Goodbye Mickey Mouse

Goodbye Mickey Mouse
Len Deighton

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

FIRST EDITION

First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1982

Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1982

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009

The author and publisher would like to thank The Big 3 Music Ltd and United Artists Music Co. Inc. for kind permission to quote from ‘For All We Know’ by Sam M. Lewis and J. Fred Coots (© 1934 Leo Feist Inc.), and Famous Chappell and Chappell Music Canada Ltd for kind permission to quote from ‘That Old Black Magic’, from the film Star Spangled Rhythm, music by Harold Arlen and words by Johnny Mercer (© 1942 Famous Music Corp.)

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EBook Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007347735

Version: 2017-08-10

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword.

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Mickey Mouse, US Military Slang. Anything that is unnecessary or unimportant. (Named for the Walt Disney animated cartoon character, in allusion to its childish appeal, its simplicity, triviality, etc.)

The Barnhart Dictionary of New English

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction

Prologue

1 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen

2 Captain James A. Farebrother

3 Staff Sergeant Harold E. Boyer

4 Lieutenant Z. M. Morse

5 Captain Charles B. Stigg

6 Captain James A. Farebrother

7 Victoria Cooper

8 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen

9 Captain James A. Farebrother

10 Colonel Daniel A. Badger

11 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen

12 Captain James A. Farebrother

13 Dr Bernard Cooper

14 Captain Vincent H. Madigan

15 Captain James A. Farebrother

16 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll

17 Victoria Cooper

18 Lieutenant Stefan ‘Fix’ Madjicka

19 Henry Scrimshaw

20 Vera Hardcastle

21 Major Spurrier Tucker Jr

22 Captain Vincent H. Madigan

23 Dr Bernard Cooper

24 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll

25 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen

26 Captain James A. Farebrother

27 Colonel Daniel A. Badger

28 Major Spurrier Tucker Jr

29 Lieutenant Colonel Druce ‘Duke’ Scroll

30 Captain Vincent H. Madigan

31 Victoria Cooper

32 Captain Milton B. Goldman

33 Brigadier General Alexander J. Bohnen

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘Never before; never since and never again,’ said a US Eighth Army Air Force veteran when I was researching this book.

He was describing one particular moment in the final months of the war. RAF Bomber Command was operating in the daytime, and flying in loose formations of squadrons instead of in the ‘stream’ it had used previously in night bombing. The RAF heavy bombers were returning across the English Channel at the same time as seemingly endless squadrons of American air force bombers were setting out in tight formations. ‘The sun glinted on them,’ said the American flyer. ‘There must have been a thousand of those RAF heavies. I was in the turret; we were leading the low squadron. All around me and behind and ahead there were over a thousand of our ships. Everywhere I looked, the sky was filled with planes.’

Perhaps he was exaggerating but other flyers remarked upon such awesome sights. The missions of ‘Big Week’ frequently comprised 800 aircraft and this short period of intense air activity was one of the most decisive battles of the war. Certainly there were times when two thousand British and American four-engined bombers shared the sky, and the men who saw these vast, futuristic fleets of aircraft never forgot. Neither did the people—British and German—who with pride and apprehension watched them from the ground.

Goodbye Mickey Mouse was rooted in a failure. I had abandoned a half-completed story about the air fighting in Vietnam when the fighting there ended. To prepare for that Vietnam book I had spent several weeks on a US Air Force base. They gave me a chair in the ready room, a physical exam with jabs, a flight suit with all the paraphernalia and a bed; and let me join the day-to-day life of the aircrew on the base. I ate with the flyers, drank with them, went to their barbecues and flew backseat in the F-4 Phantom. We dropped bombs, flew in formation and did air-to-air refueling. My assigned pilot was Captain Johnny Jumper, a young Vietnam veteran who not only became a life-long friend but also became a General and eventually the US Air Force Chief of Staff.

Writers hate waste. My vivid experience with the US Air Force nagged me and eventually became a starting point for reconstructing the 1944 US Army Air Force base in England where Goodbye Mickey Mouse takes place. Malcolm Bates, a resolute amateur historian in Porlock, persuaded me to look again at the war fought by the US air forces in Europe. Malcolm had read my book, Bomber, and wanted me to write about the American side of the air war. He sent me long letters, carefully chosen books and useful pictures. His enthusiasm fired me. I had visited American bases in England in 1944 and the structure I envisaged for the book came into my mind easily. I had always been intrigued by the degree of self-sufficiency that military bases achieved. Metal-working shops and pharmacies, libraries and prison cells, dental surgeries and chapels, ice cream parlours, movie theatres and tailor shops. There was no need to go anywhere for anything. American bases were more all-inclusive than the RAF ones I had visited, for there was a prevailing order that the British economy should not be taxed with American demands for food and supplies.

When, in the postwar world, the air force veterans of the 91st Bombardment Group returned to their old base at Bassingbourn to revive memories and exchange yarns, I was infiltrated into the party by one of the organizers: Wing Commander ‘Beau’ Carr. I spent an inspiring week with these remarkable men. ‘That was my bed,’ one elderly ex-navigator told his wife as he slapped its blanket in a barrack room now occupied by young soldiers. He looked around the room, turning his head slowly: ‘And this was my home.’

To emphasize this ‘little town’ concept I decided to allot one character to each chapter so the story was told through the eyes of technical specialists, clerks and tradesmen as well as the flyers. I had tried this before in a very simple way. In Only When I Larf chapters were provided for the first person narrative of three different people. One of them was a woman. Such a construction requires unrelenting attention to dialogue and detail. Every sentence, in fact every word, must be scrutinized carefully to establish, distinguish and maintain the integrity of the separate characters. And for that book the accounts varied according to the memory and motives of each person.

Editors can sometimes be important to the process of writing a book. It was a very fine American editor, Georgie Remer, who gently advised me to drop this ‘one first-person character per chapter’ idea. Georgie usually edited top level political and military memoirs and she had taken me, a fiction writer, on as an experiment. From my point of view her help was wonderful and she taught me the first principles of editing. A dozen or more American regional speech patterns and accents would be a big problem even for a well-travelled American writer, Georgie said. She would not advise anyone to try such a device. I was convinced that it could be done but Georgie was an extraordinary woman and her warning was apt; it would add months of extra work and pitfalls galore. So Georgie and I compromised. I tell the story from different viewpoints but I would look over the shoulder of each participant rather than relate the episode in their voice.

When I wrote Bomber, a book about an RAF strategic bombing raid in 1943, I devoted a large part of the story to the life and day-to-day activities of the Germans. Goodbye Mickey Mouse was a fundamentally different project. For this book I wanted to examine the social life of the ‘Little America’ that was the air base, and the mixed reactions of the English civilians living nearby. Because I have found that conversation is the finest basis of research I spent a long time with veterans in America. Despite the lengthy research I was determined to keep the story line clear and well structured.

A simple plot demands complex characters. I have never been lucky enough to have my characters fortuitously emerge from the keyboard, speak to me from blank pages or drift into my dreams. Like some latter-day Count Frankenstein, I have to fashion my characters to fit the needs of my story but not fit readily to each other. To give you a crude idea of what I mean: Victoria is a part of an old, over-confident, expiring world, while being young female and vulnerable. Jamie is strong and assured but feels uncertain about the foreign world in which he finds himself. Mickey Morse is a wild card; an alarming, unpredictable representative of the sort of social revolution that war brings. Equally important to me was the father and son relationship; the General and his son Jamie are separated by the love they have for each other. It is a generational gap that neither man can bridge or reconcile.

Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a love story. Almost every fiction book I have written is to some extent a love story; I suppose I must be some sort of closet romantic. This story is a somewhat prosaic tale. It depicts desperate wartime romances and the cruel anguish they bring to all concerned.

Len Deighton, 2009

Prologue, 1982

Three buses moved with almost funereal slowness through the narrow winding country lanes. Overhead the sky was dark with rain clouds. The passengers stared out at the meadows and the pretty villages, defaced by advertising, TV antennas and traffic signs, and at the orchards and streams drained of colour by the long months of winter.

The buses did not stop until they reached one large ugly field disfigured by the rusting metal skeletons of old Quonset huts and brick remains. Slashed across this huge field, like some monstrous sign of plague, there was a concrete X. Here and there strenuous attempts had been made to remove this disfigurement, but only tiny pieces had been nibbled from the great cross.

Cautiously the passengers disembarked into the chilly winds that scour the flat East Anglian farmlands. Huddled against the weather, palms outstretched to detect rain in the air, zipped and buttoned to the neck, they formed into small silent groups and wandered dejectedly through the ruined buildings.

They were Americans. They wore brightly coloured windcheaters and tartan hats, they carried cameras and tote bags, none of them was equipped with the heavy sweaters and thick overcoats that England’s climate demands so early in the year. They were white-haired and they were balding, they were florid and they were ashen, they were fat and they were frail, but, apart from a few young relatives, they were all in that advanced stage of life that we optimistically call middle age.

The nervous clowning and the determined laughs of the men demonstrated the tense anxiety behind their movements. Wives watched knowingly as their men frantically searched in the workspace of the echoing old hangar, paced out the shape of a long-vanished barrack hut, peered into dark corners or scratched upon dirt-encrusted windows to find nothing but ancient farm machinery. They’d waited a long time; they’d paid hard-earned money; they’d come a long way to find the man they sought. Sometimes it became necessary to consult an old photo for identification purposes, at other times they listened for half-remembered voices. But as the group grew quieter and, in deference to the cold, returned to the warm buses, it became evident that none of them had discovered the man they all so clearly remembered.

One couple separated from the others. Holding hands like young lovers, they followed a potholed tarmac road that, like a huge ring, surrounded the field, touching the extremities of the crossed runways. The man and woman talked as they took a shortcut along a farm track. They unhooked themselves from blackberry bushes, stepped over cow dung, and picked a wood violet to be pressed flat into a diary and kept as a souvenir. They spoke about the weather and the crops and the colours of the countryside. They spoke about anything except what was uppermost in their minds.

‘Look at the cherry blossom,’ said Victoria, who had not lost her English accent despite thirty years in San Francisco. They both stopped at the orchard gate which once marked the end of Hobday’s Farm and the edge of the airfield.

‘Why did Jamie stay in the bus?’ said the man. He rattled the farm gate. ‘Isn’t he interested in seeing where his father flew from in the war?’

Victoria hugged him. ‘You’re his father,’ she said. ‘You tell me.’

1 Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen

Colonel Alexander J. Bohnen’s large office overlooked Grosvenor Square. The furniture was a curious collection of oddments: two lumpy armchairs from the American Embassy’s storeroom smelled of mothballs, his desk and a slab-sided table, loaded with box files, bore the markings of Britain’s Ministry of Works. The antique carpet and a Sheraton china cabinet were air-raid salvage that Bohnen had bought cheaply in a London saleroom. Only the folding chairs, six of them stacked tidily behind the door, were American in origin. But it was December 1943 and London was very much at war.

The clouds were dark and low over the bare trees of the square. The soft silvery grey barrage balloon wore a crown of white and there were patches of fresh snow on the grass. But elsewhere the snowflakes died as they reached the ground and the hut that sheltered the balloon’s operating crew was shiny and wet. Smoke from the stove twisted with every gust of wind, and chased the snow flurries. For once there was no sound of aircraft. Little chance of a German air raid today; nature was providing its own barrage.

Colonel Bohnen, US Army Air Force, was a tall man in his middle forties. His uniform was well cut and he had buffered his appearance against the onset of age by a daily routine of exercise, aided by expensive dentists, hairdressers, masseurs and tailors. Now, with the same waistline he’d had at college, and nearly as much wavy hair that was only slightly greying, he could have been mistaken for a professional athlete.

His visitor was an elderly American civilian, a sober-suited white-haired man with rimless spectacles. He was older than Bohnen, a friend and business associate. Twenty years before, he had been part owner of a small airline and Bohnen a trained engineer with contacts in the banking world. It was a relationship that permitted him to treat Bohnen with the same sardonic amusement with which he’d greeted the overconfident youngster who’d pushed past his secretary two decades earlier. ‘I’m surprised you settled for colonel’s rank, Alex. I thought you’d hold out for a star when they asked you to put on your uniform.’

Bohnen knew it was a joke but he answered earnestly. ‘It was a question of what I could contribute. The rank means nothing at all. I would have been content with sergeant’s stripes.’

‘So all that business about your expecting a general’s star at any moment is just moonshine, huh?’

Bohnen swung round sharply. His visitor held his stare a moment before winking conspiratorially. ‘You’d be surprised what you hear in the Embassy, Alex, if you wear rubber-soled shoes.’

‘Anyone I know there last night?’

The old man smiled. Bohnen was still the bright-eyed young genius he’d known so long ago: ambitious, passionate, witty, daring, but climbing, always climbing. ‘Just State Department career men, Alex. Not the kind of people you’d give dinner to.’

Bohnen wondered how much he’d heard about the excellent dinner parties he hosted here in London. The guests were carefully selected, and the hostess was a titled lady whose husband was serving with the Royal Navy. Her name must not be linked with his. ‘Work keeps me so busy I’ve scarcely got time for a social life,’ said Bohnen.

The man smiled and said, ‘Don’t take the Army too seriously, Alex. Don’t start reading up on the campaigns of Napoleon or translating Thucydides. Or practising rifle drill in your office, the way you used to practise golf to humiliate me.’

‘We’ve got too many businessmen walking around in khaki just because it’s a fashionable colour,’ said Bohnen. ‘We’re fighting a war. Any man who joins the service should be prepared to give everything he’s got to it. I mean that seriously.’

‘I believe you do.’ There was a steel lining to Bohnen’s charm, and he pitied any of Bohnen’s military subordinates who hesitated about giving up ‘everything’. ‘Well, I’m sure your Jamie will be green with envy when he hears you got to Europe ahead of him. Or is he here too?’

‘Jamie’s in California. Flying instructors do a vitally important job. Maybe he doesn’t like it, but that’s what I mean about the Army—we all have to do things we don’t like.’

‘His mother thinks you arranged that instructor’s job.’

Bohnen turned to glance out of the window again. The old man knew him well enough to recognize that he was avoiding the question. ‘I don’t have that kind of authority,’ said Bohnen vaguely.

‘Don’t get me wrong—Mollie blesses you for it. They both do, Mollie and Bill. Bill Farebrother treats your boy as if he was his own, do you know that, Alex? He loves your boy.’

‘They would have liked a son, I guess,’ said Bohnen.

‘Yes, well, don’t be mulish, Alex. They don’t have a son, and they both dote on your Jamie. You should be pleased that it worked out that way.’

Bohnen nodded. There was virtually no one else who would have dared to speak so frankly about Bohnen’s first wife and the man she’d married, but they’d been good friends through thick and thin. And there was no malice in the old man’s frankness. ‘You’re right. Bill Farebrother has always played straight. I guess we were all pleased that Jamie was assigned to instruction.’

‘I suspect you had a hand in Jamie’s assignment,’ said the man. ‘And I suspect that Jamie is every bit as clever as his father when it comes to getting his own way. Don’t imagine he won’t find a way to get into the war.’

‘Has Jamie written to you?’ Bohnen was alert now and ready to be jealous of this man’s friendship with his son. ‘This is important to me. If the boy is being assigned to combat duty I have a right to know about it.’

‘I only know that he visited his mother on leave. He sold his car and cleared out his room. She was worried that he might have been sent overseas.’

The old man watched Bohnen as he bit his lower lip and then moved his mouth in exactly the same way he’d seen young Jamie do when working out a sum or learning to take the controls of a tri-motor plane. Bohnen looked at his wristwatch while he calculated what he could do to check up on his son’s movements. ‘I’ll get on to that,’ he said, and pursed his lips in frustration.

‘You can’t keep him in cotton wool for the rest of his life, Alex. Jamie’s a grown man.’

Bohnen got to his feet and sighed. ‘You don’t understand me, you only think you do. I don’t give myself any easy breaks, and if you were under my command I’d make sure no one ever accused me of going soft on old buddies. If Jamie’s looking to his old man for any kind of special treatment he can think again. Sure, I put in a word that helped assign him to Advanced Flying training. I know Jamie; he needed more time before flying combat. But that’s a while back, he’s ready now. If he comes here, he’ll take his chances along with any other young officer.’

Bohnen’s visitor stood up and took his coat from the hook on the door. ‘It’s not a sin for a man to favour his son, Alex.’

‘But it is a court-martial offence,’ said Bohnen. ‘And I don’t quarrel with that.’

‘You’ve fallen in love with the military, Alex, the same way you’ve fallen in love with every project you’ve ever taken on.’

‘It’s the way I am,’ admitted Bohnen, helping the old man into his overcoat. ‘It’s why I’m able to get things rolling.’

‘But in wartime the Army has a million lovers; it becomes a whore. I don’t want to see you betrayed, Alex.’

Bohnen smiled. ‘What was it Shelley said: “War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.” Is that what you have in mind?’

The visitor reached for his roll-brim hat. ‘I envy you your memory even more than your knowledge of the classics, Alex. But I was thinking of something Oscar Wilde said about the fascination of war being due to people thinking it wicked. He said war would only cease being popular when we realized how vulgar it was.’

‘Oscar Wilde?’ said Bohnen. ‘And when was he a reliable authority on the subject of war?’

‘I’ll tell you next week, Alex.’

‘The Savoy, lunch Friday. I’ll look forward to it.’