THE DAWN PATROL

CHAPTER 6; 1st part

CHAPTER VI

1944

I was conscripted in the summer of 1942. After six months of flight school outside of Winnipeg, they transferred us to Halifax. In May 1943, we boarded the troopship Amerika, sailing under a Norwegian flag. There were fifty-eight ships bound for England. We were on a small tramp steamer that looked as if it might have seen better days. The Amerika was reminiscent of something one might expect to come across in a Conrad novel. The paint on the hull was peeling; the wheelhouse — or whatever they called it — was painted a sickly green with rust streaks running down the sides as if they were bloody nails scratching down a chalkboard. The anchor chain was bearded with barnacles and long streamers of kelp. We were lucky if we made eight knots.

We left Halifax harbour on the morning tide under an escort of screaming gulls, with a grey, partly overcast day ushered in with a stunning sunrise reminding me of home — except there were no mountains to kiss the morning light as we headed for the open sea. I stood at the stern watching the harbour and the city of Halifax slowly slip away from view — the ship’s wake an arrow on the calm sea, pointing directly away from us.

Two men came up on deck, and the first man approached me, offering me a cigarette.

I shook my head.

“Cole,” he said, and held out his hand. The man was tall, and angular, with hair as red as my sister Jenny’s Raggedy Anne doll, and his walk about as steady I noticed, as the ship pitched and rolled headlong into the gentle swell of the Atlantic.

“Mike,” the other man introduced himself.

“Bobby,” I said.

I could smell the sea around me; I could feel it in the fine mist of spray coming in off the bow. It felt refreshing. The gulls were raining obscenities down at us while floating in the sky like ghostly spirits of the Valkyrie.

Mike was a head shorter than Cole, but he was stocky, with eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead, and a hairline that would see him bald by the time he reached thirty — if he lived that long.

“Where are the escorts? Shouldn’t there be planes flying escort duty?” Cole asked, scanning the sky.

I pointed up at the gulls, but he failed to see the humour.

“What about a cruiser? Shouldn’t there at least be a cruiser somewhere?” he asked Mike, who was standing beside me.

“Do you think it matters having an escort this close to land?” he asked Cole.

I knew fighters regularly flew escort duty with convoys as far out to sea as their fuel allowed them; I saw nothing. There was nothing to see but the wide expanse of an endless sea — a dark, gun barrel grey reflecting the dull, empty sky above us. Even the gulls were abandoning us, winging their way back to shore.

“What kind of answer is that? Does it matter? Of course it matters,” Cole was quick to say. “There might be a sub in the water, waiting to pounce,” he said, nudging me. I looked at him and nodded.

“You can be damned sure there’re subs in the water — but they’re farther out. They don’t want to risk anyone swimming back,” Mike laughed.

“We’re supposed to be meeting up with the real convoy coming out of New York,” the answer came from behind us, and we all turned together. “It won’t matter though — not after tomorrow night.”

“Why didn’t they let us leave from there?” Mike asked. “New York city? I’d like to ‘ave seen New York. You?”

I nodded because I thought it was the thing to do.

“What does he mean, it won’t make any difference after tomorrow night?” Cole asked me, turning to look at the man behind us.

  I shrugged.

“I got one guy here telling me it doesn’t matter — and now this other guy saying it won’t make a difference. Jesus Christ! D’ya think I wanna hear that kind of shit? Fuckin’ nay-sayers, that’s what you are.”

“Have you ever seen New York?” Mike asked us.

“I’d never even been to a city, until we got to Halifax,” Cole said, leaning against the rail. “I’m right off the farm,” he laughed.

“He’s so fresh, he’s still got cow shit between his toes,” Mike smiled. “I never believed them when they said you could smell the ocean from a mile away. They lied. It’s farther than that,” he laughed, and flicked his cigarette into the water.

“Halifax isn’t a city,” Mike laughed at him. “You wanna see a city, you come out to Toronto, or New York. I hear people in New York never sleep.”

“Why bother?” Cole asked, looking down at his friend. He motioned to the man standing behind us. “Isaiah over there, makes it sound like we won’t even see England.”

“Who?” Mike asked me, before seeing the man behind him.

“What’s your name?” Cole called out to him.

“Ray Pardy.”

“Pardy? Ha! ‘Where’s the Pardy?’ that’s what we should call him, eh Lump?” Mike said, and I smiled at his quick-witted answer.

“Lump?”

“It’s a nick-name I gave ‘im. Get it? ‘Lump’? His name’s Cole,” he reminded me. “As in, a lump of coal?”

“I like Cole. Reminds me of the bank robber.”

“What bank robber?”

“Cole Younger. He used to be around in the days of Jesse James.”

“And I should know these people?”

“You ever listen to the radio? Or read a book?”

For the first time since leaving home, I felt sorry for myself. I’d missed Christmas. My package from home arrived five months late; three weeks later we left for Halifax; that’s when I chose to open it.

Mom sent me knitted socks that kept falling down; mittens that were too small, and a scarf that was at least six feet long. I smiled when I read the note with her familiar handwriting: “Winnipeg gets cold at this time of the year.” Freddy and Jenny sent homemade presents, one was a bowl made of flour and water that broke in transit. It might’ve been an ashtray — funny when you consider I didn’t smoke then — and the other a round piece of twig with broken strings cobwebbed throughout. It was from Jenny. She said it was an Indian Catcher.

Like I’m going to catch Indians with it, I thought, and tossed it to the side. Dad sent me a cigar, which explained what I assumed was an ashtray Freddy sent me. That was it. No note, no final words of wisdom I could take with me as I went off to face the Hun — not even a final picture of home to hang on a wall somewhere. I felt as empty as the box in front of me.

The morning I’d left for Winnipeg, I saw Dad standing in the back field looking out at the mountains. He had a habit of waiting for the sun to crest the horizon. He called it The Morning’s Kiss. “I’m going to go out and watch the sun kiss the mountains,” he’d say. No one understood this weakness he had for watching the sunrise. It was something that made him what he was; something that held him apart from everyone else — not any better, or any worse than any other man — just different.

I went out to stand beside him. He was smoking a Cuban. I watched the mountains light up with a distinct rose colour — the winter snow reflecting the first light of the morning sun. I looked over my shoulder; the sun hadn’t fully crested the horizon yet, but I could see the sunlight breaking through the distant trees, and the morning fog like a visceral mist rising off the distant fields before I turned back to look at the far off mountains. Shadows threw themselves from crag to crag, and I was captivated. It was something I’d taken for granted all these years.

“You won’t see these colours at any other time of the day,” Dad said with a softness in his voice. A part of me wondered what he was thinking, but I didn’t dare ask. “You can look at them for as long as you want later on in the day, but they’ll always have that same distant blue to them; it’s only now, at this very moment — and it only lasts for a minute, if that — but it’s worth the wait.”

“I never noticed before.”

“That’s because you were too busy growing up.”

“You never used to watch the sun rise.”

“I was too busy watching you grow up.”

“And I have,” I said.

He nodded once, puffing on his cigar and nodding his head again. It was as if he was a having a conversation with himself. A wreath of smoke hung about his head for a moment before the wind took it away.

“Yes. You have. As much as I’ve wanted to keep you by my side — as much as I’ve wanted to keep you all here — you’ve grown. Jack’s gone. Winnie’s left. And now you’re off, too. My two oldest sons and a daughter. Thank God Freddy and Jenny are too young.”

“It may be over by the time I get there.” I said.

He shook his head. “No. This war will drag on for years. Maybe another five or six. Who can say? Wars tend to go on until they’ve run the course. I don’t think it can go much longer than five more years though — they’ll have to run out of bullets eventually — or maybe people will get sick of it, like they did before?”

“Any words of advice?”

He looked at me closely for a moment before turning back to look at the mountains.

“No,” he said, and took another puff of his cigar. “Would it matter if I did? You made a promise not to go, and you broke it.”

“I’ve been conscripted.”

“Yes. Too bad you felt you had to register.”

“It’s too late for that now.”

“Yes. It’s always too late.”

“It’s never too late to say good-bye.”

He looked at me briefly — a sidelong glance that made me think maybe he didn’t want to hear such sentiment. I thought maybe he’d already come to terms with my leaving — and my need for his acceptance was something I was going to have to understand he’d never give.

I looked up at the mountains. The colour had faded. As real as it was, I felt for the first time that I understood; or maybe it was enough just to think that I understood? The day was always renewing itself — always reliving the same moment in time, day after day — and tomorrow would be another day.

I never fully understood how large a convoy could be, until I stood on the deck of our steamer the next morning looking out across the wide Atlantic. The wind swept in from the west, blowing large cumulus clouds across an open sky. Behind us, before us — as far as the eye could see — the sea was full of ships. The sky was thick with gulls, and the choking black smoke of a thousand ships. Where’s Helen now, I thought, for surely, these are a thousand ships.

It brought Dad and Campbell to mind, crossing the Fraser through all kinds of weather — just as he would be now I thought, looking at my watch and checking the time. What time is it in Vancouver if it’s 10:00 a.m. now? Where exactly is now? I wondered, looking to the endless horizon.

There were planes flying escort above us.

From one coast to another in less than a year, and flight school in between. They that go down to the sea in ships, I thought whimsically. Wasn’t that part of a prayer I read somewhere? I was on my way to being a bomber pilot — all I had to do was survive the war, and my life was set. Surviving the war from what I was seeing around me might actually be the easy part.

Still, small wonder I should be thinking about prayers.