‘Then here we go.’
She pushed the throttles slowly but fully, fully forward, leading slightly with the port throttle lever to counter starboard engine torque. Acceleration was immediate, as the tail lifted behind them Mick seeing the airfield ahead not only through the windshields but through the nose cone, grass speeding close beneath. The Mosquito’s groan became the voice of a monster and they lifted airborne, Bess keeping them flat just feet off the ground, wheels up, at 170 mph on the dial flaps up, more tweaks, supercharger to AUTO. And Mick saw they were now climbing rapidly…
500 feet.
1000.
1500…
In less than a minute leveling off at 2000 feet, where their airspeed began to rise. Bess then peered at her compass the whole way through a long left curve, straightening on a heading of 282 degrees, Mick saw, airspeed 265, throttles mid-range.
Mick flicked his intercom switch. ‘Well… That was pretty bloody good,’ he smiled.
‘Thank you,’ her voice returned.
‘And no error… Alright then, what’s this about Ireland?’
‘Well,’ she flicked yet another instrument panel switch, ‘we land at a place called Shannon: Southern Ireland, they’re “neutral” of course… Last stop before North America, basically…’
‘So why there for you?’
‘Well they don’t tell me, now, do they; ATA girls deliver aircraft where they tell us. “Anything, anywhere”, that’s our motto… Here…’ She passed a map back over her right shoulder. ‘You can be nav. As you’ll see our first landmark en route should be Aylesbury on the left in about 2 minutes.’
Mick focused hard on the red crayon line ruled on the map as she continued.
‘…Then Bicester, Great Malvern, Hereford and finally the Brecon Beacons way out left… We cross the Welsh coast at Llan-non in just over half an hour, then the Irish Sea. Shannon in about 85 minutes all up.’
Mick checked his wristwatch, looked up from the map, at the instrument panel, at the controls. Quite visibly were these of metal, charcoal in colour, just as on the Spit. He turned, though, to the curved panel of the cockpit’s internal skin so close on his right. A pale green in colour, also just like the Spit, tapping it with a carpenter’s knuckle he felt its resonance.
He flicked his intercom switch. ‘Why wood?’
‘Simple,’ Bess returned. ‘What do they make bullets, tin helmets, tanks and battleships out of? And every, single metal ship that goes down has to be replaced which means less aircraft while they’re made of metal.’
‘Just when we need them.’
‘That’s exactly what one man said… One Mr Geoffrey de Havilland. Super chap, you’d like him. And what you’re sitting in, my dear Michael, is his solution to the problem.’
‘Wood…’
‘Wood. Ships going down makes metal rare… So too metal-workers.’
Mick squinted. ‘But not…’
‘Woodworkers,’ Bess flowed. ‘War breaks out, furniture manifacturers go out of business. Piano makers twiddle their thumbs.’
‘So you’re telling me…’ Mick looked about the cockpit again, ‘what we’re sitting in now was turned out by – ’
‘Piano makers,’ she said. ‘Thousands of them. Brainchild of a lovely man called Geoff.’
‘…God, the Air Ministry must love ’im.’
‘As it happens, they hated him for a while… Probably still do…’
‘But…’ Mick shook his head, ‘well, it sounds to me like he’s just done great good…’
‘Yes, but he proved them wrong: They said it couldn’t be done. Mosquito wouldn’t work. He knew it would… Oh, plus I’m sure a few metal aircraft industry supremos wish he’d never been born…’
Through the nose cone, a patchwork of green fields scrolling beneath in the midday sun, Mick now saw what seemed a largish town on approach. He check his watch, checked the map. ‘I’m just hoping that’s Aylesbury coming up on the left.’
With the briefest check port front by Bess, ‘Yes, that’s it,’ she replied, focused back on her instruments, then through the glass and framed perspex of the canopy scanning the sky forward, straight up, port, then starboard. ‘2 o’clock high, about a mile,’ she said, a new urgency in her voice.
A silver speck front right: a fighter coming on, as Mick saw it he was hit with a vision of the last one he’d seen: the one that showed him how it felt in a man’s final moment before burning alive. Already at 3 o’clock and closing fast, Mick watched it rolling on its side as if to bank round behind them. ‘He’s gunna come at us from 5 or 6 o’clock, Bess. Have you had a bandit before?’
‘No. Ready for hard turn to starboard; I’ll lose him…’
Mick didn’t feel terror, not even fear; he felt anger. Perfect, empowering anger: His arms and hands, his legs and feet craved the feel of control, his own control this moment to get back round and KILL the bastard – and he was closing his bank, nearing, nearing all the time, revealing now an unmistakable outline…
‘Stand by,’ said Bess.
Mick had never seen one in the air before, only on a blackboard way back at Essendon: Twin-engined though so agile it had to be fighter, it had twin tail-booms… In the whole world, Mick knew, there was one fighter with twin tail-booms, and one only…
‘Hold it, Bess,’ he said. ‘Stand by for that turn alright but I think it’s a Yank…’
By the way it so neatly zoomed in, settling alongside them so smoothly and so close, Mick knew whoever was at the controls of this one was a very, very good pilot. And there it sat: 20 feet off if that, an aluminum-silver United States Army Air Force Lockheed Lightning, the ‘P-38’, everything about it so streamlined, pointy red propeller spinners, the blue and white ‘star and bars’ of its U.S. insignia so clear in the bright noon through which they flew. Then Mick saw movement in the cockpit. The pilot was facing them. Also holding up a single gloved middle-finger.
‘Look at that,’ said Bess. ‘How rude.’
‘Ah, who cares?’ Mick smiled.
‘He will; watch this,’ she replied.
Ever so steadily did she press forward on her twin throttle levers, the Mossie’s propeller blades biting harder and harder into the air as she did until, throttles full foward, she flicked a switch and the monsters either side of them turned to demons. More firmly pressed back in his seat than he ever remembered, Mick saw the airspeed dial creep up from 265 through 280, 300, 320, out to starboard the gobsmacked expression on the U.S. pilot’s face – even through his goggles – though now gone behind, 340, 360, 380…
Ahead through the twin windscreens of the Mosquito, Mick could make out the Irish Sea on the horizon.
…And this was a bomber?!
*
After a very smooth approach and landing over the Shannon Estuary, Mick and Bess were met on the airfield by an ATA gent flanked by two highly polite young Americans who, in the chocolate brown leather jackets and peaked caps of the USAAF, at first assumed Mick had been the pilot. Promptly corrected on this point by Mick, with a ‘Beggin’ yeur pardon, ma’am’ and even a ‘Gol-lee’ were they already signing the handover paperwork for the Mossie, itself in the process of being checked and refuelled.
It took off directly over Mick and Bess as they waited for a bus in to the local area.
*
A mile or two on from the airfield and gladly accepting Bess’s suggestion they alight from the bus so as to stretch their legs after the flight, for Mick the countryside through which they now walked put ‘England’s Green and Pleasant Land’ in the shade. ‘County Clare’, said Bess…
Mick had never imagined such greenery. The little he’d seen of the Australian bush seemed a distant, dull olive by contrast; its leaves, dry, its ‘scrub’ something you didn’t brush up against if you could help it. Here the leaves were pure gloss. Mick had always liked the look of gum-trees – there was a beauty about them – but they seemed to tower in a sort of majestic ‘agony’ against Sydney’s hot, blue
sky. Here the trees just sat and spread out quietly in the afternoon sun, a sun that shone gently, as if something never meant to burn, just to shine, and give things a satisfying look. Here there seemed no contest between anything; everything seeming content to be precisely where it was.
Grass, in Australia, was something that steamed, itched and bit. Here it was something you wanted to lie down in. Which Mick did, Bess reclining close beside him. On the back of his head the feel of the cool, lush ground so new to him, the sky above just as always, he thought of home. Of his father, of the kids, of Bridie. He thought of the letter he’d just written her, one in a long line of them, except this one said he’d soon be coming home most likely. Still on his table at the Savoy, all it needed was a stamp. Whiteness feathering so peacefully, silently across deep blue – the sky anywhere, he thought of France. Of a brave, brave young woman. And of her father. His brains splattered all over his flowerbeds. Mick thought of the man who had done it to him: Gestapo, had said the MI9 Major. But most of all Mick thought of the German soldiers – the professional, well-disciplined, well-armed conquerers of France – and their faces as they’d looked up to the sky in fear.
At the sound of the Mosquito.
Beside him, Bess placed her hand in his. ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘About my little sister,’ he replied.
‘Liar.’
‘No, really, I was.’
‘I believe you. …I think you’d make a lovely big brother…’
‘How could you know?’ he sided to her.
‘I just can.’ After a moment, she sat up, pulling his hand as she did. ‘Come on…’
A horse and cart clopping past them on the grey stone walled lane down which they strolled, its driver touching his cap as he passed, ahead Mick saw a white-walled dwelling with a dark brown thatched roof. Bess gestured towards it as they approached.
‘What’s this?’ put Mick
‘An Irish pub,’ she smiled.
*
It was a two-storey place, though two of the shortest storeys Mick had ever seen, the inn of one Mr Michael Phelan, so said the small plaque out front. Inside it was stone floored with heavy, low wooden beams and the welcoming eyes of the ginger-headed man himself behind the bar, his jockey stature the perfect fit for the architecture. Having shaken their hands, as he drew them both pints of Guinness he told them he ran the place with his wife, whom he referred to several times as ‘the Mother’, out back at present he said, ‘readyin’ sopper fer the faithful,’ who would be in later.
‘O’Regan,’ the man reflected as he edged forward their draughts. ‘Your people are from a way east o’here… County Waterford. A decent enough bonch, I hear. Some rumours, moind, but ornly vicious rumours,’ he grinned. He peered at Mick’s wings badge. ‘I see you’re a flyer, Mick.’ Then at Bess’s, his ginger eyebrows lifting. ‘I see you’re borth flyers…’
‘That’s right,’ returned Bess, unable to hide her smile.
Phelan’s, in return, was strained. ‘…T’be sure an’ that’s a wohnderful thing.’
Settling at one of the pub’s mere half dozen tables, Mick raised his glass to Bess, though spoke just above a whisper. ‘Cheers, Bess.’
‘Cheers,’ she returned.
He took a first sip. ‘No, I mean for just now; you could have taken that the wrong way.’
She looked into his eyes. ‘Oh, I did take it the wrong way…’ She sipped. ‘But that’s what we’re fighting for, really, isn’t it…’
‘Eh?
‘For his right to live in the past.’
Mick chuckled. ‘Well put.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re flying tomorrow?’
‘Certainly. But we have to get back yet… And that gives us tonight,’ she grinned.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ flowed Mick.
After a few more Guinnesses and possibly the nicest Irish stew Mick had ever had – and Mrs Plunket from next door had made them regularly – Mick stood by Phelan’s bar as the man drew back on his taps, across the room Bess fielding questions on her profession from a small but growing crowd of locals. A round of laughter from the room behind Mick, Phelan spoke up quietly.
‘Mick… Can I ask ya somthin’?’
‘Sure,’ Mick replied, leaning in to the bar slightly to better hear him.
‘You’re from Australia…’
‘I am, sir.’
‘But your people are from here. And you’re flyin’ fer the British… Mick, dorn’t take this the wrong way, moind, but why would’y’wanta be foightin’ fer them, now?’
Mick’s eyes fixed hard on the Irishman’s, and on their searching stare, beyond them, through a window of the inn, fields still so very green in the dying light. White flowers bobbing in the evening breeze, Mick saw a farmyard in France. A place of flowers and functional order. A place of hard work. Yet where a man had loved his work up to the moment he was murdered.
‘Mister Phelan,’ Mick searched hard for his words, ‘it’s not so much who I’m fighting for…’ For the first time Mick remembered the face of the black-leather-coated one. A face so full of nothing except hate. Eyes, bulging with it. ‘…It’s something I saw.’ Mick looked directly back at Phelan now. ‘Something that has to go.’
Phelan had gone still as a rock. He swallowed. ‘Whatcha see?’
‘A sad little thug. Who killed a man in his own home.’
Phelan swallowed hard. ‘Why’d he do thart?!’
‘Because he could…’
‘Whare’d this harpen?’
‘France,’ Mick breathed. ‘Day before yesterday.’
From a corner of the lively room, one of its quieter occupants, a fisherman, noticed the pair for the face-off in which they seemed frozen.
Phelan grimaced: ‘Foightin’ fer the French now too, are ya…’
Mick’s tone remained. ‘If I get the chance…’
‘Whall,’ Phelan laboured, ‘at least tharr Catholic…’ Though his attempt at levity drained from him. And died. Until at length he spoke again. ‘Us Irish,’ he brooded, ‘ahnd oi mean you, Mick… we’re bahd enemies t’ have.’
From his corner, the fisherman could not hear what they were saying. Yet he could see the look on old Phelan’s face; it was unmistakable.
It was respect.
Respect, from a man he’d known since a boy, for this young Australian, between them now, something growing, something like a smile. It was only faint. Yet it was there. And it was holding.
‘Oh,’ released Mick, ‘…Mister Phelan, I meant to enquire if you might… if you might have a room here tonight… I mean, for me an’…’ Mick cleared his throat, ‘for me and my pilot…’
Phelan smiled with his whole face. ‘That - I - moight,’ he vowed. Though his face turned fearful. ‘But we worn’t be tellin’ the Mother, now.’
*
The next morning, Bess Underwood honestly could not decide, could not tell, did not know whether her whole body and soul were thoroughly energised or thoroughly exhausted. Though as far as wild ambiguities went it was one she most eminently wished on all women.
After the magnificent bacon and sweet tea of ‘the Mother’ – served with indeed more than one of her indulgently ‘knowing looks’, Bess then led Mick onto a motor launch across the Estuary from Shannon to the flying-boat base at Foynes. Where Bess then couldn’t locate the pilot of their ride back to Bristol on England’s west coast.
Standing side by side on a jetty before the mighty four-engined Sunderland flying-boat with markings of the new British Overseas Airways Corporation, Bess had been impressed by the accuracy of Mick’s description of the thing: ‘a long-snouted hippo with wings’.
Bess had seen one before but never up close like this, and the Sunderland was a giant of an aircraft.
But then a BOAC man handed Bess an ATA ferry chit which solved the mystery of the missing pilot…
The pilot was her.
Armed with the regulation ‘Pilot�
�s Notes’ for the aircraft as well as the single-page so-called ‘cheat sheet’ for it, she managed the water take-off rather well; it wasn’t her first four-engined aircraft, not even her first flying-boat, one of her very first ATA jobs having been, she said, to ferry a Supermarine Walrus, an older and conspicuously ugly cousin of the Spitfire itself. The name still gave her a smile; only could the English christen an aircraft a walrus.
After their water landing at Bristol she got them onto a bus for RAF Aston Down in neighbouring Gloucestershire, a station she knew well being home to Number 2 Ferry-Pool, Air Transport Auxiliary. There an ATA clerk handed her another ferry chit.
For a Spitfire.
‘Well,’ she angled to Mick, ‘I suppose it’s so-long for now then, love…’
Though at this moment the ATA clerk eyed Mick’s wings patch and interceded. ‘Beggin’ y’pardon, sir,’ the man piped up, ‘but might I enquire if you’ve any time on Spits?’
‘Plenty,’ returned Mick.
The man consulted his clipboard, then addressed Bess. ‘There’s two of them, ma’am… If the officer here should care to accompany you, well, it’s like this: The sole priority of the ATA regarding two Spitfire IXs to be ferried to RAF Hornchurch is their delivery. …Not their personnel.’
Nor was it Bess’s first time in a Spit. And from the way Mick flew his alongside, above her, beneath and alongside her again it very, very clearly wasn’t his first: He was smooth as silk, barrel-rolling right around her, even showing her how to do her own – ‘a beaut’, he’d said – but Mick was poetry in the air. He flew with such panache, yet fused with a sort of economy, even discipline… All over the sky yet never flashy, never ‘showy’; simply in his element.
And she flew in perfect unison with him all the way to Hornchurch east of London. But in a unison, she now knew, she never again would share with him on the ground. He was a damn good lover. A great lover. Yet she could feel it when with him: His heart was with someone else.
In any case, she had her flying now.
And so did he.
By God so did he.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Staring out his Savoy window, Mick saw the searchlights beaming icy blue up into the darkness. He thought of Bess. And how mere hours ago their goodbye had seemed just that. He drew the blackout curtains shut, switched on the bedside lamp, beneath it, his letter to Bridie.
Ghosts of the Empire Page 21