B for Buster

by Iain Lawrence

  Ratty ran to the blackboard. It was too high on the wall for him to reach the first name, the now-dead navigator from J for Jam. Even hopping up and down, he couldn’t quite reach it. So he dragged the piano bench over, jumped onto that, and smeared away the navigator in a smudge of white chalk.

  CHAPTER 13

  SERGEANT PIPER SAID THERE was nothing wrong with Buster’s engine. The others seemed pleased, but I only found a new worry. When we flew to Wuppertal two nights later, I spent every moment listening to the pistons and the valves, my heart leaping with every ping and rattle. I kept seeing pictures in my mind of the kite slowly tipping, one dead airscrew dragging down the wing. I saw us spinning, heard the shouting and the crying, and felt the world going round and round.

  Lofty took us to a staggering height, higher than we’d ever flown before. Even I felt the chill as I sat in the heater’s blast of warm air, taking navigational bearings for Simon. I could only imagine what it was like for poor Ratty, way back in his whistling turret that was partly open to the sky, so cold that his breath sometimes froze in his mask. We flew so high that the engines had a different sound, and Pop fretted endlessly about his mixtures and his blowers. We flew so high that the color of the sky changed—or so Shakespeare said; I never looked out my window. Then I heard slithers and scratches on the metal outside and shouted at Lofty, “What’s that?”

  “Ice,” he said. It was forming on the wings and the airscrews, breaking away with those terrifying sounds.

  We crossed Wuppertal at twenty-six thousand feet, and Will described the bombers down below us, the stream of Halifaxes like toys, he said, like cardboard cutouts pasted on the flames and smoke. He described the puffs of flak and twisting tracers. Then he hunched over his bombsight and called out directions to Lofty. “Left, left. Steaaaady, Skipper.”

  A night fighter cruised below us, and Ratty begged to shoot it down. His teeth were chattering as he told us that he could see it “as clear as a pig on a lake.” Whatever that was like. “I could get him, Skipper. He’s right in the sights; no lie.” But Lofty told him no. He shouted, “No! We’re safe as long as he’s down there.”

  The night fighter eased past. I didn’t see it, but I felt it. I sensed it out there in the frozen night as it hunted for a bomber. I remembered being in the bush, in an open meadow, and watching the alders at the edge bend and shake as a bear lumbered by. Now I felt the same way as I had then, that if I was spotted, I would die. Lofty gave the throttles a boost, the column a tug, and lifted us up in a slow turn to the right.

  Around we went, above the target. The air was hard and busted up, and we rattled through the turbulence. Even the white flares from the night fighters floated below us. Will watched the searchlights coning; he saw someone get the chop. Again he steered us over burning Wuppertal. “Right a bit. Steady now,” he said.

  I clung to the edge of my desk.

  “Bombs gone!” said Will.

  I started counting seconds as I shrugged my harness off. I felt us rising even higher without the weight of bombs to hold us down. The kite seemed to press at my feet as I went aft to the flare chute. We took a picture, I sent my signal, and we headed home with a tailwind, rushing to England at a ground speed of three hundred miles an hour.

  I rubbed and rubbed at my ray-gun ring. It seemed we’d have an easy op for once, that we’d go out and back with no real trouble. We crossed above Holland and started over the sea. Then Pop said we were running low on fuel. We’d gone so high that the engines had used too much to get us there. “They sucked up the petrol like strawberry ices,” he said.

  Lofty throttled back and put us into a shallow dive. Simon gave him a new course to steer.

  We thrummed along through the darkness. Gilbert stirred in his box, thrashing with his wings. I gave him water and a bit of crust from a sandwich. In the nose, Will called out, “I can see the coast, Skipper. Hello, England.”

  Suddenly Ratty shouted. “Corkscrew left! Go!” Down we went toward the water, wheeling round in a sickening whirl. “A fighter!” shouted Ratty. His guns were firing. “Right on our tail.”

  We banked to the left and banked to the right. Buzz cried out, “Where is he? Where is he?” But Ratty had lost him.

  Then we leveled out, and everyone was looking for the night fighter. Even I was looking, my face pressed to my window, staring at nothing but blackness. We raced for the coast, for England, holding the course that Simon set.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Buzz.

  “He was there,” said Ratty. “No lie. He was there.”

  It could have been a smudge on his Perspex, a spot on his goggles. To us a night fighter in a sky as black as that would be only a speck, a fleeting shape. But to him we would be huge and clear, as plain to see as the Bat Signal, as the Green Lantern flying with his cape spread across the stars. We would glow red bull’s-eyes from the hoods of our exhaust.

  We searched and searched, but saw nothing. We hugged the sea; then we crossed the coast at a hundred feet, and I looked out and saw flak above us, a black cloud that was tidy and round. Another passed, farther away. I couldn’t figure it out, why there was flak over England. I said, “Skipper. Is that flak up there?”

  “Huh?” asked Lofty. Then, in a breath, he said, “Jesus.”

  “Barrage balloons!” shouted Will.

  They floated at five hundred feet, a host of them, like black daffodils swaying on their wire stalks. We flew below them, between their cables, then suddenly rose so quickly that Lofty must have nearly torn his column from the floor. He banked the wings and brought us up in a steep turn.

  He said, “Simon, where are we?”

  Across the ground dashed the shapes of houses, the spire of a church. Simon had steered us toward beaches and moors, but we had stumbled instead on a village. A searchlight came on, its bright eye seeking us out.

  A cable creaked across the wing. It slowed us down and slewed us round, and I heard it grating on the leading edge.

  Lofty swore; the old guy yelled at him to turn, to get higher. Then the cable was severed in the cutters, and we rose above the balloons, banking past the last one.

  Our fuel was nearly gone, and we didn’t know where we were. I twiddled the wireless knobs, cranking them too far and too fast with my trembling fingers. But I got a bearing from London, and then another from York, and Simon lined us up for home so perfectly that the beacon from our field came blasting through my wireless the moment I listened for it. Lofty sent me to the flare gun mounted in the roof, and we went in between the hills, firing flares like a stricken ship; we didn’t have fuel to stooge about in a circuit.

  Lofty was furious. He was hardly Lofty at all. The fellow who had always shrugged things off now tore strips from the rest of us as we taxied to dispersal. He swore at Simon for getting us lost, at Ratty for seeing phantoms, at me for not getting a bearing sooner. He was still frothing when the erks threw down the chocks, and the moment the airscrews whirled to a stop, he went stalking down the kite and nearly bashed his way out through the door.

  He went for a walk across the field as we piled out. There was eight feet of cable dangling from the starboard wing, and one of the erks was swinging on it like a monkey. Simon stood looking around, and Pop sort of folded up on the grass. Ratty took off his gloves and thumped his hands to warm them. “What got the skipper’s wind up?” he asked.

  “Just let him think,” said Pop.

  Sure enough, when Lofty came back he was already his old self, whining his funny sayings through his nose. “I say, old chaps,” he said. “Frightfully sorry I blew up. Who’s for tea, then? What, what? A nice cuppa char.”

  Simon didn’t answer. It would take more than a few mutters to soothe the big Australian. “You can stuff your cuppa char,” he muttered.

  It turned out that it wasn’t his fault that he’d steered us to a village instead of empty coast. Sergeant Piper told us later that Buster’ s compass was off by five degrees.

  Lofty got mad at
him. “How can the compass be off?” he shouted.

  “Gremlins,” said Sergeant Piper. “That’s how I see it. No telling what a gremlin will do.”

  That was a lovely word. It made me think of a long-legged, sharp-toothed little monster that delighted in pulling out wires and unfastening bolts. It was a gremlin, I thought, who had shut down our engine over Krefeld, and a gremlin who had laid his scaly hands on the compass. But Lofty said gremlins wore coveralls and carried wrenches in their pockets. “A gremlin,” he said, “is just a careless erk.”

  Whatever they were, the gremlins loved Buster. On our next op, the autopilot went U/S—unserviceable— and nearly tossed us from the sky. The week after, over Cologne, the wireless failed. The truth, though none of us said it, was that our old bus was slowly falling apart. Ratty said that if it kept on going, the fuselage would fall away, and we’d be left strapped in our seats, flapping our arms. But we hadn’t proven ourselves enough to Uncle Joe that he would give us anything better.

  We didn’t fly every night, but every night I dreamed of flying. Sometimes I saw night fighters, sometimes flak and searchlights. Always it ended with me falling. And then it took a little more courage to step again through Buster’s door, up from the grass to eighteen thousand feet. Each time I did it, I thought it was with all the courage that I had, but the next op I had to find a little more.

  Most of it came from Bert. Each morning I went to the loft on trembling legs, and came away happy again. Bert would point at a bird on a perch and tell me everything about it. “That’s Blitzen,” he would say. “Why, I remember Blitzen when ’e was just an egg. Oh, ’e was the roundest little egg, sir.” When I sat with him, surrounded by pigeons, I never thought about engines failing and bombs blowing up. All his stories of pigeon heroes, all the tending to the babies, let me forget about flying for a while. A visit with Bert was a tonic for me. It was as though I borrowed from him the courage that he didn’t need—or I took it, really, because I had none to give back.

  And as strange as it seemed, the rest came from Percy, that bright little bird who would sit forever and listen to my troubles and my secrets. I confessed everything to Percy. I told him over and over that I didn’t want to fly anymore.

  But I did; I kept flying. We bombed Aachen in the middle of July, and we torched the city into such a blaze that the paint blistered on Buster’s belly. Then, a mile from home, at treetop height, we hit an owl. It shattered the bubble in the nose, ripping through the Perspex in a burst of blood and feathers. If Will hadn’t been in the second dickey seat, he would have had his head torn off. But he somehow managed to joke about it. “What would they have told my wife?” he asked. “‘We regret to inform you that your husband was owled to death.’”

  That same night, Lofty moved up again on the Morris list when M for Mother smashed in the Channel. The bomb aimer had been on the list, but he never got his chance with the little black bus. He had been third, right below the guy who had it now, the pilot of T for Tom.

  Then our leave came up, a few days of rest that we’d earned by weeks of flying. We went down to London. “The smoke,” we called it. The whole crew went, even Pop, who would rather have gone home to his wife and his boys. It was the way Lofty wanted it. “Kid, you’re coming, too,” he told me. “No excuses this time.”

  We took the train and arrived in the morning, and it was strange to see bombed-out buildings, whole streets reduced to rubble, but the great city just humming along. At night, though, it lived in darkness; it closed up and hid itself from the German bombers. Will saw it and went Shakespeare on us. “Look around,” he said, holding out his arms. He told us that nothing had changed in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, that the same city that now huddled from bombers had huddled in the darkness from men armed with spears. We watched people carrying electric torches to guide their way down the ruined streets, as though they followed blots of light. I wanted to warn them that nothing could save them, that a city couldn’t hide from bombers. But it was plain to see that they knew it already. There were buildings banked by sandbags, and buildings propped up with poles and posts. As darkness came, the underground stations choked with people who carried their belongings down in suitcases to build tiny rooms for themselves all across the platform.

  We felt lost in London. It was too big, too loud, and too expensive. On our third day our money was gone.

  Our crew came apart then, the fellows breaking off like the bits of B for Buster. Pop went north to his home; Will wandered away to see the museums. Simon met some Australians and went chumming with them. Only four of us were left to bum around for another day, gawking at old buildings and double-decker buses. We sat astride the lions in Trafalgar Square, in a cloud of pigeons thicker than the smoke in Happy Valley. Every inch of the place was covered with birds, every bench and every step of the Nelson column. Lofty smiled, but tried to seem disgusted. “Won’t I ever get away from damn pigeons?” he asked. Buzz knocked one from his arm. “I bet the Kid thinks he’s gone to heaven.”

  He was right. The sound of all those birds was as calming as wind in a forest. I even bought a postcard of the place, and sent it up to dirty Bert. I didn’t know his proper name, so I addressed it to “The Pigeoneer.”

  We spent our last night, penniless and sad, in a service club, with a crowd of desperate-looking airmen who had just arrived from Sussex and had gone in a fever from one bit of fun to another. They sang and laughed through their first night of leave, and we moped through the last of ours. We sat staring at nothing, then suddenly raised our heads. We all heard the air-raid sirens.

  It was a mournful sort of howl, something like wolves in a forest. It rose and fell in a warbling pitch.

  A rush of people went down to the shelters, while the desperate and the drunk stayed where they were. Then the sirens stopped, and we heard the sound of bomber engines. They were different from ours, a harsher kind of clatter, a tremble that shook cold sweat from my hands and my armpits and forehead. It wasn’t the thought of bombs that terrified me, or the thought of being caught on the ground; it was the idea of being up there, of flying through the night.

  Lofty put on his cap. I thought he was going down to the shelters, and I stood up beside him. I wanted to get under the earth, deep enough that I wouldn’t hear the engines. But he headed for the front door. He said, “I think I’ll take in the show. You chaps coming along?”

  We went with him; it might have looked cowardly not to. We took our caps and went out to a city that was nearly empty. A little knot of people hurried by, their shoes pattering. A fat man in a business suit scurried from doorway to doorway like a frightened mouse. When he disappeared around the corner, there was no one but us on the street.

  Across the sky, searchlights were wheeling. In the distance, to the south, bursts of flak looked small and harmless. There didn’t seem to be the slightest chance they could hurt an armored bomber. But with each flash, with each bang that followed, my skin twitched and jumped, and I sat on the curb so that I wouldn’t fall over. The others sat beside me, then leaned slowly back until they lay across the sidewalk with their feet in the gutter.

  The engines grew louder. We listened to the old, familiar ooom-ba-ooom, and watched for the bombers. “Only ten or so,” said Lofty. “No more than a dozen.”

  “Just the first wave, I guess,” said Buzz.

  Guns started firing. Tracers rose up from the city, and it hardly seemed possible that they were the same sort of thing we’d seen coming toward us over Germany. They didn’t start off slowly and suddenly rush along. And they didn’t seem the least bit frightening. There were so many searchlights, so much tracer and flak, that we could see the roofs and the domes of the buildings drawn as clear as etchings. We saw glimpses of the bombers, gleams of light thrown back from the searchlights. They passed right above us, and then we heard the bombs coming down.

  “Wheezy jeezy, I didn’t know they whistled,” said Ratty.

  It was an unnerving sound in
an unnerving place. The city seemed to have drawn up, struggling to defend itself. The machines above, the lights and guns below, it made me think of a war being fought without people, just thing against thing.

  The whistle became a shriek. Then we saw the flashes and felt the bursts, heard the absolute roar of bombs exploding. Stick after stick rained down, each one a little closer. Flames and smoke soared up. The flashes tore across the sky, glowing on every roof, in every window. Fire engines and ambulances rushed along distant streets in a clamor of bells and sirens. The roar went on and on as walls crumbled and roofs collapsed. A gas main broke, spewing fire stories high. People screamed.

  We lay on our backs and watched. We watched the ruin spread, the city burn, all because a dozen men were pushing their thumbs on a dozen little buttons. We saw a bomber explode, and nobody cheered.

  The raid lasted only minutes. The ooom-ba-ooom of the bombers faded toward the east, followed by the wave of guns and searchlights. Then we got up and weren’t sure what to do. We didn’t decide to go and help, we just gravitated there, as though the flames had sucked us in. Firemen in weird, medieval helmets were spraying water into buildings full of fire. Soldiers and air-raid wardens dashed all over the place. There was smoke and heat and dust, and rubble everywhere. In the middle of it all, a group of Red Cross girls were setting up a tea stand in a little truck that folded open.

  So we spent the last hours of our leave amid the ruins of a bombing raid. I saw corpses laid out on the street, a dead baby cradled in the hands of a weeping fireman. I was shocked by the destruction that a dozen bombers could bring, and I wondered what Krefeld must look like, or Wuppertal or Aachen, after ten times as many— or thirty times as many—of us had gone by. Then I was put to work pumping water, and I watched the mother of the dead baby take her child away. And I didn’t think anymore, except about pumping.