The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

  Annie sighed. “One more mouth to feed, I suppose. But we can’t turn him out.” She bent down to pat the dog once more. “Has he got a name?”

  “Peter Woodhouse,” said Willy.

  Val laughed. “Peter Woodhouse? That’s a grand name for a dog.”

  Willy looked defensive. “That’s what’s written on the side of his kennel. It’s on one of the boards. It says Peter Woodhouse.”

  Annie burst out laughing. “Woodhouses were a firm of removers. They used to pack people’s furniture in crates. Peter Woodhouse. That’s where it comes from – it’s an old Woodhouse crate. That’s what his kennel is made of.”

  “Well, that’s what I call him anyway,” said Willy. “And he answers to it. You try.”

  “Dogs answer to anything,” said Val. “If you called out Winston Churchill, I bet he’d answer.”

  “It’s a good name for him,” said Annie. “Let him be Peter Woodhouse.”

  Permission was given, and the dog spent the night on an old rug under the kitchen table. In the morning, he awoke the household by scratching at the door, and it was Annie who took him out into the garden. Then she fed him with a bowl of porridge mixed with a small amount of chicken’s liver that a friend had given her.

  “It’s going to be a new life for you, Peter Woodhouse,” she said. “Your war’s over now.”

  Archie took it in his stride. He was standing in the doorway of one of the barns when he saw her ride down the track with the dog trotting beside her.

  “So, you got yourself a dog,” he said as she drew up and dismounted in front of him.

  She leaned her bike against the wall of the barn. “My cousin rescued him,” she said. “He was being mistreated.”

  “Nice-looking animal,” said Archie. “Reminds me a bit of my last dog.”

  Val took advantage of this. “Then you wouldn’t mind if he stayed here?” she said. “He’s had a miserable time.”

  “Hold on,” said Archie. “I didn’t say I wanted a dog.”

  “No, but he wants you. Look at the way he’s gazing up at you. Look at that. He thinks the world of you already, I’m sure he does.”

  She could see that it was working. Archie was ruffling the fur around the dog’s neck.

  “You’re a good fellow, are you?” he said. “A good watchdog? Bark at any ne’er-do-wells who come around the place, will you?”

  This was her chance. She knew that farmers were worried by theft. For people in towns, worn down by queues for rations that seemed to get smaller and smaller, the temptation to help themselves to a chicken or a duck was sometimes just too great. “He’s good at that,” said Val. “You know how Mrs Carter lost ten of her chickens the other night? They traced them from the feathers. They were on the ground, all the way down to that army camp. Right into the barrack room where the lads who stole them were living. They would have caught them red-handed, if they hadn’t already sold the chickens.”

  “Heard about it,” said Archie. “A bad business.”

  “Well, Peter Woodhouse wouldn’t let that happen.”

  Archie looked puzzled. “Peter Woodhouse?”

  “That’s his name,” said Val. “It’s a pretty unusual name for a dog, but it suits him somehow.”

  Archie sucked in his cheeks. “He’d need to be fed.”

  “Rabbits,” said Val quickly. “Teach me how to shoot and I’ll get them myself.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Archie. “I can fix him up with a rabbit. Last him a week, a rabbit will.”

  She realised now that she had won.

  “I’ll find something for his kennel,” she said. “A box, perhaps . . .”

  Archie had already thought of that. “There’s an old wooden crate in the barn. It’s got something in it, but I’ll clear it out. That’ll do fine.”

  On impulse, she turned round and kissed the farmer on the cheek. He looked flustered.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that you’re so kind and I thought I might give you a kiss. It’s really from Peter Woodhouse, not from me.”

  “Nothing wrong with a dog’s kiss,” said Archie gruffly. “My old dog used to kiss me when I let him loose each morning. He jumped up and was all over me. Great wet kisses all over my face. Never did me any harm.”

  They looked for the wooden crate together, and Val watched as Archie cut a door in the front and nailed planks together to make a roof, over which he pinned sacking to provide protection against rain. Then they moved the crate into position near the kitchen door – the best place for a dog to be, Archie said, “so that he doesn’t feel left out”.

  She had been putting off the moment when she would tell him where the dog came from. But now, with Peter Woodhouse introduced to his kennel and already lying down on the sacking bedding inside – the long run from the village had caught up with him – she broached the subject.

  “My cousin Willy gave him to me,” said Val. “He took him from his last owner. He beat him.”

  Archie was not paying much attention. “Oh yes?” he said vaguely.

  “He was one of Ted Butters’ dogs.”

  This brought a reaction. “He belonged to Ted Butters? Over at Craig Hill?”

  Val nodded. “Willy works over there. He says he treats his dogs terribly. Beats them. That’s why he took this one away from him.”

  For a while, Archie was silent. Then he asked, “Does Butters know?”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  Archie stroked his jaw. “There’s no need for him to know,” he muttered. “Can’t stand people who treat dogs badly. Never could.”

  Val felt relieved. “He’ll assume he strayed. Dogs do that.” Archie agreed. “Keep it to yourself,” he said. “If nobody knows, Butters won’t ever find out. That man! Disgrace to farming, he is.”

  Val knew then that she had an ally, and Peter Woodhouse, who had been at the mercy of a bully and a tyrant, now had two allies too. It was like the war, she thought: small countries who had been bullied had discovered there were big friends willing to fight for them. It was enough to make anybody believe that there was such a thing as justice – somewhere in the inner workings of the world, in the mechanisms of human affairs, there was justice.

  The dog settled in quickly. At lunchtime on that first day, Val left her work cleaning out the hen houses to check up on him in the yard. He greeted her effusively, and she untied him to let him explore his new surroundings. Archie called her in for lunch – he had heated a pot of leek soup – and from the kitchen window they both watched Peter Woodhouse running around the farmyard, sniffing at everything and getting to know his new home.

  “I’ve got some stew for him,” said Archie. “I’ll call him in.”

  He went to the door and shouted the dog’s name. Peter Woodhouse hesitated, uncertain what to do – a call in the past might have been the prelude to a beating, but he sensed now that things were different, and he came trotting over to the kitchen door. Rewarded with a large bowl of stew, which he wolfed down with all the urgency with which dogs attack their meals, he was allowed to join them in the kitchen. There he wasted no time in finding a spot near the wood-fired cooking range, stretched himself out, and was soon half asleep. One eye remained fractionally open, though, in the way that dogs will have it when they are keen to keep at least some sort of watch on what is happening around them.

  “The thing to remember,” reflected Archie, “is that these creatures are pack animals. Understand that, and you understand a dog.”

  “They need a leader,” said Val.

  “Yes, they need a leader. And that’s why they put up with people who are unworthy of them – like that Ted Butters. He’s the man in charge, you see, and they just accept it. You never get dogs arguing about that sort of thing. Even dogs over in them communist countries. They don’t go around having revolutions and what-not.”

  Val laughed. She had begun to see a dimension to Archie that she had been unaware of at the beginning, when she had first started working on his
farm. He was just a farmer then – a taciturn middle-aged man who liked things done in a particular way and seemed to be content enough with his own company; but slowly he had revealed his sense of humour and his kindness, and she was heartened by both.

  ❖ 6 ❖

  Mike said, “I guess you’re my girl now.” He blushed. “I find it kind of hard to say these things, but you know what I mean.”

  They were sitting in the pub in the village. There were few people there: a couple of the girls from the land girl house, waiting for some young men from the RAF base; two farm hands, still in working clothes, their trousers tied with binding twine just above the ankles; a lonely-looking man in a sports jacket and tie, reading the racing page of the paper. Val and Mike were far enough away from anybody to be able to talk without lowering their voices, and to hold hands without attracting attention.

  She looked down at the floor, and then up again, to meet his gaze. She liked to see him blushing; it was a curious, boyish thing – almost a matter of manners.

  “I’m happy with that,” she said. “I like being your girl.”

  He squeezed her hand. “When all this is over . . .”

  She sighed. “We say that all the time, don’t we? When this is over . . . But somehow I wonder whether it ever will be, or whether it will just go on and on and we’ll . . .”

  He interrupted her. “It’ll be over, and then I’ll take you back to the States with me. Would you like that?”

  She felt her heart beating. Willy had asked her that morning whether Mike had proposed to her yet. He had said, “He’ll want you to marry him, I bet. Any time now, he’ll ask you.”

  She had told him not to be ridiculous, but his words had thrilled her. Of course she had thought about it – any girl going out with a man at least thought about the possibility, unless, of course, she was purely out for a good time; for tinned peaches, as her aunt would say. And there were girls like that; girls who were out to get what they could without any thought as to the man’s feelings.

  Now he was talking about her going to America, and how could that be seen as anything but a proposal?

  “What would I do in America?” she asked. She knew that she sounded teasing; she did not intend it, but she did.

  He hesitated for a few moments before answering. “I’d look after you.”

  “We’d go to Muncie, Indiana?”

  He squeezed her hand again. “Anywhere you want. We could go out west if you liked. Los Angeles, maybe. I could get a job there, now that I have this experience of aerial photography.”

  She wished that he would ask her directly. Why could he not just say, Will you marry me? She would say yes to that question. It was what she wanted.

  “I wouldn’t mind going to America,” she said.

  He leaned over towards her and planted a gentle kiss on her cheek. One of the land girls, still waiting for their RAF boyfriends, noticed, and flashed a smile of encouragement.

  “Then we’re engaged,” he said. It was not a question; it was a statement of fact, and she nodded her assent. She did not say anything, although she tried. It was too difficult for her because she found herself not thinking of him, or even of herself, but of her mother and of how she would have approved of him; she had approved of everything her daughter did, right from the beginning. She had never thought her daughter anything less than wonderful.

  She realised that he had said something about a ring. “I’m sorry, I was thinking.”

  It seemed as if he understood. “Of course. It’s a big thing, isn’t it – getting engaged and then getting married.”

  Getting married . . . She closed her eyes.

  He said, “There’s a guy at the base can get hold of rings from the States. He knows somebody in the business. He can order them.”

  “That would be lovely.” It was all she could think of to say.

  “I need to know the size of your finger. He has a card, this guy, and you put your finger into the hole that fits. Then you know the right size.”

  She laughed at the thought. “You Americans think of everything, don’t you?”

  But now a shadow passed over her face, and he saw it. He asked gently if something was wrong. “You don’t have to say yes, you know. The last thing I’d want to do is to make you say yes. You know that, don’t you?”

  She reassured him that she had said yes freely, and that she meant it. She did not reveal to him, though, what her thoughts had been, because they had been of the path of danger into which he flew every day, or almost every day. She had seen a plane limping home, a trail of smoke – not wide, but visible – issuing from an engine. Even if they were just taking photographs, they were flying over the heads of people who would be trying to bring them down, and who from time to time – probably rather often – succeeded in doing so. There were legions of young women who had become engaged to men who were risking their lives in this way and had learned that the game of dice their menfolk played had gone against them. One of the land girls on another farm was in this position; Val had seen her, and she had been tearful. One of the other girls had whispered the explanation: her fiancé of two weeks had been shot down somewhere and now she had been notified officially that he was dead.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she said.

  He laughed. “Nobody’s going to take me away from you. Nobody.” And then, with an expression of mock bravado, “Let them try!”

  It suddenly occurred to her that there were young women on the other side thinking the same thing about their men, and their men would be saying the same words back to them. It was the men who started it, she thought. Left to women, it would not work out this way; they would ground the planes that took their lovers from them; they, and the mothers, would put a stop to war.

  That was a thought that Annie had often expressed, but no sooner had she done so than she had admitted that men were needed to fight evil. “Hitler wouldn’t listen to us women,” she said. “There’s only one thing that Hitler understands.”

  Mike was looking at his watch. She did not dare ask him whether there was a mission that day; she assumed there was.

  “I have to get back to the base,” he said. He looked at her. “I’ll be thinking of you tonight. I have to go out with a bomber tonight. They’re short of men.”

  Her heart gave a leap. Not all bombers came back; everyone knew that. They were lumbering and defenceless, people said, and the men who flew them simply had to grit their teeth, do their job, and hope that they dodged the flak thrown up at them.

  “You must be really careful.”

  “Yes. Of course I will. In and out. Back to base.”

  “And I’ll be thinking of you too. Always. All the time.”

  He put his fingers to her lips. “Promise?”

  She moved his fingers gently, and placed them where she imagined her heart was. “Promise.”

  ❖ 7 ❖

  “I ain’t going back,” said Willy. “I don’t care if they shoot me – I ain’t going back there.”

  Annie attempted to calm him. She had seen how he could get worked up, and she knew it could end with him in tears, sobbing his heart out over something that any normal young man would treat as minor.

  “Hush, Willy. Hush. Nobody’s going to shoot you.” She glanced at Val, who rolled her eyes.

  “They don’t shoot people who leave their jobs,” said Val.

  Willy stared at her, his bottom lip quivering. “This is wartime. It’s different in wartime. They can shoot you if you disobey.”

  “That’s in the army,” said Val. “And only if you run away from the enemy.”

  “And not any longer,” added Annie. “That was in the first war – at the Somme and places like that. The army’s more civilised now. They don’t shoot their own men.” She was not sure about that; she thought they probably did, but she was not going to give Willy yet another thing to worry about.

  Willy looked unconvinced. “Anyway, I don’t care. They can’t make me go back to Ted
Butters’ place.”

  They were standing in the kitchen. Willy had just returned from work early – usually he arrived half an hour or so after Val, but he had come in before that, his hair dishevelled and his expression agitated. Now, Annie suggested they all sit down at the kitchen table and Willy could tell them exactly what had happened.

  “So just calm down,” said Annie. “Calm down and tell us what went wrong. From the beginning.”

  “I went to work on his farm,” said Willy. “I started four months ago. He told me —”

  Annie reached out to put her hand on his arm. “No, Willy, not that beginning. From today, this morning. What happened today that made you come back early?”

  “It was the rats,” said Willy. “Them rats in his haystack. They made a big nest like they always do. Pa rat, Ma rat and all their nippers.”

  “Kittens,” supplied Val. “They call the little rats kittens. They have litters, same as cats do.”

  “I knew they were there,” Willy continued. “They weren’t doing any harm. He didn’t have to kill them.”

  Annie sighed. “Farmers do, Willy. They kill rats because they eat food that’s meant for livestock. And if the farmer grows grain too – oats and barley and so on – rats love that for their tea.”

  “Auntie’s right,” said Val. “Archie lays poison for rats. He says they steal his eggs. And they do – I’ve seen eggs broken by rats. You can see the tooth marks.”

  “These rats were doing none of that,” persisted Willy. “They were minding their own business. They weren’t in the barn.” He paused. “And I wanted to take one of them. A rat can be a friendly creature – same as a small dog, they say.”

  This brought a response from Annie. “I’m not having rats around here,” she warned. “Not for anything. Nasty creatures, with those long tails of theirs, and their teeth.”