A Funny Place to Hold a War

by John Harris

  ‘Sounds bloody funny,’ Mackintosh said.

  ‘Isn’t everything bloody funny here?’ Molyneux asked bitterly. ‘That comedian chap hit the nail right on the head. Oysters on trees. Fishes that walk. Aeroplanes that crash for no visible reason. I’ve been here nine months now, you a bit longer, and we’ve both lost aircraft through accidents.’

  Mackintosh frowned and reached through the window to tap the ash from his pipe. ‘You know what pilots used to say in the old days, don’t you, sport? If they didn’t fancy going up, they used to claim there was no lift in the air. I’ve often thought there’s no bloody lift in the air here.’

  Sergeant Horace Maxey, of the marine section, three or four spare marine section bods and Ginger Donnelly’s gang of black labourers were shifting a cradle containing a seaplane tender suffering from worm and the exuberant marine growth of tropical waters. They were all limp with the heat and Maxey’s frantic shouts of ‘Two-six! Shove!’ didn’t stir them much. Maxey was a fretful round little man who, because of his bald head and the fact that he was always lathered with sweat, was known as The Wet Boiled Egg, and it was his job to see boats up and down the marine section slip. On the ramshackle pier behind him, flight mechanics were assembling for ferrying out to the aircraft.

  They were dressed in tropical overalls – minus collars, sleeves and legs, so that they looked like khaki combination suits – and their bodies were shiny with perspiration. Their limbs were marked with every colour of the rainbow by the unguents that had been applied to the various kinds of skin rash they had picked up or the minor cuts and grazes that refused to heal. They carried tools or spare parts and wore pith helmets, most of which had long since been sat on accidentally and lost their shape. Alongside the catamaran was a bomb scow full of depth charges because at first light Catalina P-Peter had put down after an unsuccessful attack on a U-boat a hundred miles off the coast and needed bombing-up. A heavy iron refueller trudged past the pierhead to the lagoon, the crew’s legs marked by ugly red and green sores caused by petrol or diesel getting into open pores.

  Every man was yellow, stoop-backed and slow-moving. It was too hot to move fast and the stoop was as inevitable as the saffron skin. They had arrived from England pink-cheeked and full of energy but after a few weeks of indifferent diet, enervating heat, humidity and mepacrine, all the eagerness had faded into a simple desire to sit still when they were not called on to do anything particular.

  It wasn’t so much that they were a long way from civilization. As the crow flew, they weren’t. But, isolated by the swamps in a breathless sweltering heat in a cleft in the land which halted any breeze or fresh air that might come from the sea, Jum was a lost sort of place. RAF, Hawkinge, and the naval station at Brighton, on higher ground, were quite different. In the creek at Jum, the air was still and full of the acrid smell of mangroves and the stink of diesel fumes from marine engines, which was something everybody connected with flying boats would remember all their lives.

  Beyond the end of the creek, one of Mackintosh’s Sunderlands was just taxiing in the lagoon for a test flight. The crashing of an aeroplane and the deaths of most of its crew didn’t stop the war. U-boats were still ringing Freetown and next week another crew would arrive in a new aeroplane to take the place of X-X-ray so that things could go on as before. With the thousands killed in North Africa and Russia, an accident involving a mere five men was put down as just one of the hazards of flying from a base lacking the facilities of civilized and industrialised England.

  The climate was against good and careful workmanship. Men found it hard to remain alert. Aircrew grew careless. Repairs were more difficult. Spare parts were in short supply and you used whatever was to hand. Many a Sunderland or Catalina flew with a Sierra Leone halfpenny – minted with a hole in the middle to be hung on a string round the neck of a black man not in the habit of wearing trousers – substituting for a missing engine washer; while, on the water, the same valuable and desperately needed aircraft often swung to a buoy secured to its sinker by a chain cable whose swivel was held in place by an ordinary four-inch nail because there were no heavy-duty split pins which should properly have been used.

  Coastal Command was the Cinderella of the RAF, neglected in favour of her more glamorous sisters, Bomber and Fighter Commands. Even the Germans were said to feel sorry for Coastal Command. Nobody loved them, not even their own side, and in the whole sphere of the Cinderella arm, West Africa was one of the most neglected of all. To the men flying from Jum it seemed a pretty short-sighted policy when shipping losses could lose the war.

  As usual after a crash, the mooring party had virtually taken over the pinnace, complete with rations for two days, and four hours later, roughly where Ginger Donnelly said they would be, they picked up two bodies, putty-coloured horrors swollen in the warm water and devoid of hair and fingers because the barracuda had been at them. Slipping blankets underneath them, they hoisted them from the water and searched them warily for identity discs before bundling them up and tying them with rope.

  ‘Sergeant Dugan,’ Feverel said as they brought the punt alongside the pinnace. ‘And Steen, the second pilot. Steen was split from top to bottom.’

  The pinnace crew kept well to the rear as the bodies were lifted on board. The mooring party had done the job before and the pinnace crew were quite happy to let them do it again, because the smell was one which none of them would ever forget, a pungent sweetish smell that pervaded everything and even seemed to have a taste.

  Climbing back into the punt, Feverel and Kneller started the outboard and, picking their way round the sandbanks thrown up by the tide, headed for the mangroves, where they shut off the engine and began to use a pole. Finding an opening, they were about to disappear among the curving roots when a native canoe shot round a bend in the river, its occupant waving and shouting.

  As they chugged slowly towards him, he indicated that they should follow him. Entering the mangroves, their nostrils caught by the acrid smell of rotting vegetation, they found the third body, an ugly thing that had once been a high-spirited young man but was now minus its head and one leg, draped elegantly, it seemed, across the mangroves that grew out of the mud like the arches of fan vaulting. As Feverel hacked at the roots with a machete the body fell into the water and began to float. Attaching a rope to it, they towed it to the pinnace where the usual blanket was slipped beneath it and it was hoisted on board.

  Feverel looked at Corporal Fox and indicated the Mende fisherman sitting hopefully in his canoe alongside. ‘Got any money on you?’ he asked. ‘We usually dash ’em something.’

  Fox had no money on him because in Jum there was nothing to spend money on, so instead they gave the fisherman a tin of bully beef from the boat’s store cupboard and his face cracked into a delighted smile.

  ‘Another satisfied customer,’ Feverel observed dryly.

  Everyone put Landon’s crash down to the bad luck that seemed to dog everything at Jum. An inquiry was held and the crash attributed to the effects of the climate. No one had been found who could be charged with carelessness, and the usual order was just being written to tighten things up – something which, because of the conditions and the shortages, always had to be tacitly ignored – when O-Orange, Flying Officer Paterson’s aircraft, followed.

  Paterson was a popular officer with a good crew and he had been in West Africa longer than most. He was an ex-sergeant, yellow and thin like all the old hands, but his skill with an aircraft was greater than many of his fellow officers’ and no one worried when he took off or landed because he went by the book and never took risks. His take-off was perfect and, like Landon, he had his floats up even before he left the water.

  As the machine lifted over the trees, the crew of the seaplane tender heaved a sigh of relief and turned towards the pier. The lights of the Catalina changed position in the darkness as she swung north along the coast, and she was roughly level with Makinkundi and over the river Bic when the hand who was coiling the rope
s in the well-deck of the tender heard a dull thump and, looking up, saw a red glow where he had just seen the Catalina’s navigation lights. The glow seemed to expand into an incandescent bubble of light, a chemical colour against the dark sky, billowing larger and larger, vomiting sparks like a roman candle and bursting outwards in a blinding flash of brilliant orange and sulphur yellow. Then the whole lot vanished from sight beyond the palm trees.

  ‘Oh, Christ !’ he said. ‘Another one!’

  The duty officer knew what had happened before the seaplane tender reached the jetty, because a telephone call had been received from the Bic river mine of Jan van der Pas Company, the Dutch-owned group which conducted its operations near Yima. Up there the river split into a series of smaller creeks, and at the end of one of them was a deepwater anchorage and a narrow-gauge railway that ran to a pier at Makinkundi. The mine buildings, the offices, the living quarters, the engineering shops, stood half a mile away from the pier, near the end of another creek formed by the river Bic pushing in from the sea at the other side of the little peninsula on which Yima stood. There they were clear of dust from the mine which would have laid a pink surface over everything they ate and drank and did.

  The Dutchmen had seen the aircraft explode and had telephoned just as the duty coxswain was trying to contact the orderly officer to inform him what had happened. The orderly officer dug Wing Commander Molyneux out of the camp cinema where they were having another go at Blood and Sand. Molyneux’ head jerked up at the whispered information, then he leaned across to Mackintosh, of the Sunderland squadron, who passed the message to the group captain, the MO and the padre, and they all left in a hurry.

  The group captain headed for his office to inform the air officer commanding what had happened, the medical officer for sick quarters to prepare his staff in case they were needed, the padre for the telephone exchange to ask air headquarters in Freetown to lay on transport from the harbour to the cemetery on Tower Hill, which was where the bodies would be taken this time – if there were bodies, and he suspected there would be – because it didn’t pay in the West African heat to keep them around for long.

  Trixie Tristram, who was on the switchboard, eyebrows plucked and wearing immaculately washed and starched shorts, was polishing his nails and was irritated by the interruption.

  ‘We might just as easily get a Creole clerk making a date with his girlfriend,’ he said tartly as he reached for the plugs. ‘Or a Syrian trader trying to sell industrial diamonds over the border. I’ve had them all.’

  He pushed plugs in, talking over his shoulder all the time to the padre. ‘You know what telephones are like out here. The ants make their nests in the junction boxes or the rats eat the insulation off the wire. I’ve even heard French and German…’

  ‘In Sierra Leone?’ the padre said. ‘Do you understand them?’

  Trixie tried to look modest. ‘I was on the Continental telephone exchange before the war. I often had to speak to Paris or Berlin.’

  ‘What were they saying?’

  Trixie backed down quickly because his knowledge of French and German was really limited to demanding telephone numbers or passing the time of day. ‘Well, I don’t speak them all that much,’ he admitted. ‘But I can recognize them. German’s like barbed wire in your ears. French’s different. You…’ he listened and worked the plugs again ‘…you can always enjoy French.’

  ‘What did they say?’ the padre repeated.

  Trixie looked annoyed at the probing. ‘I don’t know. It didn’t concern me.’ He sniffed fretfully. ‘We’re not supposed to listen in to conversations.’

  Molyneux was waiting by the jetty as the padre arrived. The pinnace was just pulling alongside.

  ‘The Dutchmen say she fell into the sea,’ he told Corporal Fox. ‘But a lot of stuff, including a wing, fell near their landing stage in the Bic.’

  The mooring party were already aboard and the little motor punt, dripping water to the deck, had been hoisted to the hatch top. An hour later they were passing Tagrin Point opposite Freetown and heading into the mouth of the river Rokel. If the Bunce was wide, the Rokel was even wider, an enormous expanse of water cutting deeply into the land. By daylight they were off the entrance to the river Bic, which, like the Bunce, was also really only a tributary of the greater river.

  Nobody spoke much. Like the marine section men, Molyneux was a sailor as well as an airman, part of a tightly knit community with a highly specialized way of life, web-footed warriors with verdigris on their cap badges and buttons, and a near-naval terminology of speech. Again like the marine section crews, the flying-boat men enjoyed a virtual autonomy of action, and their aircraft, like the boats, were self-contained units with a breadth of possible situations never likely to occur to land-based airmen. They had all worked in England in filthy weather on grey sullen water, in fog and rain and gale-force winds, always operating on unstable platforms, the flying crews regarding the boat crews with more than average warmth because, whatever the conditions, they never failed to put them aboard their machines.

  The entrance to the Bic was narrow, with mangrove swamps by the entrance, and turning into it, the pinnace began to move slowly inland. After a few hundred yards, they were met by a launch coming out, a large fast boat with a flared bow and powerful engines. They had often seen it in the Bunce because the Dutchmen sometimes brought it round to Makinkundi or used it for going to Freetown.

  A head appeared through the engine-room hatch and the black man on the foredeck tossed a rope. As it made fast alongside the pinnace, a white man climbed out of the cabin. He was fat and comfortable and bathed in sweat. Behind him, to Molyneux’ surprise, was Cazalet, the army colonel in charge of security in the area, whom he’d last met over drinks in the mess at Jum before the concert party’s performance.

  He saw Molyneux’ puzzled look and tried to explain his presence there. ‘Makin’ a few inquiries,’ he said. Lookin’ for a woman.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  ‘This one’s a German agent who’s been stirrin’ up trouble round Kenema. Name of Magda Fallada. A Mrs Geer, wife of a British missionary, got into conversation on the train from Blama a week ago with a Mrs Bowyer, who said she was the wife of a district commissioner at Bo. But there isn’t a district commissioner by the name of Bowyer at Bo and we think Mrs Geer’s Mrs Bowyer may be our Magda Fallada. She’s been seen in this area.’

  Cazalet’s interest in his German agent seemed of small importance to Molyneux in his concern for his missing aircraft and its crew. ‘What’s more to the point at the moment,’ he said, ‘is, did you see my aircraft crash?’

  Cazalet nodded and indicated the Dutchman. ‘Sittin’ on the veranda havin’ a gin with our friend here.’

  The Dutchman pointed. ‘She fell in the sea. But we haf here part of the wing. There iss explosion. Much flames and lights, then we hear a crash and realize iss part of the machine which falls into the swamp. We haf find it. Also there are depth charges.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t move them,’ Molyneux said. ‘If they were heading out to sea, they’d have been fused.’

  ‘We do not touch them,’ the Dutchman said. ‘Because we know they are set to explode at twenty-five feet and the basin where we moor our boats is at high tide almost thirty feet deep. A small coaster can get in.’ He gestured. ‘Now you must follow me and I must show you where iss everyt’ing. I t’ink also there iss a body. I prefer not to look. I haf not the stomach.’

  They followed the Dutchman’s launch slowly. Further along, at Yima, the river widened so that a small ship could turn round to make its exit. Behind it the land rose unexpectedly to a flat low plateau where they were scooping out the ore, and the basin, fed by a small stream, looked vaguely like a small man-made harbour. Here the mangroves had given way to sturdy palms and cotton trees, and among them they could see groups of the heavy, short-tailed monkeys of the coast watching the boats like spectators at a football match. Over their screeches came the raucous calls of
birds.

  Near the end of the creek was a landing stage with steps leading up the steep side to the flat land above. At the top was a large recreation hut on wooden piles hanging over the water to form a boathouse so that in the rainy season the Dutchmen could board their launches without being drenched. Moored near it were a heavy boat like a scow, with which the Dutchmen carried their supplies from Freetown, and a small draught dinghy with an outboard. Further down the creek several boats owned by fishermen from Yima hugged the shore, half-hidden by a high bank that stuck out into the water almost like a breakwater.

  Mooring alongside the jetty, the pinnace crew lowered the punt into the water and Kneller and Ginger Donnelly climbed in. The Dutchman gestured to a black man in shorts and shirt standing on the landing stage.

  ‘He go mit you,’ he said. ‘He show you where.’ He turned to Molyneux and the padre. ‘Meanwhile, perhaps you will permit me to take you with the colonel here back to our mess? We haf a good Bols gin.’

  As Molyneux and the padre disappeared, the black man offered to lead the way among the trees, but Ginger didn’t need a guide.

  ‘I know this place like the back of me ‘and,’ he said contemptuously. ‘I often come round ’ere. One of the bar boys lets me ‘ave a beer now and then.’

  They found the wing of the aircraft without difficulty, a flat surface of aluminium with torn edges. Then the black man pointed and they found a body lying in the grass at the foot of one of the trees.

  ‘It’s Harper, the navigator,’ Ginger said. ‘Poor sod.’