The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

  She crossed the room to stand beside him. The eggs were in a brown paper bag, and she reached into this to extract one of them. “Look at this,” she said. “I think I know which hen laid this one. She’s a Rhode Island Red and she’s bigger than the others.”

  He took the egg from her gingerly. “Shall I put it in the pan?”

  “Yes, and then we’ll put the other ones in with it and fill it with water. They need to be hard-boiled for our pie.”

  He said, “That’s six minutes at least.”

  She nodded, and remembered that Willy had difficulty telling the time. She had tried to teach him when she realised this, but he had struggled to master the concept of minutes to the hour. Why, he asked, if you counted up to thirty up to the figure six, did you then start counting down? Her explanation, she feared, had been less than clear and had merely added to his confusion.

  They put the egg pan on the stove and switched it on. It was an unsophisticated electric cooker, and it took a long time to get to temperature. But they were lucky; plenty of people had nothing so advanced, and relied on ranges fuelled by wood or coal.

  Willy was looking out of the window. “That sergeant fellow,” he said. “Did you invite him?”

  She frowned. “No. Is he outside?”

  “He’s coming by here,” said Willy. “Maybe he wants more eggs.”

  She moved to the window and looked out. Sergeant Lisowski was making his way down the front path – and he had a dog with him.

  “He’s got hold of another dog,” said Willy. “He must have been missing Peter Woodhouse.” He turned to Val. “Ain’t that nice, Val? Him getting another dog like that.”

  She did not answer. Making her way to the front door, she took a deep breath, brushed her hair back from her forehead, and opened to the sergeant’s knock.

  Peter Woodhouse leapt up at her. It was a headlong dive, and she reeled under the onslaught. She almost fell over, but righted herself as the dog managed to lick her face, covering her with dog spittle. He was whimpering, the sort of excited whimpering that comes when a dog is overcome with emotion.

  Sergeant Lisowski stood there beaming. “He remembers you,” he said. ‘He hasn’t forgotten.”

  “Is it really him?” she stuttered.

  “Yes,” said Sergeant Lisowski. “It’s Peter Woodhouse. Look at the collar.”

  She struggled to get a sight of the collar. There was so much fur, so much wriggling dog muscle, that it was difficult to see the inscription. But it was there.

  And then the full significance of this hit her, and she let out a scream.

  “He’s alive,” said Sergeant Lisowski. “He’ll be back in two or three days.”

  She screamed again. Willy was there now, and he was struggling to understand what was happening.

  “Mike made it,” said Sergeant Lisowski. “They sent the dog first because he didn’t need a seat. Mike’s waiting for a plane that’s going out there soon. It’ll bring him back.”

  Val flung her arms around the sergeant. He smelled of cooking, she thought, because he spent his days in the cookhouse. She kissed him on his neck, his chin, his cheek. He kissed her back and said, “I shouldn’t kiss another fellow’s girl, but what the heck.”

  They told Val that she could see him the day after his return. The colonel, who had returned from London, saw Mike while Val waited outside the office. It was the day after VE Day, when the formal capitulation of Germany had occurred, and there were still signs of the previous day’s celebrations. Somebody had tied a balloon to a fire bucket, and it was still there, half deflated.

  “Well, it’s over,” said the colonel. “At least, this bit of it.” He paused. “And I think I know what you want to talk to me about.”

  Mike told him that they wanted to marry as soon as possible and would like his permission. The colonel suppressed a sigh. These wartime marriages were troublesome; he had seen many of them come unstuck once the glamour faded – as it did. He gave his permission. And then he said that Peter Woodhouse, US Air Force, Dog First Class could be officially reinstated as a mascot, if that was all right with the people who owned him, but was not to fly without permission. Mike thanked the colonel, and said that he felt one forced landing was enough for any dog.

  The colonel laughed. “And your own future?” he said. “I’ve heard that you might want to stay in. Is that correct?”

  Mike nodded. “I like flying, sir. It’s what I want to do with my life.” When he had entered the air force, he had had only a vague interest in flying. Now that had all changed, and he had discovered it was the thing that he wanted to do above all else.

  He tried to explain it to the colonel. “When I’m up there, sir, up above the clouds, I just feel . . . well, I feel that I’m in the right place – for me, that is. That’s where I have to be.”

  The colonel smiled. There was no need for that feeling to be explained to him; he knew. “Uncle Sam will still need pilots. And I think I can recommend you.”

  It was a strange moment for Mike. He had committed himself to a career, and he had chosen the woman he wanted to marry. It seemed to him as if the contours of his life, which had always been uncertain, were now set out as clearly and firmly as the lines on any map.

  Willy gave Val away, leading her down the aisle of the small church not far from the post office. She was visibly pregnant by the time of the wedding, but people pretended not to notice. Archie, uncomfortable in an unaccustomed suit, sang the hymns loudly and out of tune. Afterwards, they went to the pub, where the landlord had laid out some of the tinned food that Mike had purloined from Sergeant Lisowski.

  He had told her that their future would still be uncertain. There was still work for the air force to do in Europe – they had been warned that this would not finish any time soon – and he hoped she would not mind if they did not make it to Muncie, Indiana just yet. She said that she could accept that, as long as they went there sometime.

  The honeymoon was the last three days of the leave the colonel had granted Mike. They travelled in a borrowed car, using American fuel, to a small port in Cornwall and climbed on the cliffs. They looked out in the direction of France, far away at that point, and were both for a moment silent with their thoughts.

  A breeze came up off the sea. She asked, inconsequentially, “What are you thinking of?’

  He turned to look at her. “I guess I was thinking of Peter Woodhouse.”

  She smiled. She had no idea why she should have been thinking of Peter Woodhouse just then, but she was.

  “So was I,” she said.

  He smiled. “Do you think that it happens?”

  “What happens?”

  “Synchronicity.”

  She looked puzzled. He was studying engineering – or had been – and that made him a scientist, she supposed; she knew nothing of science, and the words that went with it.

  He explained. “It’s what happens when people start doing things – or thinking things – at the same time.” He paused. “They say that it happens a lot with married couples.” He blushed – neither of them was used to the fact of marriage. In the bed and breakfast in which they were staying, he had spoken the words “my wife” with such hesitation and awkwardness as to attract a look of doubt to the owner’s face. Mike had intercepted the glance to the hand, and to the rings – that had allayed suspicion, but the fact still seemed strange to him. How did married people behave? Was he convincing as a married man?

  Val liked the idea. “I wouldn’t have to ask you to do things,” she said. “I’d just have to think them.”

  “And I’d do what you wanted,” said Mike.

  “Exactly.”

  They spent a great deal of their time talking about the future. She seemed to have an insatiable appetite for information about Muncie and Indianapolis. What colour would the roof be? It would be red – he had no hesitation in answering that. And the kitchen? It would have everything, he promised, including a refrigerator large enough to walk into – we
ll, almost – and cupboards with sliding doors.

  And she asked what they would do.

  He frowned. “Do?”

  “Yes, what would we do . . . with our time?”

  He looked thoughtful. “Go for drives in the car. Have you heard of drive-in movie theatres?”

  She had not, and he explained. “They’re going to be big. Every town’s getting one now. You park your car, you see, and you watch the movie from the car. Twenty-five cents a person, and they sell hot dogs, popcorn . . . everything.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Of course you would. We’d go every week – maybe twice a week.”

  “America,” she sighed. It seemed an impossible dream: safety, refrigerators, drive-in movies. If only the war would end, with them alive when it did. She closed her eyes and thought that if that happened, then she might stop doubting that God existed and say yes, of course he does, because he would have brought them through this. It was almost a challenge to him, if he was there: prove it to me.

  Suddenly an idea occurred to her. “Do people believe in God in Muncie?” she asked.

  He looked surprised. “But of course they do,” he answered.

  “All of them?”

  “Pretty much.” Then he said, “And here? Don’t people believe here?”

  She thought for a moment. “They say they do, but I’m not so sure that they do – underneath. Maybe they hope that he’s there.”

  “It’s easier if you believe,” he said. “It makes you feel a bit . . .” He trailed off.

  Braver, she thought. It makes you feel braver.

  “It makes you feel braver?”

  He smiled. “Boy, do we need that.”

  It was the closest he came to telling her how frightened he was, but she understood, and she steered the conversation away, onto something less real. She asked about drive-in movie theatres, and about where the sound came from. Did you leave your windows open?

  He smiled at her. “You’ll see,” he said.

  TWO

  HE HATED THE WAR

  ❖ 18 ❖

  A small square of roughly cut brown bread, stale and heavy, with a mug of lumpy soup scraped out of an urn. No meat in the soup, but a rancid smell that could have come from meat, an unfortunate horse, perhaps, or ancient pig; a thin layer of grease, too, across the surface that suggested the same origins.

  Ubi took it gratefully, warming his hands on the mug, which was made of tin and conducted heat well. It was early May, and the air was far from warm, even if the hedges were green once more and there were wildflowers everywhere, and early blossom on the fruit trees. The man next to him spilled some of his soup down his chin and onto the jacket of his uniform; his hands were shaking and it was hard for him to bring the mug to his lips. He looked sheepishly at Ubi, who smiled at him encouragingly. There were many who seemed to be fumbling or faltering in unexpected ways – tripping, or stumbling, as if some internal gyroscope had been taken from them. One man, a Feldwebel like Ubi, seemed to have lost control of his bladder and sat dejectedly and self-consciously separate from the other men, staring up at the sky as if he were somewhere else, as if this were not him, this reeking, shameful person, a disgrace to the uniform he had so thoroughly ruined. Ubi took him an extra piece of bread that he found near the table where the rations had been handed out, and gave it to him in a gesture of support. The man took it, and looked up at him, briefly, but then looked away again without thanking him.

  It was the midday meal. There would be something more at six o’clock, they had been told, although it might not be warm. One of their Canadian captors, a sergeant with a loud voice, had explained – through an interpreter – that they could not expect much more because their own people had robbed the Netherlands of most of its food. “So you see what this brings you,” he announced. “What goes round, comes round. Understand?” He looked again at the puzzled faces and repeated his question. “Understand?”

  Because of the intervention of Mees and the captain who had taken their surrender, Ubi had been put into a different prisoner-of-war holding centre from the rest of his unit. The captain had decided that if this were done there would be little risk of retaliation from his former superiors or his colleagues – the chances of their encountering him among the thousands of prisoners of war caught up behind the rapidly advancing Allied lines would be next to non-existent. A note was left with the senior Canadian officer at the makeshift detention camp to the effect that Feldwebel Dietrich was alleged to have been helpful to the Resistance and to a group of American airmen. This could be entered on his records, although nobody was sure what records there would be and who would hold them. At the camp itself, there was the barest noting down of name, age and unit, with nothing said about anything else.

  On the third day of his captivity, when they were still bedding down in a field, all two hundred of them, watched over by sentries posted along an ordinary stock fence, the Canadian officer in charge insisted on an examination of every prisoner. In the raw spring air they took off their tunics and their shirts, and lined up in front of a couple of non-commissioned officers. Each man then held out his left arm to be checked for an SS number tattooed on the flesh; this was the mark of Cain that exposed those who had sought cover in the stolen uniforms of less guilty branches of the German forces. One man, exposed in this way, yelled out in protest, turning to the men behind him for support, but was greeted with indifference, even flickers of Schadenfreude.

  An orderly sprayed them for lice, the fine white powder a cloud of humiliation that hung about them for a few seconds before settling on skin and clothing. Ubi breathed it in, and coughed and spat to rid himself of the chemical taste. He felt like an animal, prodded, probed, and treated for infestation before re-joining the herd of milling figures, clustering together like cattle.

  And everywhere he saw the raw hopelessness of defeat, only punctuated now and then by thoughts of how much worse it would have been had it been the Russians who had overrun them. The Russians were bent on revenge, shooting their captives out of hand or waiting for starvation, or death by thirst, to do their work for them; one of the men who had been on the eastern front told them of a unit of Georgian cannibals that had been let loose on German prisoners. They chose the youngest men, the boys of fifteen, even younger, who had been drafted in as the ranks of their elders were steadily diminished. “This happened,” he said. “I saw it. They ate the boys.”

  Ubi did not believe him. Men went mad in war, he thought, but not that mad. Such stories had been put about by the authorities to persuade people to fight when they had lost all enthusiasm for the cause. Ubi had never wanted to fight in the first place. His elder brother had been a communist and had told him that this war was nothing to do with the people of Germany but was fratricidal lunacy inspired by a demented Austrian. His brother had expressed these views once too often, and in the wrong company, and disappeared without trace one morning. That left Ubi with a mother and a sister, his father having died a few months after the war began.

  His mother and his sister were in Berlin, and when news filtered through that the city had fallen to the Russians he sat with his head in his hands, trying as hard as he could not to think about what would happen to them. It was unbearable, and he eventually told himself that they had both been killed, in their sleep, by a direct hit by an American bomb on their flat in Wedding. An American bomb would have been clean and merciful, and they would not have suffered – unlike those who found themselves in the path of Ivan.

  They were marched from one place to another, and eventually he found himself being called out at early morning muster and taken to a tent in which a Canadian major, flanked by an interpreter, quizzed him about his service record. There was not much to say, of course; he had had a quiet war, and had not so much as fired a shot in anger. He did not bother to tell his interrogator this, as it sounded such an unlikely story, and anyway would already have been used by those with most to hide.

  But that
was not what the Canadian wanted to find out.

  “We’ve had information,” the major said, referring to a typewritten sheet before him, “that you were of assistance to two American airmen. Can you tell me a bit more about that?”

  He hesitated. He did not want to stand out from the crowd in any way. He wanted to be anonymous, just to be one of the hundreds of thousands of defeated soldiers who could not be individually punished for what had happened. He wanted to go home. He wanted to take off this uniform and escape from under the rank cloud that the army carried with it: in good times a miasma of cruelty and noise and raucous singing, and now, in defeat, a dark air of gloom and brokenness. He wanted to sit with a girl in a café and drink coffee and feel the sunlight; he wanted to lie in a bath of soapy water; he wanted to clean and bind the recalcitrant ulcer that had developed on his right foot; he wanted not to smell. Would that ever again be possible? The world was in ruins; there would be no medicines for the dregs of this disgraced army; coffee would be a distant memory; and what would girls want to do with the men whom they would blame for bringing this all about?

  “Well, tell me,” prompted the major. “What assistance did you provide?”

  He saw that the major had cut himself while shaving and had applied a styptic pencil to the nick.

  “I took food,” he said.

  The major stared at him. “You didn’t report them?”

  He shook his head. He was tired. What was the point of going over the things that had happened in war? The dead stayed dead; the living preferred to forget. Did anything else really matter?

  “So, you didn’t report them and you took them food? Why did you do this?”

  He shrugged. “The war was almost over,” he said. “And I didn’t see any point.”

  He felt the major’s eyes on him. He looked away. He wanted this interview to come to an end.

  The major turned to the interpreter and said to him, in English, “Is this man telling the truth?’

  The interpreter answered, “Yes, I think so. I can’t be sure, sir, but liars talk in a different way – it’s just something they do. This man isn’t doing that.”