Charles den Tex & Anneloes Timmerije

Finding Her

Translated from the Dutch by Brian Doyle-Du Breuil

World Editions

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Charles den Tex and Anneloes Timmerije, 2014

English translation copyright © Brian Doyle-Du Breuil, 2016

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Getty Images/Picture Post/Leonard McCombe

The moral rights of the authors and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Het vergeten verhaal van een onwankelbare liefde in oorlogstijd in the Netherlands in 2014 by De Geus bv, Amsterdam

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-081-3

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Distribution Europe (except the Netherlands and Belgium): Turnaround Publisher Services, London

Distribution the Netherlands and Belgium: cb, Culemborg, the Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Night Flight

A moonlit garden with silver pines

to which my war-eyes must adjust:

unquestionable, peace falls

in a night replete with aerial secrets

—the droning, the despondent semaphore—

and the beams of searchlights gone astray

fan back in recognition:

no war can violate the peace

of a moonlit garden with silver pines.

emile den tex, 1942

Part 1
1942-1943

Chapter 1

The last thing he sees of her is her dress, fluttering in the wind like freedom no flag could ever express. The breeze in front of the entrance to Bandung station pulls the pale pink rose motif tight around her long legs. He’s not the only one to see it, but he’s the only one who knows how much trouble she went to to find cloth with that kind of supple quality, and how much of an effort it was to finish it in time for her birthday. While he was dead to the world, she continued to work—preferring the cool of the late evening to avoid soiling the snowy white background of the delicate fabric with her sweaty hands. Surrounded by noisy men lugging bags and suitcases, he finds a space on the backseat of the bus. He positions the lens of his camera against the glass and presses the shutter.

He’s sitting back to front, leaning on his left hand. She smiles, briefly raises her eyebrows as if she’s about to say: just look at the pair of us. He looks. The dress fits her to a tee: tight around the torso, full skirt. The hubbub of leave-taking isn’t enough to stifle the sound in his head of her pedal-driven sewing machine in the bedroom, the gentle whirring of the belt, the click of the pedal board as she moved her foot up and down, the ‘tak-tak-tak’ of the needle penetrating the cloth. He likes to look at her when he’s already in bed, her face vague through the veil of the klamboo. He likes to fall asleep to her shuffling about and wake up again when she climbs into bed beside him.

The bus fills slowly, as if the men aren’t ready to leave. Sometimes he hears someone call his name and he turns to greet the caller, but then he turns back quickly to her. The men are in good spirits—understandably; everyone’s excited about the mission. They know they’re on the brink of war, although no one believes Japan will invade the Dutch East Indies. It’s out of the question. Guus is still sitting back to front on his chair. These last few minutes are still for her. It’s as if he already knows how long he’ll have to make do with them.

This morning she twirled in front of the mirror in her new dress, danced around him. ‘Will it go with my purple sandals?’ On the train to Bandung they pretended it was already 15 February, her birthday. A picnic basket from Muna’s kitchen was wedged between their feet. Their housekeeper had sent them on their way with the tastiest snacks and he had hidden his gift between them. ‘Much too expensive!’ she said, feigning anger as she slipped the ring onto her finger and beamed. The colour of the stone matched her eyes.

The driver starts the bus, it’s time, they’re on their way to Andir Airfield. Lienke waves and mouths ‘see you soon’. She gets smaller and smaller until all he can see is the pink and white of her dress. Until he’s without her.

Chapter 2

‘Lang zal ze leven, lang zal ze leven, lang zal ze leven in de gloria, in de gloria, in de glooorrriiiaaa!’ Nine men do their best to compete with the low hum of the Lockheed Lodestar’s engines. They’re accompanied by a tenth man on a trumpet, playing the second line of the traditional Dutch birthday song. Flawlessly. Guus Hagers is surprised at first and then embarrassed, but decides just to sing along until the last song ‘Zij leve hoog’, wishing the birthday girl ‘the high life’. It’s high all right, eight thousand feet to be precise.

‘Hagers, man, congratulations on your wife’s birthday,’ says Will Burck, the trumpet player.

‘How did you know?’

‘Maria knows every birthday off by heart. It’s a woman thing; they have special brain cells for it. We’re inclined to forget such things now and again, eh?’

‘I’ll never forget Lienke’s birthday,’ says Guus. ‘And certainly not this one.’ The men in the back of the cabin shake his hand. The Lodestar is one of four transport aircraft carrying a special detachment to Australia. The best pilots and the best technicians have been chosen to man the new birds. The group consists of eighteen pilots, seven telegraph operators, ten flight engineers, a three-man technical team, a medic, and four Secret Service operatives. The intelligence boys are friendly enough, but always a little distant, as if their minds are elsewhere.

They flew yesterday from Bandung to Malang in East Java, and today they’ll be crossing the Indian Ocean in a five hour flight—give or take—to Broome on the north coast of Australia. Eleven men per bird, with provisions for two weeks there and back. Most of the men know each other from training trips on Glenn Martins and official missions. ‘Shame you have to leave her alone today,’ says Adriaan Scholte, Burck’s technician and the guitarist in Burck’s Jazz, the band in which they both perform. Heikoop and Schalk exchange some ideas on how Hagers can have a good time nonetheless, typical man talk. Storm, the doctor, pushes them back into their seats with a smile and is the last to congratulate him. ‘Teeth still okay?’

Guus exposes his teeth. ‘Couldn’t be better.’

Storm nods contentedly. He gave the pilot a day off the week before to have a crown fitted to one of his front teeth. The doctor himself took care of the stitches to his lip. These were the only injuries Hagers had been left with after being chased by a Japanese Zero. Hagers flew so low over the desas that the Zero tripped over its own wingtips and broke up. He just managed to land his bullet-riddled bomber in a sawa. It was a hard landing, but everyone survived.

‘I prescribe: stay in the air and land gently,’ says doctor Storm.

The fun is over. Guus grabs his diary—he never goes on a mission without diary, pencil and camera. He writes to detach himself, to record what happens. ‘Guus Winckel on One,’ he writes. That’s where he wants to be, where his namesake is, up front at the controls. He writes about the status of the war, which is changing by the day. The Japanese are advancing on Singapore—opposite Sumatra—via Malacca, and on Borneo via the Philippines. Their ultimate plan is to move in on Java from both the east and the west. But that’s still a long way off. The oilfields near Palembang on Sumatra, and Tarakan and Balikpapan on Borneo are of vital importance. Japan is determined to capture them. Without oil they can’t continue their advance on South East Asia. To prevent that from happening, a forty-three man detachment of the Military Aviation of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army is setting off today for Australia. Seven brand new, hypermodern American b-25 Mitchell bombers await them, all set to call a halt to the Japanese air raids. An open and shut case.

Guus is already thinking about the return journey, can almost feel the new b-25 throbbing under his thighs, and knows how much he’s going to need it. ‘If you’ve ever seen a Zero in action, you know that the Japanese emperor has some pretty brilliant fighters and pilots at his disposal,’ he had said to Lienke when they brought him home covered in blood and stiff from the adrenaline after his emergency landing. Guus couldn’t help himself fantasizing about the b-25. He had never seen one in the flesh before, but in his mind he was already flying it, forcing it into an apparent free fall, down and down, lower and lower, until his Two, his co-pilot, screams that he can count the blades of grass.

The crackling of the aircraft radio yanks him from his daydream. The intermittent reception makes it difficult to understand what’s being said.

‘What? What?’

The crackle and the excited voice echo through the cabin. The voice’s words are lost in the general racket. The radio operator slips on his headphones and almost devours the microphone.

‘repeat! repeat!’

‘What’s going on?’ Scholte roars. The radio operator gestures that he should shut up. He listens intently then suddenly rips off his phones.

‘Airborne landing on Palembang!’ he screams. ‘The Japs are invading by air!’

‘Bugger,’ Will Burck whispers.

‘Impossible!’ Scholte screams.

Guus jumps to his feet and wriggles his way to the cockpit. ‘Is it true?’

Winckel nods, his face emotionless. He hands over control to his Two and follows Guus back to the cabin.

‘The Japs have landed on Sumatra!’ he shouts. ‘Parachutists in Palembang!’

Loud and pointed curses bounce back and forth in the cabin until silence finally takes over. No one had expected this. Everyone had assumed the invasion would be from the sea, an old-fashioned landing, and not an airborne invasion with paratroopers. Everyone knows that Palembang isn’t prepared for land combat—Burck more than any, he was born and bred there. If they fail to repel the airborne landing, the Japanese will take Palembang and the oil fields of the Batavian Oil Company. But who’s going to repel the invasion? Military Aviation’s best pilots are on their way to another continent. Palembang is less than 300 miles from Batavia. An average Zero can be there in a little more than an hour. The war was suddenly and frighteningly close by.

* * *

Batavia, 15 February 1942

‘latest news, latest news: japanese airborne landing on palembang!’

Lienke is almost pushed from the footboard by a fellow passenger jumping out behind her from the train and racing to the newspaper boy on the platform at Batavia station who’s shouting at the top of his voice. Her baggage falls on the platform. A passing gentleman picks it up for her, doffs his hat, and hurries likewise to read the news. ‘oil in enemy hands!’ the boy shouts, and by the time Lienke reaches him and hands him a coin he’s almost recited the entire extra edition. She stands where she is, like most of the other passengers from Bandung, her bag at her feet, the newspaper in her face, her mouth wide open in astonishment. She reads the bold headline three times in a row. It’s there in black and white, it’s happened: the Japanese are already on Sumatra. She folds the paper under her arm, grabs her bag, exits the station and wades into the swarming early evening masses in front of the station in search of a taxi.

The sticky heat of the capital takes her by surprise, as if she’s a baru just arriving by ship from Holland. The giddiness is over. Being spoiled by her aunt and uncle after she said farewell to Guus, the splendidly lazy return journey, hours and hours buried in her book and its world with only an occasional glance outside, fantasizing about two weeks ahead, when they’d be together again. It’s all over. On the evening of her birthday, the word ‘war’ scares the living daylights out of her and crushes every other thought, until a little white barking dog, exasperatingly shrill, jumps up against her legs.

‘Jippy!’

‘Hi Lienke,’ says her father. ‘Many happy returns.’ He kisses her on both cheeks, takes her bag, throws his arm over her shoulders and leads her to his car.

‘What a surprise,’ says Lienke.

‘Your mother thought it best, with the news and all.’

Lienke relaxes in the passenger seat next to her father, Jippy on her lap. She smiles at him because she knows it was his idea to collect her from the station. She huddles a little closer to him and touches the furrow between his eyebrows. He’s a sensitive man who likes to give his wife the credit for good deeds. Lienke’s mother winks knowingly when he does that sort of thing. Lienke knows no better, and after all these years nor do her parents.

‘Worrying times,’ she says, ‘Palembang.’

‘I trust General Ter Poorten,’ says her father and he pats her reassuringly on the knee. ‘Just wait: when Guus gets back those Japs won’t know what hit them.’

‘Lien! Twenty-nine! Congratulations!’ says Adrie as they’re sitting on the terrace at her parents’ place enjoying the shade.

‘Thanks, Sis,’ says Lienke. ‘Look!’ She holds out her left hand to show off the gift she’d received from Guus.

‘Give me something tasty from Muna’s basket,’ he’d said when they were half an hour into their journey to Bandung. She looked in the basket full of sweet and savoury titbits and discovered the jeweller’s box. Guus had bought a gold ring for her, striking in its simplicity, a perfect match, with an emerald in an elegant setting.

‘I’m jealous,’ says Adrie. She exaggerates slightly, throws in a laugh, but the undertone contains a hint of truth.

‘Time that Johan of yours got a move on,’ says Lienke.

Chapter 3

They disembark into the heat of the Australian coastal town. Broome’s tiny airfield is cheerfully chaotic. The place still has to get used to having soldiers around and senior executive types who expect everything done on the double. The Dutchmen want to know about the situation on Sumatra. Guus steps forward. His English is better and his training as a teacher comes in handy. His questions are clear and imperative.

‘What about the Japanese advance? Did they take Palembang? Medan? What happened?’

No one at the airfield can tell them more than they already know. Will Burck and Adriaan Scholte insist on clarity from their commander and don’t spare the decibels.

‘Why didn’t we know about the invasion? Why do we let the Japs surprise us every time? What are the secret service boys up to when they’re done napping?’

‘We’re wasting our time here. We have to get to Brisbane. Load up the b-25s and let’s get out of here!’ Winckel tries to prod the detachment leaders into action, but to no avail. The birds need a thorough check-up before they can move on to the next stage.

Airmen, engineers and telegraph operators add their weight, but their commander, Captain Boot, turns and walks away.

The Military Aviation engineers get to work on the Lodestars in the hangar with a couple of members of the Australian ground crew. They run through their checklists, make minor repairs, keep themselves busy. The others head outside, still wound up. They wander aimlessly across the airfield waiting for orders, for clarity.

‘Pretty nice place,’ says Heikoop.

‘I’m not here for the scenery,’ says Guus. He wants to get moving. The attack on Palembang is bad news. ‘We’ve got to get out of here, in a hurry.’

After an hour hanging around they’re told they have to stay the night in Broome. Miserable to the core, the men make their way to a rectangular building with a corrugated iron roof housing two long rows of wooden bunks. The frustration flares up again.

‘The Japs are laughing their heads off!’ Burck grunts.

Boot tries to shout them down, but he has no authority. Guus observes from a distance. Boot compensates for his lack by turning up the volume, but the men give as good as they get.

‘I’m reporting the lot of you!’ he barks. No one reacts. ‘Subject closed, and that’s an order!’

The men back off, reluctantly, knowing how harsh Boot can be. He’s been known to ground people for next to nothing and even have them locked up.

Guus senses the tension thickening and sits down on his bunk. Adriaan Scholte, one of the mechanics, is standing beside him shaking his head.

‘He’s wrong,’ says Guus, nodding his head in the commander’s direction. ‘Tension needs to be exploited, not nipped in the bud.’

Scholte walks over to Winckel, the best pilot in the group and a man with natural authority. He whispers something. Winckel nods, strolls over to Burck without saying a word, rests his hand briefly on the man’s shoulder, nods in the direction of the boys from Intelligence, walks past the other pilots with his hands in his pockets—all of them sulking on their bunks—and says without raising his voice: ‘Men, tomorrow we move on. We pick up the new birds and as soon as we have them it’ll be our turn.’

That’s all he needs to relieve the tension. Winckel’s reputation is spectacular: a lion in the air, a lamb on the ground.

The thwarted mutiny sets the men on edge: their mission has started. They’re on their way, in unfamiliar territory; they have something important to do here and then they have to get back, as soon as possible. The war is there, not here. No one says it. No one dares say it, but everyone’s thinking it: if Sumatra falls, the Japs will move on Java. Guus was born on Sumatra, Lienke on Java. The Dutch East Indies are home; everyone they know is there.

That night in his bunk, he listens to the sounds of the Australian airfield, the liveliness and laughter of the men who stayed late at the mess for a drink and a song. The loud ticking of steel on steel, a car engine starting, the voices of the guards, doors slamming. He stares into the darkness, sees his house, sees Lienke running to him across the garden. Then she’s standing at the entrance to Bandung station. Her dress flowing around her legs. The thought that they have each other calms him. That will never change, even if the war reaches Java. He’s sure she thinks the same. If he had to choose a single word to describe their relationship that word would be ‘sure’. That first time, in November 1936, six years back, when he walked her under his pajong to her father’s car after a party for teachers and tutors, he already knew. The beginning of the monsoon season was particularly severe that year. There seemed to be as much water coming from below as from above. She flopped into the passenger’s seat, soaked through, hiccupping with laughter. The rain rattled on the roof of the car, but it wasn’t enough to drown out her laughter. He knew then that she was the one he wanted.

He was 22 when they met at the club and she was 23. They chatted, had a drink. He told a joke or two and she laughed, and to his own great surprise he asked Lien Buriks, the stunning woman he had never seen before and who seemed to be interested in him for no apparent reason, to dance. He called her ‘Lienke’ that evening, and he still does. These are his thoughts as he finally falls asleep.

Some managed to knock back a few before bed, but they all knew why they were there the following morning: to pick up b-25s. One more flight from Broome to Brisbane, the best part of a day, nineteen hundred miles, on the other side of the continent. That’s where the seven brand new b-25s are waiting. They take off a little after eight that morning. Guus senses the action in his pores. Eleven men in the cabin, two benches facing each other with a narrow walkway in the middle. Four seats at the back have been removed to make room for the barang. The Lodestar is a dedicated transport plane, so big you can almost stand upright in the middle. A cruising speed of two-hundred and fifty miles per hour means nine boring hours in the air before they reach their destination. Expected time of arrival is five in the afternoon. They fly over the monotonous Australian outback. It couldn’t be more different than the capricious, tropical Indies, where you always seem to be flying over the boundary between water and land and the countryside varies enormously. Vast stretches of woodland, mountains, volcano craters, plantations. Australia is massive, pretty flat, and empty.

Guus grabs his diary, writes ‘above the outback, miss you’, closes his eyes and dreams. Lienke wasn’t surprised when he asked her to marry him only six months after the party. She was sure he was going to ask her, she said later. If he hadn’t, she would have asked him. That’s what she said when they celebrated their first wedding anniversary at a picnic on the kali just outside Bandung.

When he was appointed to teach English and biology, they managed to rent an outbuilding at fifteen minutes’ walk from the school, at the back of a talkative widow’s house. It was spacious and cool, but the landlady’s prying eyes were everywhere. They sought refuge and privacy on the bank of an ice-cold mountain stream, under the jungle’s leafy canopy. Lienke jumped out of the water screaming and shivering, rolled down the top part of her bathing suit, stood over him dripping with her hands on her hips, and asked what he thought.

Guus said what she wanted to hear, and meant every word.

Later that afternoon she lay beside him, no longer cold, but warm and lazy and satisfied, her hair almost dry. She rested her hand on his belly and asked what his secret wish was.

‘You.’

‘And if you already have me?’ she asked.

That’s their little game. His usual answer is: ‘more of you’, but this time she wasn’t satisfied. She straightened her face and asked what he would really like to do if money and opportunity were no object.

He knew where her question was coming from. Lienke had given up her dream—teaching children the three Rs—when he was transferred to Bandung. There was no work for her at his school so she made do with a secretarial job at the main post office. He did the job he liked, the job he was good at, and it provided an income, but his thoughts were often far from the classroom.

It took a moment before he answered. Articulating your dream is half the journey, and he knew just how long and expensive that journey would be.

‘To fly.’

If he had said nothing back then, he wouldn’t have been sitting in the Lodestar on his way to Brisbane. But he had given words to his dream and spoken them out loud. ‘I want to be a pilot,’ he had said. Lienke made him solemnly swear. Naked, his proud member standing to attention, he raised his hand and said: ‘I, Guus Hagers, swear on the breasts of my wife, the most beautiful on the entire archipelago, that I will become a pilot.’

The day he came home in the uniform of the Military Aviation of the Royal Dutch East Indian Army, the whole family came together for a celebration. She thought his four years of preparation and training would be the biggest change they’d ever experienced. And she was right, until that stunningly beautiful morning in the lagoon of Pearl Harbour, when four battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, one minelayer, one-hundred and eight planes and more than two thousand lives were shot to pieces, and Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, the governor general of the Dutch East Indies, announced in an emergency newscast that they were at war with Japan. Yet the change that was to govern their lives from then on had only happened two days earlier, on the morning of 14 February 1942, when Lienke tried on her new dress the day before her birthday.

Scholte is the first to hear it. The man who can mimic engine noises looks out of the window, closes his eyes, concentrates and gets to his feet. He makes his way to the back of the plane but stops halfway, comes back, and leans down to Hagers and Burck to be heard over the din.

‘Sounds dry,’ he says, and he worms his way up front, to the cockpit. Only the pilot can hear what he says. Guus sees his lips move, sees him pointing outside to the right, he sees Guus Winckel and his Two follow his directions. He sees all three look to the left. Scholte points at one of the dials and then outside again. At that moment Hagers hears it too. A throaty sound above the deep drone of the engine, getting louder and louder. A dry sound, as Scholte said. A wrong sound. A sound that won’t get you very far.

Suddenly, an hour out of Brisbane, they’re left with no choice: they have to land the Lodestar pronto. Chinchilla is the only airfield in the area. It’s tiny, little more than an airstrip. A blot on the map. Voices twitter over the radio as they consult Captain Boot who’s flying a couple of minutes behind them. The radio man tries to contact the airfield, repeating their call sign time after time: ‘This is nl5-115, calling Chinchilla. Please come in. Over.’ But there’s no response. Chinchilla is silent.

Scholte returns to his seat and fastens in.

‘On a tea break!’ someone shouts. Bravura joins the crew.

They all know everything there is to know about planes and they know that they sometimes break down. Not a problem as such. All you need is a flat piece of land and any pilot worth his salt can put it on the ground in one piece. Guus Winckel is a pilot worth his salt.

Winckel struggles to keep the Lodestar in the air as the engines rapidly lose power. The men in the back are quiet. No commentary, no cursing. Their eyes are fixed on the cockpit. The deep drone changes to a sputter and moments later an empty silence fills the cabin. Air whistles past the fuselage, steel creaks and cracks. Winckel holds onto the control stick like grim death.

‘Chinchilla, please come in. Over.’

The airfield’s landing strip is a mile too far. Gliding on what’s left of its forward thrust, the contraption is only able to reach the field beside it. Winckel digs deep into his experience and executes a perfect landing. As soon as the bird comes to a standstill, he roars: ‘Out! Out! On the double!’ He himself is the last to leave. The bird doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t sputter or explode. The men peer at the airfield ahead, engulfed in a cloud of red dust. It consists of two buildings and a radio mast, and with the exception of a tiny two-seater, it’s entirely empty. The landscape is flat and desolate and there’s not a soul to be seen for miles around. Everyone looks up as the other planes fly slowly past and disappear from view. Men don’t cry, so they swear like troopers instead.

Oddly enough, it takes a while before they realize how bloody hot it is. Maybe it’s because the Australian heat is different from home, dry as dust and murderously hard, instead of heavy and humid. ‘What do we do now?’ says Scholte. ‘My guess is we’re stuck here for a while.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ says Hagers.

‘If we’re all done talking,’ says Winckel. ‘Grab your gear and move it.’

February, the heart of the summer in Australia, puffs of dust around their boots with every step. A crooked line of thirteen men. The heat penetrates their clothes. This is another world.

Chinchilla turns out to be manned after all, by Brian, a cheerful Australian who tears toward them across the field and is clearly delighted that they all seem to have survived. His radio isn’t working, hence the silence.

‘I’m waiting for a new valve,’ he says. ‘Should have it by tomorrow, or the day after. No worries. Where you guys headed?’

‘Nowhere,’ says Scholte.

‘Brisbane,’ says Burck.

‘You thought,’ says Brian and he explodes with laughter. The Australian seems to think their problems are a bit of a joke.

‘It’s not funny,’ says Burck. Brian doesn’t even hear him.

There’s nothing in Chinchilla, not even basic transport. There’s a phone in Brian’s office, but most people in Chinchilla don’t have a phone so there’s no one to call.

‘I could drive over to Fred’s place,’ says Brian. ‘Fred has a car.’

‘Does he live nearby?’

‘An hour give or take.’

It takes the best part of three hours to assemble a fleet of four cars and it’s already past nine in the evening when they head off for Brisbane, just short of two hundred miles away. Guus is squashed into the back of an old banger with Grummels, nickname Grumpy, and Scholte chewing on dust.

‘Move over.’

‘Where?’

‘Sit on Grumpy’s lap,’ says Guus. ‘It’s only two hundred miles.’

They twist and turn for hours on end, but it doesn’t help.

‘Sit still, man!’ says Grumpy.

‘Did I wake you?’

No one sleeps. It’s pitch dark outside and the headlamps are no match for the night. The driver’s in no hurry, seems to have all the time in the world. Every now and then a huge animal hares across the road in front of them. ‘Roos,’ says the driver.

‘What are roos?’ asks Adriaan Scholte.

‘Kangaroos, no worries.’

With nothing to see outside, Guus keeps his eyes shut and drifts into a restless dream. He’s walking through the house in his pyjamas with Jippy at his heels. Nothing ever happens in their street, but just to be sure he checks all the windows and doors before going to bed. You can never tell in these turbulent times. Lienke’s already asleep. He slips the klamboo to one side, lifts the sheet and is barely surprised when he finds himself climbing into a Glenn Martin bomber instead of bed. He grabs the control stick with both hands—he has a Japanese fighter on his tail. He knows that the Zero’s pilot isn’t going to make it, but he also knows that he and his crew might not make it either, at least not all of them. He brushes over the top of their house in a potentially final farewell to his sweetheart and heads off in search of a sawa to ditch the bird. Curiously, it’s not Lienke’s face that appears before him as the belly of the plane meets the watery paddy field, but the eyes of his father.

Corstiaan Hagers spotted it early on in his son’s eyes: silent admiration and unabashed longing. He was pleased with the boy’s interest in the mighty metal birds of the future, but that’s where it ended. They were a family of teachers and educators and Guus was destined to join their ranks. That’s why he did his best to be a good son, to do what he was told. He flew in his dreams, and when the sun came up he turned to his books and read about aviation and pilots.

No one was surprised when Guus graduated from college in 1935 with the best possible results—languages, science, he seemed to take it all in his stride. His father was proud when he sensed—finally—that his son was developing a love for teaching. But his senses deceived him and Guus opted for the skies. He was nervous at first, didn’t dare tell his father, but then with his mother’s gentle encouragement he finally plucked up the courage.

‘You have to start anew every day of your life,’ said his mother. ‘Today is no different.’

Corstiaan Hagers didn’t understand his son’s fascination for planes one bit, but he fully understood his passion.

‘As long as you don’t crash,’ he had said. ‘Spare me that.’

‘I’ll take care of it.’

While they both knew it was nonsense, they still had a deal, their deal, sealed by the approving eyes of his father.

If it hadn’t been for Lienke’s uncle Hendrik, Guus would never have progressed beyond amateur status. Hendrik is a senior official at the War Office and he managed to arrange things where Guus would have failed. He knew of a fund that subsidized trainee pilots and with its help Guus managed to obtain an A-class private pilot’s license in no time at all. When it turned out that he was a little too old for training as a military pilot, Uncle Hendrik did the honours once again and four weeks later Guus Hagers started training at the Military Aviation’s pilot school in Kalijati near Bandung.

He proved to be up to the challenge. In the space of eighteen months he managed to pick up all the licenses and certificates he needed and a couple more, just because he could. In July 1941 he was appointed first pilot on a Glenn Martin b-10 bomber. He and Lienke were given officer’s accommodation in Meester Cornelis, a suburb of Batavia, and Guus was stationed at nearby Tjililitan airfield.

Guus is disciplined and expects the same of others, but he’s also friendly and helpful. He has a keen eye, phenomenal coordination, a natural feel for his bird, and the necessary cool-headedness—in other words, Guus Hagers is a born pilot. And now he’s sitting in a sweltering car, crossing the Australian outback on a pitch-black night with his knees at his chin.

Early the following morning they drive through the gates of Archerfield Airbase just outside Brisbane in their press-ganged taxis. The men are dusty, bushed, and stinking of sweat, but they’re all present and accounted for. The others had arrived on schedule the evening before and welcome them with open arms. There’s just enough time for a toilet visit, heads under the tap, before the complete detachment assembles on the apron at 8 a.m. The men are excited, charged. They stare wide-mouthed at the enormous array of planes waiting in a line the length of the runway. There are literally hundreds of them, more than they’ve ever seen in one place before. Fighters, bombers, troop carriers.

Hagers, Burck and Winckel look at each other, share the same thoughts, and their tiredness disappears in an instant. A maximum of one week training, a day back to Broome, and a day to Java.

‘Where did they park our birds?’ asks Burck. There are so many no one knows where to look. ‘Anybody see the new Mitchells?’

Boot doesn’t respond right away.

‘There!’ says Winckel, pointing to a machine that’s different from the others. A magnificent aircraft, high on its wheels, straight as a dye, horizontal, a nose wheel instead of a tail wheel. Defiant and aggressive. Like a queen surrounded by her admirers, all of them looking up at her. A wingspan of sixty-six feet, gull wing configuration ... the b-25 is so beautiful it leaves the men speechless.

‘Where are the others?’ asks Burck.

Boot stares at the plane in front of him as if he’s doing his best not to look at his men.

‘There’s only one b-25,’ he says. ‘This one. And it’s not for us.’

* * *

Batavia, 19 February 1942

‘The counterattack has started. The allies are bombing the refinery in Palembang.’

Lienke’s father may have managed to rest but clearly not to sleep. He collapses into his chair. ‘According to the news, the entire petrol stock is on fire.’

‘Let’s have tea first,’ says Lienke’s mother filling the cups as she does every day after siesta time, when the family relax in the shade on the terrace at the back of the house.

‘So the Japanese didn’t have much of a chance to enjoy their win.’

‘And eat something. It’s not good to listen to such ghastly broadcasts on an empty stomach.’

Lienke waits until her mother has finished her ritual and her dad his tea and cake. ‘Who did the bombing, dad, did they say?’

‘Yanks, working with our own boys, in Glenn Martins. That’s all they had to report. The attack is still in full swing. Your mother thinks it best for you to stay with us until Guus gets back.’

Lienke notices that the groove between his eyes has grown deeper since he listened to the news.

‘They’ll give up soon enough,’ she says, sounding more convinced than she actually is. She knows the Dutch air fleet is badly in need of the new bombers—Guus isn’t in Australia for the fun of it. She’s happy she supported his choice from day one. She put up with the relocations and even became a bit of an expert. For as long as she can remember her father has been transferred from one place to the other. Farewells, removals trucks, starting over—that’s the life of the majority of Europeans in the Indies. She adjusts to her husband’s military regimen with apparent ease. She is a woman who puts her husband’s career first, but she still has her own life, her own work, her own friends. While it’s slightly more accepted in the Indies than in Holland, where working women tend to be granted an honourable dismissal when they marry, Lienke’s still ahead of her time in terms of independence.

She’s never been without work for a single day, she speaks several languages, is a qualified teacher, an excellent organizer and an uncanny judge of human nature. ‘Run it past Lien’ is a common expression among her friends when one of them sets her sights on a man. Lien looks, speaks, and is always on target.

Guus adores her.

‘You’re my angel,’ he said, shortly after their last transfer, ‘my Rose of Java.’

‘Don’t exaggerate.’

They were sitting together on the porch of their new house, at the end of the day, in that fleeting early evening light, surrounded by a world of smells and colours, rich and dense.

‘I never exaggerate,’ said Guus.

‘That’s true.’

As soon as her waving parents are out of sight and Lienke turns around, the sado driver settles his sinewy steed into a steady trot. It’s still early, and the morning light has a harshness about it, the kind you want to photograph as Guus would say. The driver clicks twice with his tongue and gees up the horse, Jippy responds with a grumpy yap. He also barks at the policeman regulating the strikingly thin traffic at the crossroads and at a passing car. Lienke lifts him from her lap and puts him on the floor of the sado where the little fox terrier sleeps until they’re home.

She takes her suitcase to the bedroom, says hello to Muna, pops Jippy into the large outside kennel under the waringin, jumps on her bicycle and heads off to the bank where she’s been working as a typist since Guus’s transfer. She pushes through the revolving door, says hello to the teller, makes her way into the office at the back, and doesn’t believe what she sees. The manager and his assistant are not where they usually are. Their desks are unmanned, their chairs tucked underneath, their writing pads and pens neat and tidy.

‘Vanished without a trace,’ says the manager’s secretary. ‘What do we do now?’