Turbulence Read Free Page B

really understand why they don’t just throw the bust ones over the side rather than have us haul them back to be repaired.’
    The reason was that these instruments were very expensive and hard to make, but one couldn’t expect an airman to appreciate that. There was often a bit of friction between these pilots and us forecasters, especially on the more remote bases. The pilots depended on us for good information, and they could often be very rude when they didn’t get it, or a forecast went wrong. The issue of authority was complicated by the fact that some forecasters wore RAF uniform and some didn’t, depending on the type of operation in which they were involved.
    I had just been promoted to technical officer, but that was a Met rank, not an RAF one. Just the previous week, prior to Sir Peter’s intervention in my life, I had been a lowly meteorological assistant, a plotter of synoptic charts, a sender up of balloons on £110 a year (£6 income tax).
    Mine was an odd way into meteorology, as few practical meteorologists have also been academics. I had been in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, and I got there at anearly age. I was awarded my PhD in 1938, at which time I was twenty-two years old. My thesis was in fluid dynamics, focusing on turbulence and other complexities of flows or ‘dynamical systems’. One encounters a lot of these in continuum physics – it’s all the stuff that’s shifting around, the material that’s hard to quantify because it’s always moving.
    In the absence of any particular girlfriend, I’d fallen in love with turbulence while an undergraduate. It is really just the study of whirls and eddies, in particular those that make up, on different scales, the atmosphere in which we all live. Fluid dynamics is also keyholder of our lives in a more intimate way, in that it governs the flow of blood and chemicals through the locks and weirs of body and brain.
    I listened to the hum of air passing softly over the machine, blowing past the wings in a whine that was clearly audible despite the whoof-whoof-whoof of the engines. Out of an intense, blue-gleaming whiteness, snowflakes whirled up from the nose. Now and then through the endlessly changing air we fell into patches of larger alteration. Troughs of turbulence, like potholes in a street in an African town – such as where, from under the dirt-stiffened pleat of his shirt, a beggar might reach out a hand for coins.
    Those are all the people I have time for now, since G— is gone, those millions of Africa for whom Overlord meant nothing, to whom the generals then and nearly every politician since cast hardly a glance.
    G —. I cannot even write the name. Even thinking it causes a sharp, tender shock to spike into my heart.
    Flying north, I watched the white flakes spattering the screen. Their shapes, distinct only for a moment, commingled with the thread-like wisps of my thoughts as they came and went. It was as if both were being blown by a wind that would permit no stillness. Everything was swelling, dispersing,happening again and yet not again – for while each thought and each snowflake was different and had its own identity, each was being carried along in the same medium of incalculable change.
    War – that altered everything too. The cosy Cambridge world of teacakes and sporting the oak began to disintegrate, chipped away in fragments. One could not just stay at one’s bench in the lab. I saw an advertisement for a training post at the Meteorological Office and, wanting to serve my country in the best way I could, I applied for the job.
    On being accepted I was sent to the Central Forecasting Unit at Dunstable. There I studied under Charles Douglas, the senior forecaster. He was an eccentric man but a kind one, and a brilliant meteorologist. He had a phenomenal memory – and some kind of nervous affliction. Something terrible had happened to him during