by Peter Rimmer
At the ball, in his boiled shirt and tails that exaggerated his long thin face, he danced every dance. With all his family wealth, the mothers of that year's debutantes had placed his name on their daughters' dance cards, but not one of the girls had ever looked him in the face or asked for a refreshment at the end of a dance. While younger brother Hal, who had just turned eighteen, was followed by a small group of giggling girls wherever he went. And Sara had made an excuse and stayed at Birchdale with a cold.
By the end of the evening, Mervyn knew what was ahead of him for the rest of his life… And he hated them.
The war, when it came, was a godsend. With goggles and flying helmet, and seated in a small plane armed with a machine gun mounted in front of him on a swivel, he was an invincible killing machine. And for the first time in his life, people stopped laughing at him. And Sara whether she liked it or not, was going to be his wife.
The leave, when they awarded him his first Military Cross, was to be the one when Sara would run into his arms. He went down to Birchdale in a new car and a new brown uniform, with his wings and the ribbon of the Military Cross stitched on his left breast. He had worn his flying helmet and goggles in the open car on the journey from London where he was staying in the family town house.
She had not even appeared at the front door. Mrs Wentworth had to coax her out of her bedroom. Instead of flying into his arms, she had stood halfway down the stairs, holding the wooden bannister while she glared at him.
"How many did you kill this time?"
"Seven," he said proudly.
"Don't you feel ashamed of yourself?"
Then she had walked back up to her bedroom. Mervyn had driven back to London with his tail between his legs, feeling much the same as he had as a child when his father verbally put him down. He had learned later Sara had joined the FANY the next day. And ever since she had refused to see him. There had been one letter. Saying the big diamond ring was in a safety-deposit box in a Cox and Kings bank in the Mall: enclosed was the key.
The key had reached him in France one morning just before the dawn patrol. The German he shot down that day might have landed his crippled plane behind British lines and been captured. Mervyn had followed the young, defenceless pilot almost to the ground. The boy had waved at him and smiled. Mervyn had swivelled his Vickers machine gun and shot the young German to death. Back at the temporary aerodrome none of his pilots had spoken to him. And he didn't care. Killing was satisfying, like the sex he had never had. Not even with a whore.
Harry Brigandshaw had first saluted and then put out his hand. The wet eyes stared back at him without recognition. Unperturbed, Harry kept his hand out. It had been a long time.
"Harry Brigandshaw," he said. "Oxford, '04 to '07, remember? My room-mate, Robert St Clair. You remember, Mervyn?" Harry only just choked back 'Fishy'. The man in front of him was his CO. He deserved respect.
"It's either Sir or Major Braithwaite, Brigandshaw."
"Yes, sir."
Calling a man his own age, who had been up at Oxford with him, sir, was about as absurd as calling his mother Mrs Brigandshaw. Harry waited for the stern face to crack and laughter to follow. Above everything, they were fellow pilots. His right hand was still out, now stared at pointedly by Fishy Braithwaite. Harry did know some of the British took themselves too seriously. He had read about Hal's death in The Times. The paper had mentioned Captain Braithwaite's brother, the flying ace. Hal had been killed on the Somme leading his company in an attack. He was going to say to Mervyn how sorry he was.
Instead, he pulled back, stood rigidly to attention and saluted. Then he turned and walked quickly across to the officers' mess. They had been outside the CO's office in uniform with their hats on, so it had been correct to salute. Harry had shrugged it off by the time he reached the small bar in the mess. He thought nothing of it. He was new to the military.
It was getting dark. There would be no more flying that day. He ordered himself a large whisky. Sundowner time!… He would first fly into action tomorrow… Africa seemed a long way away. When the other pilots trickled into the bar he was shocked at how young they were. Half of them didn't even have to shave.
No one said a word to him. They all looked through him as if he was already dead. He asked the mess steward to give everyone a drink and put it on his card. It took Harry three rounds to get a smile out of anyone, which was wiped clean when the CO came into the bar. He looked at no one and no one looked at him.
"Can I buy you a drink, Mervyn?" asked Harry, now they were hatless in the sanctuary of the bar.
"I told you outside it's Sir or Major Braithwaite, Brigandshaw… My usual Corporal. Give me Lieutenant Brigandshaw's mess card… That is not possible! No man can drink this amount in a day. Has the officer been buying my pilots drinks, Corporal?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you know it's against my rules?"
"Yes, sir but…"
"There are no buts. Cut those stripes from your uniform and give them to me."
"But sir," began Harry.
"You did not know the rule, Brigandshaw, now you do. The corporal knew, so he will give me his stripes, and from tomorrow receive the pay of a private. Now, is that clear to everyone?"
"Yes, sir," called the pilots together.
Harry had kept his mouth shut.
"Is it clear, Brigandshaw?"
"Yes, Major Braithwaite." Harry looked him straight in the eye. He had thought the Germans would be the ones to hate him in France. And then he understood. Sara Wentworth. The posting had not been a fluke after all. The man hated him.
"Oh, my God," he said barely aloud. "Better give me a drink, Corporal," he said louder. "A large one."
"He's not a corporal," snapped Fishy Braithwaite.
"He is until tomorrow if I heard you rightly… Sir."
It felt like being alone in the Zambezi Valley without a gun. He would have to watch his back.
He was woken the next morning by his newly appointed batman, just before dawn. The nine aircraft took off for the dawn patrol over the Somme, led by Major Braithwaite. Harry had felt safer with his foot halfway down onto a puff adder. He had never had a real enemy before. But like everything else in life he told himself, there was a first for everything.
Their job was to stop the Germans shooting down the observation balloons that were spotting for the British artillery. There was a minor British hate on one section of the front, a probe, Harry thought, to take prisoners in a night attack to find out the German intentions.
Soon after take-off they had split into three patrols. Harry was flying to the back and left of Fishy Braithwaite, maintaining the leader's altitude as they climbed above the Western Front. By the time they reached a position above the reserve trench, the false dawn had given way to broad sunlight at ten thousand feet. Below everything was dark. All the time Harry, in the cockpit of his De Havilland biplane, moved his head around. He was as comfortable as riding his horse on Elephant Walk, the Vickers machine gun on its swivel no different to his Purdey. For the first time in many years he was hunting. And being hunted.
Harry said a short prayer for his brother George, who had died down below, and left his flesh and bones rotting in the mud far from home. When he said his prayer he could make out the Somme River, then the Allied and German trenches.
"In the bush, Harry, always trust your senses. The buffalo, the lion, they are animals. So are you. We sense each other when in tune with nature."
Harry smiled at the voice of his dead father in his head. Even now he was giving him guidance.
"A good hunter has good senses. He knows when he's being watched. He knows by instinct he is being stalked. Get into tune with nature. Survival. That's all we are about. Survival of us. Survival of our family. Survival of our species. It's your job to make sure we survive, Harry."
Some had said before that Harry's peripheral vision was so good he had eyes in the back of his head. From years of w
atching his back in the bush, he had trained his eyes to pick up movement directly behind, even when he was looking forward.
"Never drop your guard, Harry. Never let your mind go to sleep when you are hunting. A leopard can drop on you from a tree quicker than you can bring up a rifle. Feel the cat tense before he drops and you will have time to gut shoot him in the belly. No, don't just take my word. Ask your Uncle Tinus. You only have to mess up once in the bush… And all animals are dangerous. A honey badger the size of a dog goes for the balls of a buffalo, the one vulnerable spot. A honey badger can kill a buffalo. It can kill you. Have a look at his teeth… In the bush a man feels alive."
They flew another hour up and down no man's land, looking for German triplanes. Then they headed for their airfield and breakfast. His mind still crystal clear, Harry had never felt colder in his life. His three-point landing on the rough turf of the field was perfect. He noted Braithwaite kept his goggles on even when he climbed down from his aircraft. His mechanic had taken control of the machine, gunning the engine to taxi the biplane towards the camouflaged canvas hangar. Twice the field had been attacked by the Germans. Regularly the camouflaged hangars were moved on their wooden poles.
Harry was hungry. The grey sky was weeping a thin drizzle. The third pilot in their trio caught up with Harry and walked alongside. Both of them had taken off their helmets and goggles but not their flying gloves.
"What's the matter with him?" asked Harry.
"The major is quite mad."
"You sure?"
"We all are. Too long in the air. Too many kills. Nerves snap. He's been gone a long time. Not the only one. But he's good. You wait and watch him fight… Thanks for the drinks last night. We should have told you. Most of us live off our pay… You have a farm in Africa… Sorry, sir. Money."
"Don't call me sir. We're the same lowly rank."
"It's the age bit, sir. How long you been flying?"
"Less than four months."
"Good God. Watching you up there and land, thought you'd been born in the cockpit."
"In the saddle. To the son of a white hunter."
When the third flight landed there were only two aircraft. Five minutes later the third one landed, pieces of cloth flapping under the right wing and flapping from the fuselage behind the cockpit.
Major Braithwaite strode across to the aircraft.
"Poor old Bunty," said someone looking up from his bacon and eggs. "Some say it's better to let the Hun kill you than bring back the damaged plane… Can someone pass me the butter?"
Outside in the cold, the pilot of the damaged plane was receiving a roasting. Making the gestures and shouts of the small major more bizarre, was the fact he had not taken off his goggles. Harry watched the man through the window of what once had been the farmhouse dining room. The man was like a bantam cock in a blind rage.
The leaden sky settled down just above their heads for three days and rained on them. There was no more flying. The grass airfield was waterlogged and visibility down to one hundred yards. From the air, they would be able to spot nothing on the ground. If they flew into clouds they could lose themselves and never find clear sky. They were grounded.
Harry learnt to avoid Fishy Braithwaite. Any conversation they had would be military. If the man wanted to behave like an idiot, that was his business. Because the other pilots were so much younger, he found himself mostly on his own. Which was how he liked it. Harry Brigandshaw had never been lonely in his life. The solitude of the bush was his joy. Like flying alone high in the sky. When the youngsters talked to him he joined the conversation, the kind of conversation he remembered from his days at boarding school in the Cape. At Bishops, life had been one long leg-pull. Even playing cricket. His fellow pilots were slightly overgrown schoolboys and he envied them their innocence. Getting killed was no different to getting a duck at cricket. Mostly, he left them to their small talk, their innocent practical jokes. Even the three captains in the squadron were in their teens. In a war with appalling casualties, any survivor rose quickly in rank. Harry, mostly, read a book or thought about home.
More than once the picture of Tina Pringle appeared in his thoughts. If George had not been killed and sent him running to Europe, he wondered what might have happened. He couldn't remember meeting a sexier woman in his life. She was alive, dangerous, and knew what she wanted; and that was never going back into the class system of England. He could still feel her eyes looking at him and sending a signal straight to his balls. Just the picture of her in his head had the same effect.
Even at the time he had known that there could be no casual affair with Tina Pringle. Unlike the few girls he had known in Cape Town when he did not go back to Elephant Walk for the school holidays. When he stayed with school friends. Or at Kleinfontein with Barend Oosthuizen.
The first had been a woman on the beach between the rocks, where a wet bed of sand had been washed in by the sea. She was the nurse for the younger siblings of his school friend, the only reason he could still remember his friend, Francois Botha's name. The woman, he thought subsequently, was in her twenties. Harry had just turned fifteen. Gently, she had made a man of him. He would always remember her but never knew her name.
"Always cradle a woman afterwards even if you don't want to. She wants that. Even the most casual of sex has the meaning of life."
"What's your name?"
"No, Harry. Just remember me. You are going to become a wonderful man… Just remember me the same, so for you, I will never grow old. When I am old and grey, I will think of you thinking of me, young and beautiful. Then I will be young and beautiful again. Sun, beach and me. Enjoy the rest of your life, Harry. I wish us both to have a wonderful life. Just treasure my memory for me. It's going to be precious to me."
Harry had wanted many times over the years to find out her name from Francois Botha, but he had always kept the promise. And she was still as young to him as the day so long ago they had made love together on the wet sand of the beach, hidden from any other world than their own. Even now in France, wet and cold, fighting a war, he could see her smiling up at him. And she would never grow old as long as he lived. The beach was called Llandudno, that much he could remember. And it was in the Cape, not in Wales. And he had never been back to the place. And never would. The memory was too precious to break.
The third day was more leaden than the first, visibility down to fifty yards. Away from the other pilots by the window, Harry picked up the sound first. He had never seen or heard a Fokker triplane before but he did know the engine sound was not coming from a De Havilland. The CO was not in the farmhouse they now called the officers' mess. He had not been seen all day, not even at breakfast. One of the flight leaders had stopped talking. Then everyone listened.
"Shit," cried one of the pilots running for the door. Ripping open the door, he raced over the field towards the hangar and his aircraft.
Harry could now hear the distinct chatter of machine-gun fire. Then he saw them. Three triplanes were flying down the grass runway six feet off the ground, having hopped over the hedge. The running pilot stumbled and fell thirty yards short of his aircraft still in the camouflaged hangar. He did not get up. An aircraft engine fired from the hangar, and the major's aircraft came out, the engines running as he taxied the plane to face the Germans. Then, solid on the platform of his aircraft on the ground he fired at the oncoming Germans who were shooting up his airfield, swinging his Vickers back and forth across their line of flight. The Germans were flying directly to the officers' mess. They were after the pilots, planes being easier to replace than trained pilots. One moment the three triplanes were steady on their approach and then they broke, two of them flying into the ground, the third pulling up over Fishy Braithwaite, the downdraught shaking the De Havilland biplane on the ground. It was over as quickly as it started.
The pilot who said the one word 'shit' was lying dead on the runway. It was the same boy who had thanked Harry for the drinks.
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In the middle of the grass runway, well short of his aircraft, Harry felt the rain dripping down his face. They could all clearly hear their CO shouting now the noise of the engines had gone. The two German aircraft were burning on the ground. Ground crew were trying to pull out the pilots. One was still alive.
"I'm not a wet fish! And you're dead!" shouted the CO over and over, gunning his engine. Then he got down from his aircraft, pistol in hand, and began to race across the soggy field towards the German pilot who was still alive.
"Oh, my God," said Harry and began to run. He was lightly clad from the time he was reading his book in the mess. Fishy Braithwaite was fully dressed for winter flying. Harry caught him short of the German, who was now kneeling on the ground. Harry tackled Fishy low, as he had been taught at school, pushing the major's face down in the mud. The sergeant mechanic who had pulled the German pilot from the burning wreck was standing with his mouth open. The pistol flew from the CO's right hand and Harry struggled up and trod it into the mud.
"Sorry, sir," Harry said looking back. "Following you. Must have tripped. Jolly good show. Two of them. Very brave. The one chap's still alive you'll be pleased to know. Won't be flying in this war again. Can I give you a hand?"
"You did that on purpose, Brigandshaw."
"Why on earth would I do it on purpose? You saved our lives. They were going for the officers' mess… Sergeant! Bring the prisoner to the officers' mess. Poor chap needs a drink… It is over, Fritz," he said to the kneeling German.
"I speak English," said the German. "He had a gun in his hand. He was going to shoot me."
"Nonsense, old boy. Running to help. We both were… Are you wounded?"
"I'm not sure."
"We'll have the MO give you a once-over. The weather was clearing your side of the lines, I suppose. How you jumped us."
"Yes it was."
"Almost caught us napping… You are now a prisoner of war. The other chap's dead I'm afraid. So's one of our chaps. Silly really, isn't it?"