Very rarely, it would rise high enough to be carried off at higher speed in a jet stream before fading from view.
Occasionally an agitated American voice would call us from Rothwesten asking whether or not we could confirm their sighting of activity over the border. Mostly we could not. We envied the Americans their equipment; ours was getting too clapped out to be of much use for serious surveillance work.
Sleep was forbidden, and all land-lines had to be checked at least every 10 minutes so as to make sure they were still connected. At times when there was absolutely no activity, which was more often than not, the tellers and plotters would resort to telling each other yarns and holding general conversations. I well remember one of our lads on the Waggum line asking how much 'bull' there was at Waggum. He went on to say that here at Borgentreich there was so much of it that even the mice wore pads on their feet!4 It was usual for each person to be relieved for a few minutes every hour so that they could use the toilet and have a drink. The system worked well except that for myself, being the only Officer, I had to stay in my cabin (except for brief toilet visits when the NCO i/c watch temporarily took my place) and have drinks brought to me. I usually had coffee every hour, sometimes with a biscuit or two, but changed to tea at 05.00 hours so that the effects of the coffee didn't stop me sleeping when off watch.
I encouraged the lads to write letters or read when on watch provided that, as soon as there was any 'trade', they immediately dropped what they were doing and got on with the job.
One night, to amuse myself, my letters home all written, and fed up with reading, I decided to clean the perspex windows of my cabin. I used 'Windolene' on a rag, as was usual. What I didn't realise was that the rag I used to apply the Windolene was contaminated with oil. On coming to polish the perspex afterwards I ended up with a smeary mess which defied my best efforts to remove it. To his credit, one of the plotters spotted my predicament and suggested that I dipped another rag in cigarette ash and tried that. It worked a treat, thus ending a two hour potentially very embarrassing struggle.
Day watches were different. The Duty Watch Officer and the Ops 'B' occupied the cabin in the Hippo. There were more plotters and tellers round the GSM and, behind the vertical, edge-lit, perspex fighter plotting screen stood two fighter plotters. These lads had lines to the control cabins and plotted, in reverse-written red and yellow chinagraph crayon, the positions and identity of any aircraft under Borgentreich control.
We Fighter Controllers had to wait in our rest vehicle in readiness, at all times when on watch, quickly to transfer to one of the control vehicles and take control of any aircraft allocated to us.
When it was my turn, on arriving in the cabin I donned my single earpiece head and breast set and told the Chief Controller, over a squawk box, that I was ready. He then told me the aircraft type and number (usually one or two pairs), call-sign, course, altitude, location in Georef, base, and VHF frequency of 'my' aircraft. Given this information I would at once make R/T contact and, if there was little aerial activity I might identify them very quickly on the PPI. On the other hand, given poor radar conditions and/or an amount of other air traffic, I would ask them to make a 90° turn either to port or starboard so that I could be sure that I was watching the right plots. Sometimes I had to swap radars so as to get a better picture and maybe request a further identifying turn. As soon as I could 'see' my aircraft the cabin fighter plotter started to tell the plots simultaneously to the plotter on the Craig
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4 He was referring to the foot square pieces of old blanket on which one slithered about to protect a barrack room floor after it had just been polished. I used them as an Officer Cadet at Kirton-in-Lindsey. The mental image of mice doing the same was humorous in the extreme.
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