The Dog Who Could Fly (13 page)

“All right, all right—we’ll go for a walk tomorrow. Can’t you see I’m busy studying?”

It all came to a head a few evenings later, when Antis—hungry for just a sniff of fresh air—gently touched Robert’s hand with his paw, as if to remind his master of his existence. Robert responded not by fetching his lead but by wandering across the room, his nose still in his book, and absentmindedly opening the door onto the rain-lashed darkness.

“Go on, then, if you want to go out,” he gestured, returning to his seat at the table.

Antis refused to give up. Wagging his tail in hopeful anticipation, he picked up Robert’s leather flying gloves in his teeth and placed
them in his master’s hands. They were the gloves Robert always wore on a cold and wet evening when out walking. His hazel eyes gazed up at Robert anxiously as he tilted his head to one side, trying to fathom what could have so dimmed his master’s spirits, and stressed that special bond that existed between them. In truth, Robert was at his wits’ end. He lived for one thing only—other than his dog, and Pamela—which was to take the fight to the German enemy. Yet ever since reaching England, he’d not fired a single shot in anger.

Antis gave a few good nuzzles with his nose at Robert’s hand, as if to try to dislodge his grip from the hated red book.
Come on
, his expression seemed to be saying,
let’s go! Give yourself a break. We both need to get out of this stuffy room.

“Can’t you see it’s raining?” Robert remarked. “Anyway, I’m busy. You go. Good dog.”

Antis returned to his blanket, which lay at the side of Robert’s bed, chased his tail around a few times, then lay down. If his master had been watching more carefully he might have noticed that Antis’s eyes came to rest on the little red book, which he was staring at with a resentment bordering on hatred. His mind was made up:
The book has to go.

The following afternoon Robert returned from lunch in the mess with a plate of food for his dog.

“Looking for someone?” he called as he stepped through the door.

Those few words—first spoken when Robert had turned back to save the no-man’s-land puppy dog—had become his and Antis’s catchphrase. But instead of the usual bark of welcome there was only an ominous silence. Robert glanced around the room. The place that he had left so neat and tidy that it could have passed an impromptu inspection looked as if it had been hit by a whirlwind. Strewn around the floor were half-chewed and clawed-up scraps of paper, and Robert quickly realized where they had come from.

His little red book lay in tatters. Its handsome cover had been
torn in half and was streaked with drool, almost as if Antis had spat on it in disgust. Robert stared at his dog for a long moment, struggling to calm himself. Antis was pretending to be asleep, but Robert knew by the twitching of one ear that he was paying attention to his master’s every move. Antis opened one eye a fraction to assess his master’s mood, but closed it again in a hurry.

“Come here,” Robert ordered, in as level a tone as he could manage.

Antis rose awkwardly, the ultimate hangdog expression on his face. He walked slowly toward his master, his paws dragging reluctantly and his tail between his legs. He offered a conciliatory paw to shake, but to no avail. Instead, Robert thrust the wastepaper basket at him.

“Look what you’ve done,” Robert announced. “Look at all this mess.” Antis’s eyes followed the finger as it traced a 360-degree circle around the room. “Bad dog.”

Antis cast his eyes at the floor. It was an extremely rare occasion when his master scolded him.
I know. I have been a bad dog. Very bad. But all I wanted was a walk.

“Now, Antis, you’re going to pick up every scrap of paper and put it in this basket.”

To reinforce what he meant, Robert banged the basket on the floor so hard that it made Antis jump.

“Like this.” He picked up a piece of paper, held it out to Antis, then dropped it in the basket. “Come on. Every single scrap in here. No food until you’re done.”

With that, he picked up his gloves and waved them in front of Antis’s face, as if hinting that the reward when the task was completed might be walkies as well as dinner. With a deep sigh Antis tried to pick up the nearest scrap of paper in his jaws. Instead, it stuck to his nose. He leaned his head over the wastebasket, flicked out a pink tongue to try to lick it off, but the shredded page of
Fundamental English
was stuck fast. Next he tried to scratch the scrap of paper off with a paw, but he kept missing. This promised to be a long and painstaking process.

Robert meanwhile was watching closely and trying not to laugh. Finally, as more and more of the torn pages got stuck to Antis’s nose, Robert’s composure failed him.

“What do you look like?” He chuckled. “Have you seen yourself lately, boy? I guess I’d better lend a hand, before those pages stuck on your nose start to suffocate you!”

As Robert bent to the task alongside his dog, Antis vowed he would never again take his frustrations out on one of his master’s possessions. But it was to be his unerring ability to sniff out danger and save lives that would fully redeem Antis in the eyes of his master, and that before the very day was out.

•  •  •

After the big cleanup Antis offered his paw to Robert as a gesture of reconciliation. He was not only forgiven, but he was taken on his longest Liverpool walk yet, in spite of the incessant rain. Then came a surprise that banished from the minds of both man and dog any thoughts of
Fundamental English
’s unfortunate fate. Back at their hut Robert wrapped Antis in a warm towel, and he was shuddering with the pleasure of a vigorous rubdown when a messenger called to say there was a visitor at the main gate. It was a lady, she had come to see both master and dog, and as if to deepen the mystery she had refused to give her name.

Mystified, Robert hurried to the entrance with Antis at his heel. He was not expecting a visitor; nor did he know of any Liverpool lass who would be calling at the airfield to see him, for he had barely been at Speke a week. Before he realized what was happening, Antis had dashed ahead of him with an eager yelp. The next thing he knew, his dog was dancing around a woman standing in the shadow of the gate.

As she turned in his direction Robert realized who it was. Pamela. He sprinted over, taking both her hands in his, and stood gazing at her, momentarily lost for words.

“What’s the matter?” She laughed. “Aren’t you pleased to see me?”

Robert had written to her several times, but he’d never expected anything like this—a visit from out of the blue.

“Is it really you?” he said at last. “I can barely believe it’s for real. How did you manage to get here?”

She smiled mischievously. “When I got your letter about the accident, as chief medical adviser to the pair of you, I thought I’d better check out the damage myself, in person!”

A few days ago Robert had written to Pam about the car accident, but it was of so little significance that he’d forgotten all about it. Yet for Pam it had clearly offered the excuse she needed to come looking for them.

“Fair enough, Dr. Pam. We place ourselves—excuse my English—in your disposal. But I hope you haven’t run away from your important duties just to see us.”

She laughed. “I had a few days’ leave owing and I’ve got a cousin in the area—so here I am.”

As the pair chatted, searchlights began to finger the sky above them and an air-raid siren started its banshee wail. A bunch of WAAFs ran past en route to the air-raid shelters. Such alarms were a regular occurrence at RAF Speke, and rarely had the base itself been attacked. The German bombers seemed to be concentrating on the Liverpool docks, several miles away.

Robert and Pam strolled into town arm in arm, with Antis trotting happily at their side. The sirens faded behind them and the searchlights were extinguished. It had been a false alarm. They were halfway to Pam’s cousin’s house when Robert was distracted from the lady at his side by a whine from Antis. He paused and bent to give his dog a reassuring pat, but recognized instantly the
look he saw in those eyes. Antis had sensed danger in the dark skies above them.

There had not been any raids for several nights—only false alarms. But when the sirens had sounded earlier Robert had sensed this might signal the return of the German warplanes. Antis’s whining grew louder and he shuffled back and forth anxiously, shaking his head from side to side and staring into the sky. Finally, Robert figured he could hear a faint droning in the distance.

Moments later, as if in confirmation of Antis’s early warning, the shriek of air-raid sirens rose above the streets of Liverpool, rebounding off the walls and windows of the empty offices all around them, and searchlights lanced the night. Robert did his best to play down the threat. He didn’t want anything to ruin this precious evening. The sinister rumble of the approaching bombers was drowned out by the ack-ack guns on the edge of the city, but Robert remained convinced the bombers would be targeting the docks.

Even so, Pamela seemed mightily relieved when they reached her cousin’s house and they were able to duck inside. Several hours and a few good pots of tea later they emerged. The streets seemed utterly deserted, but the angry red smear on the horizon confirmed that Robert had been right. The docks were burning, and anyone who had been living anywhere near them would have been lucky to survive.

They began to retrace their route to the airbase. Halfway there Robert heard an incongruous sound—giggles coming from beneath a viaduct. It was followed by a raucous burst of singing—in Czech. Robert recognized the voice of Stetka, a Czech airman who had joined them at Speke, plus one or two others. Stetka was renowned for spending all of his money in local pubs, and tonight he seemed to have managed to drag most of the other Czech airmen with him.

They, like Robert, Pam, and Antis, were now heading back to base. Detaching himself from his drinking buddies, Stetka crossed
the street and bent down to whisper something to Antis. But one gust of his whiskey-laden breath in the dog’s face was enough to set off a sneezing fit. Antis backed away, shaking his head to get the alcohol out of his senses.

An instant later, like a gun dog pointing at game, Antis was standing stock-still, head thrust upward and eyes raised to the sky. Robert knelt to pat him but Antis resisted and began to whimper. Then he broke free and performed the back-and-forth shuffle, the one that meant
danger
. When Robert, Stetka, and Pamela failed to react as Antis wanted, he began to dart between them, tugging at their shoes.

“Don’t worry, boy,” Robert tried to soothe him. “It’s the docks they’re after. We’re safe enough here.”

Even as he spoke, he spotted a gasworks some two hundred yards away, the huge tanks silhouetted against the sky. Several times the Germans had tried to bomb it on their way back from the docks. They probably hoped they would incinerate an entire Liverpool suburb if they scored a direct hit. The locals had seen buildings wrecked and families suffer wounded due to the bombing, but so far the gasworks had remained intact.

Robert nodded in the direction of the enormous tanks. “You know, Stetka, I get worried every time I pass this place.”

“Me too,” his friend replied, instantly sober. “The people who live round here are either ballsy or bloody bonkers.”

Even before the sentence was finished the whipcrack of a nearby artillery gun firing rang out, reverberating around the terraced houses. Robert ducked instinctively. He was rattled, but he tried his best not to show it.

“That’s got to be Thin Bertha,” he shouted to Stetka, recognizing the throaty roar of the artillery piece as it fired again.

Thin Bertha was an antiaircraft gun sited at their airbase. The fact that the gunners were opening fire had to mean there were German aircraft somewhere overhead. Antis was tugging frantically at Robert’s
heel now. Robert could sense the imminent danger, and he knew that his dog was calling for his master to lead them to safety.

“Come on!” Robert shouted, grabbing Pamela’s hand and starting to run. “Into the nearest shelter! No time to get to camp now!”

High above him in the sky he sensed the hollow pop of flares bursting. Moments later the flares were hanging from their parachutes directly overhead, swinging gently to and fro as they burned with the light of a million candle flames. The streets all around them were lit up in a sharp, blinding glow. It reflected off the dull gray of the gas tanks ominously. The German aircraft dropped such flares to light up their targets, which meant that bombs were bound to follow.

In the harsh, ghostly light Robert could see scores of people, their faces contorted with fear, running for the shelters, some with terrified children clutched in their arms. The flares drifted lower, until they were hanging a few hundred feet above the rooftops, throwing the red brick terraces into knife-cut light and shadow.

“We’ve got to get to the shelter!” Robert roared.

He was unable to conceal his worry any longer, but even as he yelled he heard the high-pitched scream of the first stick of bombs plummeting out of the darkness. With no cover in sight, Robert threw himself flat on the pavement, drawing Pamela down alongside him. Then he grabbed Antis, and pinned the dog beneath his body to shield him from the blast. No way was he about to let the Germans kill or injure his dog, not after all they had survived together. They’d have to get through him first.

To the left and right Stetka and the other Czechs rolled into the gutter, praying that a curbstone no more than four inches high might protect them. The screeching of the bombs turned to a deep-throated roar as the first to strike tore through roof tiles, penetrated ceilings and bedrooms, and smashed into living room floors, before detonating. Dropped with delay fuses, they exploded deep inside their targets, punching out walls in a whirlwind of shattered brick and masonry,
and firing debris at the speed of bullets over the heads of those lying prone in the road.

The ground shook horribly as Robert pressed Antis deeper into the gutter, calling soft reassurances into his dog’s ear. The raid was over in seconds, though it felt as if it had lasted a lifetime. As quickly as they had appeared, the bombers vanished into the distance. The flares drifted to earth, their burning light replaced by an impenetrable darkness, lit here and there a fierce orange by the fires that had ignited in the ruins of people’s homes.