The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

by Alexander McCall Smith

Ted looked at him. “Cows? You know how to milk a cow?”

  Again, Willy nodded. “You pull . . . you pull those things. The milk comes out. It goes into the bucket.”

  “Bright lad this,” whispered the official.

  Ted had accepted him grudgingly, but he had his suspicions. “You’d think they’d send me a couple of those girls,” he remarked. “Those land girls. Do they send them my way? None of it. I get the dolt. Maybe he’s somebody’s eyes and ears – who knows?”

  Willy was keen. He was taught to milk the cows and gradually mastered the technique. He was good at muck-spreading – pitching the manure from the cart over the fields, spreading it with his fork, indifferent to the stench.

  “That stuff’s good for plants,” he said to Annie. “They grow like crazy.”

  “I can imagine it, Willy,” said Annie. “You’re learning so much, aren’t you?”

  “Could be,” said Willy.

  Willy was in charge of bringing the cows in for milking but did not have much to do with the sheep because the sheepdog would not listen to him if he tried to give commands.

  “The dog senses that he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” confided the farmer when the committee came to inspect the farm.

  “You’re doing a good deed, keeping that boy,” said the chairman.

  Ted shrugged. He had regarded Willy as a nuisance, but now he was satisfied that the young man was harmless – and was useful enough, in his way. “He doesn’t seem to know very much,” he said. “But he knows how to pull weeds and he’s handy enough with a bale of hay. Can’t complain, I suppose, though some places have got three, even four, land girls. Why not me? The government think there’s something wrong with me?”

  Willy noticed things. For all that his conversation followed its own idiosyncratic path, for all that he would turn away in the middle of an exchange and start doing something else, he could see what was going on. He noticed the occasional visits of the two men who drove up to the farm in a small green van, loaded boxes, and then drove away again without going into the farmhouse. He knew that the boxes contained chickens that Ted had slaughtered in one of the barns amidst great squawking and clouds of feathers. He knew that meat was precious and that you could not buy chickens off the ration. But the farmer had said to him, right at the beginning, “Anything you see around here, my boy, you keep to yourself, understand? No poking your nose into things that don’t concern you.” And had accompanied this with a gesture that Willy correctly interpreted as somehow threatening him, a ringing motion, as if he were strangling a chicken.

  Ted need not have worried about Willy’s reporting anything of that; the young man was not interested in such matters. But what did interest him was the condition of the animals, even if he had no idea that anything could be done about it. He noticed that the cows were lame; somebody had explained to him that hooves needed to be trimmed and if this were not done regularly, could be painful for the animal. He pointed this out to Ted, who was indifferent. “They can walk, can’t they? Nothing wrong with those cows.”

  Willy was responsible for the feeding of the two sheepdogs, Border collies, who were housed in a small shed at the back of the barn. These dogs were mother and son, Willy having put the mother to a dog owned by another farmer down in Somerset. He had done so to sell the puppies, of which there were four; good prices would be paid for a good-looking sheepdog, and he disposed of three of them within a few hours at the local market. He kept the fourth, because the mother was getting on and he would need a dog to train up to take her place.

  Willy wondered why the dogs got no meat, but were given a plain porridge topped up with a few unidentifiable kitchen scraps. It was the sort of food one gave to pigs, he thought, rather than dogs. Why not give the dogs rabbit? There were enough of those on the farm and Ted could easily shoot a few for the dogs’ pot. It was unkind, he thought, to deny a dog meat and to keep it tethered for days on end, as Ted did, in that darkened shed.

  The dogs liked Willy and whimpered as he bent down to stroke them.

  “You poor fellows,” he said, allowing them to lick him on the arms, on the face. “Someday things will get better for you. When the war’s over, maybe. Maybe then.”

  He watched Ted as he tried to train the younger dog. He used a stick, a branch he cut from the patch of willows near his pond, and he wielded this with a vicious determination. He beat the mother dog too, who cowered when he approached, scraping the ground with her belly, rolling over in the classic canine pose of submission, her legs cycling in the air as if to defend herself from impending blows.

  “Bite him, bite him,” muttered Willy under his breath.

  He told Annie about this. “Ted Butters beats the dogs,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Oh yes? When they do something wrong?”

  Willy shook his head. “Just for being dogs. He beats them because they’re dogs.”

  Annie looked at him. He had an odd turn of phrase, that boy, she thought; sometimes he said things that made you stop and think. “For no reason?” She shook her head. “He’s not a very nice man, that Ted Butters. Never was.”

  “With a stick,” said Willy.

  Annie sighed. It was too small a wrong to make a fuss about, and nobody would interfere with the way a farmer treated his dogs. For most people, that was the farmer’s business. “Lots of people are unkind to dogs, Willy.” She paused. “He doesn’t lay a finger on you, does he?” You had to be careful; Willy was not much more than a boy, really, and there were some men who had to be watched when it came to boys.

  Willy looked at her blankly. “Me?”

  “He doesn’t beat you? Or anything?”

  He laughed. “No, I said that he beats the dogs, not me. He beats them.”

  Val had overheard this conversation. She had been sitting in a corner of the kitchen with a magazine. There was very little to read, because of the paper shortages, but she had obtained this from a friend on the promise that she would give it back. It had pictures of the king and queen inspecting a house that had been bombed. They were not worried about bombs, said the report. They carried on with their duties in spite of everything that Hitler could throw at them.

  She looked up. “I hate people who mistreat dogs,” she said. “That man . . .”

  “They should run away,” said Willy. “Dogs can run away, I think.”

  Val turned a page of the magazine. ‘Sometimes they do,” she said.

  Willy was watching her. He knew that Val would be kind to dogs. They would love her, those dogs at the farm; they would lick her just as they licked him. They would appreciate somebody like Val.

  ❖ 3 ❖

  The new planes arrived one morning, all coming from the same direction, dropping down below the trees just before they landed, seeming to disappear into the countryside. But even after they disappeared they could be heard, their throaty growl rising up into the sky, before this eventually died away and silence ensued. She said to Archie, “One flew right over me. Like an eagle swooping down. Big thing. Almost knocked me off the bike.”

  “American planes,” he said. “They never told us, but they’re going to be staying at the base. They were cutting the grass on the airfield. I saw that going on and thought they might be expecting visitors. They’re setting up their own base, right next to ours.”

  “All the way from America,” said Val.

  Archie nodded. “And a good thing too. Give Goering something to think about, I’m sure. Old Fatty with his blue uniform.”

  There were not many planes, and their flying patterns seemed erratic. A fighter base would have had constant comings and goings, but this sent out no more than a flight or two a day, aircraft that Archie identified as Mosquitoes, but in US Air Force livery.

  “I know we’re not meant to talk about it,” he said to Val, “but I heard down at the pub that they’re reconnaissance people. They fly off and take photographs of what Jerry’s up to. Railway lines, factories – stuff like that.”
r />   She spoke in mock admonishment. “Careless talk costs . . .”

  He stopped her. “I’m only saying what I heard.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  She got on with her work, which that day was weeding a field of carrots. She used a hoe to begin with, but damaged so many of the carrot-tops that she laid it aside and began to do the task by hand. The field was not a big one, but ploughed and sown it had produced what seemed to Val to be a sea of carrot-tops. Archie had said she could take her time – that the task would normally have kept three or four people busy – but her slow progress was an affront to her own sense of urgency. It was as if the fate of air battles fought far away was somehow dependent on her ability to clear the carrot field of weeds; she thought of the weeds as enemies – each one plucked and tossed aside was another Nazi dealt with.

  Her back started to trouble her and there were other muscles, too, that she was only just discovering. There was a crick in her neck that brought on a vague ache somewhere at the back of her head. She stood up and stretched, trying to loosen and unknot her aching muscles. She thought: What if this war goes on indefinitely? She had not learned much history at school, but she had heard of the Hundred Years War. If it had happened before, then surely it could happen again: her children, if she ever had any, could be weeding this carrot field for year after year before passing it on to their own children.

  She mentioned this to Archie. “There was a hundred years war once, you know. A long time ago, but it lasted for a hundred years.”

  Archie set her mind at rest. “A hundred years? No, more like a hundred days. Jerry won’t stand a chance now that the Americans are here. A hundred days should do it, I’m reckoning.”

  “But the Germans still . . .”

  He did not let her finish. “They’re no match,” he said. “There are these American factories, see, turning out hundreds of planes a day. Hundreds. Rolling them out.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  An American serviceman came to the farm to ask about eggs. He arrived in a jeep, being driven too fast, with a younger man who remained at the wheel and did not get out. This younger man had an angry skin, pitted and red; he looked barely eighteen, and he avoided eye contact. He was one of those people, Val thought, who was probably always unhappy to be where he was. There were people like that. They were both dressed in uniform of some sort, or working clothes, perhaps, as it seemed very casual.

  The older man said that he was from the base. “We’re looking for more eggs,” he said. “We get a lot of our rations centrally, but not enough eggs.”

  Archie scratched his head. “I could speak to the hens.”

  The man laughed. “Sure, speak to the hens. Any chance?” Archie looked over in the direction of the hen coop. “I could get a few more chickens. If I did, I could do maybe four or five dozen a week. Depends on the hens, though.”

  “Every little helps,” said the man. “Can you deliver to the base?”

  “I can send the girl,” said Archie.

  Val glared at him, but then she smiled at the man. “I can bring them,” she said. “On my bike.”

  The man smiled. “That’s mighty helpful of you, m’am.”

  Val thought it was better to be m’am than the girl. She hoped that Archie noticed. Afterwards, when the jeep had gone, she remarked to Archie, “They have good manners, those Americans.”

  Archie nodded. “Yes, but they speak all peculiar.”

  “They probably think we do,” said Val.

  Archie looked surprised. “Us? No, we speak English as it’s meant to be spoken. It’s them that’s got it wrong.”

  A week later she made the first delivery. The base was about eight miles away, and it took her a good hour to reach it on her bicycle, three dozen eggs safely stored in the handlebar basket. They had warned the sentries of her arrival and she was waved through after the eggs had been inspected.

  “Nice,” said the sentry, and added, “For the officers, I bet.”

  He directed her to an office, a Nissen hut with a large sign on its front. It was a scene of busyness: men were milling about; planes lined the edge of the runway; a mechanic stood on the wings of one and shouted to another man below.

  A thin man in civilian clothes asked her what she wanted. She explained that the eggs were for Sergeant Lisowski; it was the name of the man who had come to the farm, and she stumbled over it. But the thin man knew who it was. “Cookhouse,” he said. ‘I’ll call him.”

  A figure emerged from the door. He was walking somewhere purposively, but stopped, and turned his head. He looked at Val.

  “Something good in there?” he asked, gesturing to the basket.

  She was shy. He was wearing uniform and there was something unusual about him. She glanced at his face. It was the eyes, which were blue, and the regularity of the features, perhaps, and the way he seemed to be smiling at her without really smiling.

  “Eggs,” she said. “Eggs from the farm. They’re for Sergeant Lis . . .” Again she stumbled over the name.

  He grinned. “Lisowski?”

  “Yes.”

  Something made her want to prolong the conversation. She reached for one of the small cardboard boxes in which the eggs were stored. She took it out and prised open the lid. He peered into it, and as he did so, the box slipped out of her hand and fell to the ground.

  He reached forward in an attempt to catch it as it fell, but he was too late. Hitting the ground with a dull thud, the box disgorged several of its eggs. Val gasped, and instinctively bent down to retrieve them, upsetting her bicycle as she did so. Slowly, but irretrievably, the bicycle toppled over, tipping out the remaining two boxes of eggs.

  “Oh, no . . .”

  She wanted to cry, and almost did. She felt flustered and embarrassed. They were all broken, she thought; every one of them. Eggshell lay on the ground covered with slippery, translucent white. Streaks of rich yellow yolk mixed with the viscous white and with grit on the ground below.

  His face registered his dismay. “Oh my, this isn’t so good.”

  She looked up at him – they were both crouched down in an attempt to fix the unfixable.

  “Could be worse,” he said, straightening up. “Eggs are just eggs, after all.”

  She started to pick up her fallen bicycle, but he was there before her. “There,” he said. ‘I’ll get you something to wipe your hands.”

  “I don’t need anything,” she said, and then, lest she sound churlish, “Thank you anyway. I’m all right.”

  “Pity about the eggs,” he said. “Do you want me to square it with Lisowski?”

  She shook her head in her confusion.

  “I guess I should introduce myself,” he said. “My name’s Mike.”

  “I’m Val.”

  He nodded, and then glanced at his watch. “You’re from round here?”

  She told him about the farm.

  “I’ve probably flown right over your place,” he said.

  “Probably.”

  “I hope I didn’t give you a fright.”

  She told him she was accustomed to planes.

  He looked at his watch again. “I could give you a ride home,” he said. “I come off duty in twenty minutes. I could take you – and your bike – back to the farm.”

  She wanted to spend more time with him; she did not want the acquaintance to end. She felt something unfamiliar in her stomach: a lightness. She looked down at the ground. “You don’t mind?”

  He shook his head. He was smiling now and she saw that there was a dimple in each cheek – perfectly placed. It was a boyish face, clean-cut, the features regular. There was an openness about it, too, that gave it a strong sense of innocence. She thought he was probably a bit older than she was – perhaps mid-twenties – but it was hard to tell. She had heard people say that Americans looked younger than British people; a friend had told her it was because of the food they ate – “buckets of ice cream and corn on the cob and such things.”
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br />   He was telling her he did not mind. “It would be a pleasure. We can take a jeep – official, you see, on the grounds that we need to replace a few eggs. Your bike can go on the back.”

  ❖ 4 ❖

  Annie said to Willy, “Now, Willy, you’re going to have to take your shirt off.”

  Willy looked resentful. “Don’t like taking my clothes off. Not with women around.”

  “It’s just your shirt, Willy. And if you think we haven’t seen men’s chests before, then you don’t know very much about anything.”

  He hesitated, and then began to unbutton the shirt. Annie looked away in a gesture to his modesty.

  “Turn around,” she said.

  Holding the shirt in front of him, he turned his back to her, and she gasped.

  “That devil,” she exclaimed.

  “He only hit me once,” said Willy.

  She reached forward and put a finger on the weal. He gave a start.

  “That hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s not bad. I told you: he only hit me once and I don’t want any fuss.”

  She walked round to his front and took his hands in hers. “What with, Willy? What did he hit you with?”

  “He had a sort of whip. Those fellows who walk with the hounds carry them. I’ve seen them.”

  She drew in her breath. “You can do a lot of damage with those things.” She paused, and returned to her examination of the weal. “I don’t think the skin’s broken.”

  “I told you, it’s not a big thing.”

  “Put your shirt back on. But I’m going to watch that – I’ll look at it again tomorrow, and if needs be we’ll get Nurse Simpson.”

  “I don’t need to see her.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that, Willy.” Her manner had become stern. “Do as I say now.”

  He put his shirt back on, buttoning it right up to the collar.

  “I’m not having him raising a hand to you,” said Annie. “You’re a grown lad, Willy – you’re not . . . you’re not some boy.” She paused. “Why did he do it? What was it all about?”

  Willy bit his lip. When he answered, his tone was reluctant. “He was beating one of the dogs.”