Turbulence (27 page)

Out of the window I saw hundreds of planes and gliders, silhouetted like geese against the moon. One by one they peeled off, heading in triangular formations for the coast and Normandy. I felt my face pull as the glider accelerated. The radio aerials warped down the cabin like windblown corn.

Beneath us the surface of the Channel was covered with the shapes of ships, clearly visible in the moonlight. I had never seen so many: more than six thousand, apparently. Surely the German spotter planes would see them? It was too late now, anyway. We needed the moonlight to ensure low tides and visibility for airborne landings. It was that requirement, I recalled, which had really pushed out the odds against the right weather.

Overall, staring down at the silver stream of moving vessels and trying to judge the weather, I felt the forecast was vindicated. I was not to know that the surface wind speeds were above the Admiralty's minimum conditions and that the sea was rough and men were being sick and that much worse was to come during the run-in at the five beaches, with ships and landing craft facing steep seas and even stronger winds. Winds gusting up to 25 mph, Beaufort 5 or 6.

I could hear the boom of artillery and bombardment in the distance, and presumed the barrage had started. The man on my right took a dagger out of his boot and sliced up a lump of cheese. He offered me some, but I couldn't eat. Jourdaine, on my left, unwrapped some chocolate, its foil glinting in the dim
light. I declined that, too: I already felt queasy from the cocoa. I wondered if anyone else felt the same. A lot of the men around me had their helmeted heads cocked to one side, as if listening for something.

At first the flight was surprisingly calm – we were almost three thousand feet up when the Dakota released us. As dawn broke light filled the plane, and then I understood what the men were listening for. There was a stuttering of guns. Flak began to burst around us in mushrooms of dark-brown smoke.

Somebody said, ‘Here it fuckin' goes.'

‘I wanna go home,' said someone else.

‘Easy boys, easy,' shouted Sergeant Loadmaster Iwiss from down the cabin. He was wearing a leather jerkin with a fur collar. ‘Ready for the drop now.'

We swerved to avoid the anti-aircraft fire, which was bursting outside like fireworks.

‘Blow noses!' came the order.

We all held our noses and blew, as we had been told, to relieve pressure on the ears. My heart was racing as we swooped downward. I had good reason to be frightened. At Southwick I'd seen aerial photos showing anti-glider stakes dug into the Normandy countryside. Somebody had nicknamed them ‘Rommel asparagus'. Nine-metre long staves of sharpened wood – not the sort of thing you want to land on.

I could see the sea glittering in the half-light – changing angle and coming closer as we levelled out. We must have been going at nearly 150 mph. Then the pilot deployed his brake parachute and we were jammed forward in our seats, bodies straining against belts. I heard the sound of somebody vomiting.

There was a hard jolt as we hit the ground with terrific forward momentum. Something tore into the fuselage. Rommel
asparagus: a shaved spear ripping through the bottom of the cabin, with the glider's broken nosewheel attached. It carried on ripping through the bottom of the flimsy craft, opening it up like a zip fastener. We were thrown about, some kit was lost through a void in the floor – and I was impaled at the top of my thigh.

At first it wasn't painful but I gasped all the same, looking at it in astonishment and grabbing my pierced groin either side of the wound. It was as if a tree had started growing out of my flesh. I could see open muscle fibre round wood, and then a gleaming white fragment of bone, which just seemed like another piece of wood. All slathered with blood.

Nobody heard me call. Everyone was shouting and cursing. Out of the window I saw other gliders begin to pitch up at odd angles in the dunes, as if they were models thrown by children. We are landing far too near the sea, I thought; we should be much deeper in than this. Has anyone else been stabbed by a stake like this? My trouser leg started to fill with blood. Then the pain started. Now with a spreading cold blackness, as if someone was pouring ink into the padlock of my left eye, I felt myself begin to faint.

‘To me! to me!' Sergeant Iwiss bellowed. ‘Jourdaine, see to that man. Call medics. Get moving! Will somebody find out where the hell we have landed?'

I could feel the heavy wet of the blood in my trousers, flowing freely now; the material was like a bag filling up. My mind became misted, the rucksack radios rose like saplings. A brightness – Jourdaine's flashlight? – enfolded me from the right, beginning to dilute the inkiness in my head. I felt I must be …

‘Think it might be his femoral, Sarge.'

I didn't know …

His light. The darkness on the left side of my head seemed to
be yearning to merge with his light. What the brain was summoning, I suppose, unable to cope.

I heard Jourdaine say ‘two' into his radio, then some other digits and something about a dog. I glimpsed his grasp, wet from my blood, on the black handset as he said it.
Hu … a…
bu,
the radio squelched back, as if searching for intelligibility. Then, and clearly,
Who?

I thought I was going to die. Jourdaine repeated our unit number.
You're miles off the grid
, came the static-soaked reply, conveyed through the magic wand of the aerial.

Stars began to dance on the cusp of my left retina, along with little black motes. Then these whatchamacallits were swallowed up by the stars and the darkness in my head received what it required, novel immunity from itself.

Light!

It filled my field of vision. Different letters of the alphabet, fluid like molten metal, shone within this light. Fiery letters, jumping jacks, seven from this side, seven from that, eight from another place. Because of the eight, I weirdly thought, there is no longer any separation, no longer any discord. Because of the eight, the
Ilala
can sail out of the Lake Nyasa horizon and take me home.

Jolly good fellow.

Found again.

Still the furline.

Those were the strange words which repeatedly came into my half-closed mind as, partially loosed from the world, I watched myself descend the
Ilala's
bent steel ladder. Probably it was some confused image of the fold-out steps of the glider, as I was being insinuated out by medics. They laid me on a stretcher on the ground, and gave me a shot of morphine.

They then tied tourniquets and tried to plug the wound in my groin. I resolutely remained in Africa. I will stay in Africa, I
told myself, till the pain is gone. Next I was put on a stretcher and lifted, and then some Germans – I presume they were Germans – started firing at us. Little stabs of flame. Ducking their heads, my carriers were almost clipped by raking machine-gun fire as they ran erratically with me, each jolt ripping through the obscuring curtain of morphine. I passed out as I was carried hither and thither like that, as I was borne along by brave American medics jogging along in the jumble of the dunes and the general confusion, the smoke-screens and the mortar crumps and the chaos of barbed wire and concrete emplacements.

I came round, or half came round, several hours later; I don't know exactly how many, but it must have been quite a few as the amphibious landings were now well underway. The medics had moved me back to a first-aid post in some dunes above the assault beach next to which we had mistakenly landed. Other wounded men sprawled around me, some moaning gruesomely, some cracking coarse jokes, most silent, all alike in ignorance about what was going to happen. Though some faces were greyer than others, it was as if we were all waiting, with utter parity of probability, for either one of death or life.

The beach below was congested with vehicles and men who had driven or jumped off landing craft further out, the ramps of their vessels having had to open in heavy swell. In the shallows, a tank was blazing and a vicious tidal stream was carrying away dead and drowning men. Further out, there were ships as far as I could see. On the beach, under drifting clouds of smoke, crawling snake-lines of men were creeping up towards the dunes, behind a few successfully landed tanks. We were too near the German line for them to make much headway. A big gun was banging at us every few minutes, making my eardrums ache and sending vast columns of sand into the air, which then rained down, abrading our skin like glasspaper.

Jolly good fellow.

Found again.

Still the furline.

Discrete iterations, carrying the fervid mind on hollowed-out canoes up the continuum of the lake, to Monkey Bay. Where the fishermen sit cross-legged to mend their nets. Where the pestle pounds maize in the mortar. Where the iridaceous ixia grows, following its own instructions. Where, marbled and mottled, studded, speckled and spangled, the lineage of Vickers flourishes.

Jolly good fellow. Found again. Still the furline.

To block out the pain, and the appalling sights, and the noise and smell of exploding munitions, I had begun to tell myself a fantasy.

Vickers is a famous dog now, long dead but fabled for his wandering through Nyasaland in the wake of the mudslide, in vexed search for a place where the lost master, i.e. my pa, might be found again. He is renowned too for his barred and brindled progeny, which are prized by local hunters for their facing down of marauding lions and for the silence they keep when the kudu appears in the bowman's view.

Helpless, with a dressing plugged in my groin, I watched large numbers of troops being swept off their feet while wading through the breakers. Some drowned. Those who reached dry land were often near exhaustion. At that moment, I instinctively felt our forecast had failed, my optimistic feelings from the plane quite gone.

Unable to watch, or rather opening and closing my eyes, I kept returning to the protective cocoon of my African fantasy, remembering how the kudu meat was always divided, each hut getting its portion. The animal's gyre-like horn would be gouged out and polished (it has tremendous sound-carrying power and is used for sending messages from village to village,
or for summoning warriors during war). The antelope's skin – reddish brown with white, grey and bluish stripes – will be scraped with a stone and mounted to dry in the sun on two staves, which are thrust into the ground to make an X.

I opened my eyes again, to see a jeep struggling in the sand, its wheels revolving in about two feet of water. It eventually came free and began manoeuvring round a pile of logs, one of the many types of obstacles the Germans had placed on the shore. I picked up someone's binoculars to watch, only to see that the logs were in fact bodies. Somehow the driver got round them but shortly afterwards the vehicle received a direct hit from a shell. They were raining down everywhere now, together with intense mortar fire.

Crash!

A large shell, falling in the water, caused a plume of white fluid to rise up, as if a whale had spouted. Still I refused to be startled out of my dream, which I followed as if under the influence of a detective story, or some other composed mystery of that sort.

It could not be sustained. On the beach, a different sort of influence was doing its dreadful, unignorable work, as follow-up waves of the assault came in from new landing craft. Many were foundering. Landing craft were being hurled onto the beaches by the waves, smaller ones being swamped even before they could touch down. Others, flung upon underwater obstacles, were holed and beginning to sink. I realised that the onshore wind was not just above the permissible limit laid down by the Admiralty, it was near the actual physical limit which would have made landings impossible.

We really had taken a very great risk with the weather. Although the achievement of tactical surprise was undoubtedly due to just-tolerable conditions, the weather was seriously reducing our ability to exploit that surprise. Men disembarking
from those landing craft that did get through were being forced to jump, rifle in hand and weighed down by kit, into a milling mass of water, only to find the dead of earlier units floating alongside them.

Although the shells fell near enough to make the marram grass tremble, I seemed to be out of danger in the dunes, in that sandy saucer full of wounded men. But I wasn't feeling so good. Knots of pain were rising from the tangled bloody mess of my groin. I disciplined myself back into the African fantasy, the comforting substitution of time and space into which I had been hurling my consciousness to stave off the spasms.

A strange business. It was as if, in trying to suppress everything that was going on around me, I had gathered two different places and times under a single weather. Scientifically impossible, to mix these two distinct realities under the one sky, but that was what was happening in my head.

At any rate, it appeared I was to be drawn into the variegated dog-pack's evening gathering in the surf, stepping out of that hideous nightmare of war into a timeless irradiance of evening sun. I could be there now as I write – not on the
Habbakuk
, nor in a scratchy, blood-soaked, screech-filled dune in Normandy, but on softer, whiter sand in Africa.

Small green waves are clinking over my feet, bribing me to get up and walk. I know you, old coin, that song you make. I take the bait and rise. Somewhere the lake stretches smooth as baize to the Mozambican side, somewhere I recognise; I begin strolling towards the dogs further down the beach. Already the gap is diminishing. As I walk, sunset is closing down, one by one, rugged ridges of cloud. Soon only a bronzish sliver of sun will be left, a tawny skein being stretched ever tighter by the pulling string of time.

And suddenly, now, I remember where all this
came
from. Something about a dog. Jourdaine calling the medics on his
radio, speaking the codewords for our respective units, as I lay pinioned in my seat back on the glider, bleeding, thinking I was going to die.