The Forgotten War Read online

  The Forgotten War

  In September 2004 Richard & Judy’s Executive Producer, Amanda Ross, approached Pan Macmillan: her production company, Cactus TV, wanted to launch a major writing competition, ‘How to Get Published’, on the Channel 4 show. Unpublished authors would be invited to send in the first chapter and a synopsis of their novel and would have the chance of winning a publishing contract.

  Five months, 46,000 entries and a lot of reading later, the five shortlisted authors appeared live on the show and the winner was announced. But there was a surprise in store for the other four finalists.

  On air Richard Madeley said, ‘The standard of the finalists is staggeringly high. All are more than worthy of a publishing contract.’ Pan Macmillan agreed and published all five.

  The winning books were The Olive Readers by Christine Aziz, Tuesday’s War by David Fiddimore, Housewife Down by Alison Penton Harper, Journeys in the Dead Season by Spencer Jordan and Gem Squash Tokoloshe by Rachel Zadok.

  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 Forgotten War is the third novel in the Charlie Bassett series following Tuesday’s War and Charlie’s War.

  Also by David Fiddimore

  TUESDAY’S WAR

  CHARLIE’S WAR

  DAVID FIDDIMORE

  The Forgotten War

  PAN BOOKS

  First published 2008 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 978-0-330-50712-7 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-50711-0 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-50713-4 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © David Fiddimore 2008

  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.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 2

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 3

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 4

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part 5

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  For

  RUT, STEFAN, RAGNA, SISSI and OLA

  . . . the last of the Vikings

  I can’t let this book go without acknowledging the contribution of others.

  The work of my editor and copy editor is crucial to the telling of these tales: I just write the stuff, but they make sure it’s readable!

  Finally I have to thank the soldier who bore the service number 22602108, and lent it to me for this book – he has been a faithful and supportive brother for sixty years: they don’t make them like that any more!

  PART ONE

  Welcome Home, Charlie

  1. Doin’ My Time

  Someone once told me that policemen are trained to deliver the bad news.

  The sergeant in front of me had obviously failed that part of his course. I had been waiting for about five hours to be arrested anyway, so I just wished that he would get on with it. He fingered my fibre name-tag a last time. I noticed that the leather bootlace I wore it on was cracking: I’d need another one. He laid it down on a file cover on which he had recently printed my name in thick blue pencil.

  ‘I have bad news for you, Mr Bassett.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Someone should have told you before this.’

  ‘What should they have told me?’

  ‘That you’re dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re dead, son. Deceased. You got the chop. Kaput. Finito. Charles Aidan Bassett, RAF service number 22602108, died of injuries sustained in an air crash at Tempsford in December 1944. Tempsford’s near here.’ The cop had a fruity old Bedfordshire accent, and spoke slowly.

  ‘I know where it is. I was stationed there.’

  ‘You are buried in the graveyard at Everton. That’s near here too.’

  I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.

  The copper frowned at me. ‘Why are you laughing, son?’ Men often called me ‘son’ or ‘titch’ on account of my size. It teed me off no end.

  ‘Someone I know is buried there. We called him Black Francie. He would have found this funny. Are you telling me that you don’t believe me?’ I had walked into his police station to tell him that I was AWOL. I was embarrassed to have missed the end of the war by nearly two years. The cop sighed before he replied.

  ‘I’m glad you’re so quick on the uptake.’

  ‘So can I go? Just like that.’

  ‘I don’t think so, son. I think that I’ll have to invite you to sit in a small room with bars on its windows, while I ask myself some questions.’

  ‘What questions, sergeant?’

  ‘I’ll start by asking myself just who you really are, and, seeing as you’re reluctant to tell me, how I can find that out by myself.’

  He looked so depressed at the prospect that I had to make an effort to stop myself from feeling sorry for him.

  How the hell had I got into this mess?

  Now, I’m going to run this past you quite quickly, and just the once; so pay attention. In 1944 I completed a tour of operations as a wireless operator with a Lancaster squadron at Bawne, west of Cambridge – it sits a cough and a spit from the Bedfordshire border. You may recall that a few years ago I wrote a book about that. In the course of that tour I met, and sort of fell in love with – well, we all did, actually – an ATA pilot named Grace Baker. Grace became pregnant, but I’m not holding my hands, or anything else, up to that. I asked her to marry me because that’s what I was like when I was twenty. I know it was a mistake. She had said ‘Yes,’ but added, ‘if you can find me.’ Then she ran away. Cow. So I tried anyway.

  This is where it all becomes a bit tricky.

  My next posting, at Tempsford, was the airfield that the cop had mentioned. It was the airfield used by squadrons that flew clandestine missions in and out of wartime Europe, and my job was to keep their radio operators straight. Sheer boredom put me in one of their old Stirlings, and it served me right whe
n the old bitch buried herself in a local field a couple of minutes after take-off. The old guys in the service always warned me never to volunteer for anything. I should have listened. I woke up days later in a hospital ward in Bedford. That’s where my story and the cop’s diverged. In the copper’s account I emerged from hospital in time for my own burial. Play the slow march, and carry him along. Pity about that.

  In my story my escape from the butcher’s shop was for the purpose of finding Grace; which didn’t work out, of course. It was like this: I had recovered to find myself with the patronage of a clever sod who appeared to be a squadron intelligence officer. The word ‘appeared’ is a very important one in this context. He pointed out that the squadron no longer wanted a slightly charred radio officer: anyway, they had replaced me already, with one in more or less pristine condition. However, he had put in a word for me, and found me a nice job for the last few weeks of the war: finding Grace. Sorry about the pun, but that was me; tagged onto a culinary intelligence mission, careering across Europe in a big old Humber staff car at the fag end of the war, chasing a girl who had once agreed to marry me.

  Love’s not always what it’s cracked up to be, you know.

  My companions had been a frighteningly resourceful driver, Les Finnegan, and his boss Major James England. I never did believe that those were their real names. Their job was to follow the advancing British army, assess the food needed to supply it, and call that back to something like a large stores depot that sent forward the needful. Their job became complicated if they found themselves ahead of the Allied advance, rather than behind it. That’s when Jerry shot at them.

  Grace had joined up with a commie group – French, and Eyetie doctors and nurses who shared the bizarre notion that medical care should be offered freely to anyone who needed it, regardless of which side they were on – they were always a step ahead of us. Somewhere along her journey she produced a spiffing little baby boy, who she spoiled by giving an Eyetie name. I never caught up with her during the war. The nearest I got was catching up with a makeshift hospital in Bremen, where she left me the boy, and a sarky letter. By that time he was my second boy: I already had a five-year-old German lad, who I had found on a battlefield.

  I think that a lot of us were behaving oddly by the end of the war. That’s my excuse for what I did next. I left the German boy with a German woman I had just proposed to . . . yeah, I know: you don’t have to tell me . . . and carried on blundering across Europe with Les, Maggs, an old lady I had met in Paris, and Grace’s kid. It took us more than a year to catch up with Grace, in a small town south-west of Siena.

  The square was too bloody hot.

  Les and I found some shade thrown over the cobbles by the small church, and leaned against the wall. I recognize now what it felt like, although it was new to me then. It felt like the setting for the last gunfight in one of those dreadful spaghetti westerns my son and his wife watch in the Curzon at South End Green.

  The sun came off the buffed stones like daggers. Even the swallows were fed up. They sat on shady ledges and gaped with exhaustion. There were olive groves all around the place, but the village baker Ludovico said that the future was in the vine.

  A small church stood with its door open. The priest had told me that the door had stayed open since before the war, and all through it. It had been open to anyone who had need of it, he told me. Even for the Jews. Then he spat near his feet, and observed that he couldn’t actually remember the last time he had seen one of those. I had also been inside his church a few times in the last few days: most frequently to escape the searing sun, but once, at least, to pray to a God I’d never believed in.

  Les pulled off his grubby black beret, and lifted a roll-up from it. I noticed that he had a few grey hairs in his curly thatch that hadn’t been there a year ago. He couldn’t get rid of the beret, even though the war had been over for more than a year. I wondered if he ever would. The rest of his clothing was still uniform bits and pieces. Most of it had come from dead men in other services – and other races, come to that: his laced Jerry desert boots had lasted the distance for him. He offered me a fag which I took without thinking, because my pipe had gone stale. Like all of Les’s fags it burned through as quick as the match that lit it.

  There was an old authority administration building inside the humped walls, behind the town square, only there was no council to use it any more. It sat near the stumpy, squat castle keep, by one of the fortified gates. We had left Kate, our old Humber, outside the walls a few days ago, parked up in an empty barn at the foot of the hill. Les had jacked it up on bricks, let the tyres down, removed the rotor arm and disconnected the battery. The walk up the hill to an arranged meeting with the baker had taken more than thirty minutes in the company of Maggs and the child. We weren’t hiding the car from the war any more, merely from thieves. Europe was full of them. Anyway, this was an Italian place again: I wanted to leave England on the other side of its walls.

  You wouldn’t have expected Grace to think like that.

  She rode the right-hand seat of a jeep that roared in through the fortified gate, one booted foot on the dashboard in front of her. The jeep had been liberated, just like the Italians. Its divisional badges and number had been daubed over in grey, and the bonnet star painted out. You could see hundreds like that. Her driver, without a shirt, had grimy skin the colour of a chestnut cabinet, and wore flying goggles over slicked-back black hair. He looked light and fast and muscular . . . albeit dusty. He wore a pair of fatigue pants stolen from the Americans. She wore old KDs, too, and a khaki vest with quarter sleeves. Her hair was shorter than I remembered: a black brush yellowed by road dust. She reminded me of Lee Miller’s style and look, all those months ago. They slid the jeep fancily to a stop in front of the bar. Ludo told us they hit the bar the same day, most weeks, and stayed for a couple of hours. She stood up, stretched indecorously, and looked lazily around the square. That was when she saw me. Me and Les in the shadow of the church. She didn’t mess about, of course. It wasn’t her style. Les stepped away.

  He disappeared. He was good at disappearing. Now you see him; now you don’t. When Grace walked up to me my heart lurched. Up close she was small: my size. I always forgot that. Her vest stretched tight over her breasts, which were also still as small as I recalled. There was a sweat mark between them. Nipples like twin Bofors. I wished I couldn’t remember. Her face was tight, too. Tight and angry.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here? Still following me?’ she asked.

  I made one false start, then answered her.

  ‘I came to see you. You once said that if I could find you after the war finished, you’d marry me.’ Pause, Charlie. Make it count, even if you don’t mean it. ‘It’s finished: so marry me.’ There was a heart-stop for a three-beat. I swear the world stopped moving. It was as if Grace and I were totally alone: as if every other sound and motion had been frozen. Then she laughed. It was a dry, short little sound. She shook her head and looked me in the eyes.

  ‘I lied,’ she said. ‘Now bugger off.’

  She walked over to her driver and didn’t look back. I felt immediately that I’d probably never see her again. It wouldn’t have mattered so much, except she had given me that I win smile before she had spoken. When she reached the jeep she berated the driver, calling him a corno, which a nurse in Siena had told me was the local slang for a homo, and gabinetto, which I translated as toilet. Her voice was deliberately pitched so that the entire square could hear her, and she slapped him viciously on the shoulder raising a sudden pink splash on his tanned skin. No vino-for-Gino today. No Grace, either. Minutes later the only sign of their existence was the dust cloud their jeep had left in the air.

  Inside the bar a small lady with a lined, dark brown face served me beer, which she brewed from potato skins and flavoured with vine leaves. She named it Fausto, which I took to mean happy, or lucky. I needed some luck. One of the three free-flowing springs that had led to the siting of the village ran
under her floor, in a narrow stone channel put there by the Romans. I guess that she was lucky. She had lifted a row of floor tiles in her brewing room, and sat dozens of the screw-top bottles in the flowing stream. They emerged icy cold. She pulled out four bottles. Two for me, and two for Les. I gave her dollars, and a stolen family ration book that had come Les’s way. I wondered what Grace paid for her drinks with these days? Were her family secretly getting money out to her?

  Les slouched in half an hour later and sat beside me. He wiped his forearm across his brow to spread the sweat.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked him.

  ‘I went down to check Kate.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘No problem. There was a farmer’s boy guarding it. I think he’s been there since we left it. I think that Ludo arranged it.’

  I gestured towards the bottles. ‘Beer?’

  ‘Thanks, guv’nor.’

  ‘Charlie,’ I told him firmly. ‘This job’s over, and so is the fucking war.’

  You had to admit that Grace had been explosively superb when we had met face to face for the first time in eighteen months: expecting me to bugger off. It’s the sort of phrase that has an unmistakable meaning. So I did. It had left me, Maggs and Les in a small village in Italy without a purpose. Just like the three musketeers: all for one, one for all, and all for bloody nothing. Time to go home, Charlie. Time to face the music.

  One last thing. Les had got hold of an old Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that had caught his eye, but we gave that and most of our Italian cash to our host before we left. When he handed over the gun Les told us that he had used one in Spain in the 1930s, and had fond memories of it. Then he said, ‘A head shot from a Mannlicher doesn’t leave much to the imagination, if you know what I mean . . .’

  It was one of those conversations that come back to haunt you years later.