by Tony Park
His eyes followed where she was pointing and he saw a massive antelope, with a sagging dewlap and humped back. ‘Magnificent,’ he said.
‘There are rock paintings of rhinos around here, but they were hunted out years ago. It’s a terrible shame. These hills are crawling with leopard, you know.’
‘Stop it, you’re scaring me,’ he joked as he upended one of the beer bottles and used the lip of its cap to open the other. Froth spilled from the mouth and he licked it from his hands.
‘So, how are you going to open the other bottle?’ she chided him.
‘With my teeth?’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ she said. She took the bottle from him and fished a steel bread and butter knife from the food bag. She held the beer in her left hand, with her index finger crooked around the neck. Using her other hand she placed the end of the knife’s handle under the rim of the cap and, with one sharp, deft movement, accompanied by a loud pop, levered it off. The metal cap sailed high into the air.
‘Don’t know many girls in Australia who could manage that,’ he said.
‘We’re raised as true ladies out here in Africa. Equal to any task. Cheers.’
‘What will you do now?’ he asked her. ‘Stay in Bulawayo?’
‘I want to go back to university, but I also like my job here.’
‘Can’t imagine there’ll be too many places for women in the police once the war’s over.’
He was right, unfortunately, but she believed that the inroads women had made into male-dominated professions could not be turned back completely. ‘Do you think the war will ever end?’
‘Has to, some time. The Yanks are pouring thousands of men and millions of dollars’ worth of machinery into England. There was talk of an invasion, of Europe, even when I was still over there. Has to come soon. The Eyeries have folded and the Russians have started to push the Jerries back, but they’ve still got plenty of fight left in them, so it won’t be finished this Christmas.’
‘I’m so glad it hasn’t touched us here, not in terms of the fighting, at least.’
‘It’s funny, though,’ he said. ‘The way it’s provided an opportunity for people like you to do something, well, different with your life. Something positive.’
‘You learned to fly. That’s a skill you can use when it’s all over.’
He shrugged. ‘I haven’t wanted to get into an aeroplane for a long time, not since England.’
‘You never did finish telling me your story, did you?’
‘I thought we’d had enough truth for one day,’ he said.
She opened the food bag and then laid the chicken and bread out on the calico. ‘Can I make you a roll?’
‘Please.’
‘You don’t have to talk about it, Paul. But, God, it felt so good to tell someone today how I really feel.’
‘When I’m on the bike, like today, it almost feels like flying,’ he said, accepting the food from her and adding his thanks.
‘You should try it again sometime.’
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Too many memories.’
‘Are you scared?’ she asked, taking a mouthful and washing it down with beer.
He snapped his head around, turning his gaze from the African bush back to her eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘What happened during your two tours?’
‘That was part of the problem. I didn’t finish my second tour. I was wounded,’ he said, looking down at his food. A slender lizard, about as long his hand, and painted the colours of the rainbow, inched towards a crumb.
They both watched in silence as the lizard fought to overcome its natural fear of humans, balancing the risks between a safe exit and a feast.
‘Were you hurt badly?’ she asked. From the corner of her eye she saw the little reptile dart away with its mouth stuffed full of crumbs.
‘Probably not badly enough to keep me from flying.’
‘Did you ask to be grounded?’
‘No, I did not, and that’s the truth. Not that it mattered.’
‘Well, then it’s not like you shirked your duty or anything like that. Why do you feel so bad about it?’
‘If I tell you, will you stop asking me questions?’
‘No,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘Will was a good friend. No, more than that. We were like brothers.’
Paul Bryant shook the rain from his uniform cap as he and Will Freeman entered the briefing hut.
‘Fucking rain,’ Will said.
Paul laughed. If he’d had a quid for every time his English flight engineer, his mate, had said that during the year they’d flown together, he would have had enough to buy Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. ‘Cheer up, could be snowing.’
‘Give it a month. Christ, Paul, why couldn’t they have sent us to the bloody South Pacific or somewhere warm to get killed?’
Paul passed a cigarette to Will, then lit it and one for himself as they took their seats in the crowded room. Will never had his own smokes and Paul usually saved him the effort of asking for one. Their unspoken agreement was that he supplied Will with cigarettes and Will always bought the first three beers. ‘Three to go, mate,’ he said.
‘Please, God, make it a nickel and I’ll become a priest,’ Will whispered as the wing commander walked up onto the wooden stage.
Paul had also been hoping – he never prayed – for a nickel, the codename for a leaflet-dropping mission over occupied France, but he already knew better. ‘Fat chance,’ he muttered as a hundred pilots, engineers and navigators from half-a-dozen different English-speaking countries scraped their chairs back and got to their feet. ‘I cycled out to the flight line this arvo and took a squiz at the weight and balance sheets. They put 2154 gallons of fuel in her, Will.’
Aw, fuck,’ Will said. A full load. That means—’
‘Be seated, gentlemen.’ The Wingco said, his New Zealand accent softened by several months in England. ‘The target for tonight is the Ruhr.’ He pulled a curtain drawstring theatrically and a large-scale map of Germany was revealed.
Around them there were other muttered curses, shaking heads and closed eyes. ‘Happy Bloody Valley,’ Will muttered.
There was nothing happy about the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial centre, and the most heavily defended piece of real estate in the Reich. The target, within that seething, smoky, deadly conglomeration of iron and steel, was a ball-bearing factory.
‘I don’t have to tell you how important ball bearings are to the German war effort,’ the Wingco said.
‘Not as important as my balls are to me,’ Will muttered.
Paul took down the details of the route, weather conditions, code words, the colours of the day – flares that could be fired off by one aircraft to alert another it was a friendly – all the details that had become part and parcel of his life. When he checked the page of notes he saw the tip of the pencil tapping the paper and realised his hand was shaking.
‘Good luck, chaps,’ the wing commander said at the conclusion of the briefing.
The rain cleared as they rode to their kite in the back of a truck. ‘Who’s for P-Popsy?’ called the cheery English WAAF driver.
‘Still on for tomorrow night, Brenda?’ Will called back, to the accompaniment of wolf whistles and jeers.
‘Cheeky sod, you know I wouldn’t be seen in public with a rogue like you, Will Freeman,’ she said.
‘Who said anything about public? We can leave the lights off if you like.’
‘Out!’ she screamed.
Paul smiled, but there was no mirth in it. He knew Will’s incessant joking was just a means of hiding his fear. They knew each other too well.
‘Three to go, Paul,’ Will said to him. It was their ritual. Paul spoke the number of missions they had to complete in order to finish their current tour at the start of every briefing, and Will said it at the door of the aircraft. They shook hands and then hoisted themselves inside awkwardly, their bodies bundled in sheepskin-lined boots and flying jackets,
helmets and yellow Mae West life preservers.
Sweat, leather, hydraulic fluid, fuel and dried blood. The smells of their Lancaster, P-Popsy. She was more fishwife than popsy. Loud and lumbering and creaking with age, but Paul loved her all the same. He took his seat in the cockpit and began the litany of checks as Will settled in behind him.
His first tour, in Wellingtons, had been a comparative doddle. While other kites in the squadron had fallen to enemy fire, or been involved in midair collisions, or simply got lost, he and his five crew members had survived unscathed. A bloody miracle. Will had joined the crew for their second tour, as the Lancaster carried an extra man, a flight engineer, to monitor the engines and the myriad other working parts on the big aircraft. It was a measure of the man that Will had not only integrated easily into the tight-knit band of survivors, but also become the pilot’s best friend.
Will liked to joke that he had bought the affection of Paul and his crewmates. A successful London car dealer prior to the war, he had produced a crate of vintage champagne – a rare luxury in England – after his first sortie over Germany.
In the air, however, it was skill and nerve that counted more than money, and Will had impressed Paul with his thorough knowledge of their aircraft and his cool head under fire. Between their deadly trips over the Channel, Will had concentrated on an even more difficult mission – to get his increasingly withdrawn skipper out of his shell and keep him abreast of the earthly delights available to aircrew on leave.
‘All right, mate?’ Paul asked, looking over his shoulder.
Will gave him a thumbs-up and Paul punched the booster coils. He followed a sequence so familiar he could have done it drunk with his eyes closed. Port inner first, curls of bluish smoke escaping from each exhaust stub as the Rolls Royce Merlin engine roared into life. Next was the starboard inner, followed by the port and starboard outer engines. As always, there was the familiar but peculiar mix of satisfaction and disappointment. Satisfaction that Popsy was humming, all engines fine as he waved to the airman on the ground to haul away the chocks from the wheels; and disappointment that there was no mechanical reason to scrub the mission. Their destiny awaited in the encroaching gloom of the English twilight.
He gave a thumbs-up to the ground crew and taxied out onto the perimeter track. Popsy trundled slowly, one of a queue of Lancasters heading for the takeoff runway. The kite in front of him was away.
He swallowed his fear, for the fifty-eighth time on operations. Will was on his twenty-seventh mission, the four remaining members of his original crew on their fifty-seventh. As the pilot, Bryant had completed an additional mission, his first, as a passenger on another aircraft, before taking his own men up for their first time. The crew’s luck had changed during this second tour. They had lost two members of the originals – Nigel, their mid-upper gunner had lost his head to a piece of flying shrapnel from a flak burst. Harry, a fellow Australian manning the front gun turret, had been spitted by a cannon shell from a vertical-firing gun on a Junkers 88 night-fighter, which had snuck up underneath Popsy on the eighth mission of their second tour. The wind gushing through the holed turret had blown Harry’s blood back on to Paul’s face, so that he’d needed to keep cleaning his goggles.
Paul tried not to think of the dead men, but it was getting harder, not easier, with each sortie. He turned onto the strip, applied full brakes and ran up all four engines again. Popsy shuddered and groaned, rattled and hummed. He looked across at the yellow and black chequered control caravan. A green light flashed in the Perspex dome on top. Bryant released the brakes and the Lancaster thundered down the airstrip. He pulled back on the control column and lifted Popsy, her seven crew and ten thousand pounds of killer cargo into the sky. In the bomb bay was a four thousand pound ‘cookie’ – a high explosive bomb that looked more like a huge steel barrel – and fourteen clusters of bundled incendiaries.
It took them half an hour to climb to their operational height of ten thousand feet, the airspeed indicator showing three hundred knots. Once over open water, Paul held the oxygen mask containing his intercom to his mouth and said: ‘Gunners, test fire now. Try not to shoot down any of our own blokes, though.’
All three turrets, nose, mid-upper and the arse-end charlie opened up, firing short bursts, and reported their guns were fine. Unlike a propaganda newsreel he’d had to endure before a film at the local cinema, no one on board said, ‘Enemy coast ahead’. That would have been stating the bloody obvious. Searchlights knifed the sky and long, arching trails of glowing red tracer from antiaircraft machine-guns told them they were on the other side of the water, crossing the Dutch coast. ‘Keep your eyes open, boys, for theirs and ours,’ he said. Completely unnecessary, he knew, but the acknowledgments he received back told him that at least everyone was still awake. Around them they glimpsed the hulking shadows of the Lancasters and, way off to port, a squadron of Halifax four-engine bombers. It was a big raid. A crowded sky. Collisions between friendly aircraft were not unusual.
Nearly three hours after taking off, a light show ahead told Paul they were in Germany – a glowing orange carpet of fire, spotted with the reds and greens of marker flares dropped by the pathfinders that flew ahead of the bomber stream. By the time P-Popsy and her crew were over the target, the searchlights and eighty-eight millimetre cannons would be warmed up and ranged, thanks to the advance aircraft.
‘Happy Valley, in all its glory,’ the front gunner announced.
‘Shut it,’ Paul ordered, too terse. His nerves were showing more and more on every mission. ‘Just concentrate on bagging us a fighter or at least a searchlight, mate,’ he added, hoping to soften the rebuke to the overeager teenage gunner.
The Lancaster lurched, the port wing dropping so rapidly that men were thrown against the Perspex of their turrets and the cold metal fuselage walls.
‘All right, skip?’ Will asked over the intercom.
Paul wrestled with the control column and dragged the bomber back into a level attitude. ‘Someone’s fucking slipstream,’ he muttered. In a black sky filled with as many as a thousand other bombers it was not uncommon to hit the invisible trail of an aircraft in front. It was always a shock, but not nearly as dangerous as hitting another kite.
‘Corkscrew port! Corkscrew port!’ yelled the rear gunner, the tinniness of the intercom heightening the fear in the man’s shrill call.
Bryant threw the mighty bomber into a sickeningly steep diving turn that made every panel and rivet vibrate in protest. His actions were instinctive, born of training and the real thing. The call from the gunner had only one meaning. He heard the four browning machine-guns open up from the rear turret.
‘I see him,’ said the mid-upper gunner, calmer, more experienced. ‘FW 190. Mad bastard. He’s still on us, skip.’ His twin guns joined the chorus coming from the tail turret.
It was a new tactic the Luftwaffe had introduced, called ‘wild boar’, and it was plain crazy. Unlike other night-fighters, who stealthily sought out bombers on their way to or from Germany over quiet skies, the volunteer wilde sou flew small single-engine fighters over heavily defended targets. They waded into the bomber streams while the British aircraft were on their final bomb runs, in a bid to disrupt their aim and catch them unprepared. The result was as unnerving and dangerous for the bomber crews as it was for the German pilots, who risked collision and being hit by their own antiaircraft fire, as well as bullets from the bombers’ gun turrets.
Paul pulled back on the control column, levelling for a second, and saw a flash of glowing tracer stream past his cockpit. Will was half standing behind him. He pushed the Lancaster into a right turn this time, and caught a glimpse of the single-engine fighter as it flashed past them. As the enemy aircraft moved ahead of them the front turret opened up.
‘Think I hit him!’ cried the exultant gunner.
Their luck was in. Probably an inexperienced pilot. Paul was low now, down to three thousand feet, and while his evasive tactics had helped them lose the ni
ght-fighter for the moment, four hungry searchlights, their operators surely having seen the aerial gunfight, now hunted him.
‘Nearly over the target. Shit, they’ve got us, skip,’ the bomb aimer swore, his gloved hand over his eyes to shield them from the piercing glare.
Bursts of smoke and shrapnel erupted around them as the antiaircraft gunners below followed the searchlight’s guiding beam. A second, then third, beam found them, locking them, painting the black belly of the bomber brilliant white. The flak batteries found their range.
‘Steady,’ the bomb aimer said, his voice quaking.
This was the worst time of any mission, Paul thought. On the final run-in, coned by searchlights, just waiting for the flak to hit them. If he threw the Lancaster into a tight turn now they might miss the target by a mile, and the trip would have been for nothing. As always, it was still a tempting thought.
‘Left, left,’ cooed the bomb aimer, correcting their course. ‘Steady.’
White-hot chunks of shrapnel from a nearby burst peppered the aircraft, making a sound like hail on a tin roof. Cannon shells sailed around them as more and more German guns took advantage of the searchlight operators’ skill and luck.
‘Fuck!’ Will cried behind him as the Lancaster was rocked by a nearby explosion.
Paul wrestled with the control column. It had felt like a giant had swotted them and sent them sliding sideways.
Acrid, chemical-smelling smoke filled the fuselage.
‘Bombs gone!’ yelled the bomb aimer.
The Lancaster rose of its own accord, suddenly relieved of its deadly cargo. The leap caught the searchlight operators unawares and, for a moment, they were in blissful but confused darkness. Paul dove hard to starboard and took them down so low that the bomber was buffeted by the hot air rising from the fires below. He turned west, towards England, and didn’t level out until they were little more than church-steeple height over the German countryside.
‘Bomb bay doors aren’t closing, skip,’ Will said into his intercom. On terra firma they were mates, equals; in the air, Paul was always the boss. Will’s job, as flight engineer, was to monitor continually all the working parts of the Lancaster – engines, hydraulics and other moving parts, to ensure all was performing as it should. ‘Shit. Hydraulics are gone. Try the flaps, skip.’