‘Battleship grey! Inconspicuous? Take my word for it,’ declared our
camouflage unit’s senior Training Officer, ‘a grey that declares itself to be a
battleship is almost guaranteed to be seen!’
Of course, these days, my knowledge of camouflage paints probably has no
equal outside the armed services.
On what grounds do I
make this claim?
See for yourself.
There’s my old uniform on its hook behind my secret studded door. That
battledress jacket was once worn by a supernumerary Concealment Officer
commissioned to draw enemy fire from Allied airfields by decoy and deception . . .
no canvas of any academic painter (a calling in which I have gained no small
repute) has ever been on such a colossal scale.
You’ll recognise our
elite shoulder insignia. The scops-owl
(a superbly camouflaged species, almost indistinguishable when perched against
the bark of a tree).
But I will not rehearse
here the history of DG-SCOPS: the Directorate-General for Secret Camouflage
Operations based at Cleremont Park.
 |
The Outside
Viewing-tank of the Directorate of
Camouflage (1943).
Painting by Commander
J.
Yunge-Bateman of the Directorate. A model
of an aircraft carrier floats in the tank.
|
A camoufleur may fool the enemy but he
is not in the business of fooling himself . . .
If only I could now vanish into thick darkness as wholly as we did
then.
No human eye can penetrate the dark fastnesses of the human spirit where I
would wish to wander.
In the boatshed, above the slipway, Ingrid peered into the gloom.
‘I see no ships.’
‘Trust me.’ I took her hand, leapt towards the water and, without a splash,
disappeared.
I heard her gasp,
bewildered.
‘It’s not possible,’ she
whispered.
But it was.
For three months we’d
been refining a special heavy-duty marine paint that a wag in stores, because
of its dead matt blackboard-type properties, had labelled Nightschool No. 9.
By studying the
adaptive camouflage of cuttlefish in starlight, together with the spectrometric
theories advanced by that master painter of moonlit waters, Julius Olsson RA,
and compounding our findings with the principles of M.C. Schwab’s
hull-camouflage-through-downlighting system modulated by rheostats (filed in
U.S. Patent 2,300,067 and devised to dissipate the under-shadow cast by a
battleship by night) the state of nigh invisibility had been achieved for our Mk. 5 experimental hooded coracle into
which I’d stepped.
‘It’s as I thought,’ I
called from the blackest void. ‘I’m nothing
to you.’
I gripped Ingrid’s
wrists and she stepped aboard to fall into my arms.
‘Tell me!’ My grip tightened. ‘Has anyone ever mattered to you?’
‘I nursed a baby monkey once,’
she murmured. ‘It was everything
to me. Everything I ever wished!’
My hands brushed her
shoulder blades. It was as though I had touched a razor-backed mule.
As I trod the narrow
cinder foot-path that runs between the railway’s boundary fence and the water
meadows, I contemplated my crooked shadow in a gibbous moonlight that by my
reckoning measured eighty selinolumens.
At Cleremont Park the
Camouflage Directorate had built a Moonlight Vision Chamber above a circular
tank on a turntable, presenting a shallow sheet of water for our crypto-shaded
model warships, which permitted the measurement of all kinds of marine light
effects, from the diffused radiance of starlight to brightest moonlight, so we
could judge our visual trickery in miniature from the vantage of an aircraft
circling at any altitude.
I was still
contemplating the secrets of nocturnal mimesis, unlocked by that distant
peepshow, as I stealthily entered No. 56 by the trade gate.
In my
lab-cum-dispensary, fearful of waking Ingrid, I closed the door and, before I
switched on the light, drew the heavy drapes against the prying moon.
You don’t hear the one that gets you.
Her kid sister, Lena, came up behind me,
unheard.
Extract from Now
You See It, Now You Don’t.
(A Bad Case, 2014, Salt.)
Anthony Deverell-Hewells. A Sketch.
(Narrator of Now
You See It, Now You Don’t.)
The character of this bristling, irrepressible artist, and camoufleur, Anthony Deverell-Hewells, is
alluded to in a number of Eisner’s narratives. The ‘Prof’ was said to have
‘more opinions than the Queen has soldiers.’
And ‘the professor’s
raw complexion rivalled the face of an engineroom stoker ... and, certainly,
“the Prof” never ceased to relish stoking up controversy, for the “rummy old
coot” had often claimed that he was the first practitioner of Optical Art (a claim that rivalled Picasso’s), and
that he had not only invented an invisibility cloak but had caused a battleship
to disappear, in a series of trials that had surpassed the Philadelphia
Experiment.’
(Sister Morphine by Catherine Eisner. Page 312, 344, 346 and 403, Dispossession and A Stranger
in Blood.)
It should be noted that Henrietta Goodden’s Camouflage and
Art (2007), in a very real sense, omits a number of the Royal College of
Art’s alumni who were distinguished serving artists in the camouflage section
of the Air Ministry in WW2, whilst only a select rollcall of RCA artists is
favoured with inclusion.
Set Designers, Couturiers and the Aesthetics of Camoufleurs.
Later I took Ingrid dancing at the Starlight Rooms in Stoneburgh.
In the event, my
invisibility cloak and my self-denying ordinances were needless since,
returning through the moonlit park by way of Cleremont Chase, to my surprise
she quite voluntarily led me into a New Brutalist pillbox, now adorned with
pilasters and rustic trellises, which a foppish stage designer dragooned into
our unit had sweetly transformed into a Greek temple for Lord Jewkes of Cleremont.
In the moonlight,
Ingrid’s hair was greyish mauve and her bright red lipstick had turned black,
the accident of a not displeasing nocturnal aesthetic.
Her war paint, like the
actinic chlorophyll pigments of military camouflage, changed under certain
conditions.
But her cool grey eyes
were no less grey and no less watchful.
I had been of the
belief that I’d trained myself aright in night-time peripheral vision to avoid
the blind spot; yet, despite all my best efforts, I hadn’t seen what was there
to be had for the taking.
I repeat: in the night-time deceptions of a camoufleur,
the light can become dark and the dark can become light . . . so even a wary
seducer can be seduced by a fledgling seductress . . .
Extract from Now
You See It, Now You Don’t.
I might, perhaps, have been useful to the War Office in camouflage work, for I had had many years of experience in the very antithesis of the art. It had been my special task to make figures stand out in sharp relief to background, as has to be done in the case of Royalty. One of the essential elements of a majestic wardrobe is visibility. As a rule. ladies of the Royal Family wear light coloured clothes because such colours are more discernible against a great crowd, most of which will be wearing dark everyday colours.
Norman Hartnell (1901-1979),
Couturier to Queen Elizabeth II.
Catherine Eisner believes
passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary
craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and
psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and
ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines
Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from
psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive
recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry,
rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and
the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
