A Funny Place to Hold a War

by John Harris

  They covered the corpse with a blanket, then, as the black man beckoned, they followed him again to where they found two of the depth charges. Ginger held back warily.

  ‘Leave ’em alone,’ he said.

  ‘They can’t explode on dry land,’ Kneller pointed out. ‘They’re triggered off by water pressure.’

  Ginger was unconvinced. ‘There’s four hundred and fifty pounds o’ explosive in them things,’ he pointed out. ‘An’ the bloody plungers what set ’em off are missing. We once jettisoned one in the sea at Mount Batten. The armourers said it had been made safe but it blew up the next day just the same.’

  Kneller ignored the superstitious mutterings and, using a machete, cut boughs from the trees to make a stretcher. Rolling the depth charges on to it, they carried them to the edge of the river and left them there.

  ‘The armourers can collect ’em now,’ Kneller said. ‘Let’s get the stiff.’

  Ginger nodded. Calling bodies by another name always made it easier.

  The black man helped carry the corpse to the water’s edge. As they placed it on the deck of the pinnace, a small black boy appeared on the bank from the Dutch mess hut. He was carrying a dripping sack containing bottles of beer and lumps of ice.

  They looked at each other and Feverel eyed the blanketed bundle at their feet. ‘Sometimes,’ he said softly, ‘the advantages of this job are hard to distinguish. But there are a few.’

  four

  It was evening when they returned to Jum and, as always at the end of the day, the sun was at its hottest.

  As the pinnace put the mooring party ashore and headed for its buoy, Ginger Donnelly paused outside the packing case which did duty as the office of Flying Officer Rodney Hobson, who ran the marine section. Consisting of little more than a table piled with files and a couple of wire baskets, it was illuminated and ventilated by two large wooden flaps which were raised in the morning and let down in the evening.

  Hobson could see Ginger standing doubtfully outside, leaning on his long forked stick and wearing faded oilstained shorts fringed like a Victorian tablecloth with too much washing. They were held up by a length of heaving line, and his battered pith helmet had been sat on so often it was now entirely without shape. As Hobson watched, he lifted it to scratch his head, disclosing a dusty-looking thatch that seemed to have been stood on end by an electric shock. Grubby stockings sagged over unpolished shoes made grey by salt water, so that he looked more like a poacher than an airman.

  Hobson knew Ginger well. They were both regulars and eighteen months before, near the Horn of Africa, Hobson had been a sergeant while Ginger had been an aircraftman, first class. Providence had finally brought Hobson’s long-awaited commission and Ginger’s promotion to leading aircraftman and they had celebrated with a few others by being posted to this forgotten corner of the West Coast.

  He watched Ginger for a while, drawing slowly on a cigarette. No less than the men under him, Hobson was yellow with mepacrine, had long since lost any surplus fat in the heat, and was suffering from the dust which chafed his neck along the collar of his shirt.

  At least, he thought, the Harmattan that came after Christmas and slammed doors and filled the eyes, nose and mouth with grit all the way from the Sahara had now stopped. But if it wasn’t one thing it was another, because now the wind had dropped, the flies had started, and soon the rainy season would begin and then it would be mosquitoes, malaria and other assorted miseries.

  He sighed. There was no war on in their immediate vicinity but people still died. The latest crashes brought up the number lost during his stay in Jum to three Catalinas and a Sunderland, and in addition there had been one or two drownings as flight mechanics who had fallen from the machines they were servicing were swept away by the swift-running tide. ‘A dropped spanner’s a lost spanner’ was the saying on flying-boat bases, but nobody ever bothered to make sure that the men who worked on the flimsy platforms twenty feet above the water could swim. At Jum the tide ran out at a good ten knots, which to a poor swimmer meant death, and in Hobson’s own section two men had also been burned to death when a refueller had gone up in the last rainy season. The big, all-steel, forty-five-foot-long boats carried two and a half thousand gallons of aviation spirit and eight-horse petrol engines to pump it to the aircraft. With the humidity at its worst in the rains, these had a habit of throwing out six-inch sparks, and if fumes had built up in the cockpit that was that. Refueller 62 had vanished in a flare of flame and only the quick action of the fitter who had cut the ropes had saved the Sunderland to which it was tied. The day afterwards, while they were still getting over the accident, a depth charge had fallen from a wing and fractured the skull of the coxswain of the bomb scow who had happened to be standing just beneath.

  Hobson had arrived in Jum via South Africa, bringing with him forty-odd men who had served with him in East Africa. One had drowned when a boat had overturned. One had died while a passenger on a test flight in one of the crashed Catalinas; two had been fatally burned when Refueller 62 had exploded; another, brought up in central London among cinemas, dance halls and pubs, had been unable to adjust to Jum and cut his throat; one had lost an eye in a trivial accident involving a fallen tree; and another had died of blackwater fever at a base further down the coast. And all without even the doubtful satisfaction of being properly involved in the war.

  As Hobson laid down his cigarette, Ginger made up his mind. Jamming his pith helmet back on his head, he tapped on the door.

  ‘It’s hot,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is a bit,’ Hobson agreed. ‘Come in, Ginger. In trouble?’

  ‘A bit.’ Ginger scratched his crotch. ‘I got tinea somethin’ awful.’

  ‘Haven’t we all? Still, you’ve no need to worry until it goes far enough down your legs to meet your foot rot coming up. Is that all?’

  ‘No,’ Ginger admitted. ‘There’s somethin’ else.’

  There was no formality between them. Like Ginger, Hobson had started working boats round aircraft in the days when T E Shaw had still been with them, and there was little either didn’t know about the other.

  ‘I was up the lagoon that night when X-X-ray went in,’ Ginger said. ‘In me canoe.’

  ‘Doing what, Ginger?’ Hobson asked.

  ‘Just sniffin’ round.’

  ‘That woman of yours?’

  ‘Which woman?’ Ginger was all innocence.

  ‘I know you’ve got one.’

  ‘She’s only a friend. I’m dead ’ot on friendship.’

  Hobson waved away the protest. ‘Never mind, Ginger. You shouldn’t have been there. You know as well as I do that nothing’s supposed to be out there except the duty boats when there’s flying.’

  Ginger looked indignant. ‘I wasn’t nowhere near the flarepath,’ he said. ‘I know what’s what. I picked up Purdy.’

  ‘It’s lucky for Purdy that Leading Aircraftman Donnelly was somewhere he shouldn’t have been.’

  ‘I saw a boat out yonder.’

  For a moment there was silence then Hobson lit cigarette and offered one to Ginger.

  ‘Go on,’ he said warily, wondering what was coming, because it was unlike Ginger to sneak. ‘Somebody been taking one of the dinghies out without permission?’

  ‘It wasn’t one of ours,’ Ginger said. ‘The duty dinghy had put the crew aboard and was heading back here. The seaplane tender was in its proper place wi’ the Cat as she started her run. This boat was starboard o’ the flarepath, up against the mangroves on the side of the river. There was two men in it. I heard ’em talking. They wasn’t speakin’ English.’

  ‘Did they see you?’

  ‘When I go up-river,’ Ginger said, ‘nobody sees me.’

  ‘I’ve noticed. Were they Dutch? There are half a dozen of them working the mine at Yima. They’ve been there a long time. They go down to Freetown from time to time by the Bunce.’

  ‘They don’t go by this boat I saw. It wasn’t that launch they use. I know tha
t. I’ve seen it come up the Bunce. And it wasn’t that coaster that comes in from French Guinea to pick up ore – the Maréchal Grouchy. I know what boats they have and what they use. This wasn’t none of them. And they wasn’t wogs.’

  ‘Could they have been fishing?’

  ‘They’d never catch anything where they was.’

  ‘You’d know, of course.’ Hobson took a pull at his cigarette and studied Ginger. ‘Ginger, you’re getting at something. What is it?’

  ‘Sir…’ Ginger finally gave Hobson the respect to which he was due and Hobson nodded ironically ‘…them two in that boat was watchin’ X-X-ray.’

  ‘Landon’s aircraft? Why?’

  ‘I dunno. When I looked round after the crash they’d gone. As if they’d been waitin’ to see it crash and when they’d seen it crash they’d gone ’ome.’

  Hobson leaned forward. ‘Have you told anybody about this?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I think we’d better. The Wingco might be interested.’

  The Wingco was interested.

  He listened to what Hobson had to say then slowly lit a cigarette.

  ‘Did anyone else see this boat, Hobby?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve asked the piermaster and among the duty crew, sir,’ Hobson said. ‘It seems only Donnelly saw it and even he’s beginning to wonder if it was imagination.’

  Molyneux puffed at his cigarette. Sierra Leone wasn’t the happiest area in the world. The Vichy French who surrounded them were surprisingly hostile and the chief nightmare of the police in Freetown was the possibility of an incendiary bomb in one of the military bases or among the stores that lined the harbour because black Frenchmen never found it hard to cross from French Guinea without passes. Despite the fact that everybody knew saboteurs were being trained beyond the Scarcies river in case the Germans won and it came to invasion, since they often brought smuggled cattle across with them, with food short the police occasionally had to look the other way.

  He also knew of an aircraft which had been shot down the previous year while attempting to spy on a British convoy in Freetown harbour. When an attempt had been made to get on friendly terms with the French, he had had to detail several of his officers to attend the ceremony round the hurriedly tidied grave among the ant-heaps in the cemetery at Hawkinge Town.

  He hadn’t been sure then what it added up to but it hadn’t convinced him that all the French in French West Africa were friendly towards the British. Even local problems couldn’t easily be shrugged off. Nationalism was growing in Sierra Leone and there was a severe shortage of rice in the colony because Syrian traders kept cornering the supplies and the Africans were restless. Shops had been looted and up-country there had even been a few minor riots which had necessitated units of the West African Frontier Force being turned out to help the hard-pressed police. At Jum the problem manifested itself as raids on the camp. Gates couldn’t keep out raiders who swam or paddled round the boundary fence and occasionally Africans, their naked bodies greased with palm oil, slipped into the huts at night to steal whatever they could lay their hands on.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘both these aircraft burst into flames. I’ve seen flying-boat crashes before but never with flames. Is this chap of yours reliable?’

  ‘As far as discipline’s concerned,’ Hobson said, ‘no, sir.’

  ‘Known him long?’

  ‘We joined up at roughly the same time.’

  ‘Why was he where he was? He shouldn’t have been.’

  ‘I know that. He knows it, too, but he’s been at this job long enough not to take chances or risk lives. He’s just not very good at obeying orders. He has a canoe which he uses when he gets a chance.’

  ‘Fishing?’

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘He’s got a woman?’

  ‘Two of coffee, one of milk. Half-African, half-Syrian, I think.’

  ‘How did he manage that feat?’

  Hobson shrugged. ‘Ginger’s quite a character,’ he said. ‘He’s not what you’d call particularly clever but he has a gift for things. He catches snakes and does it surprisingly well. He also picks up native tongues as if he’d been speaking them all his life. In East Africa he was speaking three varieties of Bantu. On the way here, we did a short stint at the Cape and in three weeks he was speaking some Afrikaans and a bit of Malay. He runs one of the shore gangs – mostly Temne and Mende – and he knows what they’re saying and they know what he’s saying. He didn’t recognize what the men in the boat were saying.’

  ‘Could it have been French?’

  ‘It might have been. He wouldn’t know French because he’s never had occasion to speak it.’

  Molyneux stubbed out his cigarette and rose.

  ‘I find all this rather intriguing, Hobby,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll go and see Groupy.’

  Group Captain Robert Judd Strudwick, MC, DFC, ought never to have been in West Africa.

  He was tall and had conquered female hearts in his youth by his devastatingly good looks. At the age of fifty-two he was still good-looking but they were now the soft good looks of an ageing man who had always been used to the good things of life. He had fought with great skill and determination over the Western Front in the other war and become well-known as one of the great fighter pilots of his day. This skill had stood him in good stead when the war was over and he had remained in the RAF, where he had eventually reached the rank of wing commander. Unfortunately, there he had stuck because it had been discovered that a warrior mighty in battle wasn’t necessarily a man capable of organization, something high rank demanded. He had finally retired, not much mourned, in 1937 but in 1939 had grabbed at the opportunity to get back into uniform and, given the acting rank of group captain, had been put in command of a fighter station in Essex. Since during the Battle of Britain he’d had a tendency to disappear into the air in his Spitfire whenever possible, he had never been around when he was wanted and had even managed to get himself shot down near Canterbury, fortunately without much damage to himself beyond a severe shaking which had made him realize he was older than he’d thought.

  Deciding he was becoming a nuisance, his superior officers had shunted him to a training command in the West of England, but Strudwick was wealthy and his wife had a title and influence, and his demands to be more actively engaged had finally grown so strident someone had had the bright idea of sending him to Jum, where he was out of the way and could do little harm. He was forbidden to fly in command of an aircraft.

  Strudwick didn’t like Jum, he didn’t like West Africa and he didn’t like the ordinance that forbade him flying, but he had always lived in style with servants, big houses and big cars. And, to Flying Officer Hobson’s disgust, he had collared for his private use one of the marine section’s desperately needed seaplane tenders. He had had it painted white, given it the name White Bird and had taken over a complete crew who were expected to be immaculately dressed at all times.

  He used the boat to visit the commanding officers at Hawkinge and Brighton and to go down to Freetown. When the heat was particularly oppressive, he could always find an excuse to visit the senior naval officer or the air officer commanding. At twenty knots a boat was a splendid way of cooling off. Group Captain Strudwick had aged in an air force when senior officers were men of privilege, and he believed in exacting his due demands to the hilt.

  He listened to what Wing Commander Molyneux had to say, then looked up.

  ‘I believe you’re trying to suggest something, my boy,’ he said.

  Molyneux frowned. He disliked Strudwick and resented him calling him his boy. With a double DFC, he felt he was nobody’s boy and didn’t enjoy being patronized. ‘I feel perhaps we ought to investigate this boat that was seen, sir,’ he said. ‘I know we’ve had crashes which can probably be put down to the conditions but it seems to me we ought not merely to accept things that leave us in some doubt.’

  Strudwick leaned back in his chair. ‘You’re surely not suggesting sabotage, are
you?’

  Molyneux wasn’t quite sure what he was suggesting but he certainly felt they ought not to ignore Ginger Donnelly’s item of news.

  Strudwick heard him out, his expression disinterested. ‘Everybody out here suddenly seems to have got the wind up,’ he said. ‘Sounds a bit like panic to me. And, undermanned as we are, we have better things to do than go sniffing about for non-existent spies. Were you proposing to use people from your squadron?’

  Molyneux was not. His squadron consisted of hard-working flying crews and hard-working ground crews, many of whom, suffering from the effects of the climate and indifferent rations, were having a difficult enough time as it was. ‘My people are already hard-pressed,’ he said.

  ‘How about Mackintosh? Is he prepared to spare anyone?’

  ‘I doubt it, sir.’

  Strudwick shrugged. ‘Well, the base has no one.’ He leaned back in his chair again. ‘As it happens, first, I think this man Donnelly’s suffering from too much sun. Second, if he did see someone, it was a native canoe with a couple of fishermen in it who shouldn’t have been there. We’ll have the local police go round the riverside villages again, warning them there’ll be trouble if they persist. Third, I can’t imagine why anyone should wish to be interested in what happens here. God knows, I’m not.’

  Molyneux persisted. ‘Might we not call in the civilian police from Freetown, sir?’

  Strudwick eyed him coldly ‘We don’t want those chaps poking around here,’ he said. ‘This is an RAF station.’

  It was an old service attitude. The idea of calling in the civilian police was anathema because it suggested some kind of disgrace. Molyneux recognized the way of thinking.

  ‘The civilian police already have their hands full,’ Strudwick went on. ‘There were rice riots out at Gbani last week. Even shooting. We’ll handle it ourselves.’

  Molyneux drew a deep deliberate breath. In an ordinary airman, it would have been called ‘dumb insolence’, which was a chargeable offence, but Molyneux was not an ordinary airman but a wing commander with a double DFC and Strudwick realized he would have to do something.