by John Harris
‘You have the station police to draw on,’ he said.
Molyneux didn’t think much of the idea. The RAF police were usually tall young men who had hoped to be something else – preferably aircrew – but had been drafted into the police branch because of their height. They were invariably unpopular and usually regarded as good at little beyond checking the passes of the natives who worked in the camp. It was probably a gross slander, but Molyneux didn’t really think they were the types to produce much in the way of detective work. Especially since the camp had never had a provost officer, merely an RAF police sergeant who, while he was an example to everybody with his smartness, was not considered to be very clever.
Strudwick saw the annoyance on his face and tried to make a joke.
‘There’s the padre,’ he said. ‘He’s usually free.’
five
In the end, nothing was done about the two Catalina crashes. Like the crews, they were soon forgotten. What wreckage could be salvaged was dragged up the slipway where it lay for a day or two as a dire warning to all aircrew to be constantly on the alert, then it was hauled behind the hangar where it soon began to disappear under the ever-encroaching undergrowth.
The names Landon and Paterson and their crews were rubbed off the readiness board and yet another new Catalina and another new crew arrived from England. No more concert parties appeared and nobody expected them. Jum was back to normal. Within days it was as if Landon, Paterson and their crews had never existed.
The weather had been growing hotter for some time, the area round the river stifling, the leaves hanging like corpses in the dead, unbelievably humid air. Round the huts the mosquitoes seemed to grow more noticeable, their whirr and ping as loud as the croak of the crickets. The sky remained cloudless but there was a curious fading of colour that changed as the day advanced from blue to steel and from steel to bronze, making the hills behind the camp look like the pale-washed images from a watercolour. As evening approached, nervous little flurries of wind came, raising the dust in tiny whorls that danced across the bare patch of earth that did duty as a parade ground, ballooning the mosquito nets in the huts with an unexpected stirring of air.
The strangeness of the atmosphere made people irritable and tempers became on edge, especially among those who had never seen a rainy season. Eventually the breathless build-up when the lungs seemed to struggle for air changed to an imperceptible darkening of the sky and a silence in which the most unimportant sounds became strident. Then the squalls came, frenzied gales of wind roaring in from every corner of the compass, slamming doors, setting the palm tops thrashing, tearing branches from trees and lifting an opaque wall of red dust. Finally the stillness came again, ominous and frightening, as if there were a spectre waiting in the wings.
New clouds, yellow and muddy-looking, marched over the mountains to the west, then the first electrical storm of the season started with an ear-splitting clap of thunder that startled everybody. It battered at the shuddering earth as if with hammers, and in the drum rolls of noise violent forks of purple lightning played in an incessant flashing and flickering of unearthly light that seemed weird and terrifying.
The first heavy drops of rain spattered the earth as the thunder died, then it came down in a drenching smother which effectively drowned all conversation as it hammered tumultuously on the tin roofs. For three hours a solid wall of rain descended, the whole camp hushed beneath its roaring, so thick, so heavy, you could stand in the doorways and almost see your reflection in the falling water. It didn’t seem possible that so much rain could fall in one storm.
If died as suddenly as it had come, leaving the camp like a Turkish bath, and the following morning it was as if the whole world was pale and rubbed out, lit by a pearly radiance whose light seemed to come from an unknown source. Over the land there was a silvery wet haze that drifted like shadows among the trees. Then the sun came out as usual, mocking the distant growl and mutter of thunder that still persisted, but it was watery-looking and cast no shadows, though it started the steam bath again and increased the mist that clung to the ground like grey cotton wool. Eventually the clouds lifted and the mist vanished, and the sun poured down as usual, striking the soaked earth in a sticky breath-catching beat that made every breath feel like a throatful of wet, warm, gasping air, and the mud began to dry with remarkable speed.
A few of those who had been looking forward to grey skies as a variation from the everlasting sun thought it had been a pleasant change, but they began to think differently when another downpour burst on them the following afternoon, shutting out the horizon with its weight and fury, the rain driving across the river in sweeping horizontal sheets that were totally opaque, shuddering against the hangar, the huts, the trees, the thunder and lightning not much less spectacular than the orchestration which had opened the rainy season.
The road to the hangar became a river and the drainage ditches were filled with a boiling torrent, strewn with the wreckage and litter the rain had washed down. In Hawkinge Town there were even dead pigs which had been swept into the swollen channels and, what was worse, the rice shed of the local store had collapsed under the deluge and the rain had got at the stored bags which were now nothing more than pulpy white masses contained in split hessian.
Since there was a war on and aeroplanes had to take off in the gaps in the clouds, the latest storm had caught everybody at work on the lagoon and, shivering despite the stifling atmosphere, they were saturated to the skin in seconds in the deep grey gloom that seemed to shine with moisture in a wet swirl.
‘Owing to inclement weather,’ Feverel said, spitting rainwater from his lips, ‘the war will be held indoors.’
From the ramshackle jetty, the sweeping grey curtain cut off the sight of the moored aircraft. Mr Hacker, the engineer warrant officer, who had served through many rainy seasons in other parts of the world and knew his way about, appeared with a coloured golf umbrella, and the African labourers cut themselves leaves from the banana plants which they held over their heads so that the water ran along the central groove made by the stalk and poured off just behind their heels. Oilskins were available but the temperature was still high and only a few of the more fussy – people like Trixie Tristram and the headquarters clerks – bothered with them, most preferring to be wet rather than suffocated. Cold-weather blue uniforms hanging in the Nissens began to develop mildew and the marine section huts at the lower end of the camp were four inches deep in water.
In addition, they seemed to be losing the war again. The only available radio, situated in what passed as a NAAFI – though there was nothing to buy there – gave them the news. The place filled up every evening, as men, still grimy with grease and mud, and usually saturated, steaming and exhausted, crowded round to listen to the latest gloomy reports.
Rommel had attacked in North Africa and the British had withdrawn. The news reader made it all sound nice and tidy but most of them had seen something of the war and could guess at the shattered wrecks, the smoking ruins, the bodies and the strings of prisoners. Tobruk had been cut off again but to everyone’s surprise – because last time it had held out for months against repeated attacks – this time it had fallen and Rommel had crossed the Egyptian frontier. The general in command had been sacked – the second in a year – and it looked very much as though the Germans were going straight through to Cairo and very probably on to India. They were now at the very gates of the Egyptian capital, halted only by lack of petrol, and were simply waiting until reinforcements of men and machinery could be brought up for the next blow which would carry them beyond the Suez Canal.
At home, it seemed, they were once again frantically scraping the barrel. With what could be raised, they might succeed in stopping Rommel. Without it, they could never hope to hold him, let alone throw him back. In Jum, which was never a place to make you cheerful, the news seemed overwhelmingly bad.
Kneller’s singing was heard less often these days. Apart from him, everybody had long si
nce forgotten Ettore Mori-Moncrieff and it even began to look as though any concerts that Kneller gave in future might well be in a prisoner of war camp. He still sang to himself when out alone with Scow 14 but these days there was less of the lively ‘Questa o Quella’ and a lot more of the ‘Miserere’ from Trovatore.
Flying Officer Hobson began to count the days. He was due to go home soon – providing, of course, that his relief arrived and the Germans hadn’t already won the war. It didn’t disturb him too much because most people who’d left England in the dark days of 1940 and 1941 had expected never to see it again, anyway.
Aware of the importance of the convoys heading past the bulge of Africa towards Cape Town and the Middle East, Wing Commander Molyneux and Wing Commander Mackintosh and their crews flew more doggedly, but the submarines always seemed to know exactly where they were going to turn up and kept carefully out of sight. The mooring party began to worry again about the four-inch nails which held the aircraft in the water. There were no large split pins in the whole of West Africa.
Ginger Donnelly, aware that there was nothing he personally could do to help the war effort beyond what he was already doing, went his way exactly as before.
The disasters in the north had not gone unnoticed at home and the message that was sent from the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, to London, ‘It is unlikely that an opportunity will arise for the resumption of offensive operations before mid-September,’ was never likely to be regarded as music in the ears by the aggressive old man at the head of the British Government. He had long since come to the conclusion that the war in the desert had descended into a yo-yo sort of affair with nobody getting anywhere and that it was time for a change.
The new commander was told what was expected of him and once again the barrel was scraped. New formations were put together; newly trained men were marched from their camps; aeroplanes were assembled; tanks, guns and vehicles began their slow movement to the ports.
The ships that awaited them were travel-stained, slab-sided rusty vessels of all shapes and sizes whose speed varied from nine to fourteen knots, though their chief engineers, canny Scots for the most part, were always inclined to play down their real speed so they had a knot or two in hand for emergencies. Some of them flew the red ensign, some stars and stripes, some the pale blue of Panama.
As they began to assemble in England, the American freighter, George C Grieves, left Bathurst, in the Gambia, to head independently for Freetown. The navy in Bathurst quite naturally warned Freetown to look out for her but, nevertheless, that night in the darkness, George C Grieves was hit by a torpedo and set on fire. Low in the water and on the point of sinking, she struggled to Freetown. The harbour was crowded and, wanted nowhere because she would impede the movement of shipping, a naval tug took her in tow and dragged her up-river to where she was finally allowed to settle on a shoal at a point where there was plenty of room to pass her.
The George C Grieves had been carrying food for the colony and how the submarine commander had known she would be where she was it was hard to decide, because only the air officer commanding and the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic, and their staffs, knew of her presence.
‘This bloody place’s rotten with spies,’ Molyneux said bitterly. ‘Those French bastards north of the border don’t like us, and we know they’ve been passing Frenchmen and natives across the border ever since 1940.’
‘Are you suggesting information gets to the enemy, sport?’ Mackintosh asked.
‘Security seems to think so,’ Molyneux pointed out. ‘That chap Cazalet was looking for a German agent at Yima when we went up there about O-Orange’s crash. It wouldn’t be difficult, after all. This place’s permanently ringed with U-boats. They’re the reason why there are so many wives still in Freetown who ought to be somewhere like South Africa or England.’
‘And why refrigerators are in such short supply.’
‘He thinks security out here’s abysmal. He reckons information goes through Portuguese Guinea every time the navy sends a ship up there – on the excuse of patrolling Bissau – to pick up wine and brandy for the officers’ mess at headquarters. The crews talk and he’s trying to stop the run. He doesn’t even trust the railway. It goes from Freetown to Pendembu, and Pendembu’s only twenty miles from the frontier with French Guinea. And you know what it’s like: you take your own servant, your own supply of tinned food, your chair, your bed, your ice box, even your own oil lamp. It’s almost impossible to check what people are carrying. Even the civil servants are careless. He says the mammies in the market wrap their fruit and vegetables in old confidential papers from the secretariat files, and if they do that, what’s to stop ’em sometimes wrapping ’em up in up-to-date ones.’
Mackintosh shrugged and Molyneux went on. ‘He’s right to be worried, of course,’ he said. ‘With what’s happening in the Middle East, they’ll have to send replacements for everything that was lost in the last fiasco and, by God, when they do we’ll have to be on our toes, because there’ll be a lot of ’em and they’ve got to get through.’
Mackintosh acknowledged the fact. ‘The U-boats are growing altogether too clever for my liking,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve got C-Charlie flying this evening. Rendezvous at daylight tomorrow. I wish to God we could catch one of the sods on the surface and nobble it. It would give a boost to morale all round.’
Molyneux frowned. ‘The bastards are appearing everywhere along this coast,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve had orders to send two of my aircraft down to Takoradi.’
‘Snap. Two of mine go to Bathurst with instructions from the AOC to all crews to take extra care. He feels Paterson’s and Landon’s crashes shouldn’t have occurred and points out quite rightly that aircraft don’t grow on trees.’
Six
The rain came again the following day, this time harder than ever. It fell in straight glassy splinters that shattered as they struck, a devastating deluge that rattled on the tin roofs and thundered in the ditches as it flooded away. The sound on the undergrowth was a steady roar threaded through with the hollow plop-plop of dripping waters, every leaf of every tree streaming like a miniature waterfall, the drips clunking into the puddles in an arpeggio of notes. The river became a muddy looking flood that brought with it small trees, fallen boughs, dried palm fronds and brushwood from the upper reaches in the hills where the falls gushed over the rocks in full spate.
By this time the growth of vegetation from the wet heat-soaked earth was incredible and the wild cucumbers were visibly fatter, the plantain trees near the Nissens had pushed up several notches, and the bush had burst into a delicate new green studded with trumpets, bells and lanterns. The camp had become a sea of mud criss-crossed by wheel marks and, as the thermometer climbed, the foetid air gagged in the throat.
A warning went out to dinghy crews, moving about their business between the aircraft and the trembling jetty, to keep their eyes open for branches swept downstream which could be a menace to the flying boats’ fragile hulls, and Ginger Donnelly and four of his gang were taken off the task of clearing the ditches and spraying the stagnant pools with paraffin to prevent mosquitoes breeding and sent upstream in Scow 14 to search for half-submerged logs. Being Ginger, he took it as an invitation to visit his woman at Makinkundi.
Her name was Ili Atu and it had been Ginger who had rechristened her from a song they all sang, called ‘The Ballad of Lizzie Morgan’. Her home was near the market-place and opposite her door was the only street lamp in the area. In 1897 the village headman had been one of the chiefs selected to attend Queen Victoria’s second jubilee and he had been so impressed by London’s gas lamps he had taken one back to Makinkundi where he set it on a concrete plinth to illuminate the village. For the rest of his life it had remained a matter of great surprise and disappointment that it failed to light up regularly after dark like its London brothers.
For a living, Ilu Atu/Lizzie Morgan ran what might, by a great stretch of imagination, be called a bar. Two warped whitewashed d
oors, one coming off its hinges, opened to reveal a garage-like interior with a wooden counter behind which there was a gin bottle – empty – a whisky bottle – empty; and a brandy bottle – also empty. Her stock consisted entirely of palm wine or bottled beer, bought, scrounged or stolen in Freetown. One or two bamboo tables and chairs stood on the crooked sidewalk and along the rear wall was an incongruous admixture of heavy Edwardian furniture that seemed to add to the gloom and the smell of damp. On one side wall was a gaudy print of the battle of Rorke’s Drift and on the other a plan picture cut from the Illustrated London News of the British battle fleet of 1939 – much of it unfortunately now victim to U-boats or aircraft – together with a fading picture of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, circa 1906. About the room also, in fretwork frames, were seventy-two photographs of black men, women and children all portrayed in their best clothes but all out of date with the tall collars and picture hats of another age. None of them were relatives; Lizzie had obtained them from a photographer in Freetown when he’d cleared out his cupboards, because she’d thought they made the place look respectable. On the corrugated iron roof the feet of vultures scraped and clattered.
On Sundays, to please the minister, Lizzie went to church dressed in an ugly blue serge skirt and jacket with a straw hat decorated with artificial cherries, and vast black patent shoes on her broad flat feet, but now round her slender body she wore only a white lappa of Manchester cotton decorated with huge brown footprints. Despite the coarseness of the design it gave her an innocent dignity that would have appealed to cleverer men than Ginger. On her head was a pink headcloth which contrasted magnificently with her dark skin, and her wide smile showed perfect teeth because she spent an hour each day polishing them with a piece of fibrous tree root.