The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse Read online

  “There was a kid at school,” Mike said. “He was called Jimmy Clark. We called him Stan – after Stan Laurel, because he looked a bit like him, and walked like him too. We laughed at him – everybody laughed at him. He was, well, sort of uncoordinated. Clumsy. You know that sort of kid?”

  Val thought of a girl she had known at school who was always losing things and getting into trouble as a result. She nodded.

  “This guy, this Jimmy Clark, didn’t have many friends. In fact, he probably had none. He used to ask people if they would be his friend – he asked me once, I remember – and although people didn’t exactly say no, they never really hung around with him. People were kind of embarrassed, if you see what I mean.”

  “Children are like that, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but this went on all the way through high school.”

  She sighed. “I suppose that’s the way it goes.”

  “He admired me,” said Mike. “I was in the football team. I guess I found it easy to make friends.”

  “He looked up to you?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Mike paused. “He asked me to go to his place and see this model railway set-up his dad had made. His father was one of these railway enthusiasts who collect model trains – engines, track, the lot. They make a big thing of it. And Mr Clark had made this whole system, it seemed – tunnels, the works.”

  “You saw it?”

  Mike shook his head. “No. I said I was too busy, because . . .” He faltered before continuing. “I didn’t want people to think that I was friendly with Jimmy Clark, who was a real loser who still played with trains.”

  She looked at him, and saw pain in his eyes. But it was such a little thing, she thought; such a little thing. And her heart went out to him: that he should fret over a small unkindness of childhood. He should not; no, she was proud that he should care about something that all of us must have done at some time or other because we were young and thoughtless. “You shouldn’t blame yourself for that,” she said. “It wasn’t such a big thing.”

  “I haven’t told you what happened.”

  She caught her breath.

  “I heard that he enlisted. After I joined the air force, I heard that Jimmy Clark enlisted in the army. He was put into the dental corps. He helped the dentist, I suppose. You know, with the instruments and the mouthwash and so on.”

  Val said that she thought that must have been important. “You always need dentists, even when there’s a war going on.”

  “Of course,” agreed Mike. “Of course it was important. Toothache’s toothache. We’ve got a dentist at the base.”

  “So that’s what happened to him?”

  Mike looked away. “Until he was killed, yes.”

  She closed her eyes. It was the way wartime stories ended.

  “He was somewhere in the Pacific. I heard from my aunt, who reads everything in the local paper and sends me cuttings. She sent me the report. There was a picture of Jimmy, and the article just said that he’d been killed on active duty. There was a picture of his mom and dad too. The report quoted them. They said how proud they were of their son. Then the paper said that he would be much missed by his friends.”

  Val reached out to take his hand. “Oh, Mike,” she whispered.

  “Missed by his friends . . . me?” He turned back to face her.

  “You see how I feel?”

  “Yes, of course I do. But you shouldn’t dwell on this. You didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know that he was going to go off and get himself killed? In the dental corps? No, of course I didn’t, but I don’t think that made me feel any better. I could have been his friend. I could have gone to his place to see that damn railtrack. I could have done something. But I didn’t.”

  “But it’s the war that makes everything, well, rather worse. It’s not you, Mike. It’s the war.”

  He shook his head. “It makes me think that you should never not say what you need to say.”

  “No.”

  “So, I love you, Val. I love you so much.”

  She made an effort at cheerfulness. “What will our house be like? Our house in Muncie, Indiana?”

  He smiled. “Really neat.”

  “With a garden?”

  “Yes. A garden. Trees. Flowers in the summer. Anything you like.”

  “And a car?”

  He laughed. “Of course. I’ll teach you how to drive. Our roads are much straighter than yours. Wider, too.”

  “So I won’t hit anything?”

  “Not if you drive straight.”

  They ate their sandwiches. They walked along the river bank to where the boys they had heard earlier on were swimming. They had a dog in the water with them, and the dog was fetching sticks.

  “Could we take a dog with us to America?” she asked.

  He looked doubtful. “I don’t think so. I don’t think you can take a dog.” He looked at her fondly. “You shouldn’t worry too much about dogs. Dogs have their own lives, you know.”

  She knew that. “But their lives get all tangled up with ours,” she said.

  He agreed. “It’s what they want, I think.”

  “Even in our wars?”

  He had not thought about that, but she was right, he decided.

  They turned back. One of the boys shouted from the water. “Good luck, mister! Kill the Germans, mister!”

  “They’re just boys,” said Val.

  ❖ 9 ❖

  When Bill Edwards had gone, Archie said to Val, “Can you take that dog back to your aunt’s place, just for the time being? A week or two – maybe a bit longer.”

  Val thought about this. Annie had a kind heart, but her situation was awkward. Everybody went to the post office from time to time – including Ted Butters. Ted’s cousin, Alice, lived a couple of houses away. She and Ted were on good terms and she would probably recognise the dog easily enough. They could not risk that now that Bill Edwards was involved.

  “It would be better for him to go somewhere else,” she said. “You know how it is in the village. People talk – even in wartime, they talk.”

  Archie understood. “You’re right: he must go somewhere else.” He looked at her enquiringly. “Any ideas?”

  Suddenly it came to her. “Yes,” she said. “Mike will take him.”

  “Your fellow?”

  “My fiancé now. Yes. He likes dogs, and he said that somebody at the base had a dog but it ran away.”

  Archie looked unconvinced. “An air force base is no place for a dog. All that noise. All that coming and going.”

  “It won’t be for long,” said Val. “And think of the attention he’ll get – and the food.”

  Archie had to admit the food would be better. “They have steaks down there,” he said. “They have steaks the size of which you wouldn’t dream of. A dog could get the trimmings and do very well out of them.”

  Val smiled. “He’d be well fed. The Americans look after their own.”

  Archie shrugged. “If he’ll take him, that’s the answer.” He paused. “We could drive him there in the van. I’ve got a drop of petrol.”

  They went out into the yard. Peter Woodhouse was in his kennel, tied to the wire run that allowed him a certain measure of freedom. He leapt up at Val and licked her hands and arms enthusiastically, reaching her face and covering it with slobbering kisses.

  “He knows,” she said. “He knows that we’re planning something for him.”

  They drove to the base, taking with them the delivery of eggs that would get them past the guard. Val was known there now, not because of the engagement, which was unofficial, but as a supplier of eggs. Sergeant Lisowski had told the guardroom that she could come and go as she pleased, and she had never encountered any difficulty in getting past the front gate. Now, on this visit, there were a few more questions as Archie was asked who he was, but they were soon waved through.

  Because Val did not know whether Mike would be there, she spoke to Sergeant Lisowski.


  “The lieutenant’s on a mission,” he said. “Just left.”

  She explained about Peter Woodhouse, without mentioning the real reason why refuge was needed. “We can’t look after him right now,” she said. “I wondered if Mike could take him.”

  Sergeant Lisowski looked down at the dog. “I love dogs,” he said. “We had wiener dogs back in Pittsburg. Three of them. They’re great dogs. Small bodies, big hearts.”

  “This is a sheepdog,” said Val. “They’re not like . . . what did you call them?”

  “Wiener dogs. You call them sausage dogs over here,” said Sergeant Lisowski. “They’re German, but they’re not Nazis.”

  Archie laughed. “Dogs don’t know about these things,” he said.

  Sergeant Lisowski looked momentarily surprised. “I guess they don’t.” He bent down to pat Peter Woodhouse. “I can take care of this dog, even if the lieutenant doesn’t want him. Maybe we can look after him together.”

  “I’d like that,” said Val.

  Sergeant Lisowski took the lead they had attached to Peter Woodhouse’s collar. The dog looked up at him, and then at Val and Archie; he was clearly confused. Val saw that, and her face fell.

  “They know when we’re abandoning them,” she said. “They can tell.”

  “He’s not being abandoned,” said Archie. “I would never abandon a dog.”

  “No,” said Val. ‘I’m sorry. We’re handing him over temporarily.”

  “Temporarily,” agreed Sergeant Lisowski. “Everything’s temporary these days, isn’t it? Life itself. Temporary.”

  It was ten days before she saw Mike again. She had a message, though, left with her aunt at the post office, delivered from the base. It was a short note to tell her that Peter Woodhouse was doing fine. They call him Woody here, he wrote. The base commander has taken a shine to him and says he can be on pay and rations as a mascot. So Uncle Sam is paying for him now! One of the men has gotten hold of a collar from somewhere – a swell new collar with his name burned into the leather. It suits him just fine. And then he ended with the private fondness that made her heart skip. She loved this man; it was as simple as that. This was a good, kind man who would take on somebody else’s dog, and was so gentle in everything he did; a gentle boy in the middle of the great machinery of war.

  She told Archie about the note, and he seemed pleased. Bill Edwards had called round at the farmhouse on his official visit while Val had been in one of the fields. She had not seen him, but Archie told her how Bill had made much of looking around the barn and noting things down in that notebook of his. “He showed me what he had written,” he said. “He wrote: Inspected barn: no dog of the description. Inspected farmyard: no dog of the description.”

  Archie laughed. “I said to him: ‘Bill this is a bit of play-acting, ain’t it?’ and he shook his head and said, ‘Archie, I never told any lies in my whole police career and I’m not going to start now. I can show that Ted Butters my notebook and tell him, face to face, that his dog was not at your farm. I can tell him I looked. And all of that will be God’s truth – every word of it.’”

  Val smiled. “It’s better not to lie. And you don’t want policemen who lie, do you?”

  “If we have that,” said Archie, “if we have lying policemen and all that, then what’s the point of this war, I ask you?”

  She looked at him. She was thinking of Mike, and of what he was doing. Why was he here? He was risking his life every day – or however often it was that he went on those missions – because he had been told to do it. It was a long way from Muncie, Indiana, but he had come because it was his duty.

  Archie had more to say. “I wonder if they’ll take Peter Woodhouse up in their planes. He said he was going to be a mascot. They won’t take him with them, will they? For good luck?”

  Val said she thought this unlikely. “A plane is no place for a dog. Dogs don’t like planes.”

  This tickled Archie. “Dogs don’t like planes? Who told you that, young Val? You ever put a dog in a plane?”

  She blushed. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Dogs don’t like loud noises.”

  Archie disagreed. “Peter Woodhouse hopped up smartly enough on Henry Field’s tractor. Remember? When he brought it round, Peter was up there like a rat up a drainpipe. He didn’t mind the noise. Wanted to be part of what was going on.”

  “Tractors and planes are different,” said Val. “I don’t think dogs like planes. I just think that – I’ve got no proof.”

  Mike took her to the local pub when he had his next pass.

  “We’ve been busy,” he said. “Your boys have been pounding the Germans and we’ve been taking pictures of it all.” He shook his head. “They won’t be able to take much more of this now that we’ve landed in France. We’ll just push on and on until we get to Berlin.”

  “I want it to end,” she said.

  “So does everybody. Germans too, I imagine. They’re people, after all.”

  “But Hitler’s their fault.”

  “Sure, he’s their fault.” He was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “Woody is doing just fine. When do you want him back?”

  She had not thought about this, but she explained their concern about Ted Butters. “Someone might tell him again,” she said. “We probably need to leave it a little while yet.”

  Mike seemed pleased. “He fits in well. He obeys orders, you see. Some dogs wouldn’t. Sergeant Lisowski had those little dachshunds back in Pittsburg.”

  “He told us.”

  “Yes, well, he says that his dogs would never obey orders. He said they’d be court-martialled pretty quickly.”

  She moved her knee, so that it was touching his under the table. There were fewer opportunities for physical closeness than they would have liked. A war was a public time; private moments were difficult, although people took what chances they could.

  Mike took a sip from his glass. He had forced himself to drink the warm beer that had so surprised him at the beginning; now he liked it. “He came with us last time,” he said. “You know that? He came in the plane.”

  She was wide-eyed. “Over there? Over . . . wherever it is you go?”

  He nodded. “He whined and whined and the major eventually said okay, you guys can take him with you. That was all, and he was great in the plane. We took an old flying jacket for him to lie on and he lay there all through the mission. I held him when we made it back to the base so that he wouldn’t get thrown around if it was a rough landing.”

  “As your mascot?”

  “Yeah. A mascot. For good luck.”

  She asked him whether they would take him again. He replied that they would. “Once you start doing something for good luck, you can’t stop it just like that. That’s bad luck. So you keep on doing it.”

  She told Archie the next day. “They’re taking Peter Woodhouse up in their planes. He’s flying with them.”

  Archie did not express surprise. “They’re quite the boys,” he said. “All those air force people are – ours, theirs – they’re all the same.”

  ❖ 10 ❖

  The colonel sent his clerk to fetch Mike from the officers’ mess. It was a summons that everybody dreaded: bad news from home was usually delivered by the colonel himself, who did not believe in delegating unpleasant duties to subordinates. And he did it well, because he was sympathetic – some said the most sympathetic colonel in the US Air Force. That was not the same thing as being soft, they said; he could be as tough as a situation demanded, but he felt for his men and he understood how difficult this war was for so many of them: farm boys who should have been driving tractors rather than flying planes and being killed in Europe.

  Mike saluted, and waited for the worst.

  “I haven’t called you in for bad news,” the colonel said quickly. “Nothing like that.”

  Mike relaxed. He grinned. “That’s a relief, sir.”

  The colonel indicated for him to sit down. “Nor is there any problem with your flying. Nothin
g but good reports.”

  “I do my best, sir.”

  The colonel looked past him, over his shoulder, to where the flag fluttered in the afternoon breeze. A wireless was playing somewhere, and then it was switched off.

  “This mascot you guys have taken on – what’s his name again?”

  Mike smiled. “Peter Woodhouse, sir. He had that name when we took him. We’re looking after him for my girl, but he’s somehow stayed on.”

  “No objection to that,” said the colonel. “Nice dog. I had setters back in Maine. Irish setters. You know those dogs?”

  “I’ve seen them, sir.”

  The colonel looked back into the room. “My daddy swore by them. He said you couldn’t get a smarter dog in this world than an Irish setter. He bred them, you know, and won all the prizes at the dog shows. When he died I took over his dogs. Four of them. One very old one who never got over his death – pined, you see, pined away to nothing. Had to shoot him eventually because he was just skin and bone and it hurt him too much to walk. A great dog, though.”

  Mike nodded. “My grandfather had a coon dog on his farm. Nothing special. He was the greediest dog you ever met.”

  The colonel laughed. “Dogs are always hungry. You show me a dog that’s not hungry and I’ll tell you you’ve got yourself a cat by mistake.”

  Mike looked at his hands: the colonel had not invited him into his office to talk about the merits of different breeds of dogs.

  “This dog of yours – I know he’s been up in the planes.” He looked at Mike over the top of his rimless spectacles, but he was smiling as he spoke. “Don’t ever think I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Mike nodded. “I’d never say that, sir.”

  The colonel sat back in his chair. “He likes it?”

  “He seems to, sir. He likes being with us. You know how dogs like going in cars and trucks? It’s like that. He thinks it’s a truck, I guess.”

  The colonel laughed. “Well, I suppose it feels the same.” He paused. “And he doesn’t get in the way?”

  “Never, sir. Just lies there. Tries to stand up when we land but soon lies down again.”