by John Harris
“What’s the odds on being rescued?” he asked. “I mean, you ought to know. You’re an air commodore. You ought to know better than me. I’m only aircrew. I’m here to be shot at. But you’re in a position to know all about it from the top.”
“Lad,” Waltby said wearily, “I don’t know half as much as you. My job ever since I joined the Air Force has been to deal with stresses and strains. With revolutions per minute and aerodynamics. I’m an engineer.”
Mackay almost snorted. “Some people have an easy war.”
“Perhaps they do,” Waltby agreed. “But it’s probably easier sometimes to go out and do the fighting than to sit back and watch when others don’t come back.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“Yes, it is. And it’s often said. And for a lot of people it doesn’t mean much. But there are a lot of people, too, who do mean it. There are a lot of pen pushers who’d be glad to be fighting. People are too quick to shout the odds that they’re afraid.”
“Aren’t they?”
Waltby smiled to himself at the other’s naivety. He was tired – far too cold and exhausted to argue but he persisted. Mackay seemed to need the encouragement of a quarrel to keep him going.
“Son,” he said, “there are a lot of people they won’t let fly because, from a medical point of view, they’d be anything but a help to a healthy man like yourself. They’d get in your way and let you down. You like this lad, your skipper, don’t you?” he went on after a pause.
“Yes, I do.” Mackay sounded defiant. “I’ve never met anyone like him in my life before. He’s a toff. A real toff. Not one of these temporary toffs.”
“I’m pleased you do feel that way – it means you’re a human being after all.” Waltby spoke with a trace of sarcasm. “Try to feel the same compassion towards others, too.”
“He made me feel I was a human being,” Mackay went on accusingly.
“He wouldn’t be getting your affection if he hadn’t.”
“Ah, it’s all right to talk,” Mackay said with a sudden burst of anger that cheered Waltby a little with its new found energy. “You regular officers. You go into the Service for something to do. Not because you’ve got to earn your living. I’ve seen ’em all – at Sandhurst and Dartmouth and Cranwell.”
Waltby felt like a grandfather as he replied. “Haven’t you heard of scholarships?” he asked. “The Service these days is too technical for the wealthy to get to the top unless they’ve got skill as well. If it’s of any interest to you,” he went on a little angrily, “I joined the Air Force straight from school as an apprentice. I was crazy about flying but I never thought of flying myself. I thought that was only for the wealthy – the people you’re talking about – and I’m not wealthy. But I thought I’d be near aeroplanes and that was good enough. When I discovered I could become a pilot, too, quite easily, it was too late and I never did become one.” He paused before he went on, wondering if his words were having any effect.
“By that time I was interested only in making engines go round. As a result it took me twice as long to get a commission. I did it by studying and night school. I’m still a young man to be an Air Commodore in my line. And if it will help you at all, my father was a railway porter and still would be if he hadn’t retired.”
Mackay felt vaguely uncomfortable and didn’t quite know what to say. He could hear the slop and splash of the waves and the pummelling of the wind every time they were lifted out of the troughs of the sea, then a sudden shower of rain stopped them thinking about themselves as they tried without success to catch it in their clothes.
Waltby started to bale again and it was only as he bent his hand to the water that he realised that Mackay’s feet were bare.
He lifted his head sharply, staring in the darkness at the other.
“What’s happened to your flying boots?” he asked.
“The Skipper’s got ’em on. I thought he needed ’em more than me. He’d only got shoes on.”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m all right. I don’t feel the cold much.”
Waltby knew he was lying. “Can’t you put his shoes and socks on?”
“Too small. They’re in the bottom of the dinghy somewhere. They’ll do to bale with.”
Waltby said nothing. There seemed to be absolutely nothing he could say. He knew well Mackay’s desire to live, to be rescued – it was obvious from the energetic way he tried to perform what few duties he had, from the way he snatched things from the others to do them more quickly. Yet here he was taking a chance on dying of the cold for the sake of Harding.
It dawned on Waltby that Mackay was not quite so independent as he had thought. He needed affection and interest, someone to break through the wall of cynical resentment he had built round himself – as Harding by force of circumstance had done. Mackay had withstood everyone else; Harding, for the simple reason that they flew together and risked their lives together, had broken through the barrier. Mackay wasn’t half so tough as he seemed, and that chip on his shoulder was one of unsureness, a defence against his own loneliness. Waltby suddenly felt a flood of warmth and comradeship towards the hard-faced, unsmiling Midlander.
“I think you’ll do, Mac,” he said. “You’ll do.”
“It’s nothing,” Mackay said sourly, giving nothing away in the shape of friendship. “He’d do the same for me if it came to a pinch.”
“How’s the hand, Mac?” Waltby asked irrelevantly.
“All right,” Mackay lied. Waves of pain were shooting up his arm and had been ever since he had cut it. With every slash of salt water across the open wound, with every jolt of the dinghy, he had suffered agonies. He sounded a little surprised at Waltby’s question, however, and a little less hostile.
Suddenly he had begun to find that nothing much mattered any more. So long as he and Harding got through all this alive it didn’t matter greatly that Waltby belonged to the class he hated so much, the brass hats and the office-wallopers. And in any case it seemed that Waltby didn’t actually belong to them. Mackay even began to wonder after what Waltby had said if there were in all honesty such a class in the Air Force.
“Why is it you think so much of Harding?” Waltby asked gently.
“Oh, it’s nothing! It’s just the way he is. The things he does. The way he speaks to a bloke.”
He felt no embarrassment at his anxiety for the pilot’s safety. All he had ever felt for Harding was a warm glow of affection, admiration and probably even love, but he found it hard to put it into words. There was no sentiment beyond the hardness in Mackay’s nature, only awkwardness that amounted to rudeness, and his words did not – could not – show what was behind his feeling.
He had been in Harding’s crew ever since he had started flying and had a series of memories that left out even Ponsettia. Ponsettia had joined them to take the place of a navigator whom they’d brought back dead on the charred floor of a Lancaster. A great hole had been torn in the nose by the flak shell that had killed the bomb-aimer. The rest of the crew had been wounded, and Harding and Mackay had struggled with the controls in the teeth of the wind roaring through the hole.
There had been autumn take-offs with the slipstream whirling into the air the leaves and the chaff in the fields and the inevitable sheet of newspaper, and winter landings with the blue mist of cold across the ground. They had shovelled snow together from the runways and watched anxiously when the ice had formed on their wings as they’d struggled over the Alps to Italy. They had flown from Malta and the dust-laden desert together, their lives growing daily closer with every danger shared. Other flying personnel had come and gone but only he and Harding were left of the original crew.
They had gone through a whole tour of operations together and started on another after their rest period – never allowing the fact that one used the Officers’ Mess and the other the Sergeants’ Mess to hold them apart. They had become one being in their experiences. Harding was the first cultured, well-educated
individual Mackay had ever known intimately, and between them had sprung up over the months a strong affection that was in no way marred by Mackay’s knowledge that they could never be equals.
Until he was posted to Harding’s crew he had imagined that what he had always known as the upper classes were snobs with no time for such as himself, people who ground the faces of the poor, swindled them, forced them to live in rotten houses for high rents, and victimised them at every opportunity. Harding had shocked him at first by his lack of knowledge of the places where Mackay had lived, even angered him. But gradually the other’s natural, youthful good nature and complete lack of affectation had won him over. It was no dramatic action that had accomplished it, no life saving, no going through fire and water together that had brought it about. It had happened slowly and without Mackay’s being aware of it. But Harding so obviously liked him, and trusted him, so obviously wanted to be friendly, that Mackay had lost all his hatred and now felt only warm, flattered friendship.
“Don’t ask me what it’s all about,” he said lamely. “I couldn’t tell you. I only know he could have gone about with other blokes but he stuck to me. His dad’s got estates as big as our town. I’m just an ordinary bloke. I’ve got a little fruit and vegetable store. That what I am. A fruiterer. I started when I was sixteen in the mines, but I left and started carting buttons and elastic for birds’ bloomers round in a suitcase. Then, eventually, I started up with my shop and that’s what I am. That’s why I want to get this lousy war finished,” he said savagely. He suddenly started to talk as though Waltby, having prised a chink in the gates he kept so tightly closed, had let loose a flood.
“I want to get back to it. I was just beginning to make the thing pay when Hitler started this lot. I’ve got an old bloke running it for me now, but he doesn’t care,” he said bitterly. “All he wants to do is shut the flaming thing up and go home. It’s not the same when it’s not your own.”
“Besides,” he went on after a pause, “he’d never worked down the mines and he didn’t care. I had and I’m not going back to them – not even if they shove the wages heavens-high as they’re talking of doing. I want to see the sky above my head, and the sunshine.
“I might have shut the place up when I was called up,” he continued, “but it felt like committing suicide to think of it. I swore I’d keep it going whatever happened. And I have, by Christ! It’s been hard enough, God knows. I’ve worked some sticky leaves to get home and sort out the mess – when I shouldn’t have. I’ve – I’ve – I’ve put in for a commission,” he said unexpectedly, as though a little startled by his own effrontery. “Think I’ll get it?”
“Don’t see why not,” Waltby said. “Why? Thought you didn’t like the commissioned ranks?”
“Well” – Mackay’s voice faded a little – “other people are getting ’em. Didn’t see why I shouldn’t. Something for nothing. More pay. Why shouldn’t I? When you look round at some of ’em who’ve got ’em…”
He was unable to say he needed the money and, above all, that he wanted to be nearer to Harding than the Sergeants’ Mess would permit.
He paused, clearing his throat, then he blurted out again. “I’ve had it, though,” he said. “I pinched a jerrycan of petrol the night before we left. MT petrol, it was. It fell off a truck near dispersal and I found it in a ditch. I’ve got an old bus – I bought it off a bloke to get home quickly to my shop when I wanted and it’s been useful – and I swung the petrol into the back of it and left it there. I was going to use it to get home some time when I needed to. I thought I’d keep it in the village. I know a bloke there who’d look after it for me. It’ll be there for me when I get back. I’m going to get some survivors’ leave out of this” – Waltby noticed he obviously still felt a real, vitalising belief that he was going to escape, a belief that was rapidly beginning to die in Waltby – “and I’ll nip off and sort out that old fool who’s ruining my shop. I’ve kept it going this long and I’m not going to let him run it down now – not now the war’s almost over.” He thought for a while. “Hope to God nobody’s found the stuff,” he concluded. “I’d catch it in the neck sure as eggs. That’s what I’m scared of.”
“I suppose it’s a bit soft to tell an Air Commodore I’ve pinched some petrol,” he went on in a puzzled fashion. “But there you are. If you don’t like it, you can lump it. I’d better get rid of it, I suppose, if we get back. Safest.”
He paused. “Only, you see,” he went on, “I’ve got to keep the business going. I’ve got to. I can’t let it slide now. I’ve got to get back and sort it out. That’s why I want the flaming war to end. Hell, I never had a chance in my life as a kid. Then I made this one off my own bat. I don’t want to lose it again now just because of a lot of bloody Nazzies.”
He halted again for a moment, then went on gloomily. “The Skipper always swore he’d come and get his groceries from me,” he concluded. “Even if he had to bicycle all the way from Gloucestershire, where he lived.”
“He will, Mac!” Waltby was startled to hear Ponsettia answer out of the darkness, his voice gentle and bereft of sarcasm. “So help me, he will, bud. Those jokers in those goddam E-boats aren’t going to stop the Skipper fetching his spuds and cabbages from you. Not if I can help it. Just give us a chance and let those bastard E-boats be somewhere else at daybreak. That’s all.”
Part Three
One
It was raining steadily when Group Captain Taudevin left the Officers’ mess and made his way towards Headquarters – slanting down in long slender spears that hissed and whispered about his feet and ruffled the wet surface of the road. It spoke to him in a sibilant murmuring above the wind that set the trees at the other side of the building roaring and rushing with sound.
He was tired. It had been a long day for him. He had been to a conference at Group Headquarters and on his return had made his usual call at Station Sick Quarters, not certain whether Scotty would remember to make the round of the wards as requested. Sure enough it had slipped Scotty’s memory, but even in the silent building darkened for the night he had found a symbol of Scotty’s inefficiency in the shape of a small, pretty WAAF enquiring about the health of Sergeant Ponsettia, Harding’s navigator.
Standing in the shadows by the entrance, the smell of antiseptics and sterile cleanliness sharp in his nostrils, Taudevin had watched her as she waited outside the door of the Sick Quarters office where the medical orderly on duty had been engaged in sticking a “No Smoking” notice to the wall with strips of sticking plaster from a tin prominently labelled “Not for sticking notices”.
“I tell you,” the medical orderly was saying impatiently, as though repeating something he had said half a dozen times already, “that there’s no Sergeant Ponsettia in here. And as far as I can make out he’s in no other sick bay either. We’ve been looking for him ever since you came the first time and we’d have been informed for sure if someone had got him. If it’s anything to you, you started a proper old uproar coming in here and saying he’d been found. We’ve been searching all over Suffolk for him.” The medical orderly clicked his tongue disapprovingly.
“But the Squadron Leader Admin. definitely told me it was only a matter of time before he was back.” The girl’s voice was thin and unhappy.
“It might be, but he’s not back yet. Not here, he isn’t. From what I’ve heard from Operations Room, nothing’s been heard of ’em yet. I’m sorry, kid, but there you are.” The medical orderly turned with an air of finality, tore off a strip of plaster and stuck down the last corner of his notice.
“But Squadron Leader Scott said definitely they knew where they were,” the girl insisted wretchedly.
“Squadron Leader Scott talks out of the top of his head sometimes,” the medical orderly said loftily.
The little WAAF turned away, obviously on the verge of tears, and the medical orderly, struck by compassion, called out after her. “Listen, ducks, I’ll tell you what: if he’s brought in here tonight, and you don�
��t mind being wakened up, I’ll send one of the WAAF medical orderlies round to your billet to let you know. Let’s have your billet number and the position of your bed.”
“Of course I don’t mind being wakened up.” The girl was sniffing slightly as she wrote down the required instructions on a sick-report form. “I wouldn’t have bothered you at all, only the Squadron Leader Admin. said they’d be back any time.” She was repeating her words as though the very repetition could put right her unhappiness. “I’ve rung the Sergeants’ Mess and he’s not there.”
“I keep telling you” – the medical orderly’s voice had a ragged edge of irritation – “Ops. Room says nothing’s been heard of ’em yet. I rang up some time ago. We want to know, you know, same as you. We’re keeping beds ready, and water bottles and the whole bag of tricks. The MO’s on tap and everything. Have no fear, kid, if they find him they’ll be bound to bring him in here, if only for a check-up. Keep your chin up,” he finished as she turned away again.
Taudevin, standing in the shadows of the waiting room, opened the door for the girl and she crept past, too obsessed with her anxiety to notice who he was. Then, as he closed the door quietly after her, she saw the rings on his sleeve and her eyes widened with a sudden start of horror.
“That Scott!” the medical orderly was saying to an unseen companion in the dispensary as Taudevin silently crossed the waiting-room. “Tells ’em anything to get rid of ’em. Crikey, nothing’s been heard of that lot since yesterday morning. For all we know, they’re down among the fishes. Perhaps it’s as well, too. There’s a court martial waiting for one of ’em, I’ve been told. Pinching petrol.”
Taudevin, on his way up the stairs, paused again. So Scotty hadn’t been able to keep his own counsel after all! In spite of everything Taudevin had said about secrecy he hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut. Taudevin was frowning as he mounted the rest of the steps…
