Blue Smoke (16 page)

But Billy had already gone.

As he walked towards a wooden ramp leading up to what was presumably the door of Ward Three, he could hear a hell of a racket coming from inside. Someone was singing tunelessly and banging away on a piano, and there seemed to be some sort of yelling match going on, punctuated with bursts of raucous laughter. Perhaps he’d turned the wrong way when he’d come out of the main hospital building and this was the wing for mental patients?

He went up the ramp any way, and found himself in a wide corridor that smelled strongly of antiseptic and something else a little less pleasant. There were no signs advertising which part of the hospital he was in, so he stopped the first nurse he saw.

‘Excuse me, is this Ward Three?’

‘It is. Are you here to visit someone?’ The woman replied. She was very pretty.

‘Yes, I’m looking for my cousin, Duncan Murdoch. He’s a pilot with Fighter Command and I’ve only recently heard he’s here.’

‘Yes, Duncan’s a patient here. And you’re …?’

‘Private Billy Deane, Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force.’

‘Well, it’s lovely to meet you, Private Deane. I’m Nurse Pearsall. Duncan will be thrilled. He doesn’t get many visitors, mainly just
the chaps from his old squadron, when they can get away. Perhaps you’d care to leave your coat out here? And perhaps your jacket and your scarves, and maybe your hats, and probably your gloves and goggles as well? It’s very warm in the ward. Then would you like to follow me?’

She waited patiently while he struggled out of his multiple layers and piled them onto a wooden bench against the wall.

‘I should warn you though, Private Deane,’ she said in a low voice over her shoulder as she started walking, ‘this is a burns ward and most of the men here are very injured. Not sick, you understand, injured. You may find some of what you see disturbing.’

Billy felt embarrassed by the possibility that he might look like the sort of person who would be upset by disfigurement. ‘I’ll be fine, thank you, Nurse,’ he replied just a tiny bit frostily.

Claire smiled to herself — they always said that.

She opened the door to the ward — a large, open room, and still rather noisy — and ushered him in. ‘Duncan’s in here somewhere, well, he was five minutes ago. Just wander along and you’ll see him.’

Billy took a few steps forward, then stopped in front of a man in a wheelchair with an open book propped against his heavily bandaged hands. This clearly wasn’t Duncan, but he nodded hello anyway. The man smiled back. It wasn’t until he started moving again that Billy realised that there had not been any feet poking out from the bottoms of the man’s trousers.

The piano had stopped, but someone else was singing now, although Billy couldn’t see the singer.

He looked at the next group of men, gathered around a card table, smoking. Some of these blokes had the use of their hands, but two or three of them had extremely strange-looking faces.

The man facing him now, smiling — at least Billy
thought
he was smiling — appeared to be missing his nose. Where it should have been there was just a flat piece of taped white gauze, which
moved in and out slightly as the man breathed. And instead of eyelids there appeared to be two miniature sausages stitched to the front of his brows. His top lip was also unnaturally flat and a shiny pink colour, and he was missing several of his top front teeth.

The ears on the man next to him had been burned down to small twists of skin, and the flesh on the back and sides of his skull was a mass of lumpy, shiny scar tissue. His face was untouched from the nostrils up, but below that his lips were a shapeless border around a mouth that revealed far too much of his gums.

The next man had most of his face bandaged, while the fourth, his face unscathed, held his cards in heavily scarred hands that had only thumbs.

They were grotesque, but what really horrified Billy was the realisation that these weren’t old men, they were young blokes probably only a year or so older than himself. He hoped his shock wasn’t registering on his own face.

Everyone in the room seemed to be looking at him now, as if
he
were the odd man out. He supposed he was, really.

‘Looking for someone?’ said the man with the missing nose.

‘Er, yes, actually, Duncan Murdoch.’

‘
Anyone seen Duncan
?’ The man bellowed to the ward at large.

Another man wandered over and said in a parched, wheezing voice, ‘In the bog, I think. Who’s this?’

Billy was fascinated by the sausage of rolled skin that protruded from the man’s collar; it was stitched down to the base of his neck and looked bizarrely like a fat caterpillar about to take a leisurely walk up the man’s throat towards the large dressing on his right jaw and cheek. His mouth also appeared to have been badly burned.

The invisible singer turned up the volume a notch. Billy stuck out his hand and introduced himself.

‘Good-oh, welcome to Ward Three,’ The man replied, returning
Billy’s handshake. He touched the protrusion on his neck. ‘It’s called a pedicle, for skin grafting, in case you’re wondering. Duncan shouldn’t be long. Mind you, he might be — we had beans and cabbage last night. Have a seat while you wait,’ he added, indicating a spare chair at the card table.

But just as Billy sat down someone sauntered into the ward, a tall man with large squares of gauze over his chin, cheeks and nose, and a heavier dressing on the underside of his jaw. From the confines of a bandage wound around his head, set low over his brows and covering one eye, tufts of bright bronze hair stuck up untidily. His hands were a vivid pink and had the telltale shine, but they seemed to function adequately as he was carrying a rolled-up news paper in one and a packet of cigarettes in the other.

He stopped when he saw his cousin. ‘Billy!’ he cried in delight. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

Billy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he suddenly realised who he was looking at. ‘Duncan! Bloody hell. How are you?’

Duncan pulled up a chair, his one visible eye twinkling with pleasure. Above it the eyelid was raw and puffy. ‘Well, I’ve been better, I must admit, though I’m starting to come right. What about you, just passing through?’

‘No, I only just heard you were here, and the battalion’s only over near Aldershot so I thought I’d come and see how you are.’

‘Give you leave, did they? That was unusually thoughtful of the army.’

‘I’m AWOL.’

‘Oh, right.’

The invisible singer hit a particularly high note then, and immediately followed it with a very clearly enunciated curse.

Duncan said, ‘Ray’s dropped his pipe again,’ and one of the card-players got to his feet and headed towards a screen near the end of the ward.

‘We’ve got a saline bath. The chaps spend hours in it, especially Ray. He copped it just about everywhere.’

Billy nodded. ‘Where did you cop it, apart from what I can see?’

Duncan pulled a face that was half grimace, half dismissal. ‘I was lucky, really. I had my gloves on so the burns on my hands weren’t too bad. I’m getting the use back quite quickly, see?’ He held his hands up and waggled his fingers to demonstrate. ‘I’ve had six grafts on my face so far, three on my eyelids, although one of those didn’t take, one on my cheeks and nose, and two on my lips, which finally look like lips again. Fortunate, really, because they looked pretty bloody queer before.’

They didn’t look a hundred per cent now, Billy thought, but compared with some of the other men here, Duncan didn’t appear too badly off at all.

‘And there’s a bit of a mess under my chin, but the Boss says he can tidy that up with a few more grafts. I broke my arm as well, when I came down, but I didn’t even know about that for the first ten days.’

Billy didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t come out with something as trite as ‘Well, you look really good’ because it just wasn’t true. And ‘She’ll be right’ was hardly appropriate either.

‘Will you go back to flying?’

Duncan’s face darkened. ‘No, I won’t, my eyes were damaged. I’m not blind, thank God, but my vision’s no longer good enough to fly. I’ve had it checked,’ he added morosely.

‘What about a desk job?’

‘Who the fuck wants to spend the rest of the war behind a desk?’

Billy nodded in agreement; surely there could be nothing worse. ‘So will you be off home soon?’

‘Not for at least another twelve months, according to the Boss, so I’m stuck here for a while yet. But, you know, it’s not too bad. There’s beer on tap, cards and chess, plenty of stuff to read, the
food’s all right and we get out quite a bit. The villagers are really good.’

Claire walked past them then, and to Billy’s surprise she gave them both an enormous wink.

‘And of course,’ Duncan added in a stage whisper, ‘there’s Nurse Claire Pearsall. She doesn’t know about this yet but I’m going to marry her in the not too distant future.’

When Billy got back to Farnham he discovered he’d barely been missed. He was subjected to a quick five minutes on the mat in front of the company commander and a lecture about not nicking off with battalion equipment, then was told to go and pack his kit because they were on the move again.

The gen was that they were finally off to much warmer climates, and he realised his own wedding plans really would have to wait. Speculation was rife, but most agreed that the battalion’s likely destination would be Egypt, and this was unofficially confirmed when they were issued with tropical kit and ordered to paint the battalion vehicles in yellow desert camouflage. They were all very grateful that the Luftwaffe had almost ceased daylight raids: the finished vehicles stuck out like dogs’ balls against the white Surrey snow.

Christmas came and went while they were waiting, although celebrating Christmas in freezing temperatures with no sunshine and no pohutukawa trees, and not even any decent stones for the hangi, wasn’t very festive, and some of the boys began to feel really homesick for the first time. But on 3 January, they were finally ready to go.

Kenmore, April 1941

L
eila swore inelegantly as she attempted, once again, to sit on the lid of her suitcase heavily enough to force the latches shut.

Her mother looked on, bemused. ‘Bonnie’s managed to close hers quite successfully.’

‘Bonnie’s managed to close
hers
quite successfully!’ Leila mimicked rudely.

Keely ignored her; it was always for the best when Leila was in one of her moods. It was frightening really — sometimes Leila’s behaviour was uncannily like her own when she’d been that age.

‘What on earth have you got in it?’

‘Oh, just stuff. Clothes, my new winter coat, shoes, my make-up kit, some hats — which will no doubt be squashed beyond recognition now — my swimming costume, spare towels, linen …’

‘Leila, you’re only off to Auckland, darling, not a six-month tour of Europe. And won’t you be given a uniform when you get there?’

Leila finally managed to shut her case, and got off it. Her blonde hair was escaping from its fashionable roll, and her face was red from exertion.

‘Yes, but I’m not living in it for the duration! There are
bound
to be opportunities to go out dancing. I’ll need dresses and shoes for that at least.’

Keely shook her head. She supposed that of all the war activities her girls could have signed up for, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was a reasonably safe option — providing of course that they didn’t end up having to go over seas — but already she pitied whoever would have the misfortune of overseeing them. To think that they’d actually had to go through a selection process and they’d passed! But, to give them their due, their typing and shorthand skills had improved markedly during their stint in town, and when they’d left they’d both been given excellent references. By someone called Mr Dimbly, if Keely recalled correctly.

Bonnie came in then, Henry shrieking ear-piercingly as she held him upside-down by his ankles.

‘Mum!’ he squealed. ‘
Mum
! She’s going to drop me,
help
!’ But he was giggling helplessly all the same.

Keely noted his beet-red face. ‘Put him down, Bonnie, he’ll be sick.’

‘No, I won’t,’ he squawked, ‘breakfast was ages ago!’

But Bonnie put him down any way; he was nearly five now and getting quite heavy.

‘All done?’ she asked Leila.

‘I think so. I’ve managed to get everything in, just.’

‘Good, we’ll take our bags down then, shall we?’

They looked at each other and grinned.

Owen used precious petrol filched from the station supply to drive them into town to catch the train to Auckland. Henry was wildly excited as the engine came whooshing into the station platform, hissing and blowing steam exactly like the dragon in the book Gran was helping him to read at the moment.

But he had to be held by the hand, crying and stamping his feet, when he suddenly realised that Bonnie and Leila were going away
somewhere without him. He didn’t even perk up when they hung out the window and promised they would send him something nice from Auckland, which could have been on the moon as far as Henry was concerned. They had to get their handkerchiefs out then at the sight of his tear-stained little face.

Then Keely cried because Henry was upset and because she didn’t know when her girls would be home again, and Owen had to blow his nose because his entire family was weeping and all because of this bloody war.

But by the time the crowded train had gone through Hastings, Bonnie and Leila had cheered up considerably, stashed their hand luggage and coats in the racks and settled in for the long journey. They were actually travelling in the wrong direction at that point, but would change trains at Palmerston North, then head back up the main trunk line through Taumarunui, then Hamilton, and on to Auckland. There was of course a road between Napier, Taupo and the railhead at Rotorua, but petrol rationing meant that the trip was just not feasible by car.

They were tired, grubby and grumpy by the time they arrived in Auckland the following morning. They changed trains at Newmarket, then got off at Henderson where they waited to be collected. They would have been amazed, had they known that the bench on which they were sitting impatiently for what seemed like ages was exactly where Tamar had also waited years ago for a train that would take her on to her own new life.

An air force driver eventually turned up, in a smelly great truck that looked big enough to take a whole platoon of new recruits.

‘Are you two Miss B. and Miss L. Morgan?’ he called. ‘Hey, are you two twins?’

Bonnie and Leila nodded in unison, wishing for the thousandth time that they had a pound for every time someone had asked them that.

He jumped out, took their cases, tossed them none too gently over the tailgate, then he helped them up into the cab.

‘You’ll have to hop in the back before we get to the base, though,’ he informed them as he manipulated the gear stick with a bone-shuddering crash and pulled away from the station.

‘Why?’ Bonnie was mystified.

‘Because it’s
fraternising
, that’s why. Airmen are not allowed to fraternise with airwomen, it’s the rules.’

‘Oh, right. Well, we don’t want to break the rules, do we?’ Leila gave Bonnie an exaggerated nudge in the ribs.

‘No, actually, I’m only teasing about the truck. But not about the fraternising,’ admitted the driver.

He pointed out various sights on the way, the bush and farmland, the road to the other air base at Hobsonville off to their right, and Waiarohia Inlet directly in front of them, until they eventually drove through the gates of the rather bleak and windswept Whenuapai Air Force Base.

‘Here we are,’ he announced cheerfully as he climbed out to retrieve their cases. ‘Home sweet home, for the duration anyway. Unless you get transferred, of course. That happens. The administration block is dead ahead. Enjoy yourselves!’

They soon discovered that they were the last of a group of thirty new recruits to arrive at Whenuapai that day. They were given a cup of tea and a biscuit, and a talk from a stern-looking woman in uniform who introduced herself as Mrs Buckley-Jones, the WAAF supervisor. Like the others, Bonnie and Leila had had their medical and eye examinations, and their measurements taken for their new uniforms, before they’d left home, and Mrs Buckley-Jones explained that their uniforms would be available for collection from stores later that afternoon. Then the commanding officer, the station adjutant and the administration officer arrived, and the new recruits were required to stand and take an oath of
allegiance to the King. It was a very serious, if brief, procedure, and even Bonnie and Leila felt rather humbled by the gravity of the moment.

The next stop was the mess, where they were given a filling but not very inspired meal and a cup of stewed tea, then it was back to the administration block to be issued with registration numbers and ‘meat tickets’, identification discs — one red and one white — to which each newly sworn-in airwoman had to add her name, number and blood group. There was general agreement that this particular bit of the induction process was somewhat sobering.

After that they were taken to the women’s barracks — known collectively as the ‘waafery’ — where Bonnie and Leila received their first major shock. Instead of the cosy, private, single rooms they’d envisaged, there were several long huts, partitioned into small cubicles just big enough for one person. Each contained a single wooden bed, a chest of drawers and a narrow wooden wardrobe with a shelf at the top for hats. The walls were bare, as was the floor, and there wasn’t a blanket, sheet or pillow to be seen. A quick inspection revealed that the furnishings in each cubicle were identical.

Mrs Buckley-Jones gathered them together again and told them that they would have to draw their bed linen and so on from stores, that the ablutions (where on no account could clothes of any description be laundered) were in the hut behind this one, that barracks cleaning day was always on a Thursday and that next door was the recreation room, where they would find some rather more comfortable chairs and sofas, a radio and a sewing machine for their off-duty use.

Leila raised her hand. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Buckley-Jones, but I brought my own linen. May I use that?’

There were several titters, but unfortunately none of them came
from Mrs Buckley-Jones. ‘No, I’m afraid you cannot. This is the air force, there is a war on and you are required to use, and
only
use, regulation air force stores and equipment. I suggest you send your personal linen back home, Miss Morgan.’

Leila stared defiantly at Mrs Buckley-Jones, and Mrs Buckley-Jones stared defiantly back, but Leila was the first to drop her gaze.

The supervisor went on. ‘You are all expected at stores at 1500 hours to collect your uniforms. You can pick up your bed linen then as well. Oh, and there is usually a photograph of new recruits in their civvies before you put on your blues for the first time, so I suggest, girls, that you take the opportunity to freshen up and reapply your lipstick. I will see you at stores, which is to the rear of the admin block, in twenty minutes.’

‘Well!’ exclaimed Leila when she’d gone, flopping onto one of the beds and grimacing because the mattress was even harder than it looked. ‘It’s not quite what we were expecting, is it?’

‘And what were you expecting? A five-star hotel?’

This was from a tall, solid girl with dark hair and a cheerful face.

‘No,’ Leila replied, ‘but it’s all very … communal, isn’t it?’

‘I think it’s great,’ The girl said. ‘Sheila Sullivan, from Kaitaia. Where are you girls from?’

Bonnie said, ‘Napier. I’m Bonnie Morgan and this is Leila. We’re twins, before you ask.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘We applied to get in before Christmas but we weren’t called up until just a couple of weeks ago,’ Leila added.

‘It was the same for me,’ said another girl with freckles and huge hazel eyes. ‘I didn’t hear for ages. Oh, sorry, I’m Eileen Parr.’

‘Well, Sheila Sullivan and Eileen Parr,’ said Leila as she got up off the bed, ‘you heard what Mrs Buckley-Snooty-Jones said, get your lippy on and let’s go and have our photograph taken.’

‘Actually, she isn’t really snooty, you know.’

Leila turned to face an attractive, fair-haired girl leaning against the edge of one of the partitions. She was wearing a smart grey-checked suit over a fine, baby blue jumper, and a pair of very good pearl earrings.

‘Is that right?’

The girl nodded. ‘My mother knows BJ really quite well, and apparently she’s quite a good stick once you get to know her.’

‘BJ?’ Bonnie echoed. ‘That’s good, I like that. Much less of a mouthful than Mrs Buckley-Jones.’

‘Quite, but don’t rub her up the wrong way.’

‘Mmm, perhaps not. Any way, what’s your name?’

‘I’m Peggy Buchanan. I live out at Kohimarama, so I haven’t come far.’

Bonnie laughed out loud. ‘Peggy? We had a dog named Peggy once.’

‘Really?’ Peggy replied coolly. ‘When we were kids we used to have a nasty old donkey called Bonnie. Dad said she went to heaven but I think he sent her to the knacker’s.’

There was the briefest of tension-filled silences, then Bonnie and Leila burst into shrieks of hysterical laughter that soon set the other girls off as well.

‘What’s happening?’ someone called from the other end of the hut.

‘Nothing,’ Leila called back. ‘It’s all right, my sister’s just making an ass of herself!’

This set them off again and all five were still giggling as they set off to find stores and their uniforms.

They weren’t feeling quite so amused, however, as they staggered back to the barracks an hour later laden with great piles of clothing and their bed-packs. They had been issued with almost everything the air force had decreed they would need. This included: kitbag; brushes (one hard and one wire); cap badge; two belted jackets and
two skirts (of barathea, air force blue); tie; gloves; low-heeled shoes (leather, black); two felt slouch hats; shirts and stockings (lisle, dark grey). There was also a cardigan, which Leila tried on immediately and declared ‘positively dire’. The girls destined to work in the mess or as medical or dental orderlies also received white overalls and shoes, and the drivers blue overalls. The air force did not provide underwear, much to everyone’s relief — they were to wear their own — although sanitary supplies could be discreetly obtained via one’s WAAF supervisor.

It was exciting, though, having a uniform, especially one so smartly tailored and decorated with shiny buttons and buckles, and the girls couldn’t wait to get changed. It made them feel, after more than a year of watching the men in their lives going off, that they were finally doing something for their country.

Tamar was going over the books. At nearly twelve and a half pence per pound of clipped wool, Kenmore was not doing at all badly out of the war so far, contrary to what she had expected. Occasionally she felt vaguely guilty about this, but New Zealand’s wool clip had been commandeered by the British government for the duration and the price negotiated fairly, and she knew the wool produced by Kenmore was destined for military purposes. And, privately, she believed that was only fair; if Britain insisted on dragging her family into yet another war, then it should pay a decent price for the raw materials required to dress them. And especially after what had happened to poor darling Duncan. He always played down the extent of his injuries in his letters home, but Tamar knew he must be in a dreadful way if he expected to remain in hospital for another six months at least.

She was just adding up a final column of figures, squinting at the numbers in spite of her relatively new reading spectacles, and
reflecting that it really was time she handed this job over to Owen and Joseph, when she heard Keely calling out to her.

‘I can’t hear you, dear, I’m in the office!’ she called back as she underlined the figures at the bottom of the page.

Keely appeared in the doorway, with a basketful of freshly picked leeks, carrots and an enormous savoy cabbage from the kitchen garden. She put the basket on the floor and sat down on the sofa near the fireplace.