‘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.
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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. |
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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