The Hidden War Read online

  The Hidden War

  DAVID FIDDIMORE was born in 1944 in Yorkshire and is married with two children. He worked for five years at the Royal Veterinary College before joining HM Customs and Excise, where his work included postings to the investigation and intelligence divisions. The Hidden War is the fourth novel in the Charlie Bassett series following Tuesday’s War, Charlie’s War and The Forgotten War.

  Also by David Fiddimore

  TUESDAY’S WAR

  CHARLIE’S WAR

  THE FORGOTTEN WAR

  DAVID FIDDIMORE

  The Hidden War

  PAN BOOKS

  First published 2009 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-50730-1 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-50729-5 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-50731-8 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © David Fiddimore 2009

  The right of David Fiddimore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  For Johnny’s and the crew of HMS Harpy,

  the finest ship that sailed

  Acknowledgements

  The last pages of this book could not have been written without Jane Howell and Jo Hamill, the best guides in the business, who took me up a hill to meet The Diamond Bomber, and down a mountain. They are the best and safest of walking companions . . . and I must not forget the Vipers Skiffle Group, whose recordings keep me sane as the world around goes irreversably mad. Bless you all.

  PART ONE

  The Bus Conductor

  Chapter One

  ‘Do you actually believe in God?’ I asked my pal Fergal.

  That was Father Fergal. He’d watched Boy’s Town too often, and ended up at a parish in Liverpool after the war.

  ‘You mean the old fellah with the white beard? That sort of ting?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘They taught me about that kind of question at the seminary.’

  ‘What kind of question?’

  ‘The damned if you do and damned if you don’t sort of question. Getting damned is important to us Catholics you know. If I answer Yes you’ll think your old friend is off his head. If I answer No you’ll ask me what I’m doing masquerading as a priest.’

  ‘I always liked the word masquerading, didn’t you? I’m going to Berlin again on Sunday. Do you want to come along for the trip?’

  Fergal and I had been to Berlin a few times in 1944. We used to call it the Big City in those days, although it wasn’t so big by the time we’d finished with it. I thought Fergal had been the best flight engineer in the business, in a Lancaster bomber named Tuesday’s Child. I had been the W/Op. For those of you brought up to use wartime slang I’ll explain that wop doesn’t mean Italian for once: it means wireless operator. I was their radio man.

  ‘I don’t think my Boss would like that. Not on a Sunday. He’s a bit keen on Sundays.’

  ‘So you do believe in Him then?’

  ‘Of course I do: but probably not in the way you think. I believe in the God principle I suppose.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That the God I believe in is unknowable and unimaginable . . . so I don’t try. But that doesn’t mean He’s not there.’

  ‘Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, as far as you’re concerned?’

  ‘Yes. That’s rather good, Charlie. Where did you come across it?’

  ‘A whore in Paris last week. We were talking about VD.’

  ‘He wouldn’t like to hear you talking like that.’

  ‘Sure. He created VD just the same as He created us. The pox must have a divine purpose; it’s just that to us it’s unknowable and unimaginable.’

  ‘Let’s go and have that drink, Charlie.’

  Later I asked him, ‘Don’t you suppose that somewhere there’s a holy gonococcus preaching to all the other little gonococci, that God created them in his own image?’

  Fergal fell off the bar stool while he was laughing, and two pretty girls came across to help me get him to his feet again. Maybe my luck was changing.

  It was, and the joke was on me as it turned out, because a week later I began to itch.

  I’d had the chance to look Fergal up because I had flown into Liverpool Speke Airport and, you guessed it, by early1948 the silly beggars were already beginning to call it Speke International. I was in Dorothy, the company’s Avro York, and had a couple of days kicking my heels whilst they did an engine-out job on one of its four Merlins. The owner had a thing about The Wizard of Oz, and named all his aircraft after characters from it. I should have run away as soon as I learned that. We’d hauled Dot up to Speke with a load of Dutch rivets for a small car manufacturer, and next year’s tulip bulbs for the municipal parks. For an aircraft that was only six months old it was already clapped out: she was being flown to death.

  Fergal went into the priest’s school at the end of our tour in 1944. I don’t know how he ended up at a poor parish in Liverpool, with a children’s home full of war orphans. I asked him if he had a choice about where God posted him.

  ‘No, Charlie. God’s agents in Dublin sent me here to make me humble. As I remember, it was a case of Speke, or for ever hold your peace.’ He’d made me smile.

  ‘Has it made you humble?’

  ‘Liverpool would make anyone humble, Charlie. Where I live is a bombed-out human sewer.’

  ‘Come away with me then: I’ll get you a job.’

  ‘God’s already given me one.’

  ‘But you hate every arse-wiping minute of it.’

  ‘That’s the poi
nt, Charlie. I’ll explain it one day.’

  ‘Fancy a beer then?’

  ‘Thank you, Charlie. Why not?’

  I had already met the nice old guys teaching Fergal his trade. Liverpool seemed to attract Irish priests like old dog deposits attract flies . . . and Fergal was right about the districts around the docks: they were full of holes, gifts from creative German flyers in the early Forties. I had a curious conversation with one of the priests whilst waiting for Fergal to finish work one evening. He had tufty wings of red hair, and a ruddy complexion. We sat in a large study, and he poured me an Irish whiskey.

  He said, ‘In the old days we would have called this the Chapter House.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Just Church House. Sad, isn’t it? You flew with young Fergal during the war, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I was his wireless operator.’

  ‘What do you do now?’

  ‘Same thing, but not for the RAF. I was civilianized. Just like a bus conductor really: I fly with a small freight outfit in Kent. Last week I actually flew a load of coal from northern France to Newcastle. We take it to Germany as well.’

  The conversation stalled, then he said, ‘I hear that things are really bad in Newcastle.’

  ‘Better than it was. I met someone who told me about entire families freezing to death on his street in the last winter. They don’t report that in the papers.’ I wanted to ask, Where was your God then, when they needed him? But we’d all just got through a war, so we knew the score. Instead I asked him, ‘Did you learn to be a priest here, as well?’

  ‘No. I went to a seminary in Spain. The Scottish School . . . and that’s where I found my calling, and stayed . . . until Franco chased me out.’

  ‘I have a friend who fought over there. He was chased out as well. He was probably a Communist, so you wouldn’t have got on with him.’

  ‘And why not? At least they stood and fought when God deserted us.’ He said this without blinking. He wanted to be sure I understood him. Another pause, and then he asked me, ‘What do you know about our Church’s procedure of confession, Charlie?’

  ‘Precious little, Father. Why?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about Fergal’s confession.’

  ‘Are you supposed to do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well . . . ?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Charlie. I have always excused myself by choosing to believe that God is not a personality at all: maybe He’s something more like an animated, but complex, set of rules . . .’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Rules are for the obedience of fools, Charlie, and for the guidance of wise men.’

  ‘And we’re the wise men?’

  ‘We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t, Charlie. Only there’s just the two of us.’

  ‘What was your problem again?’

  Don’t ask me how I knew. It was just like being in the RAF. If an officer butters you up it’s always because there’s a problem that he wants to pass on to you.

  ‘He confesses your flights over Germany. Twenty-eight of them, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. I try not to think about them myself. We had some interesting experiences, but from your viewpoint we probably did pretty ghastly things to nice people.’

  ‘Does that worry you?’

  ‘No. Not any more. I don’t know why.’

  ‘It worries Fergal.’

  ‘It always did. Situation normal.’

  ‘That’s not the way it works for a Catholic, Charlie . . . do you want another drink?’ I must have been slinging it back.

  ‘No thank you, please carry on . . .’

  ‘A Catholic confesses their sins to a priest, repents and asks for forgiveness. The priest gives them penances, usually prayers to recite, and then absolves their sins in God’s name . . . and they are forgiven. Their sins have been taken from them, and they are no longer sinners . . . ready for Heaven.’

  ‘Whiter than the shriven snow?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Just li’ that?’ I said it the way that comedian does. Father Leakey didn’t rise to it.

  ‘Yes. Just like that.’

  ‘I must get a bit of that one day.’

  ‘I’ll introduce you to a good priest when the time comes.’ I’ve always liked these buggers who had a quick return of serve. ‘The difficulty with Fergal is that he kept coming back with the same sins. He confessed your flights over Germany again and again. Countlessly . . . as if the memory of them was eating into him somehow.’

  ‘As if the absolution hadn’t taken? Perhaps he knows God better than you do.’

  ‘That’s not the problem, Charlie.’

  ‘Then what is?’

  ‘He stopped confessing the flights two weeks ago.’

  ‘There you go then: alles ist vergeben.’

  ‘No, Charlie. That’s not it. I think he believes he’ll never be forgiven. He’s given up.’

  ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever you can, I suppose.’

  I awoke flat on my back on a stone slab. When I opened my eyes the universe was above me. There was the constellation of Orion, its belt like a finger pointing into the sky. It must have been about three in the morning. Fergal was six feet away; alongside me on another table grave. He was alert, and had probably been awake longer. The girls had gone. He asked me, ‘You OK, Charlie?’

  I yawned. I was cold, and my back was stiff, but I felt disinclined to move.

  ‘Yeah; great. I spoke to your mucker when you were finishing up in the church tonight. He’s worried about you . . .’

  ‘Mucker. You’ve only been up here a couple of days, Charlie, but you’re already picking up the lingo.’

  ‘It’s a talent I seem to have; or a disease.’ But I wasn’t prepared to let him get away from it. ‘He’s worried about all you’ve been saying about bombing Germany.’

  ‘He’s not supposed to tell you, the louse: there’s something called the sanctity of the confessional.’

  ‘He told me that was cancelled out by God being a set of rules . . .’

  ‘Yes; for the obedience of fools, but the guidance of wise men. I’ve heard that one; he uses it on all of us. It’s his excuse for making up his faith as he goes along. He’s an old renegade, and will be in trouble with the bishop before long. Apparently he forgot himself once in Spain, got lost, and ended up fighting in the International Brigade. He says he’s one of God’s backsliders.’

  ‘Like you, and that rule about chastity a couple of hours ago? She was very noisy.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ll need to confess that.’

  ‘He’s worried that you banged on about it for so long, and then suddenly stopped.’

  Neither of us said anything for a couple of minutes. I recognized Cygnus, the Swan, low in the sky and counted her stars.

  ‘Do you ever worry about what we did to Germany, Charlie?’

  ‘Is it on my conscience, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No. Not any more. I’d find it difficult to look at the faces in your orphanage and feel bad about what we did to Jerry. Besides, there’s another thing . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I remember going to Germany in Tuesday now, it doesn’t feel like it was anything that men did. It seems more like an act of nature. Like something terrible but inevitable; like something I wasn’t responsible for . . .’

  I didn’t tell him about the nightmares.

  ‘I worry about it.’

  ‘I know. That’s why they’re worried about you.’

  I spotted a bright star about thirty degrees to my starboard, and billions of miles away. I thought that it could be Betelgeuse. Fergal spoke quietly and without passion – quite the old Fergal I knew.

  ‘I won’t do anything silly, Charlie. If it gets too bad I’ll come looking for you, and take that job you suggested.’

  ‘Good. Can we go back now?
’

  ‘Yes; we can.’

  ‘In that case you’ll have to pull me up. My back isn’t working any more; that whore must have done for me.’

  ‘Were they whores?’

  ‘I paid them anyway . . .’

  ‘What was yours like?’

  ‘Very soft and firm at the same time: like lying on one of those blow-up beds. Consider the Li-Los of the field . . .’

  ‘. . . they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Then he said, ‘Mary Magdalene was said to be a whore . . .’ He had a gentle, faraway smile on his face.

  ‘Why did we come to this terrible graveyard in the first place, Fergal . . . couldn’t we have found somewhere more comfortable?’ I asked him.

  ‘Remember Marty?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Marty Weir had been our bomb aimer. When the crew had split Marty had organized all of our signatures in a Gideon Bible he’d swiped from a hotel, and given it to Fergal for luck.

  ‘I thought that you’d like to visit him. He’s lying over against that wall.’

  There were about twenty service headstones over there. I hadn’t given them a second glance. I sat up suddenly, leaned over and was sick. It was probably something to do with all the beer I had drunk.

  We flew into Berlin on the Sunday morning with a load of coal, and arrived as black as miners, covered by the dust from the sacks. Without making it obvious the American military governor of the western part of the city was trying to stockpile fuel for a hard winter; there was already a heady black market in coal. Sorry about the pun. This was purely a civilian operation: a charity was paying for the shipment. Berlin was still an open city.

  It was a longer stay this time – we were opening up an office there. Old Man Halton, who owned us, flew in as our passenger. He coughed the whole way like someone in the terminal stages of TB. The Red Cross doughnut van followed us around the perimeter: Marthe, its driver, had recognized the red-liveried York as we crossed the boundary, and as usual was determined to let no one get to us before she did. The first time I had met her, a year ago, she was driving an identical wagon in Hamburg, selling hotdogs to tired aircrew. She parked at the fuselage door, so it was impossible to ignore her.