The Chequer Board (15 page)

She said, “Oh, nobody pays any attention to that.”

She did not think to ask him how he was, or to explain why she had not been able to get down to Penzance to see him or to answer his letters. She was nice to him in a distracted sort of way, but her mind was utterly engrossed with her theatrical job, and with her clothes, and with the cabarets and night clubs that she went to, usually
with Bristow. Flight Lieutenant Bristow had a job at the Air Ministry which kept him in London; Morgan found himself an intruder in a pleasant little friendship. Whenever he went out with Joyce, Bristow was likely to go with them, and they seldom sat at home.

“It was difficult,” said Morgan, staring out over the wide river to the dim hills beyond. “You don’t know what to do when things get like that. I didn’t make a song and dance about it, because I wanted to go on ops and, well, there’s always the risk, you know.” He paused. “Anyway, Bristow usually paid the bill. I hadn’t got nearly enough money for all the things Joyce wanted to do.”

He sat silent for a moment. “I suppose I was a bit of a coward,” he said. “I was afraid to start a row.”

He was posted to an aerodrome near Exeter for ground duties after his leave, still in Transport Command. From there he could get up to London pretty frequently on a week-end pass, and each time he returned from leave distressed and worried. Bristow was very much in evidence, and it was clear to Morgan that his wife went out with Bristow almost every night. They had little secret jokes from which he was excluded, and though the girl was still kind to him, it gradually became clear that she was bored by his visits. Morgan became morose and unhappy, too inexperienced to know what to do about such things, too much tied by the R.A.F. to do very much about it anyway.

In the spring of 1944 he was put back on flying duties and sent for a short conversion course to fly Dakotas. From
there he was sent to a Dakota squadron forming up in Yorkshire for supply-dropping duties; while he was there he saw very little of Joyce, who now called herself Bobby Charmaine. In July 1944 the squadron was ordered out to India, and Morgan saw his wife for the last time on his final leave.

It was not very different from his other leaves. He was going out to the war in the Far East; he would be away for three years or so, if he came back at all. His last leave left little impression on his mind but a series of wild parties after the theatre with his wife and Bristow and various officers of the U. S. Air Force—and a series of hangovers next day that lasted till the evening party started up again. During that fortnight he thought he was having a marvellous time and that everything would be all right, and that Joyce would write to him every week while he was away; he had bought her a very expensive fountain pen, and she had promised to use it. Sometimes he wondered if they couldn’t do something in the country, like sailing a boat or riding a horse, which might be rather fun, but the theatre intervened, or the hangover. Then the evening party would start up, and he would have a marvellous time all over again.

The squadron left England in August 1944 and flew by night over the French battles to land at Malta in the dawn. From Malta they flew on to Cairo West, from Cairo West to Shaibah in Iraq, from Shaibah to Karachi, from Karachi to Barrackpore in Bengal. They rested at Barrackpore for a fortnight after the flight out, while defects in the aircraft were made good and the crews became acclimatised.
Then, as a fully operational unit, they flew down to the dirt airstrip of Cox’s Bazaar, a little place on the Bay of Bengal, on the edge of Burma.

From there they began to operate down the coast of Arakan to support the Army battling in the vicinity of Buthidaung. Each Dakota carried a load of four tons for relatively short hauls such as that; they flew in everything the Army needed, from field gun ammunition and petrol to sausages and hair oil, dropping the loads by parachute from three hundred feet on ground marked out with white cloth strips by the Army, and returning immediately to Cox’s for another load. They had more crews than aircraft, and the machines were worked very intensively. It was usual for the same crew to do two or even three trips in one day, flying for as much as twelve hours; then they would have two days of complete rest.

Morgan lived with the rest of his squadron in tents immediately beside the airstrip and the aircraft. There was no shade, of course; the fierce September sun beat down on the tents and on the blazing sand that made the strip. There is surely no place hotter in the tropics than an unpaved airstrip, except perhaps a paved one. At times it was so hot that it was possible to fry an egg on the metal tail plane of the Dakota, and this Was about the only recreation the trip provided. From time to time they would take one of the squadron jeeps and drive down to the beach, and bathe in the lukewarm Bay of Bengal from the grey, dirty sand. The water was too warm and sticky to refresh them.

He lived in a continual grit of dust blown up from the surface of the strip as the aircraft took off or ran up engines
on test. It got into his food, into his cigarettes and his drink, into his blankets; it formed a gritty mud on his body, with the sweat that poured off him all day. He lived dressed in a bush hat and a dirty jungle suit, which is like a battledress made of thin green material. Usually he wore the trousers only, and the top half of his body became tanned deep brown. In three months of this strange life of supply dropping he matured considerably; he grew more self-reliant in this mode of living, stripped down to the elementals of the job.

At the beginning of November Phillip Morgan got a letter from his wife, the first to reach him since he had left England. Thrilled and excited, he carried it off to his tent, and sitting on the charpoy in the sweltering shade, he opened it. It read:

P
HILLIP DARLING
,

This is going to be a dreadful letter to write and I really don’t know how to begin but it’s not as if we ever had been married really is it I mean had a home and all that. I know when Jack was killed you were too sweet in looking after me and of course he
wanted
it and so we simply had to and it’s been marvellous and I’ll never regret one minute of it will you?

Well now I’ve found somebody at last who can provide for me properly just what Jack would always have wanted for me it seems
too terrible
that he couldn’t have been there first of all but that’s the way things happen isn’t it?

I wonder if you can guess who it is? Jack Bristow isn’t it funny that his name should be Jack too it came on me like a thunderclap the other morning that this was what my first Jack would have wanted for me and of course I thought of you at once and my dear I was
miserable
and Jack and I talked it over last night when he came round after the show and he said I must write and tell you my dear I felt terrible I couldn’t
sleep. I asked him again this morning and he said I must and if I didn’t he’d never see me again so I said I would and he said I ought to ask you to give me evidence a hotel bill or something so that I can divorce you and get the whole thing straight and then we can be married.

I feel this is a stinking mess but it’s the only way I expect you can fix up something in Calcutta or something much better get it all settled up before you come home only please be quick because Jack has only another two months at the Air Ministry and it’s horrible being sort of neither one thing nor the other in spite of it having been all a mistake to start with hasn’t it? I do hope we’ll be frightfully good friends for dear old Jack’s sake.

Ever your loving,               
B
OBBY

Phillip Morgan sat for an hour in the sweltering tent turning this
cri du coeur
over and over in his hands. He sat on the charpoy, naked to the waist; the tears made little streaks in the damp mud of dust on his cheeks and mingled with the stream of sweat from his temples, and ran down his neck and into the sweat beads on his chest, and were lost in the steady stream that ran down his body. At the end of the hour he lit a cigarette with hands that trembled a little. Then Flying Officer Scott, who shared his tent, came in from a trip over the mountains into northern Burma, and Morgan showed him the letter, dumbly. Scott had the best part of a bottle of Indian gin, and sympathy, and he gave both to Morgan, and a bottle of the Wing Commander’s beer ration. Presently the sharp pain eased to a dull ache, another ache among the many aches and pains and itches that made up life on the airstrip of Cox’s Bazaar.

There was, of course, nothing that he could do about the question of divorce. There were only five European women, nurses, in the district at that time, and about seventy thousand men, and there were no hotels to provide him with a bill even if there had been any women. He was too far from England, and too much strained and occupied with war to do anything about it. He did not answer the letter. He stopped writing home. He sank into an apathy of heat and dust and sweat, and joined the morose ten per cent of men in South Fast Asia Command whose wives had let them down.

He had one relaxation for his long hours of leisure that was denied to the other pilots of his squadron. Along the strip there was a squadron of Spitfires commanded by a squadron leader who had served with Morgan in Africa. These Spitfires operated on long-range tanks right down into the south of Burma, bombing a little, dropping parachute supplies a little, shooting up a lot. Morgan had done two tours in Spitfires, and in times of little pressure he could borrow a machine and get up into the clean, cool air at ten or fifteen thousand feet in something that would really fly. Once or twice, when one of the Spitfire squadron pilots was sick, he substituted and flew with them on an operational sortie; he did that for the last time on November the 23rd, about a fortnight after he had received the letter from his wife.

The job was at extreme range for the Spitfires, to strafe Japanese river boats and shipping on the Irrawaddy River between Prome and Yandoon.

The accident, when it came, was almost unbelievably stupid. The Spitfire that he flew was old and battered,
maintained for six months in the open air in the pouring rain and blazing sun of the airstrip, with only improvised appliances. Everything on it worked after a fashion; nothing worked with the mechanical reliability that Morgan was accustomed to in Spitfires. Still, he was glad of the chance to fly it, and took off with the squadron and flew into Burma. He flew on the belly tank until, not far from Zalun, as he was flying down the Irrawaddy with the squadron at two hundred feet, his engine coughed and spluttered. He zoomed up and turned on the wing tanks, but the engine did not play. Instead, it went on coughing for a little, and then stopped for good.

Phillip Morgan spoke on the radio to the squadron leader. He said: “Orange calling Charlie. Sorry, Pete, but this thing’s packing up on me. Out of juice, I think. Looks like I’ll have to put it down. I say again, I’ll have to put it down.” He switched off, and gave all his attention to the landing.

He was then at about a thousand feet, and his propeller had stopped; it stood diagonally across his view; most unusual. There were a few woods below him, the wide river, and a range of paddy fields, small areas separated by earth walls a foot or so in height. There was nothing for it but these paddy fields. He swept around in a great turn in a very flat approach glide with his wheels up for the belly landing, came in across the river, dropped off height with a little flap, and put the Spitfire down in a great smother of dust on the dry fields. She bumped from wall to wall, wrecking herself considerably, and came to rest.

Phillip Morgan was unhurt, and he jumped out with
his emergency pack and his revolver in his hand. A quick inspection showed him that the wing tanks were quite dry, not having been filled up before the machine took off. The petrol gauge in the cockpit, however, still showed FULL when switched to the wing tanks.

His situation was a bad one. He was in the middle of a country occupied by the enemy, and he could speak no word of the language. If he had been a hundred miles nearer to Cox’s Bazaar, his proper course would have been to stay near the wrecked Spitfire in the hope that an attempt would be made to land a light aeroplane near it, an L-5, to get him away. A quick calculation showed him that the range was too great for an L-5 to reach him. He must depend upon himself entirely if he was not to surrender tamely. He took his pack and his revolver and ran for the nearest wood, three hundred yards across the paddy fields, and reached the shelter of it, and lay down panting.

As he rested, he considered the position. He would at any rate make an attempt to get away and back to Cox’s, though he knew that his prospects were not good. Nearly five hundred miles of enemy-held country separated him from the front line, a country lightly held by the Japanese, but a country of mountain and tropical jungle. He had in his emergency pack a good kit of drugs, and rations sufficient for two or three days but nothing like sufficient for a journey such as that. Moreover, the country that he was now in was relatively thickly populated and well farmed; his forced landing must have been observed by many of the natives if not by the Japanese. Still, he would walk on to the west and see what happened; he could not
make his situation any worse. He could surrender at any time.

He pressed on westwards through the woods, using a jungle track; he could not have got through the undergrowth. It was early afternoon and very hot; the flies tormented him. He went on for about an hour, covering perhaps three miles, and sank down for a rest in an exhausted sweat. He was so blind with fatigue that he did not notice men creeping up behind him, did not know of their presence till he heard a voice say, “English,” and he swung around. There were four Burmans, with rifles in their hands, and fierce, scowling faces. They were not in any uniform.

Dispassionately, Morgan wondered if this was to be the end of it.

He knew from his briefings that these men could be one of several categories. They could be dacoits, who would murder him immediately for his clothes and his revolver. They could be Japanese supporters, who would murder him and take his head and give it to the Japanese as evidence of loyalty, and earn a few rupees by doing so. They could be members of the Burma Independence Army, who had fought against us when the Japanese invaded the country and now were rumoured to be fighting for us. They could be just a pack of frightened farmers, uncertain of what to do for the best. He could not know, and since he could not talk the language, he had no means of learning.