He collected me at six-thirty the next morning. The hotelier had woken me an hour before, and I’d lain in a bath until the hangover began to relent. I was still halfway through breakfast of Loch Fyne kippers and scrambled egg when Galloway arrived for me. He sat in the sun and smoked his pipe until I showed up. Then he just nodded along what passed for a street and we began to walk. Where the street ended an unmetalled forestry road began: it wound up into the heights like pictures I’ve seen of roads in the Swiss Alps.
Galloway told me, ‘Don’t fret, Mr Bassett; we’ll be up the hill long afore noon. It’s just a wee scramble for a man as fit as yersel’.’
The hill, he called it. As far as I could make out I had about five miles of Alpine pass to climb, onto a hundred miles of rough scrub, and then the hill: great grey crags like rotten teeth . . . it looked about as high as bloody Everest. A cloud actually touched one of the peaks.
‘We going up there?’
‘Most of the way.’
‘Any tips for me?’
‘Keep your pipe going, sir, against the midges.’
My old man had told me about the midges; he said they’d bite you to the bone.
‘Will that prevent them from biting me?’
‘No; but it might help keep your mind off them.’
‘Would you mind slowing down a bit, Mr Galloway, so I can keep up with you?’
‘I’m trying to outrun the midges and the ticks for us . . . if you put the work in now, Mr Bassett, you’ll find it easier going later on.’
Seconds later I felt the first midge grab me by the nape of the neck, so I hurried to stay up with him.
We weren’t troubled by midges at the crash site. Duncan told me the strong smell of aviation spirit in the air disagreed with them, although we’d still have to run their gauntlet on the way down. The big silver Boeing had iced up above the mountains, clipped one of the peaks and created its own Viking funeral in a high glen named Succoth.
‘What does Succoth mean?’ I asked him.
‘Buggered if I know. A lot of places up here have damned silly names.’
‘Aren’t you a local?’
‘I am now. I came up from Manchester when I was a teenager, after the First War. I never went back.’
An area the size of a football pitch of heather and coarse grass was burned and scorched. The fuel soaked into the ground ensured that it would be years before the secondary growth reestablished itself. Interestingly it was already pitted with freshly dug rabbit holes, and piles of their fibrous pellets. There were pieces of aircraft everywhere – most of them small, so she must have hit the ground very hard indeed. The first thing I recognized was the distorted tail turret, under a small section of fin. Then I picked out engines, wheels and small sections of airframe. Bullets were strewn around; the local lads could have had a field day up there – they probably did.
Duncan told me, ‘I was the third man up here that day. We’d heard the aircraft, you see; awfu’ low . . . And then the crash; it was a hell of a bang. With two other hill men we made up two parties of two, and climbed the hill to look for her. The other group got there first; we searched too low to begin with.’
‘What was the weather like?’
‘Bloody cold, sir. Exceptionally bloody cold as I remember. There was a light covering of snow – which had melted with the fires of course – but the ground was still as hard as iron.’
‘It must have been ghastly . . .’
‘You ever saw an air crash, Mr Bassett?’
‘Yes. I’ve even been in a couple.’
‘So I don’t have to tell you what it was like.’
‘No you don’t.’
Time for reflection. Neither of us spoke for a minute or two. Then he resumed. ‘We checked for survivors, but all we found were bodies everywhere. They’d been thrown around, and smashed up. They were all dead before they burned, I’m sure o’ that.’
‘Good.’ I’d always had a morbid fear of burning; still have, come to that.
‘The nonsense started the next day when the Yanks arrived.’
‘What nonsense?’
‘All the pretending that things were other than they seemed to be, sir. For instance, they said that the passengers were all low-ranking soldiers, but we’d been picking up solid gold wings and generals’ stars all morning. At least five of them had general’s uniforms in their kit. I saw a full dress uniform come out of a split kitbag. Then there was an army padre going round picking up any loose papers he found, and pulling papers out of briefcases and spilt bags, and burning them. Right over there.’
‘Didn’t he say a prayer for the dead?’
‘No. He just told me to fuck off when I asked him what he was doing. Funniest damned preacher I ever met!’
‘Can you remember if there was a big man among the dead?’
He sighed. ‘Mr Bassett . . . there were big men, small men, middle-sized men, and bits o’ men. Scattered all over the hillside. Some o’ them pretty, and some o’ them not. It took us all the next day to recover them . . . I can’t remember any one man. Except the one who wasn’t there, o’ course: we didn’t find him till spring.’
‘How was that?’
‘Oh: people come up here – you know. A hundred years ago the poor folk took the bounty of the seas when wrecks came up on the coasts; now we collect pieces of airplanes when they fall on our mountains – you’ve no idea how useful some things are. One of my neighbours took a bit of an aircraft’s body down the hill with his tractor and trailer: it’s his garden shed now.’
‘From here?’
‘No, man. There was nothing up here that size.’
‘What happened to the bodies?’
‘They were taken off the hill the next day. ’orrible day that was: freezing fog. We had to take them down on stretchers. They say that from Lochoilhead you could see the line of lanterns and torches, bobbing down the hill in the fog and silence. Then there was the Yanks collecting everything up, and burning the papers like I told you.’
‘Did they take the dead away then?’
‘Not at first. They laid them in the church hall for identification. The place stank of petrol and burnt people for months afterwards. The Boy Scouts who meet there now say the place is haunted.’
‘Do you believe that?’
He looked off into the distance. The cloud had lifted, and the peaks were granite grey and magnificent against the blue of the sky.
‘I don’t know of anywhere that’s not – haunted, that is. It’s what happens to you as you get older.’
‘What about the man you found later?’
There was a long pause again before he said, ‘He’d been thrown hundreds o’ yards away by the crash. That’s why they missed him. He’d been up here for months by then, and even although it had been freezing he was messed about a lot. Foxes and wild cats had been at him. Maybe some birds as well.’
I shuddered: that echo through time I told you about. ‘What did you do?’
‘We emptied his pockets, and buried him over there.’ He nodded to where the scorched earth and shallow crater ended, and the green scrub started. ‘. . . about twenty paces over there, and put him under two slabs o’ rock. We dug him a good grave, but we couldn’t write on it of course.’ When you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything: one of my dad’s rules, and not a bad one. So I said nothing, and Duncan went on, ‘I still feel bad about that. Some of the bodies are still down in the burial ground: he should be down there wi’ them.’ Then, from his pocket, he handed me Tommo’s Swiss wristwatch. It had been scrupulously cleaned, and was still ticking remorselessly. Tommo had been very proud of it. ‘I took that off him; I always knew someone would come for him one day.’
I took the watch and walked away – as far as the patch of ground covered by two granite slabs. It actually looked like a pretty decent grave to me; I wouldn’t have minded it myself. I pulled out the half of Johnny Walker I had taken with me, and had a decent couple of swigs. As I tipped t
he bottle the sun made my eyes water. Duncan left me alone: I don’t know what he was thinking. I don’t know how long I stood there. When I eventually walked back to him he said, ‘They told us that there were twenty people on the plane, you see: four crew and sixteen passengers . . . all on their way home to America. They took twenty down off the hill that second day, so this last man was never there.’
‘So you robbed him?’
He sighed before he told me, ‘Aye: I’ve already said, Mr Bassett. I don’t feel proud about what we did.’
He must have thought I was slightly crazy when I grinned and said, ‘Don’t worry about it; he would have found the idea really funny . . . and I don’t suppose he’ll mind being up here on his own either. Anyway, he won’t be alone . . . you and your pals will climb up from time to time and toast him, won’t you?’
I didn’t say it, but the implication that that was the price of my silence was deep in there somewhere. Duncan nodded. That would do. I told him, ‘I’d like to keep the watch.’
‘Fine. I was jest minding it fer ye.’ Then he said, ‘If we started out now we could be down again fer opening time. It always takes longer going down.’ I’ve never figured out why, but he was absolutely right.
As we picked our way down in the sunlight the midges began to savage me again. Duncan didn’t seem to notice. I rubbed some whisky on my exposed neck. I don’t know if that helped, but at least I smelled better. Part of the way down he said, ‘The way of it with these high-ground aircraft wrecks is that you find something new every time you go up there. I picked this up while you were thinking about your pal.’ He dived into a pocket, and held his hand out. ‘. . . one of them must ha’ been taking back a doll’s house for his kiddy; that’s very sad to think of.’
He handed me what looked like a miniature hand-painted pub sign. It read Alice’s Restaurant. Poor Alice. She must have been on her way back home too. I told him, ‘I know who this belonged to. Can I keep it as well?’
‘Sure. It will make a nice keepsake.’
The road, when we got back to sea level, was uneven and dusty, and my ankles were sore. There were a lot more people in the bar when we reached it. They must have known what Duncan would tell me, and I suppose everyone was interested – if not anxious – to see how it panned out. I didn’t see Duncan again until later in the evening, and we were all pretty lit up by then. That’s when I got what I now think to be the real end of this story. I found myself crushed up to the small bar when Duncan shoved in with two glasses of whisky. He gave me one, and said, ‘These folk think I’m touched y’know.’
‘Touched?’
‘Not all there.’ He tapped his forehead with a finger.
‘Why?’
‘I told them that I saw a big fat snake up on the hill last month; thick as my arm it was. No bugger believes me.’
I probably laughed, because he winced. I told him, ‘I’ll believe you. What did it look like?’
‘Like one o’ them poisonous things in Randolph Scott Western films, but bigger.’
‘Did it rattle at you?’
‘It surely did, sir. I think it must have escaped from a zoo, or something like that . . . but no one believes me here.’
‘Then that’s their misfortune, isn’t it? Tell the kids to run away if they hear the rattling sound: better safe than sorry.’
I tried to engage him with the eye-to-eye lock, to communicate that I knew more than I was saying, but his attention was already elsewhere, his head turned away. He was looking across at one of the few women in the bar; the only one under fifty.
Much later I was very drunk. The Coastguard, James Gillies, steered me to a chair at a small table. Duncan was in another alongside it. Gillies asked me, ‘So tell us . . . how long will you be gracing us by your presence, Mr Bassett?’
‘. . . another couple of days I expect. I have to wait for the boat. My dad’s still on it.’
‘Well, Englishman . . . why don’t we walk up another hill tomorrow, with my friend Duncan here. You can meet his ewes, and he can instruct us in the finer points of shepherding. The exercise will do you good. Then we can drink some more.’
‘Why not?’ I asked him.
The last person to call me Englishman had been Russian Greg, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t thought about him for weeks. I raised my glass and said, probably in a bit of a wobbly voice, ‘’bye Tommo: ’bye Greg.’
The Coastguard asked, ‘What was all that about?’
‘Just closing a book,’ I told him.
Epilogue
Behind our grey stone house there’s an overgrown Victorian garden I never got round to, but years ago we opened up one of the old paths. We cut a large round glade in the rhododendron forest which had swallowed everything. The glade is framed by high, lanky larches and firs, and we planted large boulders around it like a Neolithic stone circle. That was my horticultural joke; something for the archaeologists to puzzle over in years to come. We’ve managed to keep it open, and it fills with bluebells and snowdrops each spring. It is my favourite private space. I love it because it’s cool in the summer, and one of the last spots to succumb to the frosts of autumn.
I saw Tommo there last week. He’s taken up a pipe, which is quite odd, because he was always a cigar man when I knew him. He was standing in the last of the autumn sunlight, but throwing no shadow of course. He was telling a joke when I hobbled in, and turned and waved idly to acknowledge my presence. Russian Greg was sitting on one of the stones listening and laughing, and swinging his legs in his polished cavalry boots. He appeared to be chewing on a stick of that awful liquorice.
I guess that he must have gone at about the same time as Tommo, because he looks no older than when I last saw him in 1948. He looks chipper enough these days, but his head is crooked slightly to one side, so maybe it had been the old bullet-in-the-back-of-the-neck job for him after all.
What really pisses me off about these ghosts from my past is that they seem to be no older than when I last saw them; whereas I’m as crook-backed as Richard III, walk with a stick, and have a face as lined as a zebra’s arse. I’m also annoyed that I can’t hear what they’re saying. I can see that they’re talking, or laughing – sometimes it’s about me; I can see that in their eyes – but I can’t hear them. There’s something both substantial and insubstantial about them at the same time: I saw a bat fly right through Marty last year – he looked momentarily startled, and then began to laugh. These dead bastards seem to spend a lot of their time laughing, although once you’re dead it probably isn’t time any more, is it?
Sometimes I lie awake at night and simply long to know what happens next. But it’s selfish to want to be dead when there’s nothing essentially the matter with you except the batteries running down. Anyway, then I feel the old lady warm alongside me, and hear her snores and her occasional mutterings, and know that I have to wait for the proper time. That’s what most folk do. I imagine that one day I’ll walk out into the garden, into the sunshine, and find that I’m dead just like everyone else. All the boys will be there and up for a big party. Maybe the girls will be there too; I’d like that. You never know.
Afterword
The ravens of Succoth . . .
and some mislaid history
I have a problem with UFOs – apart from the fact that I don’t actually believe in them, that is. The problem is that when I was about ten years old I actually saw one, spinning slowly and silently above Muschamp Road Junior School playground, in about 1952. I am reasonably certain that the authorities would have explained it away as a runaway weather balloon, a planet – suddenly and uniquely visible in a clear blue sky – or offered some other such flaky misdescription that no one in their right mind should believe.
What I saw during that morning break – we still called it ‘playtime’ in the 1950s – was a stationary, slowly rotating, shiny metal disc, which tipped gently from side to side occasionally, as if maintaining trim. Having seen silver barrage balloons aloft, and sil
ver metal aeroplanes, I knew the qualitative difference in the images they fed back to the eye – and I still do. This was a shiny metallic disc, and although there was a noticeable breeze it did not tack.
What I remember clearly is that our teachers also came out and watched it with us for more than an hour. It finally departed vertically, and with incredible speed it was gone, in maybe less than 15 seconds. By then it was too close to dinner time to go back into class. So what I remember is a single magical playtime which seemed to go on for ever, and the staff of the huge Sunlight Laundry opposite coming out onto the road to stare up at the sky. When I told my parents they were mildly interested; the press reported flying saucers regularly in 1952, and everyone knew what they were. Oddly, no one was particularly worried about them. Looking back, both our almost passive acceptance of them then, real or not, and our total denial of them now, is a little disturbing. So, there you have it – I am a man who cannot believe his own eyes: just like the rest of you I do not believe in UFOs, but I saw one once . . .
Unfortunately so did Captain Mantell, and I borrowed him. The real Captain Thomas F. Mantell was the leader of a section of F51 Mustang Fighters being moved between airfields in the USA. It was his bad luck that his flight was crossing Godman (Air)Field in Kentucky on 7 January 1948, when an alert was received concerning an unusual object in the sky. He was asked to investigate, and two of his flight went with him.
There is no doubt that Mantell climbed his flight to a height above which the aircraft couldn’t operate without oxygen equipment for the pilots – and they had none – and this contributed to the disaster that followed. Both Mantell’s wingmen dropped out of the climbing chase, but Mantell did not. Among the transcriptions of his radio transmissions can be found the reports, ‘the object is above me, and appears to be moving at about half my speed’, and later ‘it is metallic, and is tremendous in size’.
The Hidden War Page 45