The iron that entered his soul was the hot metal of clanking tanks and army lorries, and the poker face of a disdainful sergeant. Stanley tried to escape by volunteering as a stretcher-bearer at El Alamein to experience battle at the front, not the back. But it was a worse hell: desert with chaos, clamour and death.
The wagons they’d loaded didn’t appear at the camp, but two days later a black sedan arrived with two men in the back: a Gestapo officer and a civilian in a dark suit. Major Irving murmured, ‘General alert. Pass the word around. That one’s Kripo. Kriminale Polizei. Evil buggers who do all the dirty work. Something’s up.’
‘What?’
‘An escape?’
‘Or they’ve heard about the looting.’
‘So the Kommandant’s for the high jump.’
T
HE MAYOR HAS SWEPT BACK TO THE VIP
pew and the congregation settles down again, though there is a frisson of heightened alert in the church. Newspaper editors have their heads down thumbing SMS messages on muted cellphones. The politicians look grave and thoughtful, as if debating the advantages of being at a funeral that has become a magnet for aggrieved voters.
Purkey and Clyde have remained at their post in the side aisle, keeping an eye on the flag-draped coffin on its wheeled trolley. When the church doors opened on the shouting men, Purkey muttered, ‘If they come storming in we must rush the casket into the vestry,’ but to Clyde’s disappointment that hadn’t happened. Resigned to more boredom, he stands clinking his tongue stud against his teeth.
He’ll drive me mad, Purkey broods. But where do you find trainees today who’ll take on cadavers? Old Kitching here was a tough customer to lay out: strong bones and an athlete’s muscles, even though they were wasted. I saw him on a history newsreel once – the famous Kitchen Boy sending it down the field on one of the Springboks’ glory days in the fifties, legs pumping, ball under his arm, handing off tacklers and grinning as he dived for the try line. Who would’ve believed that in the new glory days it would be Springboks of all colours scoring those tries, with the whole nation cheering them on? But most youngsters want to go to college now. Instead of a willing apprentice I can teach, I get this dingbat with studs in his tongue and ears. Christ. He’ll drive me mad.
Purkey nudges Clyde. ‘Stop it.’
‘What?’
‘Playing with that thing.’
‘Studs are supposed to be played with. Girls love ’em.’ There are spit bubbles at the corners of his mouth. He has a slug’s pallor too.
‘This is a funeral service. Keep it still. Study to be quiet, and to do your own business. First Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians.’
‘Bo-ring.’ But Clyde stops clinking and edges from behind the stone column to check the congregation for talent.
Two girls are sitting next to a woman who must be their mother in the pew behind the family. As he moves, their heads swivel towards the copper glints from the little horns sticking out the top of his ears. He slides his tongue behind slightly parted lips to expose the stud and gives them the eye. One returns a heavy-lidded half-smile that says, You’re okayyyy, dude, and he thinks, Yeah, dynamite. Then the other girl gives her a jab and they both look away.
‘Nauseating,’ the grey-haired woman whispers from the next pew.
‘But it works, ouma. I’m a chick magnet.’ He gives her a teasing leer.
‘Thank God I’m not a gel any more,’ she says with a shudder.
With the congregation re-seated, the bishop picks up the lesson where he’d stopped. ‘And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?’
Sam has been daydreaming, but that sentence catches his attention. It’s like what Grampa said about the re-supply missions to Warsaw. They’d been sitting on the window seat of his and Gran’s bedroom where he spent a lot of time before the end, gazing out over the sea.
Grampa had been talking about how he loved flying, then he stopped before saying in a different voice, ‘Loved wasn’t true after we started the missions. It was bloody terrifying. I wanted to run back home every time we climbed into our Lib at Celone airfield.’
‘But you’re a hero.’
‘That means nothing. Nothing!’ The old man glared at him. ‘We were scared shitless. Never knew if we’d get as far as Poland, let alone make it back. From the time we crossed the coastline of Yugoslavia there’d be at least twelve hours of zigzag flying through darkness and smoke.
Flames roaring up from fangs of bombed buildings. Flak clattering on the fuselage. Messerschmitts howling out of nowhere, especially near Krakow where the Luftwaffe trained night-fighter pilots. Squadron OC called the flying conditions “extreme jeopardy”, meaning we were flying through hell.’
There was a silence when Sam didn’t know what to say because Grampa looked awful. He knew that the old man was very sick, but that day for the first time he realised that he was dying. Sam thought, He can’t! though it came out as, ‘But I thought Liberators were bombers. You should have had bombs.’
‘No room. We were carrying arms and ammo and supplies to the Polish partisans fighting the Germans who held Warsaw. Libs had the range, but it was such a long flight that it needed extra fuel tanks. Even then there was only ten per cent reserve instead of the usual twenty-five.’
‘And you had just a tail gunner to defend you.’
‘Right. Bloody nearly defenceless. We were getting slaughtered like the Poles. Everyone in the squadron ate in the same mess. There were more and more gaps. It got so you didn’t want to go to meals in case you saw that another friend had copped it. Or a chap from a nearby hut. Or even someone whose face you knew because you’d stood next to him once.’
His saggy lower eyelids had filled with tears, and Sam knew that a spillover would halt the story. So he cut in fast with, ‘How did you drop the supplies?’
The old man knuckled his eyes. ‘God, you’re persistent.’
‘I just want to know, Grampa. You promised to tell me.’ Sam looked at him with the expression that always worked with his mother: accusation with a tinge of sadness.
‘So I did. Someone’s got to know these things. Ancient history to most people now.’ He cleared his rattling throat and went on. ‘Okay. Ground crew packed everything in metal cylinders that fitted into round canisters about six foot long, strapped into canvas covers with fixed parachutes. We stowed ’em in the bomb racks, twelve at a time. You had to fly low and slow for the drop at the target area, down to a hundred and fifty feet. The bomb doors folded out like wings to either side. We clipped our harnesses to safety stanchions while we rolled out the canisters.’
‘Through an open hole?’ A gasp. Sam is afraid of heights.
‘Sure. And we had to do it true and fast so the parachutes deployed without their shroud lines getting snapped. After the drop, the pilot opened the throttles to get out chop-chop before the anti-aircraft guns and Messerschmitts nailed us.’ His bony hands were clenched in his lap.
‘And then you did get nailed.’
This was well-known family history and the old man slid over the facts in a few staccato sentences. ‘Yes. Between Krakow and Tarnow. Second flight in three days. Half the tail blown off. Co-pilot ordered us all out. I grabbed the tail gunner and we jumped. Landed in a beet field. Wehrmacht patrol found us lying there. First stop: Stalag Luft VII at Bankau bei Kreuzburg.’ He sucked in his breath. ‘I couldn’t believe it. In the bag after three weeks of war.’
‘And there you sat,’ Sam finished for him.
‘And there we sat for five bloody months. Freezing cold. Hacking coughs. Boils. Crawling with lice and fleas and bedbugs. Dysentery that had us crapping rivers of green shit. No hot water so we stank like camels’ crotches.’
Sam had never been close enough to a camel to tell how bad that was, though he’d once been hit by a stink bomb made with rotten eggs. He has learnt to shield his mother from the knowledge that he is being bullied at school, explaining the smell on his blazer by saying he’d dropped it into a school toilet.
Grampa went on, ‘We were furious about being sidelined. Fed up with the activities to keep us busy. Choirs. Chess. Bridge. Amateur dramatics with men playing girls’ parts. PT. Lectures. Yawn. For light relief, the hut commanders set us make-work.’
‘What does that mean?’
The old man grumbled, ‘Handicrafts, like making braziers and blowers and illegal radios. One bloke even embroidered his regimental badge on his kitbag. Then there were the so-called sports played on gravel: deadly serious soccer and rugby with everyone shouting, “Good show, chaps!” It was all such a fucking waste. I was nineteen and the highlights of my life were sleep, farting and pig-food: mouldy potatoes, turnips, cabbage, rat stew.’
Sam saw the fleeting smile of remembrance. ‘Did you really eat rats?’
‘For flavouring. The only other meat we had was a stray cat. Plus tinned Spam if Red Cross parcels came through. Big
if
by then, because the Allies were bombing the hell out of the Hun railways. You never forget those parcels as long as you live. When they were divvied up, we’d each get a teaspoon of Spam or half a sardine, a thumb of cheese, a blob of jam, a square of chocolate, a pinch of Klim for our tea. Cigarettes too. You’d give your back teeth for a smoke.’
Sam made the mistake of saying, ‘It sounds like camping.’
‘Bugger that! It was prison, boy. I was sentenced to jail for serving my country. We just had to sit there with the war raging on without us. You could hear far-off explosions sometimes, but that was it. Beyond the barbed wire was snow and black fir trees and eerie silence, not even a farmhouse. Do you know what helpless feels like?’ he barked. ‘Having your whole reason for being taken away. Having your guts sucked through your arsehole. Being at the mercy of Nazi thugs who have the power of life and death over you.’
‘The guards.’
‘The guards.’ The old man shivered all over like a dog shaking off water and his eyes began to fill again. ‘At the end of January they herded us into cattle trucks to be shunted off to Stalag Luft III at Sagan. That was worse.’
Sam saw his grandfather’s face closing up in a way that meant he’d stop talking if not jogged again. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘Enough for today, son. I’m dog-tired.’ Grampa’s face was the colour of Barbara’s old ivory bangles, yellow-tinged and etched with pencil lines.
In the church now, Sam sees that the fat candles burning on the altar and in tall candlesticks at the head of his grandfather’s coffin are all the same colour, except at the top where they glow a warmer yellow, cupping the flames. He knows that the body inside will be eaten by worms and turned to dust, but hopes with all his heart that Grampa’s spirit is in Valhalla, strong again and being celebrated by other heroes.
Bridget looks down at her son gazing at the coffin and wonders what is going through his mind. She has seen so little of him during his schooldays, though she’s tried to make up for it in the evenings with the working-mother’s standby, quality time: helping with homework, talking to him over supper and tucking him up in bed to read. He’s a serious boy, very quiet in class according to his teachers. She suspects that his asthma and lack of interest in games make him seem a nerd at school. Perhaps he’ll do better in the co-ed high school where she and Hugh plan to send him. Hugh knows only too well what it’s like to be non-sporty in boys’ schools.
She remembers her dead father-in-law’s accusation: ‘You just went off and indulged yourself. It’s wrong. A woman’s place is with her family.’ But damn it, that was unfair. Sam is as much Hugh’s responsibility as mine. And Neli’s too. She leans forward past Barbara and glares at them.
Shirley registers Bridget’s glare and wonders why her ex-daughter-in-law is upset. She and John hadn’t exchanged more than a few words since the divorce, so the emotion can’t be directed at him. Why is she so angry with Hugh?
She’s been a good daughter-in-law. At least Shirley can talk to her without feeling she has to apologise for being an apartheid-era white woman who didn’t join the Black Sash or do anything meaningful to help the underprivileged. Blame it on Durban, she thinks, where the living is easy. John loved Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. She wishes she had thought to ask the organist to play it during the service.
One bullet, one German.
– Polish Resistance sniper motto
SAAF, RAF AND POLISH AIR CREW LOSSES ON THE WARSAW RE-SUPPLY MISSIONS, 14 –17 AUGUST 1944
In these four days, fourteen
SAAF
Liberator VI flights from Italy to Poland went down while flying supplies to partisans:
EW
105 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire over Warsaw and crash-landed on the Warsaw Aerodrome. Six airmen became prisoners of war; one went missing.
EV
961 Broke up in flight after being hit by anti-aircraft fire and crash-landed into Kamionski Lake in Warsaw. Six airmen were killed; one became a prisoner of war.
KG
939 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the outskirts of Warsaw and crashed in flames at Michalin; three airmen were killed; five survived.
KG
828 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the return flight and crashed in the Zdzary area. All seven airmen were killed.
KG
871 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire and crashed at Goledzinow on its second mission to Warsaw. All seven airmen were killed.
EW
264 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the return flight and crashed in the Krakow area. All seven airmen were killed.
KG
836 Crashed in flames in Warsaw Central Square after the aircraft wing hit the rooftop of a building. All seven airmen were killed.
KG
890 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire. All seven Polish airmen were killed.
KG
873 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the return flight and crashed in the Krakow area. All seven airmen were killed.
EV
941 Shot down by Luftwaffe night fighters on the return flight and crashed at Kocmyrzòw. All eight airmen were killed.
EW
275 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire. All seven Polish airmen were killed.
EW
248 Hit on its second flight by machine-gun fire from Luftwaffe night fighters and exploded in mid-air between Krakow and Tarnow. Seven airmen were killed; one survived.