The Bomber Dog

by Megan Rix

  ‘Good idea,’ he muttered.

  Next, Sabine took an old matted sheep’s fleece from the chicken house, covered it in mud and tied it on Grey with some string.

  ‘It’s for his own good,’ Sabine told Claude, as the boy held his nose and then started to laugh.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, crossly.

  ‘Now he’s really like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ Claude told her.

  Madame Dubois stared at the dog in horror when they took him into the kitchen.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ she gasped.

  The dog hardly looked like himself any more. The fleece bulked him out, making him look misshapen, and he smelt terrible.

  ‘It’s his disguise,’ Sabine replied.

  ‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ said Claude.

  Madame Dubois nodded. It wouldn’t fool anyone on close inspection, of course, but from a distance … from a distance it might.

  ‘I need you to take this food out to the old barn at the turnpike,’ she said as she put the last of what little she could spare into a basket.

  Sabine and Claude nodded. It wasn’t the first time they’d taken supplies to soldiers who were trying to help France. They’d also hidden men in the chicken coop and the stable. So far they’d never had to use the rabbit hutch their father had made before he left to take a more active part in the Resistance with the French army.

  ‘Come, Grey,’ Sabine said as she took the basket of food from her mother.

  Madame Dubois was glad her children had Grey to protect them. Although he hadn’t been with them for very long, having a dog around had rekindled all the old feelings she’d had about the ones she’d lost. The children had been so upset when the puppies and their mother had been taken by the German soldiers four years ago and she relished their joy at spending time with a dog again. Plus he added to the authenticity of their disguise. After all, what was so unusual about two children with very large appetites and their smelly, odd-looking dog, going off on a picnic for the day?

  Grey sniffed the air as he trotted along after Sabine and Claude. He couldn’t detect so much as a faint trace of Nathan’s scent as they hurried across the fields to the old barn.

  They didn’t see any German soldiers as they ran, but when they reached the straw-filled barn and went inside it looked as though the Allied soldiers must have gone too.

  ‘Hello?’ said Claude.

  ‘We’ve brought food,’ Sabine announced, into the seemingly empty space.

  Grey looked at a particular spot, his head tilted to one side. He put his paw out and rested it on top of a lump in the straw and a British soldier emerged from it, brushing stalks of wheat off his shoulders.

  ‘It’s OK,’ the soldier said to the other man who was hidden in the barn. ‘It’s just some children and their foul-smelling dog.’

  ‘He’s not smelly,’ Sabine said. ‘That’s his disguise. Underneath he’s beautiful and very clean from all the time he spent in the river.’

  ‘Our mother took his collar off in case the Germans caught him and shot him,’ Claude added.

  The British soldiers looked at each other and shrugged. The children were making very little sense but they were too tired from their mission and sleeping rough in the barn to question them more about their dog.

  ‘Let’s see what’s in that food basket,’ the first soldier said. While Sabine and Claude took out the food they’d brought with them, Grey slipped silently out of the back of the barn.

  By the time Sabine, Claude and the soldiers looked round for him, Grey had gone.

  His strong sense of smell and the tracking skills he’d been taught led him back to the part of the river where Sabine and Claude had first found him. But Nathan wasn’t there. Then he ran on to the place where he’d come down in the parachute drop. But Nathan wasn’t there either.

  He sniffed at the air in all directions and ran in a large circle as he tried to pick up Nathan’s scent. He pawed and sniffed the ground, but Nathan had landed more than five miles away and there was no scent trail of him here.

  Grey threw back his head and howled up at the sky. It was the last place he’d seen his friend.

  Sabine and Claude spent the rest of the day looking for Grey and finally returned to the farmhouse without him at dusk.

  ‘We searched everywhere,’ Claude told his mother, defeated.

  ‘He must have gone back to the soldiers,’ Sabine said.

  They were startled when a moment later Luc burst through the door.

  ‘German soldiers,’ he gasped. ‘Coming!’

  First they’d come to Luc’s farm, where the squawking of the guinea fowl had alerted Luc to the fact that there were intruders. As soon as he realized what was happening, he’d dropped the bucket of grain he was about to feed to them and ran as fast as he could through the trees to warn Sabine and Claude to hide Grey. But now he found that Grey had gone.

  ‘We’ve been looking for him all day,’ Sabine said desperately.

  At least the German soldiers couldn’t take him if he were missing.

  ‘We have no British soldiers hiding here,’ Madame Dubois insisted to the German soldiers who pushed their way roughly past her. They’d had a report of British spies in the area, and although most such reports led nowhere, each of them needed to be investigated.

  Claude’s eyes went to the small pottery jar on the shelf above the fireplace. If the soldiers looked inside it they would find Grey’s ID tags and know that although they might not have been helping the British soldiers, they had helped the British soldiers’ dog. And that would be enough to get them all into serious trouble.

  Sabine saw where Claude’s wide eyes were looking and gave the slightest flick of her head to tell him not to keep staring at the jar. Claude tried his best not to, but it was very hard to drag his eyes away. He’d never been so scared before – he felt that he couldn’t breathe – he felt he might faint.

  Upstairs they could hear the soldiers stomping about, throwing over furniture, tapping on walls to see if there were any hidden panels and opening drawers.

  Having found nothing, they came clattering back down the stairs.

  ‘Monsieur, look!’ Luc said to the first of them.

  ‘What is it?’ the soldier demanded.

  Luc pointed through the window into the distance. ‘I saw someone. He was running …’

  The soldiers pushed roughly past him and headed off down the road and away from the farm after the person Luc pretended to have seen.

  Once the German soldiers had gone, Luc returned home, picked up the grain bucket he’d dropped and fetched more grain for the guinea fowl. Without their early warning there might not have been time to alert Sabine and Claude before the German soldiers arrived.

  ‘Merci,’ he said as he scattered the grain.

  The birds pecked it up and then went back to their lookout wall.

  At the Dubois farm Sabine took Grey’s collar and ID tags from the pottery jar and threw them in the fire. They were too dangerous to keep.

  Chapter 15

  Back in England, Nathan found it hard to feel relieved at being home because he was still so worried about Grey. During the three weeks they’d spent apart he’d missed him terribly and often dreamt about him. Sometimes they were happy dreams in which he was reunited with the dog. Sometimes they were sad dreams in which Grey hadn’t survived the drop and Nathan found his body. The worst dreams of all were the terrible ones in which Grey needed him. The dog barke
d and whined for his help but, however hard he tried, Nathan could never reach him in time. From those dreams he woke with tears on his face, only to remember that they weren’t real.

  ‘Just a dream,’ he told himself. But the harsh reality was that he didn’t know where Grey was or what had happened to him.

  On the night of the parachute drop he’d dragged the injured French Resistance fighter, Jacques Dubois, back to his motorcycle and managed to drive it with Jacques clinging on behind him, barely conscious, to the emergency rendezvous point on the beach. Once they got there it was decided that it was too dangerous to send the information Jacques had given him over the radio. No one wanted the German army to suspect that they’d been tricked into believing the Allied attack was taking place in one place when it was actually going to be in another. Not while they could still do anything about it and thwart the attack.

  Nathan was ordered to sail on a boat back to England to hand over the information in person.

  Once he’d told Major Parry everything he knew, Nathan asked if he could return immediately to France to search for Grey. Major Parry looked grim as he shook his head.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ he told Nathan. ‘If you were caught and interrogated our plans would be discovered.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘No, soldier,’ Major Parry said. ‘You’ll be returning to France along with hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers soon enough.’

  The other soldiers at the base camp didn’t understand that for him, losing Grey was like losing his best friend. They’d spent every single day together since they’d met and losing him left a great empty hole inside him.

  Nathan wrote to Penny to tell her that Grey was missing and must be presumed dead. At least she’d understand how he was feeling.

  As more days and then a week passed, Nathan fretted that there was no news of Grey. He desperately hoped that if the dog had survived the drop, someone was taking care of him. His only comfort was in knowing that if any dog could survive alone in France it would be Grey. He’d survived as a stray dog on the streets of Dover and British streets weren’t so different from French ones.

  Grey desperately tried to pick up the scent of Nathan for days and days without any success. He was hungry and lost. The last meal he’d eaten had been a large rat the evening before, so when he spotted something that looked similar to a rat, in that it was about the same size, he pounced.

  Grey’s head went down and then snapped back up even faster as his sensitive nose encountered the sharpness of the hedgehog’s bristles. Grey hopped back in surprise and looked at the creature that had hurt him. He growled at it. Then he went towards it again, intending to bite it, only to find the hedgehog was now curled safely into a ball and first it was Grey’s nose that got prickled again, and then his tongue.

  Grey barked at the hedgehog as he hopped backwards away from it. Then he reached out his front paw to touch it and ended up giving a yelp and hopping away again as a spine spiked his pad.

  Grey barked and barked at the creature that had hurt him, but it remained tightly curled in its ball, safe from the dog’s unwanted attention.

  Grey lay down and waited for it to uncurl and when it didn’t, he eventually gave up and went to the river to cool off. He still wore the last remnants of the disguise Sabine had made for him and flies buzzed around him whenever he stopped moving. He bit at them but all they did was fly away and then come straight back again.

  Grey took a long, refreshing drink from the river and dipped the paw that had been pricked into the cool water. It was a hot day and the fleece was heavy on him. He swam out into the water and the last of the fleece disguise finally dislodged itself.

  Grey came out of the water smelling much better and shook himself vigorously, leaving the fleece to sink.

  His thirst quenched and his body cooled by the water, Grey’s hunger still remained.

  As night fell, he scratched a bed from the soft forest earth and lay down. His thick fur kept him warm but he didn’t sleep. He lay awake with his head on his paws. Somewhere out there was Nathan but he didn’t know where, and as often as he sniffed the air he couldn’t detect any scent of him.

  The clouds shifted and the sky above was clear. The forest was silent apart from the sounds of night creatures. Finally Grey slept, only to be woken at dawn by the sound of lowing. He opened his eyes and found himself looking right into the soft brown eyes of a brindled brown cow, which was towering above him. She had a white belly and head and eyes that had brown patches over them.

  Frightened, he stayed very still as the beast stood over him. And then he was relieved to feel the lick of the cow’s massive tongue on his fur.

  Eva had run out of the cowshed and into the trees of the Brotonne Forest, terrified when the German soldiers began shooting at her farm.

  She’d never lived in a wood before – never lived anywhere other than a farm – but the forest suited her just fine, apart from making her feel a little lonely. The wild boar that lived there were mostly nocturnal and skittered away if she even came close.

  Eva led Grey to the clearing where she spent her days and watched as he chased a rabbit, before lowering her head to eat the rich forest grass. Grey chased the rabbit out of the clearing and into the trees before he lost it, only to spot a squirrel, chase after it, but lose that too. He returned to Eva who was now lying on the grass in the sunshine. He went to join her and flopped down but then saw another rabbit. This time he caught it and his hunger was finally satiated as he gulped the rabbit down.

  As Grey and Eva spent a lazy time together, Nathan and the Allied forces spent a frenzied day in the final stages of preparation for the mission to liberate France.

  ‘It’s on and it’s taking place tonight.’

  ‘Right, lads,’ said Major Parry in the briefing room. ‘The plan is for you paratroopers to land in France first and prepare the way by taking out any major guns and bridges you can before the bulk of the force arrives at dawn.’

  ‘The intention is still to trick the German army into believing the attack will take place elsewhere,’ he continued, ‘and we’ll be dropping thousands of fake dummy men called Ruperts over the Pas-de-Calais area at the same time as the Normandy invasion begins, to try and pull the wool over Hitler’s eyes.’

  Once the order was given, thousands of Allied aircraft – transport planes, military gliders and bomber planes – filled the sky like a cloud of locusts.

  At her grandparents’ farm in Kent, Penny was awoken by the insect-like droning sound of the Allied planes on their way to Normandy. As she watched them from her bedroom window she didn’t know if Nathan was on one of them or not, but the mission to take back the country for the French people was no longer a secret.

  ‘Be safe Nathan and Grey,’ she whispered.

  She’d had Nathan’s letter telling her Grey was missing and probably dead but she didn’t believe it, not for one minute. She was sure Grey was alive and out there somewhere. He had to be because she wanted him to be so badly.

  Mrs Green also saw the planes fly overhead from where she stood by Dover Castle.

  Dover port was busy with soldiers, some of them acting as decoys. Most would be travelling to Normandy on ships from further along the coast in the morning.

  As another wounded pilot was brought up the hill to the castle to be treated in the underground hospital, she longed, as she did every day, for the war to be finally over and for Nathan to come home safely.

  It was dark when a faint droning sound woke Grey and Eva as they lay clos
e to each other in the forest. Grey opened his eyes and then sat up at the sight of a family of wild boar, playing in the dark of the night-time.

  He’d seen pigs at the Ringway airbase with Nathan, but he’d never seen wild boar before and they smelt different though similar to domesticated pigs. The mother was about as tall as Grey, but much stockier. Her skin was a brown colour and she was covered with tough bristles.

  The wild boar piglets that came scampering after her were candy-striped in brown, black and white. They ran around squealing and chasing each other in a puppy-like way while their mother dug into the ground seeking out roots and worms. One piglet rooted up a worm and snuffled it down only to have a second piglet grab hold of his little tail. The first piglet squealed and the two of them were soon chasing after each other, before Eva sat up and they ran back to their mother in fright.

  Grey looked up as the droning grew louder. Little did he know that it was the sound of the Allied planes on their way to free France.

  The drone of the aircraft grew ever louder, until the sound was right above them and almost deafening. The frightened wild boar ran back to their nest of vegetation for cover. And Grey ran too, not away from the planes, but in the direction they took, towards the coast, as Eva gave a bellow of goodbye.

  The night sky around Nathan’s plane was soon lit with orange flames. He could hear the sounds of guns firing. Nathan and the other soldiers were restless. No one wanted to wait. They all knew they could be killed by enemy fire as they parachuted down – but at least they’d have a chance. They’d be doing something instead of waiting inside the plane, which was a far larger target than a single paratrooper would be.

  ‘Let us out!’ the men on Nathan’s plane shouted to Sergeant Harris.

  The static wire along the centre of the plane to which each of them had clipped their parachute clip was needed to operate the parachutes once they reached 600 feet. If they didn’t get out before the plane was hit they’d have no chance of survival. There were so many men crammed into the plane that there was barely room for them to move, other than in their appointed positions. They were sitting ducks inside the plane.