Free Turbulence by Giles Foden Page B

observations.
    Feeling the wind-chill on my face and hands, I rode alongside the water, past the row of large loch-front houses which constituted Kilmun itself, passing an old church with a tower in its graveyard. I then turned left under bumpy green hills, travelling for several miles (and at one point falling off) until I reached Dunoon.
    It was a busy place. As well as local residents there were an awful lot of people in one sort or uniform or another. Colonial troops and Americans as well as British servicemen. On asking where I might find HMS Osprey , where Sir Peter had said Whybrow was based, I found it to be one of the shore-based establishments – in this case a former convalescent home – which the navy insists on calling a ship. The floor is referred to as the deck, right starboard and left port. Even to leave by the front door is to take a liberty boat.
    As I arrived, a flag-raising ceremony was taking place outside the building, complete with buglers and ratings in blue and white uniforms. The event was unpopular with the townsfolk as it brought the main road to a standstill.
    We stood waiting and watching, our way barred by sentrieswith rifles. At the crucial moment, much to the amusement of civilian onlookers, an old fellow in a blue jersey, who was selling fish and oysters from a wheelbarrow, shouted out ‘Loch Eck herrings, fresh Loch Eck herrings!’
    Once the performance was over, it turned out my wait had been for nothing, as on gaining entrance I learned that the Met station at Dunoon was actually inland rather than on Osprey itself. Yet even this second site was still conceived as part of the ‘ship’.
    I remounted my motorbike and eventually found, on the outskirts of the town, a group of Nissen huts dotted around an old white-painted farmhouse. There was a cookhouse and a washhouse and a hydrogen shed (formerly a grain barn), some dormitories and not much else. The conditions were quite primitive. There was mud everywhere. The sight of it made me shudder.
    Gordon Whybrow was bald and short-sighted, with a pair of thick-lensed spectacles balanced on the end of his long, thin nose. I first found him in the Ops Room, as the farmhouse drawing room had been rechristened. He was wearing RAF uniform, like all Met staff who have been conscripted, even if they’re actually working in another branch of the services, as he was on Osprey . I was still a civilian employee at this stage.
    Bent over a desk bearing the large typewriter on which, I presumed, his letter to me had been written, he was studying another machine, or part of it. I recognised it as the switching mechanism on a new type of radiosonde.
    Three inflated red balloons bumped on the ceiling of the room, their strings draping over Whybrow as he peered at the device. Behind him, on a large board on the wall, a Waaf was plotting combined readings. A slight brunette, she was reaching up for strings – held in place by brass ‘mice’ – which showed the directional lines of balloons released from different stations.
    Little red flags marked the positions of weather ships in the Atlantic, the Channel and the North Sea, while lines of green flags marked the tracks of the met recs, the meteorological reconnaissance flights which took off from airfields all over Britain each morning.
    Another Waaf, plumpish with short fair hair, was kneeling on the floor, reading data to her colleague as the teleprinter roll spilled down. Her chubby face was dotted with freckles. She was the only person in the room to notice my entrance, smiling pleasantly and brushing a hand against her skirt as if doing so would compensate for the awkwardness of kneeling.
    â€˜You have to set the switch sequence before you put on the windmill,’ I said to Whybrow’s bald head. He looked up with a face full of surprise, swiftly followed by irritation, whether at my remark, which I suppose was a bit know-it-all, or simply my arrival I could