by Robert Ryan
‘How is the Twin?’ asked my father as he followed my eye. ‘Or whatever your plane is called.’
I shrugged. ‘She’s an AT-11.’ I pointed upwards as the DC-3 banked into cloud. ‘And she’s a damn sight better than that thing.’ The AT-11 was virtually identical to the Beechcraft Twins except for her Plexiglas nose. Mine had a chequered history. She was shipped over from the USA in World War Two and used by the US 8th Air Force to train navigators and bomb-aimers. Hence the transparent nose, which housed the trainee, a Norden bombsight, and a bomb-spotting Bell & Howell A4 camera. If you looked carefully you could still see the metal blanking disc on my fuselage where the practice gun turret used to be, because AT-11’s were also used for training Flying Fortress and Liberator gunners.
After the war she was given an IRAN (Inspect and Repair As Necessary) then, before I bought her at auction, did a spell as an aerial mapping platform for the Ordnance Survey people. It was a quiet life, so her airframe was only around 1200 hours old. The right engine had 450 hours SMOH (Since Major Overhaul), the left 700. She was fun to fly, reliable and steady as a rock and she was wasted tossing parachutists out into the wide blue yonder on ten-minute jaunts.
I told Dad all this and he said, ‘Sounds a bit dull.’ My father thought any plane built after 1930 was too easy to pilot, too much like driving a car. He had been a keen flier in the 1920s, even building his own kit plane. It was his interest in flying and motorcycles—two activities which seem to be inexorably bound together—that fired me up to be a pilot, and it was his tuition and enthusiasm that had enabled me to fly so young. And to ride a bike too young.
‘Jack,’ my father said solemnly.
‘Yes, Dad?’ I still hadn’t succumbed to the modern trend of using a parent’s Christian name.
We were virtually alone on the deck. There was still a full week of racing to go, so the island remained crowded, the ferries back to the mainland half-empty. Even though there was nobody within earshot, he lowered his voice.
‘While you’ve been away, things have changed.’ I watched a girl in a very short skirt totter by, the wind whipping back the dark curtain of her hair to reveal two eyes peering from thick circles of mascara and eye-liner. ‘I notice, Dad. Every day.’
His words came quietly. ‘I’m going to wrap up the firm.’ It hit me hard. Wrap up? I managed to say: ‘What do you mean?’ He tapped his inside pocket. ‘I got a letter from Joe Sergeant.’ Sergeant was one of the men in charge of contracts for the Ministry of Pensions.
‘Off the record. Personal. You know we go back to …’
‘The war.’ Both had been involved in the design and fabrication of large-scale engineering projects, such as the floating docks used at D-day.
‘He says the Ministry are considering proposals to phase out disabled carriages and to offer candidates suitably modified four-wheeled vehicles instead. Mostly Austins and Morrises. Perhaps Minis.’ His voice was level and calm, but his eyes were filling up. He blinked the tears back. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve still got the bikes.’
‘Honda are opening a dealership in town. Yamaha are looking at sites. Suzuki—’
‘Wait. Wait.’ I took a breath. ‘How long have you known all this?’
‘Months, I suppose. I wanted us to come away to talk about it.’
‘We’re on our way back,’ I snapped at him.
‘There was never a right time.’
‘We must be able to fight. Who has the Honda franchise?’
‘Steve Riley.’
Riley had worked for my father after the war. While I was off chasing weather on my clear air turbulence sorties, he had wooed and wed Julie, my girlfriend from the age of fifteen. He had even done the TT on a Kirby in 1951, after I quit. ‘There’s loyalty for you.’
‘He told me about it well ahead of time, son. He did the decent thing.’
I laughed. That’d be a first. ‘Where is he setting up?’
‘Granville Farm, Patcham Road.’
My mouth fell open. It was our address. He was selling out to the competition. ‘Dad!’
‘I know. It must be a shock. Sorry. It’s for the best.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Not for you, maybe,’ he said cruelly and, without waiting for a reply, he went below to the bar, leaving me to curse the gulls.
All the years I’d been kicking around the world, never getting a proper job, a wife, or a decent bank balance, I had always seen Kirby Motorcycles as something strong and lasting. One day, Dad would have had enough and I’d come home and settle down to a comfortable middle age, keeping the line going, us working together again, as we had before the war. I would be disappointed if it all went, but what really concerned me was the thought of my father retiring. It was another sign of his mortality, and I didn’t like it. I wanted him to live for ever, and I wanted to be with him while he did.
It turned out nothing was signed so, in a stubborn rearguard action, I spent a week with our longterm accountant Mr Lloyd—nobody ever used, or I suspect even knew, his first name—going over exactly what the financial loss of the invalid carriages would be. We also looked at whether the British bikes, which seemed to be getting more and more troublesome, could compete with the new Japanese models and whether the Kirby marque had any viable future. I even looked at us selling scooters to the Mods who were popping up everywhere, especially in Brighton. I could just see the pitched fights on the forecourt between the two sets of customers, the black leather-jacketed Rockers and the prissy Mods.
At the end of those seven days, I went into town to The Ship pub and got very drunk.
I had accepted that my father was serious, that he intended to retire. He was sixty-six, he kept reminding me, and my mother was looking forward to seeing something of him after all this time. I told him that I thought retirement would kill him. He said that there was always golf. I told him that was the same as death, but with worse clothes.
What there wasn’t, he claimed, was a future for the British bike manufacturing industry and for Kirbys in particular.
He showed me a letter from designer Bert Hopwood of BSA: Management doesn’t seem to realise that Continental manufacturers are bearing down on us with models which make ours look pitiful; I also think the Japanese will take advantage of the shambles at the top in the British motorcycle industry. I don’t believe they will be content with small and middle-range machines for ever. In my opinion, there is too much consultancy, not enough work to bring our designs up to date. Perhaps all that was true—Hopwood was famously pessimistic—but it wasn’t like Dad to go quietly.
There was a TV in the corner of the public bar in The Ship—something unheard of in my village in Italy at that time unless Inter Milan or Juventus were playing—and the younger crowd were ogling the teenager presenting something called Ready Steady Go; who looked remarkably like the girl on the boat. Or probably vice versa.
I wondered if I had been away too long. Since I had been back, I had fought off a strange sense of dislocation, as if my cogs no longer meshed with this particular time or place. I felt like the Triumph Tina, the company’s laughable attempt to make a scooter, the one where the transmission seized solid as soon as any human hand touched it. Something that should have been allowed to slope off and die a peaceful death.
I recognised I was reaching the maudlin stage of the evening, and that I shouldn’t have any more to drink when, by the happiest of coincidences, Steve Riley walked in.
Five
London, July 1964
I MUST HAVE WINCED when Lindy Carr took my hand because she said, ‘Are you all right?’
She had nominated Jules Bar on Jermyn Street as a meeting place. It was smarter than anywhere I knew in London, so I was glad I’d made the effort with a jacket, shirt and (borrowed) tie. She probably thought that as an ex-flyer I’d feel at home in the Jules. It was a long, narrow, crowded room, decorated with portraits of famous aces and both RAF and USAAF planes, and during the war it had
been a meeting-place for the Allied flyers of both countries, neutral territory where any rivalry was supposed to be forgotten. If the walls could speak, they’d be able to discuss which was superior, the Spit or the Mustang or the Focke-Wulf or the 109 until the Second Coming. I scoured the framed pictures for a Mosquito, but there was none.
A young Irish bartender in a white jacket and bow-tie mixed cocktails for an older affluent crowd, some of whom looked as if they had drunk here in the war. Not me. On the few occasions I was posted close to London, I was more a Bag O’ Nails man, sometimes favouring the Tivoli on the Strand with the Antipodean boys. I might have been an officer, but I was hardly a gentleman. Lacking a public-school or university education, and with an engineer for a father, I didn’t quite fit in with the Jules crew.
However, that didn’t matter too much because, thanks to Dad’s enthusiasm for machines, I could fly the arse off a Tiger Moth and pretty much anything else they threw at me. In 1939 or 1940 that would have meant fighter planes but, by the time my number came up, the nature of the engagement had changed, and I got the Mozzies. They might not have had the same hold on the public imagination as Spits had, but I felt I’d been lucky. I sometimes thought of the lives wasted in slow, vulnerable crates like the Blenheim or the Wellington, and thanked the Lord for De Havilland, who had developed the Mosquito as a private enterprise. I was also under no illusion that, had I been flying in Fighter Command in 1940 during the Battle of Britain, the odds were hugely against me being around to meet anyone in Jules Bar.
I looked at Lindy, then at my swollen knuckles and lied. ‘I slipped with a spanner.’ Hitting Steve Riley had been stupid and juvenile and got me bound over to keep the peace for six months. On balance it was worth it, though. I should have done it when he took my girl.
Lindy Carr already had a table. She ordered a glass of champagne while I went for a Scotch. I looked her up and down while she spoke. She was barely an inch shorter than me, which made her around five nine or ten, with long blonde hair, a glowing healthy face and piercing blue eyes—a world away, and a refreshing change, from all the pale kohl-eyed girls I had seen hiding their features behind their protective veil of hair. Lindy Carr looked like she knew how to get outside and enjoy life, rather than skulk around in darkened basements.
‘Say fish and chips,’ I requested.
‘What?’
‘Fish and chips. Humour me.’
‘Feesh and cheeps,’ she said. Australian. A Kiwi would have said fush and chups.
‘Aussie.’
‘Yeah. Sydney.’
‘Good. OK, carry on.’
She smiled in that way you do when you find yourself sitting next to a madman on the bus, and said slowly, ‘I have a picture of him. My father.’
She reached into her bag and presented me with a standard aircrew photograph taken on the ground, a line of young men—kids, like I was—smiling at the camera, only the eyes, dull and lined beyond their years, showing the tremendous strain they were under. Behind them, the deep, corpulent fuselage of a Liberator.
‘Here.’ She jabbed the front row, indicating a figure slightly older than the others, with an affecting, world-weary grin. The sort of man you’d buy a pint for and listen to his story. ‘William Carr. Bill to his friends.’
‘Right.’ I pretended to examine the picture more intently, but it told me very little other than this was one of many crews who one day never came home. ‘And forgive me, you want to find him?’
‘His body.’
‘Right,’ I repeated. ‘Which you think is where?’
‘I can’t be certain, but I have been doing some research.’ I had noticed the bulging Gladstone bag on the floor next to her, but had assumed it belonged to one of the men nearby. As she heaved it onto her lap and opened it, I could see it was stuffed with handwritten notes, mimeographed files and books. ‘He was based in Southern Italy, with an SAAF squadron, a mixed unit—’
‘I know. Mostly South Africans to begin with, but then came Canadians, Australians, Rhodesians and British. But the pilots were usually South African.’
‘Yes. Of course they’d had plenty of losses by then. My father was seconded to them from the RAF.’ I knew what she was going to say, but I looked down at the eight young men and their aeroplane with new respect as she said it: ‘When he arrived, the squadron was about to fly the Warsaw run, out of—’
‘Foggia,’ I finished.
Foggia sits on the spur of the boot of Italy, inland from the coast. In 1944, it was a bleak place of windswept flatlands; the runway was covered in thick steel plates, to give a firm base for the heavy bombers to land on when the soil turned to thick mud, as it did every winter. The SAAF squadrons flew the big Mk VT Liberators, an American-built four-engined bomber. At sixty feet long, with a wingspan nearly twice that length, they weren’t pretty or elegant planes—they lost out in the public popularity stakes to the B-17 Flying Fortresses—but they were tough workhorses. The crew of eight consisted of two pilots, a navigator, a bomb-aimer, three gunners and a wireless operator-gunner. USAAF versions carried ten men, but the RAF and SAAF thought eight was plenty. It had a range of 2,000 miles, which meant that from Italy the bombers could be launched against targets in Eastern Europe previously out of reach—Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Austria.
On 1 August 1944, there was an uprising in Warsaw of the Polish patriots, the Home Army, egged on by Soviet radio which promised the Russian forces would come in and support them. Soldiers and civilians rose up and overran most of Warsaw, taking the Germans by surprise and digging themselves in to hold out until relief came from the east.
But, as everyone soon discovered, the Russians stayed put. Their tanks ground to a halt, their planes stopped flying. The lumbering but lethal Stukas reappeared to bomb and strafe, and the German heavy armour moved in, grinding murderously through the city. The Armia Krajowa was abandoned and alone. It transpired that the Russians wanted to make sure they wouldn’t face any resistance from a well-armed force of Polish patriots when it was their turn to be occupiers. Why not let the Germans do their dirty work?
The Polish government in exile in London asked for help from Britain, and the RAF tried a re-supply sortie from England. It lost 85 per cent of its aircraft. So it was decided to equip and feed the beleaguered patriots from Foggia.
‘You know about that?’ Lindy asked.
I nodded. One night in Sicily a bunch of guys in the makeshift bar at an airstrip near Catania, penned in by bad weather, were swapping flying stories. An ex-31 Squadron South African had told his particular war tale, and it had gradually silenced the table.
‘We took off at around 19.30,’ he began, ‘so by the time we crossed the coast of Yugoslavia, it was dark. At Scutari we turned north. Each plane carried twelve canisters, eight feet long, crammed with food and weapons and medical supplies. We went up over Hungary, roughly parallel with the Danube, then right across Czechoslovakia. You had to hop the Carpathians then at fifteen, sixteen thousand. That was where we hit the weather. By then our electronic navigation aids were pretty u/s. So you’d start to come down to eight thousand, then seven, then six, trying to find the Vistula River. Sometimes it was there like a silver band, glinting in the moonlight, ready to lead you in. Other times you’d feel your eyes ready to pop out as you strained to find it through the low cloud. Once you were on it, that’s when the flak kicked in—the big guns were waiting for you. Then the searchlights.’ He paused and took a gulp of beer.
‘As you got closer, the glow from the city itself pulled you in. It was ablaze, you see. There were fires everywhere, orange and red, reflected in the river. You could almost feel the heat of the city coming through the soles of your flying boots. You’d come in at around five hundred feet, half-flap, down to 120 mph, which is just about where a Lib falls out of the sky. Then down, down, three hundred feet, two hundred, skimming the rooftops. You’d be looking for the four bridges, which told you you were in the centre, near the Poles, who were holding out ar
ound Krasinski Square. At the fourth bridge, you yanked her round, following the street down to the square itself. Then they’d start firing at you, from each side.’ There was complete silence in the room by now, as we all listened intently.
‘On half-flap you can’t manoeuvre, so you just had to sit there, counting the seconds till the drop, hoping you’d see the letter T or K which told you to let the damn things go. But spotting a letter in a city on fire is no piece of cake. You were so low, they could hit you with small arms and you heard the ping, ping as they went in; sometimes you’d see the engine or prop spark and splutter as a bullet found it. You saw other aircraft go down. Some of them came back round for a second run with one or two engines on fire, just suicide.’
He took another long drink of beer. ‘On the first sortie we lost half the aircraft in the attack force.’ He shrugged sadly. ‘We figured that we would get better at it. But so did they. The flak got more accurate. Every time we went out, half never returned. Eighteen hundred miles—that’s if you didn’t get lost—twelve and a half hours. If you got back through the nightfighters which were waiting to get you on the return leg, you’d be exhausted. Like death. Yet you couldn’t sleep at night because what you’d seen kept playing on your mind. The Liberator that caught the rooftops, cartwheeling into the street below, the aviation fuel flaming in jets or rolling into a fireball, killing God knows how many people on the ground; the ones that exploded in mid-air, those that couldn’t find the height to get back over the Carpathians, forced to crash land, those last seen trying to shake off the searchlight beams that had locked onto them. Even if you could blank that out, the bloody Flying Fortresses were taking off, hour after hour, for their daylight raids, so sleep was hard. Then, the next night or the night after, you’d have to do it again. One hundred and eighty sorties in six months were flown from Foggia. Of course, it was all in vain—the Germans crushed the uprising while the Russians did nothing.’