B for Buster

by Iain Lawrence

  “Where’s he been?” asked Lofty.

  The bird hopped down to the roosts, down to the floor. It took a drink of water from one of Bert’s fountains, and other birds hurried to nuzzle against it. They crooned in that peculiar voice that Bert said was singing.

  Lofty belched. Moving his hand like a bandleader, he started to sing. “Been to London to visit the Queen.”

  I could have hit him. “That bird went flying tonight,” I said. “He was out on George or Victor.”

  “No kidding?” said Lofty. “Then why’s he back? What’s he—”

  I could see the truth sink in for Lofty. A soberness came over him, in a way I’d seen a hundred times with my old man, as if beer could be shocked from his blood. He took his pipe from his mouth; he pushed it back in. “They’ve bought it, haven’t they?” he said. “That bird’s come from George, and they’ve bought it.”

  I picked up the pigeon. Its heart was pounding, its breath coming in gasps. I turned it over, but there was no message, no cylinder. There wasn’t even a leg on that side. It had been shot off or torn away, and streaks of dried blood covered the feathers on the pigeon’s belly.

  “It’s George, isn’t it?” said Lofty. “It’s that damned list.”

  Bert came in, zipping his coveralls as he rushed through the door. “I ’eard the bell,” he said. “Who’s ’omed, sir?”

  I held out the bird. “He’s hurt,” I said.

  “Oh, mercy,” cried Bert. “That’s Geordie! Wee Geordie!”

  “I knew it,” groaned Lofty. “It’s George.”

  “No, no,” said Bert. “This is Geordie from Victor.” He took the bird in one hand and felt through its feathers. He pulled at the stump of the pigeon’s leg, and the poor bird thrashed wildly.

  “What’s happened to Victor?” said Lofty.

  We never found out. Only the pigeon came home. The kite and the crew vanished completely, as though V for Victor had flown off to that other place of Donny Lee’s.

  But right then in the loft, it was the pigeon that Bert cared about. He got out his salve and his bandages and went to work. “Oh, ’e’ll be all right. Don’t you fret now, sir.”

  Lofty still hadn’t sorted it out. “Are you sure that one’s not from G for George?” he asked. “How can you tell?”

  “I think I know my birds,” said Bert.

  Lofty hung around, though neither of us wanted him there. He lurked by the nesting boxes, whistling through his pipe with a sound that grated at me. I helped Bert wash Wee Geordie, changing the water as the redness brightened in the bowl. We had just finished and were settling the pigeon into a nest when we heard the sound of engines, a single kite coming in.

  “You’d best go, sir,” said Bert. “You and your chum ’ere, sir.” He was signaling to me with his eyes; Bert had never cared for visitors.

  I took Lofty outside. “We’ll watch him come in,” I said. But we were nearly blind in the darkness, and we had to half grope our way around the corner of the loft. Then we struck off toward the huts and nearly stumbled over Simon, who lay on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky. He was even drunker than Lofty, cradling a brace of bottles that clattered as he got up.

  The bomber passed above us, flashing its recognition signal. Everyone knew the code for V, the three dots and a dash that had come to stand for victory. And that wasn’t the signal that came from the aircraft. It was G for George coming home, all right. It went round in its circuit.

  The runway lights were on, shining across the ground in watery pools of crimson. Lofty stood with his pipe jutting straight from his mouth, looking up as the Halifax came sliding from the sky. All we could see were its landing lights, glowing brighter and larger. The engines raced for a moment, then slowed to a putter.

  “You see, Simon?” said Lofty. “There’s no such thing as luck. You don’t get the chop because you write your name on a blackboard. Even the Kid says it’s true.”

  G for George leveled off above the runway to let its airspeed fall away. It flickered in the runway lights, its black bulk seeming only partly whole. Wheels down, it hurtled along the flare path, flashing redness from the struts and the bubbles of glass, but aloft—still flying.

  “Put her down,” muttered Lofty. “Put her down.” George touched the ground with a squeal, then another. The engines hurried in a mad, deep roar, and the kite struggled up again.

  “Oh, God, he’s botched it,” said Lofty.

  I saw him clearly in the blast that followed. The ball of fire lit him up, and I saw his eyes staring, his lips apart. I heard his breath in the moment before the explosion reached us, before the hot wind tore across the field and plucked the caps from our heads. I saw the look on his face, and wished I hadn’t seen it.

  In that instant Lofty moved to the top of the Morris list. The little car that Donny Lee had driven, that had passed four times from owner to owner, now belonged to him.

  Simon stared toward the fire in the north, in the field beyond the runway. A fire truck and an ambulance were racing toward it.

  “Well, Cobber,” he said. “Fancy a ride in your Morris?”

  CHAPTER 21

  I HAD NEVER SEEN ribbons as long as the ones that stretched across the map the next day at briefing. They dodged across France and over Belgium, then wound their way to the east, so deep into Germany that they almost reached Poland.

  The target was Nuremberg, an ancient city full of castles and cathedrals. I asked Ratty, beside me, “Why are we going there?”

  He whispered back, “I guess that’s where they ran out of ribbons.”

  The intelligence officer showed us the things to watch for. He pointed at a photograph taken from twelve thousand feet and showed us the monastery and the royal castle and the bronze dome on the tomb of a saint. He said the starlight would shine on that bronze; we were lucky it was there.

  “And now,” he said, “here are the defenses.”

  We all leaned forward as his pointer scratched along the picture. I thought he would show us a hundred searchlight batteries and a thousand flak towers. But he smiled and ran his pointer along a ditch a hundred feet wide, and back up an ancient wall that nearly circled the city. “That’s about it,” he said. “They shouldn’t give you much trouble.”

  He got a chuckle out of just about everybody. But those defenses seemed very sad to me. I thought they must have been built centuries before, to keep out men and horses, but it seemed that the people inside them hoped they would keep out bombers, too. I remembered someone saying almost the same thing about London, and I thought of the dead baby that I had seen there in the Big Smoke. I supposed there would be a lot of dead babies in Nuremberg, and that struck me as sort of a shame.

  The intelligence officer let the laughter fade away. Then he got down to serious business, showing us the things that could really hurt us. All along the route there were guns and searchlights and night fighters. But our worst enemy, he said, would be time. To Nuremberg and back, it was eight or nine hours in the air. The darkness wouldn’t last that long. “Don’t relax when you’ve dropped your bombs,” said the officer. “You’ll battle the fighters all the way home.”

  “What about Window?” somebody asked.

  “It will help, but I’m afraid they’ve largely found their way around that.”

  There were mutters among the airmen, little coughs and nervous breaths. If it hadn’t been for Percy, I would have been terrified. I couldn’t have hauled myself into the crate that night if it hadn’t been for him.

  We drove to dispersal in the Morris. Or most of us did, at least; Pop refused to get into the thing. He wouldn’t even throw his chute aboard. So he legged it across the runway as the rest of us drove, with Ratty balanced on the bumper. Lofty parked behind Buster, jamming the binders too suddenly. Buzz slid right off the fender and sprawled on the grass. He shouted, but not from anger. He’d landed right on top of a four-leaf clover.

  For the first time ever before an op, the keys were left in the
Morris. Any change in routine was normally met with fears of a jinx, but no one said anything this time. They must have thought it really didn’t matter what we did if we were already on a chop list.

  Pop arrived five minutes later, out of breath, frowning at the Morris. “I hate that thing,” he said. “It gives me gooseflesh just to look at it.”

  “Then don’t look, old boy,” said Lofty.

  “I’ll never get in it.”

  “That’s fine, Pop. You don’t have to.”

  Lofty sounded kind and caring, but the old guy looked nervous. He took out his crucifix, and it was still in his hand when we climbed through Buster’s door.

  In bright daylight we started the engines. We wouldn’t see the sun go down until we were halfway to France, and Buster was hot and muggy, thick with kerosene fumes. Along the wings, the airscrews thrummed as Lofty and Pop tested the temperatures, the pressures, the flaps and magnetos. They did it carefully, and they did it twice. Each engine was run up and throttled back, each magneto switched to left and right and back again.

  “It looks good,” said Pop.

  “I don’t know,” said Lofty. “Gee, I don’t know.”

  The bombers started passing, nose to tail along the perimeter. I watched them through my window as they lumbered by, huge and black, shimmering heat from their wings.

  The erks pulled our chocks away. Sergeant Piper held up his thumbs. Will, in his place beside Lofty, nudged the throttles. By the sound of the engines I knew he was pushing the levers farther than ever to get Buster moving with all the weight of bombs and fuel. We turned onto the runway, then braked to a stop.

  “Magnetos,” said Lofty.

  “We checked them already,” said Pop.

  “I want to check them again.”

  Pop sighed. His breath whistled in the intercom. But he did as he was told, and Lofty worried that something was wrong with the magnetos. “Damn,” he said. “There’s too much drop.”

  That old dodge? I heard Bert’s voice in my mind. But suddenly Lofty said, “To hell with it. Full throttles! Lock ’em, Will.”

  If anything really was wrong with Buster, she managed to hold herself together. She took us through the evening to the night, all the way to Nuremberg without a murmur from the engines. She took us across the city, lurching through the flak and the billowing smoke from the fires. Percy lay inside my jacket, and I held him tightly as we rolled to the left. Through my window, eighteen thousand feet below, I saw the dome where a saint was buried, and I saw the castles burning.

  Buster brought us home again. She brought us to a land of clouds, and went shivering through them as I tuned the loop and listened on the wireless. I picked up the streams of dots and dashes. “Skipper, we’re on the beam,” I said.

  Two nights later the old crate took us to Italy, and it was such an easy show that even Fletcher-Dodge came along in his perfect R for Rags. It was our best machine, bright and new like a showroom car. He had renamed it for his favorite old dog. More than five hundred bombers went, and all but three came home to England. But Fletcher-Dodge stepped out of Rags as though he was Jimmy Doolittle returning from Tokyo. He was still swaggering the next day, when the first of the Lancasters came.

  The entire squadron watched it circle round the field. We watched it tilt and sideslip down, then level off above the field, beyond the hedge. We heard the engines fade away, then rise again.

  Fliers and erks and WAAFs, they all cheered as the Lancaster touched the ground. No one could have cheered more loudly if the king had arrived inside it. Then they surged forward, and I saw Ratty practically skipping along at the front of them all, Lofty—somewhere in the middle—grinning round his pipe. But I stayed where I was, feeling empty and sad. I saw the ending when that Lanc arrived.

  Over the next few days I watched others arrive, one at a time, and a line of Lancs began to grow at the farthest end of the field. I never went near them until I had to, when our turn came around to go up for a spin on the fifteenth of the month. It was a night flight, under a big full moon.

  I felt strange getting into a kite without a pigeon box to carry. I kept thinking that I’d forgotten it, that I heard—from a distance—the flutter of Percy’s wings, the bubbly coo of his voice. For the others our first pigeonless flight was something to joke about. Simon said he was glad he wouldn’t have to smell the bird anymore. “No lie,” said Ratty. “We’ll never smell pigeons again, soon as the Kid takes a bath.”

  I settled at the wireless, not wedged down in the nose, but high in the fuselage, right below the astrodome and just behind the engines. A trainer took the pilot’s seat as Lofty hovered near him. He fired up the engines, taxied to the runway, then steered west to the coast in the moonlight. Down into valleys, up over hills, we took the same sort of winding route we’d taken in Buster our first time up, and I loved it all over again.

  The Lanc made our old crate look like a dodo bird. Despite what I wanted to think, I loved flying in a thing so fast and big. I leaned sideways and looked forward through the front office, out through the windshield at the moon straight ahead. We were climbing toward it, with the engines in their perfect, powerful drone. Lofty was driving now, and it seemed that he could take us there if he wanted to, that he could put us down among the craters, or just loop the loop around that moon. But he throttled back and rolled us over, and I saw the ocean—all bright and sparkling—slant across the glass.

  A shiver of delight ran through me. For a moment there was nothing in my thoughts but the joy of flying. I reveled in the weightlessness of dipping into the dive, then felt myself grow huge and heavy as we leveled out above the sea. I grinned as we turned and gamboled through the sky.

  “Roaring rockets!” I said, and this time nobody laughed at me. Then I reached inside my jacket to stroke at Percy’s feathers, and when I found only sheepskin, all my joy dissolved.

  I suddenly missed my little friend so strongly that my heart ached. I felt a terrible guilt that I’d forgotten that he wasn’t there. And I thought of what it really meant to be flying in a Lanc—that he would never be with me again.

  CHAPTER 22

  WE DROVE IN THE Morris to the Merry Men the first night beyond the full moon. It was the sixteenth of August, and we’d been with the Four-Forty-Two almost exactly three months. “Time to celebrate,” said Lofty. I had no choice but to go along. The moon was so bright that there couldn’t be an op for days to come. But more importantly, I was the only one who had saved any money, so I was shanghaied to pay for the rounds.

  Lofty drove the bus flat out. Will and I clung to the bonnet, Buzz to the boot. Little Ratty rode on the bumper with his goggles on as our slipstream of road dust swirled around him. Simon was in the passenger’s seat; Pop had refused to come along.

  We flitted through the valley; we raced up the hill. For a moment, at the crest, we were airborne. Then we landed in a thudding four-pointer, jinking across the road. Lofty drove so fast and recklessly that I couldn’t decide if he wanted to smash the little bus or if he believed that it couldn’t be smashed. Maybe he thought that the Morris was somehow blessed on the ground, that it made sure we were safe until it got a chance to smash us in the air.

  I leaned back against the windshield, holding on more tightly than I’d ever held to Buster. I watched the moon-lit road twist toward us through the headlights’ gleam and flash underneath; I saw white ghosts of milestones hurl themselves past. We went laughing into the bar, and for once I enjoyed myself. I played darts and sang songs, not even bothering to pretend that I was getting drunk. But early that morning, back in my bed, I had my dream again.

  It was more frightening than ever, coming out of the blue like that. I woke up shouting, dizzy from a spinning world of sky and flames. Then I lay in a sweat, with a racing heart, staring up into utter blackness.

  I was glad the moon was full, that its brightness would keep us on the ground. But I couldn’t shake away my dream as I sat at breakfast. Lofty was planning a trip to Leeds for t
he evening when the speaker hummed and the WAAF told us, “You are on for tonight.”

  I could see from Lofty’s face that he didn’t believe it. “It’s a full moon,” he said. “This is a joke. Some silly clot is playing a prank.”

  But it was no joke. The erks right then were filling Buster ’s tanks. They were getting ready to stuff her belly full of bombs.

  The briefing scared me. It scared us all. The red ribbons went straight across the North Sea, over Denmark’s narrow throat, then down along the islands of the Baltic. They ended at a village called Peenemünde, a little seaside place that none of us had heard of.

  But six hundred kites were about to attack it. Six hundred kites from all over England, they would meet above this little village and bomb it to hell, and none of us could even guess why. It was just another Goodwood, Fletcher-Dodge told us proudly. “It’ll be a wizard show,” he said. “Every squadron in England is putting every crate in the air.”

  Someone asked him, “Are you coming, sir?”

  The swagger stick swished against his leg. “I only wish I was,” he said.

  Short little Drippy told us the skies would be clear. “Spectacularly so,” he said. “You might get a glimpse of aurora borealis.” But once the intelligence officer got up, I doubted that anyone would be looking for northern lights. He said there would be flak and searchlights on the ground, a smoke screen laid out as a welcome. Flak ships would be anchored in the Baltic. “Now mind you, watch for those,” he said, as though it might not have occurred to us to do that. We would drop our bombs from just eight thousand feet, below the spotlight of a moon.

  I told myself not to worry. I tried to think of Percy and his eye-sign, of his magic as a homer. But I only saw my hands trembling, and I held them together as the briefing went on, each bit of news worse than the last. Ratty and Buzz kept sighing and shaking. Simon doodled slashes on his notepad. Lofty, stoic as ever, stared straight ahead with his empty eyes.