some beer on board!”

He stopped dead, his brow creasing irritably as he sought some connection between my idiotic remark and our previous conversation.

“Beer?” he said. “What the hell are you suggesting?”

“Beer!” I said. “With a Gremlin in it, to make you talk like that!” And the trick was done.

His tired mind was jerked backward to the previous night, to the warm fireside, to the chaffing of his friends, to that comradeship which linked even my plodding duties with his valiant adventure. The strain was relaxed and I ceased to be a pestilential official who sat safely on his bottom while better men went a-flying. I became, instead, to his refreshed outlook, a cog – small but vital – in the pattern of service of the R.A.F. A bloke, in short, who was trying to do his job.

Moaner raised a smile . . . wan and weary . . . but still a smile. “Sorry, old boy,” he said, “but there really isn’t anything else . . . not a thing! You don’t mind if we push off? We’ve had quite a party out there!”

“I’m sure you have,” I answered, “and thanks for being so patient – all of you. Good night!”

But, even as the sergeants chorused “Good night, sir,” the shutter clicked in Moaner’s brain.

“Gosh!” he cried. “There was something. . . .Ginger! Bradley! Jones! Didn’t any of you chaps spot it, too? I yelled out on the intercom . . . and a moment later that flak burst turned us bottom up’ards. Damn nearly slipped my memory . . .”

And out it came.

It was flashed to Group, to Command, to the Air Ministry, Admiralty and War Office. A mere scrap of “gen”, photographed on to Moaner’s mind in that perilous instant while he fought for control of his machine over the enemy ships. Yet it fitted, like a lost piece of a jig-saw, into a picture which “Intelligence” had been struggling to complete for months. A night’s intervening sleep might have lost it for ever.

At the first opportunity I stood Moaner a pint of beer – Gremlin or no Gremlin. And he winked over the tankard’s edge as he said “Cheers” in the accepted style.