There were all sorts of stories, related repeatedly and at length, about the time that a certain patient toured East Grinstead after a night at the Whitehall and diligently uprooted every single road sign, about wheelchair races down the main street, and about very under-the-weather patients being delivered back to the hospital by civic-minded civilians, then put to bed with tea and toast by tolerant nurses. Duncan heard a fair bit of the latter himself. The chaps steered clear of the booze only the night before they were due to go under the knife; that was an unwritten rule that was never ignored. They were extremely proud of the fact that a local clergyman had been heard to refer to them as the most ungodly people he had ever come across.
It was unorthodox, but it worked. The Boss condoned the rather undisciplined behaviour, and at times even joined the chaps in the pub or at the piano. It was rumoured he had asked the people of East Grinstead to support his patients, and it was clear that the town was more than happy to comply. In fact, members of the community often turned up at the hospital to visit the patients or take them out for the day, or home for a meal.
The place seemed to run very smoothly and efficiently and the medical side of things was very professional. In fact, Duncan doubted he could have tolerated lying on his back for all these weeks in a silent room filled with other patients weighed down by their own doom and misery.
After the ambulance crew had picked him up only yards away from the wreckage of his Spitfire, a couple of miles from Biggin Hill, and while the skin and tissue on his hands and face was already blowing up as if he were a human balloon, he’d been taken to the nearest hospital equipped for burns injuries. Then, when he’d stabilised enough to be moved, Doctor McIndoe had come to collect him and bring him back to East Grinstead, fortunately before he’d been given the tannic acid treatment, which often caused more permanent scarring that the original burns.
The first few weeks in Ward Three had been a blur of agony and uncertainty, of morphine injections and not knowing whether he was awake or asleep, and of the Boss continually assessing the damage to his face, head and hands. It had been too early then to start any grafting procedures, but Duncan knew that within the next few days he was due to go ‘on the slab’ To prepare him for what would be the first in a series of skin grafts.
After the shock of his prang had ebbed, Duncan had been on the verge of sliding into a very frightening depression, but he simply had not been allowed to do it. The other chaps had joked and chatted with him about nothing in particular, just to stop him from withdrawing into himself, and the nurses had been tremendous too. Especially Claire Pearsall, in Duncan’s opinion. She had never been far from his side during those bleak weeks, and even now was only ever seconds away if he needed anything. Such as the urine bottle, which he required desperately.
‘I can’t find my bell,’ he said through the bandages covering his lips. ‘I must have knocked it off the table.’
‘I’ll look for it later,’ Claire replied. ‘I’ll get you a bottle, that’s more urgent.’
She squeaked away, and was back again almost immediately. Duncan felt his sheet being pulled back and hands undoing the cord on his pyjama pants. He spread his thighs a little as he felt the bottle being placed at the base of his groin, then heaved a great sigh of relief as Claire held his penis inside the neck of the bottle and he let go. He couldn’t direct himself because of the boxing glove-sized bandages on his hands. He had almost died of embarrassment the first few times this toileting had happened, but he was quite used to it now, and any way it was far better than wetting the bed, which he’d also done. It was rather pleasant, really, having your penis handled by lovely, smooth hands attached to a gorgeous-sounding nurse.
‘Better?’ Claire asked. ‘Good. Don’t leave it so long next time, it’s bad for you. And by the way, the Boss says you’re going under the knife the day after tomorrow, but before that we’ll be taking the bandages off. Actually, we’ll be doing that this afternoon.’
There was a brief silence as the last few drops of urine emptied out of Duncan’s bladder, and he digested what she had just said.
‘Off my eyes?’
‘Yes.’
This was momentous. In only a matter of hours he would find out whether or not he could still see. He suddenly realised that he was absolutely terrified. Being scarred he could cope with — even not having the full use of his hands would be manageable — but to never again see the sky, or the sea, or the green and brown hills of Hawke’s Bay was unthinkable.
‘If it’s gone, my sight,’ he asked so quietly it was almost a whisper, ‘will the Boss be able to bring it back?’
Claire’s eyes filled at the hopeless naivety of the question. They both knew it was an absurd thing to ask, but Claire understood very well how desperate Duncan Murdoch must be feeling.
‘No, not if it’s the eyes themselves,’ she replied gently. ‘If it turns out that they haven’t been damaged too badly, and it’s only the tissue around your eye sockets and brows, he should be able to do something. He usually can, you know.’
‘The chaps keep saying how good he is.’
‘He’s a miracle worker, in my opinion. I keep forgetting — you haven’t seen any of his before and afters, have you?’
Duncan shook his head.
‘Well, you will soon, I’m sure.’
Claire thanked God he couldn’t see that she had her fingers crossed; she had become very fond of Flight Lieutenant Duncan Murdoch from New Zealand.
Just before dinner late that afternoon, the Boss himself helped Duncan into a wheelchair and, to a hearty chorus of ‘Good luck, old boy’ from the other patients, wheeled him out of the ward and along the cream and green hall to a smaller room, known as the clinic, one of the few private places in the hospital. This was for Duncan’s convenience, not McIndoe’s. Once inside he closed the door, pulled the drapes against the deepening dusk outside, and set about laying out a tray of the instruments he would need to remove Duncan’s bandages.
Archibald McIndoe, a dapper man of medium height with horn-rimmed spectacles and a touch of grey at his temples, was a New Zealander, originally from Dunedin but now resident in Britain with a private plastic surgery practice in Harley Street, a very impressive medical reputation and more young men to practise on now than he’d ever imagined in his worst nightmares.
‘So, Duncan,’ he said conversationally as he inspected a pair of small scissors for sharpness. ‘How was the weather in Napier before you left?’
Duncan was slightly startled at the question. ‘Before I left to fly in England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it was four years ago now, sir.’
‘Yes, that’s right. How was the weather?’
‘Ah, it was quite nice I think, sir, if I remember rightly.’
It was a very strange question but it had served its purpose — Duncan was no longer focusing on what might or might not be under his bandages.
‘Been there myself a few times,’ McIndoe went on. ‘Lovely beach. Well, before the earth quake, of course. Lose anything in it, did you?’
‘In the earth quake?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Well, not personally. I was at school at the time of course, and the assembly hall came off pretty badly. And our beautiful new Chrysler Imperial Roadster was flattened in Emerson Street.’
‘My God.’
‘Yes, it was a tragedy.’
Duncan heard the door open.
‘Claire’s going to be giving us a hand,’ McIndoe said. ‘Don’t mind, do you?’
A light hand rested on Duncan’s shoulder, and he knew she was there to lend moral support, just in case.
‘No, that’s fine,’ he replied. He was nervous again, and feeling rather sick, but trying not to show it.
‘Right then,’ McIndoe said, and Duncan felt the outer layer of bandages begin to come away.
The surgeon’s hands were gentle, but there seemed to be yards and yards of the stuff wrapped around his head.
Eventually, McIndoe stood back again.
‘We’re down to the last few layers and then the gauze. Are you ready?’
Duncan nodded. He wasn’t, but there was no point in delaying what was inevitable.
He felt the last two turns of bandage lifted off, followed by a single clicking noise. Then the gauze, peeled carefully away with what he assumed was the aid of a pair of tweezers. The air felt strange on his skin, which felt wet but tight at the same time, and there was an odd, not altogether pleasant smell coming from somewhere under his nose. He didn’t know whether he had his eyes shut or not.
No one said anything, but he felt Claire’s hand tighten on his shoulder.
He struggled to move the muscles of his face, feeling an appalling stiffness and a dull, ragged pain, then he blinked once, and then again.
He suddenly felt embarrassingly helpless, and swore in frustration, anger and despair.
‘Jesus bloody Christ.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but … oh shit, there’s nothing.’
‘Settle down, Duncan,’ McIndoe said blandly. ‘We’ve turned the lights off. It’s pitch black in here.’
‘Oh.’ Duncan felt even more pathetic now.
McIndoe said, ‘I’m going to turn a torch on, but I’ll keep my hand over it, all right? I want you to tell me if you can see anything. Anything at all.’
There was another tiny click, a pause of the deepest silence, then Duncan started to laugh.
‘Ow!’ he yelped. His bandaged hands flew up to his mouth, freed now of the heavy dressings and unaccustomed to stretching far enough to accommodate a decent laugh, and he swore again as they came in contact with the raw skin of his face.
‘Careful,’ Claire warned. ‘Now, what can you see?’
‘Mostly nothing, but I can just see four pink sausages, or something like that, with lines of red between them. In a sort of a ball.’
In the barely lit room, both Claire and McIndoe smiled.
McIndoe took his hand off the torch and positioned it on the table facing away from Duncan. ‘What about this?’
‘I can … yes! I can see an outline of a chair, and the bottom of some curtains, and a cabinet or something, with shelves on it.’
McIndoe turned the torch around then, so that the room was at least half illuminated.
And Duncan turned himself around, so he could see what he had been longing to look at for weeks now.
Claire Pearsall’s hair was a thick, unruly dark brown and framed a bold face set with sparkling brown eyes, an aquiline nose and a wide, full mouth. Her skin was creamy and smooth like that of so many English girls, and her generous figure looked firm and toned, probably from belting about the wards all day and lifting patients like himself. And she was smiling at him.
Duncan smiled back, but carefully so as not to hurt his mouth.
‘Well, then,’ McIndoe said, ‘I don’t think we have to worry too much about your vision now, do we?’
Duncan couldn’t say anything; he was still gazing at Claire.
McIndoe switched a reading lamp on and the torch off. ‘We have to bandage your face again, although we’ll leave your eyes uncovered. Do you want to have a look at the damage now, or leave it for a bit?’
Duncan took a deep breath. ‘No, now, thanks.’
McIndoe nodded. He took a hand mirror off the implements tray and passed it over.
Duncan slowly raised the mirror to his face and looked into it.
After a minute he lowered it to his lap, where it rested, mirror side down.
Billy Deane also had his eye on a girl.
He nudged his mate, Harry Tomoana, sitting next to him in the bar of a small English country pub, and said, ‘I’m going to ask her out, I’ve decided.’
Harry took a huge drink of his beer, then wiped the froth off his top lip. ‘You’ll be lucky. You’re too black and ugly.’
This wasn’t true. Billy had grown into a handsome young man, with his father’s pale brown skin and striking bone structure, and his mother’s enormous dark eyes. But Harry could be right — the local people hadn’t seen many dark-skinned men before the Maori Battalion had arrived at Camp 49B, and although they had been friendly, especially after the boys had received their new uniforms with the ‘New Zealand’ shoulder flashes, the village fathers might not take to the idea of their daughters going out with the big, brown ‘Moo-ree’ men.
The battalion had been in England now for several months, and being on dry land after six weeks at sea had been an almost universal relief. The ocean voyage to Gourock near Glasgow in the luxury liner Aquitania, requisitioned for the duration of the war for use as a troopship, had at first been exhilarating, especially the send-off in Wellington when the whole ship had sung ‘Now Is the Hour’ when the Governor-General came out in a launch to farewell them. They had then joined up with the rest of the convoy carrying the Second Echelon, and had felt immense pride in the fact that they were all going off to war.
But then had come the seasickness, followed by increasing boredom with the shipboard menu, lavish though it was. Used to fairly basic fare, most of the men had been startled to be presented with such dishes as Salisbury steak served with creamed spinach and French-fried potatoes, or roast beef with horseradish sauce, or pressed beef or Oxford brawn, followed by sago or custard pudding and then coffee. The problem was soon solved, however, by one enterprising entrepreneur who broke into the large supply of mutton-birds stored in the ship’s hold, and sold them at a healthy profit to those who preferred more traditional food.
The convoy had stopped at Fremantle for a couple of days to give the troops a chance to go ashore, but after that the monotony of life at sea began to set in. Then they were told they weren’t going to Egypt after all and that the convoy was changing course, which had disappointed all those raring to go into battle.
There were meal times, and there was frequent training, but the growing heat began to fray tempers even further, which led to fights and worse — two stokers working in the engine room committed suicide by jumping overboard. Concerts and community sing-alongs went some way towards alleviating the lethargy and boredom, and new songs did the rounds like wildfire. The tune adopted by the battalion as their marching song, with its rousing, homegrown lyrics about victory and glory, was very popular. But perhaps even more favoured was a song introduced by a mate of Billy’s, one Ruru Karaitiana, a Ngati Kahungungu man who in peacetime was a piano player in a band.
He called his song ‘Blue Smoke’, and its melancholic opening words — ‘Blue smoke goes drifting by into the deep blue sky/And when I think of home I sadly sigh …’ — could be heard all over the ship at various times. Billy was very fond of it himself, and even went as far as writing down the words and the chords and sending them back to his family in one of his infrequent letters.
There were the official housie games with a heady, threepenny limit, or the unofficial games of poker and two-up, at which Billy excelled, having picked up the skills from the farmhands and drovers who had passed through Kenmore over the years. By the time the battalion disembarked in the UK he had a very tidy sum stashed away in his kitbag.
At Cape Town, the Aquitania was too big to go into port, and they were forced to gaze in frustration at the awesome sight of Table Mountain towering above the town. They had already been warned that the white South Africans might be more than a little frosty, and the fact they couldn’t go ashore did little to improve the prevailing mood. When they were able to disembark for less than a day after the Aquitania moved to the port of Simonstown, they were taken on a tour of local vineyards in buses, then driven to Cape Town for a cup of tea and a bun. Then those who hadn’t already absconded were let loose for an hour and a half to explore and spend all their money, though it was actually only twenty-five minutes after they’d sat in a drill hall listening to a lecture on how to behave.
The battalion, though, had its revenge. By the time the scores and scores of huge,
green lobsters filched from the clear waters of the bay at Cape Town were discovered on board the Aquitania, it was far too late to do anything about it.
Eventually, the convoy was told its destination. Zigzagging through the English Channel, now accompanied by a flotilla of destroyers, the convoy passed the wreckage of torpedoed Allied ships. The New Zealanders watched in awe as an oil tanker ahead of them blazed until it sank in a boiling cloud of steam hundreds of feet high.
On 16 June, the convoy docked at the Scottish port of Gourock, and soon afterwards the Maori Battalion headed for the south of England to begin training for its defence. The four days’ leave in London on the way down had been interesting, especially the underground railway system, which had been a real novelty, but the general consensus had been that the city was big, old, dirty and very expensive, and no one was particularly sorry to be moving on. Ewshott, on the other hand, had been a small, very pleasant village surrounded by gentle fields and meadows criss-crossed by tree-lined lanes. Viscount Bledisloe had visited the battalion there, and so had King George VI himself.
On 9 July the battalion had packed up and marched about five miles to the little hamlet of Dogmersfield, where they were now stationed. Since arriving they’d taken part in endless exercises and manoeuvres designed to thwart and repel the Germans should they land. It was during one of these that Billy’s company fell under a cloud of suspicion when a disgruntled farmer complained that a mature pig had disappeared from its paddock at about the same time that D Company had passed through. The inference was that the pig had been disposed of in the traditional Maori manner, and the battalion subsequently received a bill from New Zealand Force Headquarters for twelve pounds, to go towards compensating the irate farmer. A newly promoted Colonel Dittmer was compelled to make several visits to HQ to argue that his men would never do such a thing, which increased his mana considerably. Together with the recent memory of an excellent feed of fresh pork, it raised the troops’ spirits markedly.
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