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  THE LONG FLIGHT HOME

  ALAN HLAD

  JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER 1 - EPPING, ENGLAND—SEPTEMBER 7, 1940

  CHAPTER 2 - BUXTON, MAINE—SEPTEMBER 8, 1940

  CHAPTER 3 - EPPING, ENGLAND—SEPTEMBER 11, 1940

  CHAPTER 4 - BUXTON, MAINE

  CHAPTER 5 - PORTLAND, MAINE

  CHAPTER 6 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 7 - HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA

  CHAPTER 8 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 9 - LONDON, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 10 - NORTH WEALD, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 11 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 12 - NORTH WEALD, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 13 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 14 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 15 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 16 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 17 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 18 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 19 - NORTH WEALD, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 20 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 21 - NORTH WEALD, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 22 - NORTH WEALD, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 23 - 10,000 FEET ABOVE THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  CHAPTER 24 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 25 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 26 - GERMAN-OCCUPIED FRANCE

  CHAPTER 27 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 28 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 29 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 30 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 31 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 32 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 33 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 34 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 35 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 36 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 37 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 38 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 39 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 40 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 41 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 42 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 43 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 44 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 45 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 46 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 47 - AIRAINES, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 48 - ROUEN, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 49 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 50 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 51 - ASCAIN, FRANCE

  CHAPTER 52 - THE PYRENEES

  CHAPTER 53 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 54 - EPPING, ENGLAND—MARCH 21, 1941

  CHAPTER 55 - EPPING, ENGLAND—JULY 18, 1996

  CHAPTER 56 - ROCHFORD, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 57 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 58 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 59 - EPPING, ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 60 - HOME

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE LONG FLIGHT HOME ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Alan Hlad

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  The JS and John Scognamiglio Books logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2019932232

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2167-9

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: July 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2169-3 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-2169-1 (e-book)

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: July 2019

  CHAPTER 1

  EPPING, ENGLAND—SEPTEMBER 7, 1940

  On the day of the atrocity, Susan Shepherd was working in a pigeon loft, sprinkling feed—a mixture of sorghum, wheat, and field peas—into a long metal tray. A few sleepy squabs lifted their heads from under their wings but made no effort to leave their nests. Most of the pigeons were outside, circling the rolling green sheep pasture or decorating the bending birches of Epping Forest.

  “You’re going to help us save Britain,” she whispered.

  The loft was a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot wooden shed lined with cubbyholes like a primary-school classroom. But instead of holding rain boots, hats, or wet gloves, the tiny compartments were the homes for more than sixty pigeons. This was the original loft, constructed by her grandfather, Bertie, before she had been born. And over the past year, a dozen new lofts had been hastily built. Except for more pigeons, her grandfather’s farm hadn’t changed since she’d left to study zoology at the University of London. Same musty smell: a mixture of down feathers, droppings, and grain. She hadn’t expected to return home so soon, but her volunteer work for the National Pigeon Service had postponed her studies in lieu of a more important endeavor—raising war pigeons.

  As Susan brushed away specks of feed from her well-worn skirt—repaired with darn and patch—her eyes were drawn to the faded pencil marks on a wall Bertie had made to record her growth as a wee child. She had pressed her back against the wall and stretched her neck like a giraffe. Desperate to grow, she had even resorted to stuffing her shoes with tissue. And six months later, Bertie only laughed when his granddaughter, who failed to remember her tissue, had shrunk an inch. During her childhood, she had grown quite fond of the pencil gracing the top of her head, the sound of scratching lead, and turning in anticipation to check her height as an audience of pigeons cooed in amusement. Susan kneeled and touched her first marking as a toddler, a date shortly after she had come to live with Bertie.

  I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in flew Enza.

  Susan shook the childhood jump-rope rhyme from her mind, then picked up a wooden spoon and rapped the side of a can, once used to hold the paint that now peeled from the siding of her grandfather’s cottage.

  Pigeons flocked through a hole cut near the ceiling. One by one, they entered the loft and fluttered to the ground. The pigeons scuttled along the floor, jutting their heads and flicking their feet, while their bodies remained eloquent and steady, as if they could balance acorns on their tails. The last bird entered, stood on the grain barrel, and tilted its head.

  “Hello, Duchess,” Susan said.

  The bird—unique with its glowing, purplish-green neck plume, more appropriate for a peacock than a pigeon—fluttered to the floor and waddled to Susan’s feet.

  “I’m afraid I’ve spoiled you.” Susan poured feed into her hand and kneeled.

  Duchess pecked at the grains.

  The touch of the beak tickled Susan’s palm. She knew she shouldn’t be hand-feeding a pigeon—it wasn’t the Pigeon Service’s protocol, or her grandfather’s—and would no doubt cause problems if Duchess were put into service. But this bird was different. All because a feral cat had managed to scratch its way under the door and take the lives of Bertie’s prized racing pigeons, Skye and Islay.

  Three years earlier, Susan and Bertie had found what was left of Skye behind the grain barrel. They had found Islay in her nest with a severely injured wing, sitting on an egg she had laid before her attack. They had tried to repair Islay’s wing with tape and splinters of wood, but she was too weak to eat, and she sat feebly on her egg for five days before she passed. They had buried her in one of Bertie’s tobacco boxes, next to Skye near the edge of Epping Forest.

  When none of the other pigeons would sit on the egg, tainted from the feline tragedy, Susan insisted on incubating it,
despite her grandfather’s belief that the chances of the egg hatching were extraordinarily slim, especially without a calibrated incubator that they could not afford. Stubborn like her grandfather, Susan retrieved a blue ceramic bowl, once used by her grandmother to eat oatmeal. She warmed the bowl with water from the teakettle to establish a good base temperature, then delicately wrapped the egg in a lightly moistened towel and placed it inside. Setting the bowl under Bertie’s desk lamp, she adjusted the distance to reach the ideal temperature by using a medical thermometer, which she had tested by sticking it under a nesting pigeon.

  For two weeks and two days, Susan rotated the egg every eight hours and sprinkled drops of water onto the towel to keep the proper humidity. And despite the odds of having to bury the egg next to its parents, the egg quivered early on a Sunday morning. Susan and her grandfather skipped church, pulled up chairs, and watched for three hours as the egg slowly cracked open. As church bells rang over Epping to release their congregations, a shriveled hatchling poked its way into the world.

  “Your parents and your granny would be proud of you,” Bertie had said.

  Susan, a heaviness in her chest, had smiled and gently caressed the hatchling.

  It had been a miracle, but Susan knew that this hatchling still had a slim chance of survival without the aid of her parents’ pigeon milk. Undeterred, she took to grinding seed into paste and feeding the hatchling by hand. Within a few days, the hatchling was able to stand, unfurl its wings, and peck. One week later, it was eating feed with the others in the loft. And Susan named her Duchess, despite her grandfather’s fondness for naming his racing pigeons after remote Scottish land masses, none of which they had ever visited.

  Duchess had grown into something extraordinary. And it wasn’t just her looks, even though her neck plume shimmered like mother of pearl. It was the bird’s intelligence—or odd behavior, as her grandfather believed—that made her stand out among the flock. While homing pigeons were trained by the reward of food, Duchess seemed to be driven by the need to understand the world around her, a strange sense of curiosity hidden behind her golden eyes. Instead of joining the group, Duchess was content to watch her companions eat as she stood on Susan’s shoulder, cooing in response to Susan’s words, as if the bird enjoyed the art of conversation. And even more impressive was Duchess’s athletic ability; she was typically the first to arrive home after the pigeons were released at a distant training location. Bertie had commented that Duchess was the fastest to return only because of her desire to get a few minutes of Susan’s undivided attention. Susan laughed but knew there was some truth to what he said.

  As Susan stroked Duchess’s back with a finger, a siren sounded. She stopped. The horn began as a low growl, then grew to an ear-piercing roar, tapering off, then repeating. Goose bumps cropped up on her arms. Pigeons fluttered. Walls vibrated. Seed in the feeding tray quivered.

  The door flew open. Her grandfather, a bowlegged man wearing a tarnished tin helmet, shouted, “Luftwaffe!” He grabbed Susan’s hand and pulled.

  Susan saw the spring door closing behind her, Duchess standing calmly on the ground as the other pigeons scattered. “Duchess!” She broke her grandfather’s grip, threw open the door, and scooped up the bird.

  Susan, with Duchess tucked into the crook of her arm, ran with Bertie toward the bomb shelter, just like they had rehearsed, praying each time that this day would never come. But they knew it was merely a matter of time. As they ran across the field and past several other pigeon lofts, the siren wailed from nearby North Weald Airfield.

  Bertie paused as he struggled to catch his breath. He pushed up his old military helmet that kept falling over his eyes. “Hurry!” he shouted.

  Before they reached the shelter, the siren died, replaced by the buzz of mechanical bees. Susan looked up, swallowed, and pushed up the brim of Bertie’s helmet. Hundreds of enemy bombers, and nearly twice as many fighters, darkened the late-afternoon sky like a swarm of black flies. Antiaircraft fire boomed. Black bursts exploded below the aerial armada.

  The shelter was a broad earthen mound under the canopy of a large beech tree. Green grass now covered the embankment, blending the refuge into the rolling pasture. Except for the front door, which made it look like a home for a hobbit, the sanctuary was camouflaged. Susan had helped her grandfather build the shelter, piling up wheelbarrows of dirt and mixing concrete in buckets to line the inner walls reinforced with remnant bricks and scrap steel from a demolished cannery. And for the entrance, they used a door from an old outhouse.

  As they reached the shelter, the bellies of the bombers cracked open. Instead of hunkering into the pit, they were compelled—despite their own safety—to watch scrambling Royal Air Force Hurricane fighters soar over the trees and pitch sharply to the sky. The fighter squadron was sorely outnumbered as enemy escort fighters bearing the Iron Cross swooped down to surround them. The RAF put up a short but valiant effort. One Hurricane exploded after rounds of enemy gunfire pierced its fuel tank, sending shrapnel over Epping Forest. Another had its tail shot off, sending the Hurricane into a spinning dive and crashing into a field with no sign of the pilot bailing out. One by one, the RAF Hurricanes were shot down, and the few planes lucky enough to suffer only minor damages retreated with smoke pouring from their engines.

  Susan and Bertie watched the invaders fly toward London, a mere twenty miles away, contested only by inaccurate antiaircraft fire. Seeds of destruction dropped from the bellies of the bombers and whistled to the ground.

  “My God.” Tears flowed down Susan’s cheeks as the first bombs exploded.

  As night set in, the horizon of London glowed with scores, perhaps hundreds, of great fires. And with the darkness came a second wave of bombers dropping their payloads throughout the night, using the burning fires to identify their targets. White-hot incendiary bombs flared. Echoes of explosions filled the air.

  At 4:30 AM, the bombing stopped. Susan stepped to Bertie, sitting on the ground, and helped him to his feet. With weak legs, he shuffled into the shelter, then curled onto a cot with his tin helmet covering his face. Unable to rest, Susan stood outside with Duchess cradled in her arms and watched the glow on the horizon. The grinding continued as the German planes flew overhead, masking the stars and crescent moon. She closed her eyes and prayed that they would not return. But the following evening they came back. And again the night after that.

  CHAPTER 2

  BUXTON, MAINE—SEPTEMBER 8, 1940

  Ollie Evans, lured by a squeaky porch swing and the roasted-nut aroma of chicory coffee, opened the screen door. He found his parents gently rocking, sharing a wool blanket and a cup of coffee, as an orange sun rose above the dew-glistened potato fields.

  The cup in his mother’s hand, Ollie noticed, was a misshapen toad-green mug he had made in industrial arts class in the seventh grade. He chuckled. “Where did you find it?”

  His mother shrugged, wisps of faded brown hair resting on her shoulders. She sipped. Steam swirled in the cool air.

  Ollie was no longer a little boy. He was six feet tall, give or take an inch, with wavy brown hair and caramel eyes, a gift from his mother. The dimple on his chin mirrored the one on his father. As Ollie took a seat on the porch steps, an unsettling feeling that he should be somewhere else filled his belly. It wasn’t unusual to be home in the fall. After all, most of the schools would soon be on potato recess. Unfortunately, his harvest break was more permanent.

  “I’m proud of you,” his father said.

  “For what?” Ollie asked.

  “For putting family first.” He accepted the mug from his wife and drank. “I’m sorry you’re still home.” He nudged the cane hanging from the side of the swing. “It wasn’t fair that you had to stay.”

  “That’s okay. The farm’s important. And so are you.”

  Three years ago, his father’s muddy boot slipped off the tractor’s clutch while attempting to pull out a stump. The machine flipped backward, pinning his father’s right le
g, shattering his hip, and snapping a femur in two places. Ollie, unable to lift the tractor, dug him out with a hand trowel from the garden shed. His mother had called for an ambulance and helped by scraping earth with her bare hands, ripping off three of her fingernails. It had been a painful recovery, including two surgeries and agonizing rounds of physical therapy. And now his father, held together with screws and wire, was able to perform some of the farm duties, except for plowing and crop-dusting. He was no longer able to work the pedals, the strain too much for his brittle leg. His father didn’t seem to mind moving as slowly as a tortoise, the constant ache in his joints, or the pronounced limp in his walk. It was the inability to fly that had stolen his spirit, his once-dark hair turning gray with the passing of days spent grounded, as if the lower altitude accelerated the aging process.

  His mother adjusted the blanket covering their laps, took the mug from her husband, and handed him the newspaper.

  Ollie’s father slid the rubber band from the paper, wrapped it around his forefinger, and shot it at Ollie.

  Ollie ducked, even though it whizzed two feet over his head.

  The smile fell from his father’s face as he unfolded the paper. “Good God.”

  Mother’s eyes widened.

  “They’ve bombed London,” Ollie’s father said, showing her the paper.

  “Those poor people,” Mother said.

  Ollie stepped to his parents and stared at the newspaper headline: Nazis Strike! German Planes Raid London! He took a deep breath and exhaled.

  “The Nazis took France in just over a month,” Ollie’s father said. “Without our help, they’ll take Britain in a year. And before we know it, we’ll have a regatta of U-boats in Casco Bay.”

  Ollie crossed his arms as another debate about the war began to dominate their conversation. It usually started with the newspaper but always ended with his father’s proclamation of their British heritage.