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By Root 582 0

the ground arrived early. He hit at force, which stunned him temporarily, and he didn’t react quickly enough to what happened next. Before he knew it, the wind had dragged him across the field. ‘I was being scraped and bumped along the ground at speed, face down,’ he remembered. ‘I couldn’t seem to free myself from the harness.’ When he finally managed to do so, he sat in a dazed heap, cursing Seymour for ignoring the warnings. Sneum was now going into Denmark with a broken nose and conspicuous cuts and bruises. ‘It was a bit stupid of them to send me to Denmark a few days after I’d smashed up my face,’ he reflected.

It was the first week of September when the SIS mission to Denmark received its final green light. MI6 was about to join the war in Denmark. Seymour celebrated by tying the knot with Hazel in Exeter Cathedral, then SIS allowed the newly-weds a five-day honeymoon in the charming Cornish fishing village of Mullion.

Back in London, Sneum and Christophersen were ordered to rip all conspicuous labels off their clothes, and were given a little Swedish and Danish money. The problem was that Danish cash was particularly hard to come by, and when the time came the British had only a single five-hundred-krone note to hand over to their spies. For some reason, it was given to Christophersen, but Tommy decided not to protest. He already had a bad feeling about the mission, so one more piece of stupidity didn’t seem to make much difference.

On 9 September 1941, Sneum and Christophersen were put on to a Whitley bomber at a small airfield outside Newmarket, Suffolk, and flown across the North Sea into Danish airspace. Their parachute drop was delayed by thick cloud, and confusion reigned in the cockpit over their precise location. But a difficult flight was about to get worse. Tommy recalled: ‘Suddenly we saw tracer fire coming straight up at us, and it looked as if it was going to score a direct hit. The flak was uncomfortably heavy.’

The British crew didn’t take long to decide they had to turn back. But no one realized just how close the flak had come to taking their lives until they examined the aircraft, after landing back in Newmarket. Sneum remembered: ‘The fuselage was peppered with holes: we counted thirty-seven. We had been lucky and the pilot was surprised at how much damage there was.’ The night’s trauma had been for nothing, but at least they were still alive.

The weather forecast was so bad the following day that they didn’t even try to reach Denmark. Rabagliati could see how wound up Tommy had become, so he took him out for a drive through some of Suffolk’s country lanes in his Bentley.

‘I want to show you a little trick I learned from my racing days,’ he said. ‘If you survive the war, you might be able to use it. Good pilots are often good drivers. Do you like fast cars?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Sneum. ‘Malcolm Campbell tried for the land speed record on my home island when I was a boy. There were races too, but one of my friends was killed by a flying wheel and that put a stop to it all.’

‘Dangerous business,’ said Rabagliati sympathetically, and pointed to the huge dent in his skull. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, ‘my brains are still where I need them to be.’ Turning his attention to the Bentley, he said: ‘See the clutch? When you’re racing, you don’t necessarily need it. Not if you have a good ear for music.’

Tommy was baffled, so Rabagliati decided to demonstrate. He hit the accelerator on a straight stretch and the Bentley roared forwards, but when he heard the engine strike a certain pitch, he flicked the gear-stick into neutral. On the cue of a new engine note, he changed down into a lower gear. The car had barely lost any speed during this manoeuvre; and at no point had Rabagliati touched the clutch. ‘See?’ Triumphant, the colonel performed the trick again, then turned to his pupil. ‘Now you try.’

They swapped places and Sneum had a go. Soon he had the hang of it.

‘You’re a natural,’ said Rabagliati. ‘Don’t make a habit of this if you’re not racing. Cocks up the car. But it’s fun, isn’t it?’

Tommy