Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  It was more than Elizabeth could stand: she had looked forward to this outing all summer, her one sure escape from her home in Banbridge, from her cold, watchful brothers and the care of her mother, bedridden since her first stroke . . . The day was fine enough – you wouldn’t complain about a bit of wind like that if there was no rain on it – but she felt her old darkness descending. She needed to stay at least one step ahead of it. She slipped away from the others and into trees.

  The Lough Neagh rescue boats were at Aldergrove and Langford Lodge: it would be most unwise to call for their help. But the wind, veering wildly from west to south, spun the helpless plane around on the wave tops. Cross-currents of air and water raised a short choppy sea, vicious enough to threaten the wing-floats. They put on their Mae Wests and readied the dinghy, and then the engineer opened the nose hatch and paid out a sea anchor. It steadied the flying boat, holding its nose to the waves as it drifted downwind. Through his binoculars, Morgan saw the ground crew waving from the shore.

  ‘The wind’s carrying us away from them. If you can get them on the radio, tell them we’ll be blown ashore somewhere on the south-east corner of the lake. They need to be there to drag this thing ashore or we’ll be for the high jump.’

  Elizabeth’s feet carried her northward along a path of imperfectly dried mud skirting a field that had been left for grazing. The headland was snowy with cow parsley. Primroses grew through a barbed-wire fence. Gusting over the long grass of the pasture, the wind made tortoiseshell patterns of silver and grey. She buttoned the red cotton coat she had bought with her savings for this special day. It was more of a town coat, she reflected, and this place, though not exactly wild, was a good deal less tame than what she was used to.

  Water gleamed through the alders that screened off the lough to the north. She knew from a map at the sailing club that this was Oxford Island, which formed the western side of Kinnego Bay. On either side, ragged green fields sank into brown meadows that looked like they flooded. A few cattle lay under a hedgerow, out of the wind. There were no houses or farm buildings. Today, this place was just for her and the self-contained livestock. But why did they call it an island when you could walk here from the shore? Had no one ever tried to sail around it? The sky was pale and almost cloudless, the sun beat down from the sky. She ought to go back, to rejoin the picnic. But her feet took her onward. It seemed to her that there were things here to discover.

  *

  ‘Paddle? God damn it, Hughie. This fucking thing has a hundred-foot wingspan. You think you can row it against this wind?’

  ‘We’re going to pass only a few yards from that spit. If we can just get a line ashore there we can tow her in behind those trees and radio the men to tell them where we are.’

  ‘And where are we?’

  ‘Here. See? This peninsula here.’

  ‘That’s an Admiralty chart. It doesn’t name land features.’

  ‘I’ll figure something out.’

  ‘Okay. You want to get a line ashore? Let me tell you about flying boats, Hughie. Sometimes there’s only one way to do it: you tie a line around your waist, you climb out on the wing and then you jump off and you swim.’

  The path narrowed as it entered the thin band of woodland. Under the trees it was cool and dark and the sun and wind had not reached the mud. Cattle passed this way often, coming to drink from the lake, and their feet made holes that brimmed with green water. Elizabeth felt the mud suck at her boots. The ferns, crowding in on her, tickled her face and left dew on her clothes. Then she came out the other side, onto the edge of the lough, where grass and wild flowers sloped down to a band of mud and rushes washed over by the waves.

  And there it was, the miracle she had prayed for, an intrusion from a much wider world.

  It bobbed and swayed on the waves, a great grey aeroplane with the body of a boat, so close she could have almost touched its wing. And standing on that wing, in line with the northern horizon, so that he seemed to be walking on the lough, was a sad-looking man stripped to his underwear. A rope was coiled around his arm and tied to his middle; he hugged himself and shivered, looking at the cold water. In a few moments, she saw, the wind would carry the plane past the spit and into the dead end of Kinnego Bay.

  ‘Hello!’ He was only a few yards from her, but he had to shout above the wind and the hiss of the waves on the mudflats. ‘Can you tell me what this place is called?’

  He sounds American, she thought. But there was an RAF roundel on the side of the plane.

  Elizabeth summoned her nerve. ‘It’s Ulster,’ she called. ‘County Armagh.’

  A second man stuck his head out of the front of the plane. He was wearing a leather helmet and had Bakelite cups on his ears. ‘For Chrissakes, Hugh,’ he shouted. ‘You’re wasting our chance. Get that line ashore!’

  The man on the wing ignored him. He was looking at the girl in the red cotton coat. She had anxious grey eyes. From the way that she stood she might turn and vanish in an instant.

  ‘I meant, specifically. What is this place called? The place where we are now?’

  ‘It’s called Oxford Island.’

  The man in the cockpit said a word that she had heard only once before, at the horse fair which took place on the fringe of the Armagh Agricultural Show. ‘It’s a goddam island. Forget it, Hughie. The men don’t have a boat. We’ll have to take our chances on the mainland.’

  The man on the wing was still looking at her. The wind had turned his skin a pale shade of grey. His legs and chest were dark with hair, which surprised her: she didn’t know that men could look like that. He was a little older than most of the foreign servicemen whom she saw about Banbridge, coming and going from pubs and from dances forbidden to her. She had never spoken to one of them before. They didn’t come to her church group.

  ‘It’s not really an island,’ she heard herself shout. ‘I came here on foot. I don’t know why they call it that.’

  He took a step towards her, so that he was balanced on the very tip of the wing. Then he hunkered down, as if that would make their shouted conversation more intimate.

  ‘That looks like a raised shore that you’re standing on. Maybe the level of the lake used to be higher. Maybe it really was an island when they named it that.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ shouted the pilot. ‘What does it matter? The line, Hughie. Ashore.’

  The man on the wing took the coil from his arm.

  ‘Do you think, if I threw you this rope, could you give it a couple of turns around one of those trees? It would save me having to swim.’

  Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, July 1948

  The weather reports were uncertain, the alternate runways remote and unreliable. So Barnett squeezed every drop of fuel possible into the wing tanks and the long-range auxiliary tank in what had once been the bomb bay.

  The engines roared. Yellow-tipped propellors became yellow-edged discs and the earth pushed away from the undercarriage. Heavily laden with fuel, the plane barely cleared the high ground west of Frobisher Bay.

  Morgan unbuckled his harness and stood in the navigator’s astrodome behind the cockpit. He had no intention of doing any navigation, but he always got airsick when he couldn’t see out. Thin overcast feathered above him, a soft grey ceiling shutting out the sky. Beneath the aircraft, the Great Plain of Koukdjuak stretched west and north, brown tundra bemazed with white lines and blotches, the rivers and ponds yet unfrozen by spring.

  You could do what you liked with your cameras and radar, Morgan thought, but this was an impossible landscape. You could map it if you liked, at the government’s required scale of one inch to a quarter million. But what was the point of trying to map chaos? Such a map would have no purpose or meaning. Who would ever want or need to look at it? From this altitude he could see two whole sheets of the government’s new set of maps without even turning his head. But what names would you print
on those sheets? He could think of just one: ‘Amadjuak Lake’, the great ice-free triangle ahead and below where the Inuit went to fish and hunt caribou. You could do nothing for the rest of it, an impassable swamp of muskeg and ice. It made sense only in winter when covered with merciful snow.

  The overcast cleared just south of the Arctic Circle. The plane was then over Nettilling Lake, a vast sheet of ice turned turquoise and green where the meltwater pooled on its surface. It was almost noon and the sun glared down from a brilliant blue sky. Far off to the east, the Penny Ice Cap shone white above Cumberland Sound. To the west, the Foxe Basin was clear of ice, a sheet of rolled silver. It was too much for Morgan. The light made his head hurt. He would have to abandon his place in the dome.

  ‘Skipper, I’m going back for a spell. I need to do tests on the SHORAN.’

  Bent over his chart table, Tomkinson ignored Morgan as he crawled through the central compartment. The wireless operator, head drooping, might have been asleep: his position at the rear of the compartment, where the heating ducts entered from the engines, was the only warm place on a Lancaster. Taking care not to wake him, Morgan crawled into the tunnel which led aft over the bomb bay.

  In wartime the rear compartment would have been occupied by the mid-upper gunner and the tail-gunner and the snaking metal trays that fed bullets to their guns. Now it was unmanned apart from the aerial photographer who – having nothing to do until they reached their survey line – sat wrapped in a blanket and reading a comic book, his back turned to Morgan. It was bitterly cold.

  Morgan put his mouth close to the photographer’s ear and shouted above the engines. ‘Go up front and warm yourself. We’re still a couple of hours short of the fill line . . . Leave the blanket for me.’

  He watched the grateful photographer scramble across the wing spar into the central compartment. Then he picked up the blanket. Morgan had won a new US Air Force parka and flight pants in a poker game at Thule two nights before. But even the superior American kit would not warm him by itself. Keeping his headset on, though still unplugged, to give him some relief from the battering engines, he wrapped himself in the blanket and settled on the floor, knees bent, back resting against the curve of the fuselage. Then he pulled up his hood to block out the light. In a minute or two he was gone.

  He was dazed by the noise, unsure where he was. The photographer bent over him, fumbling for his intercom cord. Morgan sat there, blinking stupidly, and watched as the photographer plugged him into the circuit.

  ‘I’ve got him, skipper,’ a voice said in his ears. ‘He wasn’t jacked in.’

  The sun blazed through the port Trimetrogon window, set low in the side of the plane. We must have turned west while I was asleep, thought Morgan. We must be almost there.

  ‘Pilot here – I think you’d better come up front, Wing Commander. There’s something down there that you’ll want to see.’

  There was no one in the central compartment. The wireless operator had moved forward into the cockpit, crouching behind the pilot and flight engineer. Tomkinson the navigator must have gone into the nose, thought Morgan. He probably saw it first.

  He felt very tired despite his short sleep. He had done his part. He had brought them here, to the last place on earth. That ought to be the end of it. He plugged in his headset and keyed the mic.

  ‘We should fly a couple of photo survey lines. Otherwise no one will believe us. Don’t worry about fuel. I’ll scrub the rest of the operation. We’ll go home when we’re done here.’

  The Lancaster climbed to survey altitude at 20,000 feet and turned onto a south–north photographic line. Morgan, who had gone back to the astrodome, turned his face to the tail. He watched clouds being born in the track of the aircraft, four white lines, ruler-straight, across the empty blue sky. Prison stripes. A graticule descending on the unmapped lands below.

  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’ Barnett was still pestering the navigator. ‘We’re not too far north? That’s not Rowley Island?’

  ‘A hundred per cent. I’ve taken a sun fix, radio fix, dead reckoning, everything. Besides, that island must be eighty miles by sixty. It’s way too big to be Rowley Island. Or the Spicer Islands. Or anything else on the charts of Foxe Basin.’

  ‘Then how come it’s not on the map?’

  ‘Beats me . . . Drake and Goldsmith flew this way two years ago and they didn’t see it.’

  ‘I guess there could have been sea fog that day, like that patch up ahead there.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s bigger than Prince Edward Island . . . Looks like we’ve discovered our own province, boys.’

  ‘It’s nothing but muskeg and ponds.’ This was a third voice, less elated. Maybe the flight engineer.

  ‘Still,’ said Barnett, ‘real estate is real estate. How’s it going back there, photographer? No one is going to believe us if you screw up this line.’

  ‘Fine, sir. All good.’

  Morgan was still watching contrails form in the vortices behind the engines, boiling away from the plane. Off in the distance, above the horizon, they softened and spread, turned grey and organic. Then they were no longer there any more, sublimated back into the air.

  ‘Navigator here. I can see two more new islands down there. One off the starboard beam. The other dead ahead.’

  ‘I do believe you’re right, Tommo . . . Do you see them, Wing Commander?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Morgan, still watching the contrails.

  ‘They look pretty small.’

  ‘Only compared to the big one,’ said the navigator. ‘That one out to starboard must be twenty miles by ten . . . As if this country wasn’t big enough already.’

  ‘Three brand-new islands. Not bad for one day’s work.’

  They fell into silence. The aircraft droned onward, following its gyros to the geographical north. Morgan looked at the compass repeater mounted in the astrodome. It moved in leaps and jerks, randomly driven by vibrations of the airframe. To a magnetic compass everywhere up here was the same. He turned to the front and looked down.

  Treeless brown tundra grouted with streams.

  The new islands sat low in the water: other airmen might have overflown them in winter and mistaken them for land-fast ice. Travellers by sea – Foxe, Parry, the whalers, Charles Hall – could have missed them in the fogs which smothered these waters in summer.

  That is what the cartographers will tell themselves. They won’t even notice that their job is done.

  The aircraft cruised at 20,000 feet. From here he could see about 170 miles in any direction. A circle 340 miles across. The diameter of that circle was about five degrees of the earth’s circumference. One seventy-fourth of the full way around. This was more of the world than he wanted to be able to see in one go.

  What could he see, measured as an area? He was good at arithmetic: he did the rough sums in his head. By his reckoning, he was looking down at about half of one-thousandth of the planet. That sounded better, but not much. And if he went only a little higher he would see a lot more. The B-29 that had brought him to Frobisher Bay could go better than 30,000 feet: you had to go high when your bombs were atomic. At that altitude the curve of the earth would be clear to eyes that looked for it. Soon people would go higher still, until the sky turned black and the stars shone without blinking and the shrunken globe twisted beneath them, visible in its entirety, naked, nothing to hide, a futility framed by a void.

  But at 20,000 feet the world hadn’t yet lost all its mystery. To the west, slabs of drifting pack ice seemed to float above Foxe Basin, borne upward by the light. Beyond that, on the horizon, was the murky coast of the Melville Peninsula, where Charles Hall had wandered in search of Franklin’s ghosts.

  The plane now crossed the northern edge of the largest of the new islands, over a nameless new sound, clear of ice, which stretched between it and its two smaller neighbours. That white line below m
ust be waves on a beach, waves breaking on land which, relieved of the weight of the ancient ice-cap, the ice-cap which lingered on those mountains far ahead, slowly re-emerged from under the water, rising an inch a year faster than the melting ice could raise the sea-level around it. Some day that ice-cap would return. From up here, if you could only watch for long enough, you would see how the planet was breathing.

  The Inuit of Fury and Hecla Strait had told Francis Crozier that a strange and terrible people lived down there, the last survivors of a much older race. Maybe they were still there. If so, Morgan hoped that they, like himself, had the sense to keep hidden.

  ‘Hey,’ said the navigator, ‘I’ve been thinking: what do you reckon they’ll call these islands?’

  ‘Now there’s a question,’ said Barnett. ‘We saw them first. We should get to name them. We’re the explorers, right?’

  ‘Then I want the big one,’ said the navigator. ‘Tomkinson Island.’

  ‘I’m the skipper. I should get the big one!’

  ‘I saw it first.’

  ‘Okay. Noblesse oblige. You can have the big one. I’ll take the second one. I christen thee Barnett Island. God bless her and all who freeze on her.’

  ‘What about the third island? That little one? Who gets to name that?’

  ‘Wing Commander? You’re senior. Do you want your own island? Somewhere to take the wife and kids?’

  Morgan remembered Meares Island, up the west coast from Victoria. It was uninhabited, so Meares had hired a boat to go and claim it in person. As a joke, he’d said. But Morgan’s own name was a common one: there must be lots of Morgan Islands.

  What about Elizabeth Island, then? There must be plenty of them too. He knew of one in particular: Elizabeth Island, two hundred miles south west of Cape Horn, where Francis Drake had landed four centuries before on his voyage around the planet. Drake had collected wood and plants and water, killed penguins for food. He had claimed this new land for England and named it for his queen.