A Funny Place to Hold a War

by John Harris

  ‘Come to that,’ Cazalet said, ‘if he was a Frenchman and was wanting to join the Free French, which I gather he claimed before he became unconscious, why was he at Lungi? The nearest place in Sierra Leone to Kissidougou is Sefadu and that’s only fifty miles from the railway at Pendembu. So why didn’t he go to Pendembu or Bo and take the railway to Freetown, instead of turning up on the wrong side of the river at Lungi? What else did he say?’

  Morgan smiled. ‘I thought someone might ask questions,’ he said. ‘So I wrote it down.’ He fished out a sheet torn from a notebook and placed it on the table. ‘It was all a bit disjointed but he said something I didn’t catch which was to happen “im August”. “Zehnte August”. Tenth of August. Then he kept repeating numbers – AS29 was one. Another was WS24. There was also an RS number and an OS number. I didn’t get them properly. What are they? Cyphers?’

  Molyneux frowned. ‘They sound to me,’ he said, ‘like convoys.’

  Although Ginger Donnelly was by no means a fast thinker, he was also no fool. He had kept the bottle of Bière Etoile on his locker ever since his visit to Makinkundi and now, following the rescue of the dying man from Lungi, he began to think about it again.

  As he had listened to the comments of the medical officer, the padre and Wing Commander Molyneux, the thing had begun to hang together. Men in a boat on the night X-X-ray had crashed, speaking a language he couldn’t recognize; a bottle of French beer turning up in Makinkundi, which was only around eighty miles as the crow flew from the border of French Guinea; and now an unknown man at Lungi claiming to be French but speaking German.

  He made up his mind in the middle of directing his gang of Africans in the pushing of a seaplane tender on its cradle towards the slip. He simply stopped what he was doing and, leaving the sweating Sergeant Maxey yelling, ‘Come on! Two-six! Shove!’ just walked away. When Maxey turned round to look for him he was halfway to the hut where he lived. Ten minutes later he was outside the door of Hobson’s office. It had been raining again and the airman who clerked for the section, a neat young man who had once worked on the stock exchange and preferred pushing a pen to handling a boat, looked up to see Ginger’s pale-lashed eyes blinking at him through the drips that fell from the roof. Ginger could never have been called handsome and, with the mepacrine yellow that stained his skin, and the soaked overalls that clung to his scraggy frame, he had the appearance of a wet evil sprite. The clerk frowned. He didn’t like Ginger. Ginger didn’t like him. It made everything very easy.

  ‘Op it,’ Ginger said, jerking his head.

  ‘This is my office.’

  ‘I said ‘op it. Go and ‘ave a drink. They got a barrel of water in the ‘angar made all nice an’ clean wi’ purifyin’ tablets. Go and ‘ave a swaller. It’s stopped rainin’.’

  The clerk eyed Ginger for a moment then decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Pretending unconcern, he vanished and Ginger pushed through his office, knocking to the floor with his stick a pile of papers and the clerk’s tin mug. He didn’t bother to pick them up.

  As he placed on Hobson’s desk the empty beer bottle he’d been cherishing, the sun, which had been struggling to pierce the rain clouds, managed it at last in a waft of heat, and the ray of light fell on it as if it were a spotlight.

  Hobson studied the bottle gravely, then looked up, never very surprised by any action of Ginger’s. ‘Ginger,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you cared.’

  The attempt at humour passed over Ginger’s head. Reaching forward he turned the bottle round so that the label faced Hobson. ‘It’s French,’ he pointed out.

  Hobson studied the label. Its significance struck him at once.

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Upriver. Makinkundi.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘Yeh, I been out ’ere a long time now. I’ve drunk beer in Freetown bars. I’ve drunk beer in ‘Awkinge Town and Brighton. I never seen that one afore.’

  ‘No, Ginger.’ Hobson said quietly. ‘Neither have I. Where did your – er – your girlfriend get it?’

  ‘Boyfriend, I reckon.’

  ‘I thought you were her boyfriend.’

  ‘She’s got one or two others.’

  Hobson pushed a cigarette packet forward and Ginger helped himself.

  ‘You’re telling me something, Ginger,’ Hobson said. ‘It might help if you’d use words.’

  Ginger was unoffended. He indicated the bottle. ‘There’s a bundu ceremony coming off soon. She bought it for the booze-up they ‘ave afterwards. Somebody musta slipped it over the border. Somebody where this feller who got it for ’er works.’

  Hobson was still staring at Ginger’s bottle as a smart naval launch from Freetown turned into the creek and headed towards the base. Its crew were putting on a good show, clearly determined to show the junior service how to do things, and as it approached the deckhands were standing stiffly to attention with ropes and boat-hooks in the best naval fashion.

  Unfortunately, the tide race at Jum was tricky – especially after the rains – and as the launch did a smart swing-to with its stern, the bow whacked unexpectedly against the catamaran with a crash that sent the crew staggering to one side. The passenger in the well of the launch, a commissioned engineer with a weather-beaten face, who had once been a chief petty officer, snarled something under his breath about ‘bloody ’am-fisted matelots’ and scrambled ashore, a magnificent figure in white against the gaunt, sweating, muddy men who worked and lived in the swamps.

  He had half-expected to be received in naval fashion – not exactly a red carpet or even a bos’n’s pipe because the RAF were a bloody uncivilized lot who didn’t know how to go about things – but at least someone to salute. Nobody took any notice of him, however, until he found himself looking through the open window of Hobson’s shabby office. Hobson was still looking at Ginger’s bottle and, seeing the spectacle in white outside, neater and tidier than anything he’d seen for months, he rose to his feet.

  ‘Looking for somebody?’ he asked.

  The naval man was just about to bark at him when he spotted the blue stripe on Hobson’s shoulder and changed his mind.

  ‘Wing Commander Mackintosh?’

  ‘Up the hill there,’ Hobson said.

  ‘How do you get there?’ The sun was blazing down now and the naval man, used as he was to a breeze blowing off the sea, was beginning to feel the sticky heat of the creek and was wondering where the transport was.

  ‘Usually,’ Hobson said, ‘we walk. I’ll walk up with you, if you like. I’m going that way.’

  He picked up Ginger’s bottle and led the way down the rickety jetty. The naval man stared down his nose at the jetty, and Hobson smiled.

  ‘We’re supposed to be having a decent place built for us,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately it never seems to get started.’ He indicated a group of concrete piles lying on the mud surrounded by land crabs and mudhoppers. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘they’ll bring a pile driver down and start knocking them in, and then we’ll get a proper jetty and some decent housing here. As it happens, though, it won’t affect me much. I’m due for home.’

  ‘You’re lucky.’ The naval man spoke with feeling because he’d only recently arrived and he didn’t like Sierra Leone very much.

  They continued talking as they headed along the jetty and Hobson couldn’t resist getting in a dig, because the people in Freetown, who complained about conditions louder than anyone else, always collared everything worth having – including the drink. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘there always seems to be something more important to do down in your neck of the woods. It’s amazing how much they seem able to provide for headquarters in Freetown where the air’s salubrious, and how little for us unhappy lot up here in the swamps where it’s not. Perhaps it’s because headquarters esteem their comfort more than they do ours, or perhaps it’s because the builders don’t like swamps and mosquitoes.’

  Despite his teasing, Hobson’s manner was gentle and
by the time they had climbed the hill the naval man had thawed a little. He had discovered that, like himself, Hobson was a Yorkshireman and they were on friendly terms as they approached Mackintosh’s office.

  ‘Purvis.’ The naval man introduced himself. ‘If ever you’re down in the harbour, find your way aboard HMS Gleaner, boom defence vessel. We hoisted your aircraft up, I can promise you a gin.’

  ‘I’d like to do the same for you,’ Hobson said. ‘But unfortunately up here it’s harder to get. The mess runs out occasionally and I couldn’t guarantee it.’

  Molyneux was in his office, reading Hacker’s first report on M-Mother. Hacker was in no doubt that M-Mother’s near-miss had been due to some sort of explosion near the waterline. This was clearly what Cazalet had been suggesting and now, it seemed, they had proof.

  He looked up as Hobson appeared, then frowned as he placed Ginger’s bottle on the table.

  ‘What’s this, Hobbie?’ he said. ‘Are we celebrating something?’

  “Fraid not, sir,’ Hobson said. ‘In fact, it’s empty.’

  Molyneux looked puzzled and Hobson explained. ‘Nothing very special about it, sir,’ he said. ‘Just an ordinary beer bottle. The only thing that makes it different is that it’s French.’ He turned the bottle round so that the label faced Molyneux. ‘It came from Makinkundi. One of my chaps got it.’

  ‘The one with the girlfriend?’

  ‘Exactly. She got it from a boyfriend. Now, what,’ Hobson asked, ‘would a French beer bottle – it was full when Ginger got it – be doing at Makinkundi where there are no Frenchmen?’

  As they sat studying the bottle, the corporal clerk from Mackintosh’s office a few yards away, put his head round the door.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt you, sir,’ he said, ‘but Wing Commander Mackintosh wonders if you could step into his office for a minute?’

  Molyneux looked at Hobson who shrugged. ‘The navy’s visiting,’ he said. ‘Probably the boom defence vessel’s report on A-Apple. Brought by a commissioned engineer working with the naval diving teams.’

  Molyneux rose, then he frowned. ‘Why the hell would he bother to bring it personally?’ he asked. ‘If it didn’t contain anything special, he’d have sent it by teleprinter. Come on, Hobbie, this sounds interesting.’

  Commissioned Engineer Purvis had laid a folder of photographs on Mackintosh’s desk and he and Mackintosh were bent over them, studying them.

  ‘Mr Purvis,’ Mackintosh said, ‘has something interesting to tell us. Not at all what we expected.’

  Purvis was sure of his facts because he’d been fishing wreckage out of the sea for a large part of his naval career. He pointed to one of the photographs. It showed the hole in Flying Officer Knight’s A-Apple.

  ‘Sea water does funny things to aeroplanes,’ he said heavily. ‘But I’ve never seen it do that before.’

  He indicated the photograph again. ‘It puzzled me,’ he went on, ‘so I took it to our salvage experts. They had no doubt. They said it was an explosion and that it came from inside the aircraft.’

  Molyneux’s eyes widened. ‘Inside?’

  ‘That’s what they said.’

  ‘But there’s nothing to explode there,’ Mackintosh pointed out. ‘That hole’s in the hull, sport. Beneath the floorboards. Somewhere under the galley near the drogue stowage. There’s no machinery there and no depth charges.’

  Purvis was unmoved. ‘They reckoned something in the region of a five-pound charge,’ he went on. ‘It blew out the hole and, since the aluminium was bent outwards by it, it acted as a scoop.’

  ‘And with the aircraft at take-off speed,’ Mackintosh said slowly, ‘it would shovel up tons of water in seconds. No wonder the poor bastards stood on their nose and went in.’

  Purvis’ report, coming on top of Hacker’s report and the appearance of Ginger’s beer bottle, changed things at once.

  Mackintosh immediately obtained the name of every man who had worked on the aeroplane and questioned them all at length about their movements on the day of the crash. It proved only that they were all in the clear. This left the crew – who were not available for questioning because they were all dead save the rear gunner who was still in hospital – or somebody unknown who had been aboard the machine when he shouldn’t.

  It was at this point that Ginger remembered an extra man in the lorry that had returned from Freetown full of time-expired men on the afternoon of the explosion at Giuru.

  ‘That blond feller,’ he said to Feverel. ‘The one ’oo wouldn’t sing. ‘Oo was ’e?’

  ‘I didn’t know him,’ Feverel admitted. ‘And if he’s time-expired, it means he’s been here as long as we have and we should have done. Didn’t Trixie Tristram know him?’

  They sought out Trixie in the snug bower he shared with one of his friends in what had originally been a storeroom in one of the Nissens. It was surprisingly colourful, with pictures on the wall and pink ribbon on the mosquito nets, and smelled of perfume.

  ‘That feller in the lorry coming back from Freetown,’ Ginger said. “’E was standing next to you. Did you know him?’

  Trixie hedged. After they’d returned to the camp, the fair-haired boy had disappeared and, to his great disappointment, Trixie had never seen him since. ‘No, dear,’ he said cautiously. ‘I never saw him before in my life. He asked me in Freetown if the lorry was going back to camp and I said it was, so he hitched a lift. That’s all I know. He said his name was Paul.’

  ‘Paul what?’

  Trixie looked coy. ‘I don’t bother with the “what” part, dear. Paul’s enough for me.’

  They passed on the information at once to Hobson who passed it on to Molyneux and Mackintosh. A check was immediately made of everybody who’d returned to the camp in the lorry, and the police corporal in command at the gate at the time of the return was put on a charge for permitting it to pass inside without identity cards being checked.

  A search for the missing airman was immediately set in motion but, as Molyneux had expected, he wasn’t turned up, though, when questioned, more than one man of those in the lorry from Freetown mentioned him and none of them knew him, which was odd, because, as Feverel had said, if he were time-expired, everybody in the lorry ought to have known him.

  ‘I think we’re trying to bolt the stable door after the bloody horse has bolted,’ Mackintosh growled.

  As the inquiries about the unknown airman increased, one of the dinghy drivers recalled taking out a man to A-Apple in the early evening. He didn’t know his name, however, and lists of passengers weren’t kept, but the piermaster remembered someone asking him which aircraft was due to take off that night and recalled that he had said A-Apple. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have done. Similar inquiries were normal enough from the odd people who appeared with equipment to do a job. The man who had asked him, he remembered, like the man who had been taken out to A-Apple, had worn normal short-legged, short-sleeved, collarless overalls like anybody else and had said he was going to check the drogues.

  Mackintosh and Molyneux looked at each other.

  ‘What was he like?’ Mackintosh asked.

  The piermaster thought for a while. ‘He was slight and fair, sir,’ he said. ‘And good-looking. Very good-looking. Like a film star.’

  Molyneux looked at Mackintosh. ‘The chap from Lungi,’ he said.

  Eight

  The AOC’s request for every aircraft to be in service kept the whole of Jum busy, particularly with the implications of what Cazalet had said and what the padre had offered.

  It seemed to Molyneux, in fact, that they ought to press their inquiries further, but Cazalet was up-country investigating a sudden upsurge of unrest over rice at Miteboi and Kabauka, and in the end Molyneux decided that, in view of the beer bottle Ginger had produced, it might be a better idea to make their inquiries at Makinkundi. As he turned the idea over in his head, his thoughts fell on the padre. It was really a case for the civilian police or the CID department of the RAF polic
e, which Molyneux knew existed, though he’d never come across it in Sierra Leone, but it occurred to him the padre might do the job more efficiently than anybody. He was a devout enough man who conducted his sparsely attended services every Sunday, struggled against the odds to provide a reading room for the bored occupants of the camp when there weren’t any books, and was always available to anyone with a problem such as deaths at home or a wife who had gone off with another man.

  But he was also unorthodox; though his habit of doing what he could for his spiritual flock in the way he did rather than pound their ears with prayer had always seemed to Molyneux to be the right one under the circumstances. The previous Christmas he had obtained several pigs to provide a Christmas dinner and when volunteers to guard them against the depredations of the natives – who were also keen to have a Christmas dinner – had not been forthcoming due to the normal indifference of the lower ranks, it had been Morgan who had sat every night on top of the pigsty with a shotgun fighting off the mosquitoes to make sure they weren’t stolen. His efforts had done more for the Church than a couple of dozen sermons.

  ‘Dhu, man,’ he had said, ‘the strength of Christianity lies not in its divisive denominations but in the behaviour of those who practise ’em, and I always did think singing “Nearer, My God, To Thee” as the ship sank was a pretty impractical solution to the problem.’

  Bored like everybody else and restless because he was blessed with a great deal of energy and little on which to expend it, when Molyneux put his idea to him, he jumped at the chance.

  ‘Sure, boy,’ he said. ‘Just leave it to me.’

  Molyneux’ next recruit was Hobson. ‘I want a boat upriver with a radio receiver,’ he explained. ‘I think somebody’s hacking down our aircraft and, if they are, they’re probably using a radio somewhere and I’d like to pinpoint where it is. And since, if I’m right, there are likely to be Germanic undertones, we need someone up there who not only speaks German but also understands the Germans. The padre.’