by Robert Ryan
‘Walk ahead of me to the café on the left of the market square. I’ll be two paces behind. Don’t do anything stupid. That big fat head of yours is too tempting a target. OK?’
Another nod and he turned from the fringes of the gathering and walked up the cobbled street into the old town, which had more or less survived the bombardment intact. There has been a market every Saturday in this square since Roman times, and where there are markets there are always cafés. In this case, four of them. He chose the correct one and walked inside, waiting at the counter.
I joined him and ordered two coffees. ‘Kirby,’ he said.
‘Hello, Nino.’
Nino Leone was a Swiss-Italian who appeared in Domodossola hours after the free republic was declared, offering to bring in food, medical supplies and even weapons from the Swiss side. He kept some of those promises, but not the one that Fausto wanted the most: anti-tank weapons. There had been an argument. Only one of them walked away.
‘You have some nerve coming here,’ I said.
‘It’s a free country.’
‘It was then. I’m not sure about now. Not for you.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘It was self-defence.’
I wanted to punch him, but I accepted that he was partially right. Fausto probably shouldn’t have shoved the Labora under his chin. You shouldn’t spook a man like Nino. And when an 88 shell explodes fifty yards away, it’s liable to make you all the more jumpy. ‘You think that would stand up in court?’
He made a noise that could have been a laugh. ‘You think it would even get there? Something that happened in that chaos? Jesus, if they tried every man who killed an Italian between forty-three and forty-five …’
‘I saw it happen.’
He nodded. ‘I know.’
I gripped his arm. ‘Why did it happen?’
‘It just did.’ He looked at me and realisation dawned. ‘You don’t have a gun, do you?’
‘No,’ I admitted, ‘but there are people here who have, who would kill you if I told them you were here. You aren’t liked.’
He sipped his coffee and indicated my injuries. ‘You don’t look like you are winning too many popularity contests.’
I had to smile at that. ‘No.’
‘If you have no gun, then I’ll be going.’
‘Why did you come back, Nino?’
‘Why did you, Kirby? I was part of this, too. I know you would like to think the Republic was about Fausto and Rosario and Francesca and maybe even you … but it wasn’t. It was lots of people, a collective, a very special moment. And I did my part—which is more than the British did.’ I made to speak, to tell him that at the time we felt abandoned, but we now knew that the supplies didn’t come because of Arnhem, of Warsaw, of Yugoslavia, that the air-drop resources were stretched too thin, but he kept going. ‘You know nothing of what really went on here, Kirby. They simply used you to keep Bern happy. Their little SOE mascot. They laughed behind your back. A flyer playing at being a partisan, making those big puppy eyes at Francesca.’ Now I really wanted to punch him, but he was just goading me, I knew, because he thought he was safe. My fists were clenching and unclenching. ‘You were an outsider then. You are an outsider now.’
‘So were you. Just a middle man. Out to make a quick buck, like the rest of your nation.’
I was trying to needle him in turn, but he laughed in my face. ‘As I said, you know nothing.’
‘I know that if I were you I’d make myself scarce.’
‘I don’t have to skulk in the shadows, Kirby. For you or anyone.’
Nino strode off and I didn’t try to stop him. The sound of distant applause echoing round the arcades told me the mayor’s speech was over. I realised it was the second time that day someone had walked out on me and stuck me with the bill. Maybe the scars and scabs spelt ‘sucker’. I threw down some coins and left.
I took my time strolling back to the municipio. I was half-hoping that Nino had run into Rosario and that the little guy had snapped the lawyer’s neck, but no such luck. I worked my way into the mass of people, jostling until I had a good view of the stage.
There were two surprisingly brief and affectingly modest addresses by ex-partisans, one of whom I knew had held a bridge against armoured cars for six precious hours, and then a commotion as someone climbed up out of the crush and was ushered to the front of the stage, looking young and nervous in that venerable company. However, Lindy Carr took a deep breath and began to speak into the microphone.
‘Thank you for letting my voice be heard on this important day. You may wonder what I am doing here, because I was hardly born when you were fighting for your freedom.’ She paused, and the mayor stepped forward and gave a rapid translation before she continued. ‘My father was a man called Bill Carr. He was a pilot. He flew out of a place called Foggia, in the south. I’d like to tell you about him, and then read something.’ She tapped her jacket pocket. ‘In here is my dad’s last letter, and he wrote it to me from Foggia.’
Sixteen
Foggia, Italy, 1944
BILL CARR TRAMPED THROUGH mud towards the broken-backed barn which served as the squadron headquarters; it was time for the day’s operational briefing. The weather had been atrocious for the past five days, and the airstrip was a quagmire. The perforated steel plates that formed the runway had sunk into the mud, which at least helped muffle the noise of aircraft tyres as the bombers rumbled into position.
Right now though, it was just after lunchtime and unnaturally quiet. The last of the USAAF B-17 Flying Fortresses had departed on their day raids, and the ground crew had yet to start the engines of the South African Air Force’s Liberators. Carr moved aside as a car drove by and stopped outside the barn. From it stepped Captain Elwyn Davies, the squadron’s Intelligence Officer, and another man Carr didn’t recognise, who was wearing civilian clothes. They had disappeared into the ops HQ before Carr reached it.
‘OK, Bill? There was a slap on the back from Kier, one of the South African pilots. There had been some resentment at an Aussie, on secondment from the RAAF, getting the pilot’s seat a few months ago, but that had all disappeared after the first of the ‘gardening’ raids in Romania, when the squadron had mined the Danube. Carr had nursed his plane back on three engines with a fuselage full of holes, leaking oil and glycol, with a wounded tail gunner. Nobody suggested a South African could do any better after that.
‘Fine. You?’
‘Tired,’ yawned Kier. ‘I’m gonna move into town. Can’t sleep here.’ He pointed to the line of tents where many of the officers were billeted.
‘You can’t sleep there either,’ Carr told him. He too had tried living in Foggia itself for a while. It was a bleak posting, the city wrecked by Allied bombers, the people reduced to living in hovels without sanitation. There was no sign of a cat or a dog—they were either dead or eaten. In their place were hordes of dirty kids, many with disfiguring sores, all of them lousy, begging for cigarettes and chocolate, their older sisters offering to make even more desperate trades. The parents were sullen, treating the flyers not as saviours, but simply another set of conquerors. The city was never peaceful; there was always someone scavenging among the ruins, arguments over scraps of food, people hustling at all hours.
After two weeks, Carr had had enough and had moved into a pigeon loft on the edge of the base. For a while the birds kept him awake with their constant shuffling and cooing, but soon there wasn’t a single one left. They had all gone into pies.
Inside the converted barn, which smelled of a mixture of old animal manure, cigarettes and pipe tobacco, Bill Carr took his place at the rear of the congregation and lit his own pipe. At the front sat Brigadier Jimmy Durrant, the group’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, the Air Staff Officer, Captain Elwyn Davies and the unknown civilian.
Carr turned as his co-pilot, Flight Sergeant Reg Lisle, came and sat beside him. They exchanged brief smiles. Lisle had originally found it hard to hide his resentment a
t not getting the pilot’s seat. Now he too accepted that the best man had been chosen to fly EH-148.
The noise was growing as more crew arrived, joshing with each other, trading wisecracks and insults. Each pilot or co-pilot had their own way of dealing with their apprehension while trying to ignore the map hidden behind a sheet on the wall which would tell them their destination for that night. Carr and Lisle preferred to keep still and quiet.
‘Right, gentlemen, if you will, please.’ It was Elwyn Davies, the IO. He glared at a latecomer. ‘I’ll recommend the Pig and Whistle close during the day if you can’t drag yourself away,’ he said, to laughter. The tardy pilot was one of the few teetotallers on base. The Pig and Whistle was a remarkably authentic version of an English pub built by the British anti-aircraft unit in their spare time.
The gathering settled down after a few coughs, their minds working overtime. Where would it be tonight? Warsaw? Romania and the oil-fields again? Up to bomb the Gothic Line?
‘Now. Before we discuss your designated target … a few words about Romania. Reports suggest that the mines you laid have sunk …’ Elwyn Davies consulted his notes ‘… sixty tugs and two hundred barges.’ A half-hearted cheer went up. They all knew what those raids had cost them. ‘And that the journey-time from the oil-fields to Vienna has now trebled. So well done, all. I know it wasn’t easy.’
There had been murderous ground fire from the banks of the Danube on every occasion, getting worse as the weeks went on and the Germans got wise to the approach runs. They had lost some good men to claim those tugs. Bill Carr had almost been one of them. Still, that was nothing compared to Warsaw, but he preferred not to even think about that.
‘Which brings me to tonight.’ Elwyn Davies pulled down the sheet, revealing the large map of Europe. In the north of Italy was a small parachute symbol, and another and another. There was a collective sigh. Not Romania or Hungary then, but a supply drop to the partisans.
A babble of relieved conversation broke out while Elwyn Davies handed out the charts and the drop-zone photos from the ‘shuftikites’, as they called the reconnaissance planes. Reg Lisle turned and winked at Bill Carr. A partisan supply drop, more than likely in remote countryside. Which meant no murderous flak towers, few nightfighters, drop runs at a decent height. It was almost like a night off.
After the briefing, which went over the partisan locations, ground signals and the weather en route and at the Incipient Point, where they should see the flares shaped into a T, the normal routine was tea and snacks in the mess. This was usually followed by a run-through for the rest of the Liberators’ crews and ground support as to the target and types of bombs they would be carrying. This time there were no bombs to worry about, just the enormous supply cylinders which had been broken out of the stores. These would be packed with weapons, medicines and food. Bill Carr asked Lisle to take care of the second briefing because he had something to attend to, but as he was about to leave, Elwyn Davies called him over.
‘Bill, I’d like you to meet Jimmy Morris. Jimmy, Bill Carr who, despite being an Australian, is a damn fine pilot. There had to be one, I suppose.’
The man in the civilian suit gave Carr a vigorous handshake and said he was pleased to meet him. He was close to forty, Carr reckoned, but there was an energy force exuding from him all the same. He had a sallow face, black hair and a moustache. His eyes were pale green, with the most unnerving direct stare.
‘Bill, Jimmy here is going SN on your flight.’ This meant supernumerary, an extra body, not expected to pull his weight.
‘Right-oh,’ was all Carr could think of saying.
‘A White Stocking run. I’m going out with your canisters,’ Morris beamed, as if he was looking forward to being turfed out over the mountains.
‘I hope not,’ said Carr. ‘Be bloody cold in that bomb bay.’ Morris could exit either from the rear hatch or through the open apertures where the tail gunners stood. And it would be a good idea for him to go well before the canisters, or he would risk tangling with them. ‘Have you jumped before?’
Both Elwyn Davies and Morris laughed. ‘Yes, but not from a Liberator. Think you can show me the ropes?’
Carr felt he was being patronised, but he nodded. ‘We’ll get you down in one piece.’
Carr cadged a lift back to the fattoria that served as the officers’ mess and found himself a corner with a mug of tea, a ginger snap biscuit and a pad. Foggia reverberated with noise once more. Ground crews were running the big Pratt & Whitney engines to test them, as the twelve huge supply containers were loaded into the Liberator’s cavernous belly and the great snakes of ammunition fed to the guns. Coffee, tea and sandwiches were being stowed, mostly to be saved for the return run. Only a very few had the stomach to eat on the way to a drop.
Canisters of chaff, the aluminium foil used to confuse enemy nightfighter radar, were placed in the waist, where the gunners would hurl it out into the night if necessary. Already, DeWitt, the young Rhodesian navigator, would have plotted a course and be checking and re-checking it until he could get them there and back blindfolded, with or without the electronic navigation beams. Carr approved of that.
Soon the Liberators’ pilots would walk around the deep fuselages and under the high wings, looking for leaks or damage. Then, once inside, after completing an instrument check, they would start the warm-up. Master switch to battery, set mixture controls, throttles cracked, superchargers zero boost, master ignition on, fuel booster pump on; wait for the hum and set starter switch to mesh. Ignition. Repeat until all four engines are running. Boost to 48 inches, release brakes and the stomach unknots as finally they are on their way, eight men, off on a mission to help save the lives of freedom fighters they have never met and never will.
But, before all that, Bill Carr had two tasks to perform. One was his customary prayer for himself and the crew, a very personal and private ritual that only Lisle knew about. The second was to write a letter on the tiny sheets of paper onto which someone had stamped the squadron logo, issued to aircrew for personal correspondence. So prior to his milk run to the Lakes, Bill Carr composed a letter to the daughter he had never seen, the very letter that, twenty years later, Lindy Carr would read out to a hushed crowd in Domodossola.
Has she shown you the letter? Lang had asked me back in Whitehall. No, I had replied. Clever girl, he had said.
Lindy Carr, having given the onlookers a thumbnail biography of her father, produced a piece of card from her jacket, no more than five inches by three, dark with tiny writing. To conserve paper, she explained. This was the letter Bill Carr wrote to her from Foggia, no doubt in some ops room with the deep thrum of Liberator engines warming up in the distance. Pausing every so often for the mayor’s translation, Lindy read in an increasingly confident voice.
‘My Dear Daughter,
This is the first time I have written to you and although you are as yet too young to read it, perhaps Mother will save it up until the time comes when you can read it yourself. In two days’ time it will be your first birthday anniversary—a great event for your parents. My regret is that I cannot personally be there to help you blow out your single candle but, believe me, lassie, I will be there in spirit.
I am writing this from a place called Italy which is far away from our fair land—a place where I would not be by choice so far away separated from a wife and daughter so dear to me. But I am here, precious one, because there is a war on caused by certain people who wished to rule the world harshly and despotically, imperilling an intangible thing called democracy which your mother and I thought all decent people should fight for. You will understand as you grow up what democracy means for us and how it is an ideal way of life which we aspire to put into practice.
All I ask of you, Lindy dear, is that you stay as sweet as your mother and cling tight to the subtle thing we call Christianity, which has been the core of her way of life and her mother’s and mine. I hope that you will love and respect me as I love and respect my fathe
r.
That’s all, young lady. Have a happy birthday—may they all be happy birthdays. I hope to be home again one fine day. In the meantime, lots of love to you and to Mother.
From Dad,
Bill Carr.’
Lindy paused and wiped away a tear. ‘My father posted that letter as he went off on the mission to Domodossola,’ she told us. ‘He never came back, and the plane has never been found. My dad is somewhere up in those mountains, and if anyone knows anything about EH-148, I would be very grateful for any information you have. Thank you for listening.’
As the translator finished his version, the crowd broke into applause and I joined in, clapping until my hands stung. When I had agreed to take on the search, I did it for two reasons, one of them commercial—I needed the money—one of them sentimental—finding a fellow war-time pilot. Now, hearing his words from twenty years ago, I realised that there was an element I had overlooked. Bill Carr was not just a brave pilot, he was a good, honest man and a father who never got a chance to raise his daughter, yet he had managed to leave her a memento that crackled with the warmth of his humanity. I was now more determined than ever to find Bill Carr, no matter what it cost me. I’d like to think I would have felt the same, even if I had known at that precise moment just how high the price would be.
Seventeen
I SKIPPED THE DINNER in the piazza. Listening to Lindy reading her letter, on top of meeting Nino the Lawyer, had sapped my enthusiasm for eating and drinking in celebration of Domodossola. It was, after all, a doomed effort that had cost many lives, Bill Carr’s included, those thirty-four days of stubborn optimism, most of us believing until the first shells fell that we could hold back the opposition with sheer willpower.
There were a number of Communist protesters circulating in the town. I never quite grasped the difference between Italian Reds and the regular Marxist-Leninist issue, except that the ones hereabouts seemed more down to earth than ideological. They had recently fomented large-scale strikes in Turin at the Fiat factories, claiming industry and government were keeping wages artificially low. From what I knew about Italian big business—not much, admittedly—I reckoned they were right. Perhaps that made me a fellow traveller, one of my father’s dreaded ‘pinkos’.