African Sky

by Tony Park

  Bryant shook his head, though, at Kenneth’s latest piece of advice. ‘The odds are literally about a thousand to one of me finding a girlfriend on this base, mate. In case you hadn’t noticed, men outnumber women around here. And you, you should spend less time with your head in the books and more time in the shebeens if you want to find a woman. Have you ever had a serious girlfriend?’

  ‘No, not really.’ There had been a woman, a few years ago, when he was studying in South Africa. He’d attended Fort Hare University, in the Eastern Cape. It was the first institute of higher learning for black Africans in the southern part of the continent, and had been established by Scottish missionaries just before the First World War. The woman was a member of the South African Communist Party, a firebrand who sided with others who whispered of force and armed revolution as the way to change the world. As much as he loved her mind and her body, Kenneth could never bring himself to agree with her on the value of bombs and bullets over words. She had left him for a young man of her own party. Factionalism had proven stronger than love, and Kenneth had been quietly devastated in his final year of study before returning to his native Southern Rhodesia to take a job as a schoolteacher – the highest qualification his degree had qualified him to apply for. ‘Once, maybe.’

  ‘So, Ken, what is it today? More books? Building materials for the school?’

  ‘There is a work party coming out to the school to help construct a new classroom tomorrow. It’s term break, so a good time to get started. I wanted to see if you would come out some time and see the progress we are making. It’s been a while since we’ve seen you at the school.’

  ‘I’ll try. Things have been a bit chaotic lately, and there’s the big wings parade coming up as well.’

  ‘I also thought you might have wanted to talk . . . about the woman who died.’

  Bryant lifted a stack of manila envelopes from a corner of his desk. ‘I’ve got a shed-load of paperwork to get through tonight, mate.’

  Kenneth nodded. ‘I understand.’ He wondered what was going through Bryant’s mind. It was getting darker outside, though, and it was a long walk to the single-room tin hut he called home. ‘I’ll come back in a couple of days after you get back from Wankie. We can talk then, if you like.’

  ‘Sorry, mate. I didn’t mean to fob you off, but work is work. How did you know I was going to Wankie?’

  ‘I am the teacher, Paul. I am supposed to know everything.’ Kenneth reached down and lifted his battered leather briefcase. It was secondhand and had cost the equivalent of almost all his first week’s wages. He carried it everywhere. He pulled out a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. ‘I have another request. This is some medicine for my father. He has pleurisy. He works as a security guard at the De Beers ranch. I told him I would buy it for him in Bulawayo and try to get it to him. It would mean a lot to me if you could . . .’

  ‘Of course, Ken.’ He took the parcel. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m trying to get rid of you, mate, but it’s been a hell of a day, and that’s the truth.’

  Kenneth stood and buckled his bag. ‘I understand. I’ll ask you about the corrugated iron for the school roof next time.’ They both forced a laugh, but Kenneth left the hut with the distinct feeling that his friend had got himself into some kind of trouble.

  6

  Bryant nearly drove straight past Pip Lovejoy in the dawn’s half-light.

  She stepped off the footpath outside the guardroom as the red-and-white-striped boom gate was raised by the African air askari on duty to let the convoy out. It was five after five in the morning and the sun was a hazy semicircle peeking over the horizon. She waved at the Humber sedan, which was followed by a Dodge lorry and a Bedford prime mover, towing a long, empty Queen Mary aircraft recovery trailer.

  Bryant put on the brakes, and the still-dozy airman driving the Dodge very nearly rear-ended him. ‘I didn’t recognise you,’ he said. It was the truth. He’d called the guardroom and asked if a female police officer was waiting for him. The duty NCO had replied in the negative.

  ‘I left the uniform at home. I thought it might be easier for Mrs De Beers if I were a little less formal.’

  It was an understatement. He’d fleetingly noticed the young woman standing beside a bicycle as the gate opened, but she had been half turned away from him. Even if he’d seen her face, he thought, he still wouldn’t have recognised her. The loose, wavy blonde hair softened her face. He hadn’t even been able to see what colour it was when she was wearing it tucked up under her police hat. Her outfit, too, showed off a body no longer constrained by mannish tailoring. She wore flared beige pants and a cropped red jacket that accentuated a bottom that was hard to ignore. He heard whispers and a wolf whistle behind him and looked up to see ten pairs of male eyes staring out of the cab and over the wooden side rails of the Dodge, eager to know who the attractive young woman chatting to the adjutant was. The top two buttons of the white blouse under her jacket were undone.

  ‘You’d better get in the car before you cause an accident.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  He wore an old blue uniform shirt, its collar frayed on the edge, and, as it was cool that morning, a blue airforce battledress jacket that came to the waist and normally buckled up with an attached belt. The belt, however, was undone and the jacket had clearly seen better days. It was stained with oil and dried blood – some his, some not. The embroidered pilot’s wings on the left breast were little more than a faded tangle of loose threads. He wore old khaki trousers and suede desert boots. He noticed her staring at his stained jacket. ‘It can be a dirty business recovering a crashed aircraft.’ He turned back to the rest of the convoy and called, ‘Right-oh. Pull your heads in and let’s get weaving.’

  ‘That’s quite a force you’ve got. Are you going to bring the aircraft back with you?’

  ‘Once we’ve done an investigation the fitters will pull the wings off and partly disassemble her and lift her onto the Bedford. The askaris are along to provide some additional muscle.’

  ‘I noticed a couple of them are armed.’

  ‘I don’t want any of my blokes being taken by a lion while trying to unbolt a pranged kite. Also, there might be something worth shooting for the pot.’

  ‘I love the bush,’ she said. ‘It’ll be nice to get out of town for a while.’

  Bryant led the convoy through downtown Bulawayo. Only the city’s earliest risers were stirring or working – black African street cleaners leaning into brooms, horse-drawn milk carts, a white policeman walking the beat, a straight-backed Matabele woman in a maid’s pinafore gracefully walking down the road with a sack of maize meal perched on her head. The bag must have weighed twenty pounds at least. Few heads turned to watch the vehicles rumbling down the wide jacaranda-lined street – the novelty of the colonial outpost’s wartime role had long since worn off. Bryant turned right at the signpost that pointed north to Victoria Falls. The stately colonial buildings and white-kerbed avenues soon gave way to rough tar and the thirsty brown bush of stunted acacias and forests of mopani trees. This close to the end of the dry season, everything was in desperate need of water, a step away from death. The climbing sun warmed the right side of his face.

  Once out of town the sealed road gave way to two parallel strips of tar, each about eighteen inches wide. Constructed between the wars, these ‘strip’ roads criss-crossed Rhodesia. The roads had provided work for soldiers returning from the First World War and had been laid for a fraction of the cost of a fully tarred highway.

  ‘I take it Mrs De Beers knows we’re coming,’ Pip said.

  ‘She knows about the aircraft crash investigation. I arranged this visit last week. If you want to know if I’ve called her and told her you’re coming too, the answer is no. I did try phoning her last night, but I couldn’t get through. She has a problem with elephants knocking down her phone lines.’

  ‘All part of the fun of living in Africa.’

&n
bsp; ‘There are worse places to sit out a war.’

  ‘How did you end up here?’

  Where to start? He was reluctant to talk about himself. ‘You want the long or the short version?’

  ‘It’s a five-hour drive.’

  ‘I joined up in October, 1939. Couldn’t wait to get into the game.’ He remembered his naive mix of excitement and nerves as he’d fronted up to the recruiting office near Central Station in Sydney on a sunny spring morning. He’d done well at school and earned good enough marks to study mechanical engineering at the University of Sydney. Machines interested him, far more than a life on the land. His father was bent and bowed from a lifetime shearing, and with precious little to show for his hard labour. The quiet home life on the farm where his uncle and aunt lived had started to bore him as he’d entered his late teenage years. He’d been a voracious reader and couldn’t wait to get out and explore the world. University was hard at first – most of the other men in the course were from families far better off than his. But he was a good rugby league player and had made friends soon enough on the field and off. He had only recently graduated when, for the second time in half a century, Europe’s problems became Australia’s.

  He shrugged. ‘I was working as an assistant engineer in a factory making parts for tractors.’

  ‘Sounds like a good job. Why give it up?’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’ he smiled. ‘I signed up for the air force. I’d been in the university air squadron and had been for a couple of flights in trainers. I fancied myself a fighter pilot.’

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t exactly strike me as the Errol Flynn type.’

  He laughed. ‘No offence taken, though you’ve got to work on your flattery. You can blame football for the nose.’

  ‘I mean you’ve got a bit more character about you than those recruiting-poster types.’

  He was silent for a moment. He glanced across at her and saw her cheeks had started to colour. He thought she had just complimented him, albeit in a backhanded manner. He wondered if she were trying to put him at ease before hitting him with more questions. Whatever she was up to, he reluctantly started talking – at least it would keep the conversation away from Flick’s death.

  ‘Anyway, the RAAF – Royal Australian Air Force – took me on and I cooled my heels for about a year after initial training. Finally – it seemed like it took forever – they put me on a boat to here, via Egypt, the Suez Canal and Mombasa. That was early ’41. I’d never been out of Australia – it was quite an eye-opener, that cruise.’

  ‘What did you think of Africa?’ she asked.

  ‘I loved it, and that’s the truth. I didn’t exactly complain when they sent me back here. Anyway, I did initial training all over again, except in Bulawayo this time. Same boring stuff as back home – square bashing, saluting, polishing your kit. Eventually, I got to fly. We did elementary flight training on DH-82s – Tiger Moths – at Cranborne, near Salisbury.’

  ‘It must be wonderful to fly. Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Back then I did. I thought I was going all right, but the instructors didn’t recommend me for fighter training in the end. I went on to Ox Boxes – Oxfords – at Guinea Fowl air base, near Gwelo.’ Like Bulawayo, the small town on the high plains of central Rhodesia had been transformed into a massive military encampment. ‘I couldn’t complain. I was getting paid to fly and it seemed at the time that Bomber Command was the only outfit giving Jerry any stick. We were taking a pasting in the Pacific, North Africa and Hitler had just invaded Russia. A lot of us training to fly bombers reckoned that fighters had had their day after the battle of Britain, and that it was us who would win the war.’

  ‘Bomber Command is winning the war, if you believe the newsreels at the cinema and the Bulawayo Chronicle,’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘Sure. If you believe that, I’ve a bridge to sell you in Sydney.’

  ‘It’s not all going well, then, over there?’

  He wondered how much to tell her. ‘I don’t talk about it a lot, back at base. The trainees’ll learn the hard way, when they get to England. Even if you do tell blokes what it’s really like, most of them either don’t believe you or they think you’re just trying to scare them.’

  ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘You’re good at asking questions.’

  ‘I was studying to be an advocate – a lawyer – before I got married. But we’re talking about you now.’

  ‘A lawyer! Bloody hell. Well, since you ask, it’s . . .’ He couldn’t think where to start.

  She sat silently.

  ‘From here, or Canada or Australia, where they also train flight crew, they send you to what’s called an Operational Training Unit – an OTU. They give you a bomber – twin engine, usually – and you think you’ve hit the big-time. You’re ready to go bomb the Führer, Goering, the lot of them, and win the war single-handed. Sometimes the OTUs get drafted into going on real raids, into Germany, when there’s a big push on, but mostly it’s just training missions, navigation exercises and practice bombing with smoke bombs. Occasionally, they’d send us on a nickel raid – that’s dropping leaflets on occupied cities.’

  ‘Sounds like a good way to get crews used to the real thing.’

  ‘What they don’t tell you, but you find out pretty soon the hard way, is that the loss rate in the training units is almost as bad as in the operational squadrons. About one in four aircraft, a quarter of all crews, are lost during training.’

  ‘Twenty-five per cent casualties, before they even get to bomb Germany?’ Her blue eyes were wide with surprise.

  He nodded. ‘Four kites – twenty–four blokes – didn’t come back from training missions while I was converting to Wellingtons. That mightn’t sound a lot, but this is happening every day. There were crashes on take-off or landing, and some got lost and never came back. I suppose they ditched in the North Sea.’

  ‘Are things better in the operational squadrons, in terms of losses?’

  ‘Worse. There are still accidents, but now you’re flying into flack and night-fighters. The odds are against you from the start. During my first tour, on Wellingtons, we took a hundred per cent casualties. Obviously not all of us died, but they kept replacing the crews that were lost and by the end of my tour we’d lost more men, in total, than were on the books when I’d started.’

  ‘You survived,’ she said. It was not a question as to how or why, or an accusation. Just a statement.

  ‘Too bloody right, I did. Me and my crew, all of us. Thirty missions without a scratch.’

  ‘Amazing, from what you’re saying.’

  He downshifted as the twin strips of tar that made up the road temporarily disappeared from under them as she moved through a dip. He guessed the sandy creek bed on either side of the road had been a raging torrent at some point during the last wet season and had washed the surface away.

  ‘A bloody miracle,’ he said in answer to her. ‘And did we think we were hot? You bet your life we did. We drank for three days at the end of it. We all got gongs – medals – and six months leave. None of us took it, though.’

  She was surprised. ‘Why not? Surely you’d cheated death and earned your leave.’

  ‘We knew we’d all have to do a second operational tour after our leave, but we decided, as a crew – even voted on it – to go straight on, as a team, and do the second thirty sorties without a break.’

  She shook her head. ‘Men.’

  ‘You have to understand, we were invincible, or so we thought. Also, the squadron converted to Lancasters. Four-engine bomber, an absolutely beautiful big brute of an aircraft. We thought we’d be safe in one of those.’ He looked out the window at the endless African bush, stretching away for miles and miles in every direction. ‘But we were wrong.’

  ‘You don’t have to go on, if you don’t want to,’ she said.

  He stared straight out the windscreen as they drove, not looking at her, or the African children in
ragged hand-me-downs waving at them as they passed through a rural village. This was more like what he had expected of Africa. Mud huts with roofs of thatched yellow grass. The tribal areas were out there still, if you scratched below the surface of white colonial Bulawayo. It wasn’t until you flew over the country that you realised how much more existed beyond the stone buildings and tarred roads. It was like Pip’s questioning. If people really wanted to ask, they had to be aware that the truth was bigger, meaner and less pretty than the facade. ‘You asked,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but –’

  ‘People should know the truth.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That it’s not like in the newsreels.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘Right.’ He slowed at the sight of dark-coloured animals on the road, near the crest of a hill. He thought they were more cattle, but as he got closer, he could see they were cape buffalo. ‘I hear they’re dangerous,’ he said, pointing at the beasts.

  ‘Very.’ He said nothing more, even though she sensed that he had so much to tell and needed someone to tell it to. Clearly it wasn’t going to be her.

  ‘You’re married,’ he said after a while, as he glanced down at the simple gold band on her finger.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is he? Overseas?’

  ‘Not sure, exactly. He’s with the Long Range Desert Group. In Italy somewhere.’

  He nodded. ‘What did he do; before the war, I mean?’

  She hated how people always asked about him first, as if the man were the keystone of marriage, and what happened to the woman before, during or after was inconsequential. ‘We farm dairy cattle. Outside of Bulawayo, on the road to Plumtree.’

  ‘Good country for it.’

  ‘We try.’

  ‘It must be hard for you, running the farm, working as a copper, fighting crime all by yourself.’

  ‘I manage. I’ve got an excellent Matabele foreman who looks after the dairy.’