“Yeah it was a bastard, I had to pack the Velocette, bump start it down the drive and not wake the old man.
I used to push it out the shed with my gear ready, kontiki, lines, bait and some scones from mum’s pantry; that set like rock and head for Muriwai……
Snapper mate, snapper big bastards, there for the taking. I only needed twenty baited hooks on the line and there’d be enough fish for us and half the neighbourhood.
The trick was to get down the drive all gravel and crunching noises. The bike would pop once or twice if I remembered to prime the carb and kick her over so it wouldn’t just lock up when I dropped the clutch, third gear was best and a big bounce on the seat at the same time.
Repeated over and over the technique, waking the old boy, or skidding to a halt and kicking frantically as the household stirred to life, chores to do, pigs to feed, chickens to feed. Eggs to collect, gardens to weed…..
Bang, bang, bang or pop, pop, pop depending on the bike, but the Velocette 500cc single she was good for the ton and even on the metal roads out west she ate it up. In the early morning before old Ed stirred it sounded like a canon BOOM BOOM BOOM…..
But by then I was at the end of the street and halfway to the Great South Road….
Think of my disgust when I got to Muriwai and the wind was onshore, try as I might even with the kite in air there was no way the wind was going to change and take the line out past the surf.
I broke a tooth on a date scone and sat thinking about how the hell I was going to get a line out past the breakers…..
“Oh yeah” Billy Bug stirred a little, “Rex you sure got some stories mate but for Christ’s sake keep ya head down will you”
A shell exploded only fifty yards away.
The bunker was muddy and not deep enough but in a forward position they waited for the call “Medic!” and they’d move, running stooped with a stretcher and throw themselves into the next shallow muddy hole.
Sometimes the call would come and a shell would explode again and there’d be no one to find let alone transport back to the medics tent.
“And that’s when it came to me”
“What?”
“Nitroclycerin, mate that’s what”
Acid, Nitric Acid and Sulphuric acid in eqaul parts. Mixed it together in an AG jar in the wood shed.
“What the hell were you going to do with that?”
“Use it in my canon to fire the contiki out over the breakers”
“Did it work?”
“In a manner of speaking, but you had to be careful add the Nitric to the Sulphuric and not the other way around or it’d go bang in your face. Or maybe it was the other way around, can’t remember now but if it started to smoke you’d have to dump the lot straight away”
“But yeah it was sort of successful”
“How’s that?” asked Billy his interest piqued given the danger of the story, amidst the immediate danger they were presently in, laying low during a barage of mortar.
“Well I blew up the shed and the old man”…..
“Oh shit…”
“Yep, I didn’t notice at first, but after I poured the stuff out in the garden I put the jar up on a shelf. A crystal formation started on the glass. I thought it was interesting, but didn’t think anything of it. Until…”
“Until?”
“Until I was painting the frame of a bicycle and the old man was talking about how I hadn’t fed the pigs yet. I was turned the frame to see if it was dry one the other side. I had it hanging from the roof.
Well it knocked the bloody jar off the shelf didn’t it.
Exploded with a Ka Boom!!
Blew the bloody windows out of the shed, set fire to everything knocked the old man out the door wth the concussion, singed my eyebrows.
I stamped out the flames, I had all my tools in there and my bikes, Jesus it could have been really bad”
“It wasn’t bad already?”
“Well the old man chased me around the house with a stick. But he wasn’t very fast and I was sort of used to it.
I almost blew him up when I tested some charges I made from the same batch. I set them off and he just happened to walk around from the garden past the barn, just as the fuse ran down….”
Another shell exploded near by with a Crump!! Medic!!
“Come on mate” all at once they were running……………..running, diving into bomb craters, scrambling for the stretcher, tending the wounded and the dying, carrying wounded back through the lines, swerving, ducking, diving again…..
“I gotta piss mate”
“Well don’t do it here”
“Be right back” and Rex clambered up the rear side of the crater. The relief! All the whiskey was catching up he stood pissing on the downslope with the radio on his back….
A shell close by exploded with no sound at all, he landed face down in the dirt, with his fly in his hands clutching checking himself, his ears ringing, he clambered back into the crater, where the hell was Billy? His head spinning, eyes foggy, ears still ringing, hurting now, he passed out…..
“I’d be a hundred years old this year if I lived you know”
“But you didn’t Rex you’re dead like me”
“Jesus Christ Billy, you keep reminding me”
“Easy Rex don’t use the bosses name in vain mate”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, I mean shit well anyway, 1920 I was born, so yep I’d be a hundred.”
“And just look at ya not a day older than when we first met”
“Yeah, how’s that work? You look pretty good yourself, but you always were the good looking bloke, getting on with all the nurses and such”
“Yeah well someone had to do the talking mate you were so bloody slow”
“You remember those nurses we went dancing with in Naples?”
“Well that was a weekend, that was”
Posing as American Airmen, all leather jackets, peaked caps and furry collars, they hitched a ride on a DC3 transport heading south to Naples on a supply run.
“Sign here Rex” Billy pointed to a clip board in the gate house.
The flight down was uneventful, the weekend a blissful time of dancing and romancing with some nurses Billy had met in the field hospital. Billy arranged leave passes for all four, forged signatures arranged the lot.
“You were a bloody dab hand with a pen Billy”
“Yeah well it got me rich once the war was over Rex. Trick was knowing when to stop and take up a proper job somewhere”
“Forging bank notes and plates for printing was easy enough during the war. Bloody army wanted me to do forgeries for them to flood the German’s currency and ruin their economy from the inside”
“While we bombed the hell out of them from above”
“Yeah well they could have bombed Monte Casino a bit more what a bloody nightmare that place was”
“Yeah well I got my Lira from other sources, when the Yanks left I got the keys to their stores and made a good living selling condoms, blankets and chocolate”
“Bloody hell I remember that”
“Yeah was a bit of fun, I was a multi-millionaire in Lira”
“Pity Lira was worth nothing in the end”
“Yeah, still those nurses aye”
“Yeah those nurses”
The old man never said what happened with “those nurses” but apparently they did “go dancing” which I suppose they did, but being a child listening to the stories, I guess he left out the other activities….
“We arrived at the airfield to get our flight back north. There was only one plane heading back so we signed the book and helped load up. A load of coca-cola and sweet crap for the American soldiers up north. They hadn’t left Monte Casino yet so supplies were still being flown up in DC3’s”
“There was a couple of mechanics working on an oil line on one of the two engines. It had been repaired before and shortened. So now it was rubbing on a cowling and had worn through. A pin hole leak had developed and oil had sprayed all over the engine. They removed the pipe and there being no spares they braised the old pipe up and refitted it. This all took a few hours and we were happy to be taking off knowing we’d be in the shit if we weren’t back by tomorrow morning when our leave passes ran out.”
“The sky was clear and blue, the sea as clear as any sea and as we flew from the south across the Tyrrhenian Sea I could see the reefs and rocks below as clear as anything back home.”
“It was a long flight by DC3 standards and we had to stop to refuel at some little airfield north of Naples. They been bombed a while back and nothing had been repaired so instead of a fuel tanker, they bought the gas out in jerry cans by truck. It was getting on a bit and refueling a can at a time took a while. Billy was getting nervous, we had to report back by 0800 tomorrow and we were still only halfway back.”
“Finally we were back in the air and I was keeping busy looking out the window for fishing boats and ships. Billy was snoring his arse off on a pile of kit bags. I laughed and rolled a smoke looked out the window again. That’s when I saw the windows on my side turning black, the bloody repaired pipe had sprung a leak again and we were still over the sea.”
“Ahhh shit Billy wake up!!! The pilot yelled at us to start throwing out freight, he was shutting down the offending motor before it seized and or caught fire. Boxes of corned beef, crates of coke went out the doors into sea. We kept losing altitude slowly but surely we were running out of time, with land still a way off we would have to ditch into the sea.”
“Lucky it was calm as glass, the pilot was bloody good, with the nose up and the doors closed again we got a bit of a bumpy landing, but not much worse than landing on a rough airfield somewhere. Billy was fair shitting himself, but I had every confidence in the pilot, he seemed calm and the conditions were good.”
“As soon as we landed some idiot opened a life raft before we could get it out the door. We had to bayonet that one so we could get out.”
“Lucky we had one more and we walked out on the wing and opened it there. Blokes were jumping in the water and making a hell of a scene of it. The pilot was radioing the closest base for assistance and I held the raft until he got on board then stepped in myself. I had my good kit on buggered if I was going for a swim.”
“We sat and waited and after an hour or two, the DC3 sank with a gurgle after what seemed a long time we watched it sink into the clear waters leaving a trail of oil and fuel. A plane came over head and dropped a life boat, that flipped and spun in the air as it dropped then sunk as it hit the water bow first diving faster than any submarine, I’d ever seen”
“Night was coming Billy was getting twitchy, the Yanks wondered about our accents, what part of the US you boys from? I can’t remember what we came up with, but they weren’t a suspicious bunch and New Zealand was enough of an explanation for them, all sheep and snowy mountains”
“Finally a flying boat landed and it was just as well, the sun was going down and we didn’t really want to spend the night out there with a box of corn beef and a crate of coke in a life boat made for four with eight of us looking at each other taking a piss over the side every now and then”
“We got back to base by a whisker before 0800 the next morning. I was buggered, Billy was ok but both of us were unshaven and looking pretty hungover. I didn’t think anything of it till three months later”
“I should have known we were in the shit when I saw Billy sitting on the bench outside the CO’s office. Hell he bawled us out”
The CO was an older man, fulltime military, not one to resent volunteers and conscripts but he didn’t like being mucked around. He looked up at the two of them standing to attention flicked through the papers in front of him. Italy was hot at this time of year and he didn’t like the food, he had enough to think about without these two causing havoc everywhere they went…..
He sprung up out of his office chair knocking it backwards into the wall, if he could have knocked either of them out without getting in the shit he would have…..
“CARTER!!!! BUGGGGGGGGGG!!!! he let himself draw out the Bugggggg for effect. “How long have you been American airmen???”
“Ahhhhh sir I can explain we uhhhhhhh”
“Shut up man!!!! You’re in enough trouble don’t make it worse!!!!!”
“They’ve been searching for “Airman” Bugg and “Airman” Carter since that plane went down three months ago!!!!
“You’re restricted to base for the next three months until I decide what to do with you, for Christs sake what were you thinking???”
“We ahhhh….”
“Don’t bloody answer me!!! It was a rhetorical question you idiot!! You DO know what a rhetorical question don’t you?? AND don’t answer that….get the hell out of here before I do something we all regret…..”
They beat a hasty retreat, Rex for the Monte Casino railway station were he was based and Billy for the field hospital…..
“I guess I better give him a free bottle of moonshine this week?”
“Jesus Rex, he’s one of your customers?”
“Yep him and almost every other commissioned officer around here”
Crash writes a river 