A Blind Man's War Read online

  DAVID FIDDIMORE

  A Blind Man’s War

  PAN BOOKS

  To:

  23162882 L/Cpl George. A. oBrien

  A2 Wireless/Op, The Royal Signals (retd)

  and

  The other National Servicemen and Policemen

  who went to fight our end in Cyprus:

  you did us proud lads, thank you.

  How do you say ‘thank you’ . . . to Charlie’s hard pressed editors, those who provide the word pictures and technical information which make these stories work, and the many readers who write to him with stories which are often stranger, funnier and altogether more interesting than those he could dream up alone?

  The best I can come up with is to print it at the beginning of this book, and hope that you notice.

  Bless you all.

  Contents

  One: Toast and Tizer

  Two: Hello, Pete

  Three: Love and Bullets

  Four: Teamsters are Very Nice Men

  Five: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

  Six: Lost John

  Seven: Where the Hell is Loughborough?

  Eight: Hello, Pat

  Nine: Spontaneous Reproduction

  Ten: On His Blindness

  Eleven: Murder Mile

  Twelve: Let’s Hear It for the Dead Men

  Thirteen: The Chanctonbury Ring

  Fourteen: Returned to Sender

  Fifteen: The Lone Rider of Santa Fe

  Sixteen: Aphrodite

  Seventeen: Love for Sale

  Eighteen: The Black Spot

  Nineteen: Chasing the Dragon

  Twenty: Last Orders, Please

  Epilogue: Last Words . . .

  The Last Post

  Chapter One

  Toast and Tizer

  It had been a decent late-summer’s day until Dieter said, ‘Are you going to get married, Dad? Because I can’t see how we’re going to manage if you don’t.’

  ‘I hadn’t planned on it.’

  That was the sort of reply Hopalong Cassidy would have made before thumping a Red Indian and blowing on his knuckles.

  Thinking back on it I must have been thirty-two by then, and Dieter about fifteen. We had met in Germany in 1945, when he was a little lost orphan boy. I hadn’t intended to adopt him; it was something which had crept up on me. We were sitting in the bar of the Happy Return, a pub owned by my old Major and his woman Maggs. It was next door to my bungalow down on Bosham Bay.

  Maggs always referred to herself as ‘the Major’s woman’, and enjoyed the matrons clucking in the back pews every time she went to church.

  ‘Explain,’ I asked Dieter.

  ‘I’m going to the Merchant Navy College: you agreed.’

  ‘So I did.’

  ‘So what happens to Carly? He can’t live next door on his own, and even here with Mrs Maggs and the Major he’ll be terribly lonely.’ Carlo was my other son, although like Dieter he wasn’t a biological connection: he was the result of the liaison between Grace, my lover, and an Italian deserter. In Carlo’s case I had been left, literally, holding the baby when his mother and her Italian bailed out . . . But that’s another story. I hadn’t intended to adopt Carlo either. ‘We haven’t been separated since you brought us down here; I’ve been more like a father to him.’

  ‘More like a father than me, you mean?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Dad, but you’re not exactly here as often as other dads, are you?’ He was right. The little bugger usually was. He added, ‘Don’t think we’re not grateful to you for taking us on. It’s just going to be tricky for Carly when I go away next year.’

  I lit my pipe. He sipped his ginger beer. I sipped my pint of bitter and glanced at the bar clock, wondering when I could allow myself the first whisky of the night. James – the Major – had just restocked, and I was keen to start sampling.

  ‘Did you have anyone particular in mind?’ I asked Dieter. ‘For me to marry I mean?’

  He gnawed his lower lip. ‘There was that red-headed girl you brought down here a few times after you got back from Egypt. You seemed to get on well; you certainly made enough noise after you went to bed for the night.’ Whenever he came out with something like that I wondered whether he was really only fifteen. I’d collected him on a battlefield; holding onto the hand of a dead teenager he thought was his brother. ‘And she got on well with Carly.’

  ‘June. But she didn’t get on well enough with me to stay, did she?’

  ‘Did you ask her?’

  He always put me under the cosh.

  ‘I was getting round to it.’ She had another boyfriend who had slipped in when I was abroad. I still see her when I visit the company’s head office, but she became engaged to marry this new guy, and couldn’t see her way into letting him down when I got back. These things used to happen all the time in the war – we didn’t have too much time then to fret about them. June was one of my boss’s secretaries; our heady romance had been going well before the War Office jerked my chain in 1953 and sent me to Egypt. ‘How long have we got before you go?’

  ‘About six months . . .’ He looked rather longingly I thought at my pint, swallowed the last of his ginger beer, and stood up, saying, ‘I have to get back. Carly’s struggling with his English homework, and I promised I’d help him.’ A German boy helping an English boy with his English homework – you live and learn, I suppose. Despite his Eyetie name Carlo was as English as the icing-sugar primroses on a chocolate Easter egg.

  There was a rush later, and I helped James behind the bar – between pulling pints I asked him, ‘Are you giving Dieter beer when I’m not around?’

  ‘Yes, Charlie. Someone has to teach him how to drink. He gets half a pint a day; usually when he gets back from school . . . and he keeps his mouth shut about it. Is that a problem?’

  ‘No, James. I’m glad you’re watching out for him.’ It wasn’t the first time I’d slipped up with the boys, and I was sure that it wasn’t to be the last.

  Maggs and the Major had built me a prefab alongside their pub in Bosham while we were still blessed by a Labour government. The boys lived there with me when I was away from where I worked – Lympne in Kent, a couple of hours along the coast. I managed a small commercial airline. Well, that’s stretching the truth actually – it more or less managed itself these days.

  I had formally adopted Dieter with the help of the Chichester WVS. I think it went through because it was the easiest way out for the authorities.

  But Carlo was another matter. I was his legal guardian for the time being.

  His father was certainly dead because a mate of mine had shot him. His mother might have been still alive – nobody knew for certain – but if she was dead it was because I had killed her. Grace and I had exchanged loving gunshots with each other in a small town in Turkey in 1953. She had hit me twice, but was unable to make it stick. I thought I had hit her once – I saw her stagger – but no body had turned up. So you never know, do you?

  The matter had become less pressing the next time I got down to see them – about a fortnight later – because James, the Major, was living in the bungalow with the boys. Usually they stayed in the pub with him and Maggs when I was away. We sat round the kitchen table just after I arrived, with plates of beans on toast. Carlo had a glass of Tizer, James and I pints of beer, and Dieter’s half-pint was out in the open. He sipped it thoughtfully.

  I asked James, ‘What happened to you?’

  Dieter didn’t give him a chance. He said, ‘Mrs Maggs threw him out. She caught him with Mrs Valentine on Mr Valentine’s boat.’

  Ho-hum. What goes around comes around. Mrs Valentine was a willing workhorse: I knew, because I’d taken a few equestrian lessons myself. I asked them
, ‘What does Mr Valentine think about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ James muttered scornfully. ‘We haven’t seen him for months; he’s resigned from the yacht club. Maybe they’ve separated: she didn’t give me time to ask.’

  ‘So Maggs, to whom you’re not married, is living in your pub, and you are living in my house?’

  ‘It’s just a temporary arrangement . . .’ I hadn’t seen James look so uncomfortable for years. ‘Just until she cools down.’

  ‘She’ll get over it,’ Carlo told us, and belched. He still sang soprano, and had a squeaky voice. ‘Women usually do.’

  We all turned to look at him. The little sod was only eleven years old. Dieter was right in one way: someone had to take Carly in hand.

  ‘Don’t talk about your elders that way,’ I told him – probably too tamely.

  ‘Anyone who’s not a friend of the Major’s is not a friend of mine, Dad.’

  ‘You’d better move in for good,’ I said to James, ‘and teach these wee buggers some manners.’

  Mrs Valentine’s front end was Evelyn. Eve. You should never name girl children Eve, Bathsheba or Salome: it puts ideas in their heads. I’m sure that James had known of my previous engagements with her. Later on we sat on either side of the fire, and toasted each other in Red Label Johnnie Walker.

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked him. ‘Any good?’

  ‘Very energetic. I thought we’d go through the bottom of the boat. It didn’t occur to me that Maggs would be offended.’

  ‘Why? Because of that brothel she kept in France?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘That was stupid, James. The brothel was business; you’re personal as far as Maggs is concerned. How do you feel about her?’

  ‘Haven’t got a clue, old boy: I never think about it.’

  ‘Then you’d better bloody start. Cheers.’ I raised my glass to him. It was the first time in ten years I’d ever given him any advice – it was usually the other way round. I’ve said it before, haven’t I? What goes around comes around. ‘Do you think she’ll forgive you?’

  ‘She’s told me she will; after a fortnight. How can she know that?’

  ‘I dunno. It’s a mystery – that’s a phrase I learned in Egypt.’ An Egyptian pal used it to block any question he didn’t want to answer.

  ‘When,’ he asked me, ‘are you going to open that bloody envelope?’

  The envelope in question was brown manila, and bore those magic letters OHMS. It must have come from the place we were beginning to call Fairyland on account of all the southpaws that were floating to the top in the Home Civil Service. The postman had delivered it earlier in the week, and Dieter had put it on the mantelpiece above the fire for me. The microscopic RTS address on the reverse directed it back to the Foreign Office in London. I opened it, and read the two terse lines on the letter it contained.

  ‘They want me to go up for some kind of interview next week,’ I told James. ‘And Old Man Halton wants to see me as well. What do you think?’

  James held his glass towards the fire, and squinted at the flames through the whisky. After a big swallow he said, ‘I think you’re in the shit again, old son.’

  Just like Dieter, my old Major was rarely wrong about these things.

  There are two impressive things about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office building in London: they are size and scale. Absolute and comparative. The room I was escorted to was large enough to keep one of Halton Air’s Avros in, and still have room for a tennis court. Halton Air was my employer, and the Avro was the York – a civilian development of the Lancaster Bombers I had flown in the war. I was admitted through a double door from a Cecil B. DeMille film, and had to walk four miles across a room whose tall, narrow windows stretched from floor to ceiling. As I walked across the room I moved continually from bands of light to bands of shadow. It was a vaguely disorienting experience.

  The desk in the middle was so old it was probably made from Armada timbers. The man sitting behind it didn’t look much younger. He didn’t rise to greet me: I don’t think he could. They call things like him Whitehall ‘Mandarins’ these days, and he looked as if he was welded to his seat. He smiled a thin smile that somehow conveyed the fact that it pained him to have to do so, and indicated an upright chair opposite him. I’d seen photographs of chairs like that in America – they wire them up to the mains, and kill people in them.

  He said, ‘Mr Bassett?’

  ‘That’s the name I write on my shirt tabs.’ It didn’t work. The smile became thinner. If I had had a violin bow I could have played a tune on it.

  ‘Thank you for coming to see us.’

  I quickly looked around. I couldn’t see any us, only him.

  ‘That’s all right, squire. I had to come up to town to see my boss anyway.’

  At the word squire he winced. One to me.

  ‘Do you know why we’ve asked to see you?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Sorry. If that’s all, can I go now?’ I don’t know why I was being such a tit: there was just something about this specimen that immediately annoyed me. I wanted to punch his lights out. I half rose to make my point.

  ‘No. Sit down. The Foreign Secretary has asked us to discuss your record with you.’

  ‘Which record?’

  I actually had a point. There were two card files on the desk; one under his right hand and one under the left. The one under his left hand was my old blue RAF personal file. It was about three times as thick as the last time I had seen it: that seemed hardly fair. The one under his right hand had a buff card cover, and was slimmer. That would have been a relief if the hand over it hadn’t been trembling, as if the file contained a violent animal straining to get out. He calmed his hand with an effort, and spread his fingers out, pinning the papers to the desk.

  ‘This one: you’re a damned disgrace.’

  We went mano-a-mano – the old eye lock – and I said, ‘Oh, that. I wouldn’t worry about that. There’s bound to have been a misunderstanding.’

  He didn’t fall for it. He didn’t say, ‘Pull the other one.’ They don’t say that in Eton and Oxford.

  They say things like, ‘Sit up, and damned well pay attention. This file contains letters to the Foreign Secretary from our embassies all over the world, concerning your behaviour in other sovereign countries. To be specific, it comprises a list of countries who don’t ever want you back.’ He flipped the file open, and lifted a number of sheets of paper one by one. ‘France. The Netherlands. Belgium. France again. Germany. Germany again . . .’ He lifted a further three sheets of paper, and added, ‘Especially Germany. East Germany. Egypt. Iraq. Persia . . . Need I go on?’

  ‘If you like.’ I was, I admit, a little taken aback. I didn’t think I’d pissed folk off that badly.

  ‘America . . . What have you done to the Americans? They’re supposed to be our allies.’

  ‘Nothing: I’ve never met an American I didn’t like. They must be mixing me up with someone else.’

  ‘Not a chance, Mr Bassett – the FBI has labelled you “an undesirable alien” who consorts with terrorists, spies, black marketeers, smugglers and career criminals.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I seriously haven’t a clue. I don’t know what you’re talking about. They must mean someone else.’

  He allowed himself his first proper smile of the morning. ‘For your sake, I truly bloody well hope so. Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  When had we swapped from mid-morning tea to coffee?

  ‘Why not? Then you can tell me what you want.’

  Mrs Bassett, you see, didn’t have any stupid sons, and I wouldn’t have been sitting there unless the spiny bastard wanted something.

  Coffee came in a tall Georgian silver pot. The china cups and saucers were as fine as knife blades, and probably worth a king’s ransom: these civil servants did all right for themselves. He played mother. The biscuits were sweet Abernethy. That was a social gaffe: you should always serve Abernethie
s with cheese. I think I read that in a John Buchan novel.

  ‘I want you to go back to the RAF, as a civilian consultant, and do some radio work on Cyprus for them,’ he told me.

  I blew half an Abernethy biscuit all over him as I spluttered.

  ‘And you can go and take a running jump.’

  At least we understood each other from more or less the word go.

  He smiled as he brushed his jacket down. It wasn’t a smile I liked.

  He said, ‘Most men would be grateful of an offer of employment these days, even if it is temporary.’

  ‘I already have a job. I run a perfectly respectable small airline from a perfectly respectable small airfield in Kent. Thank you for the offer, and I’ll be going now.’ Again I tried to move from my seat.

  He waved me down. ‘You haven’t finished your coffee. I always think the coffee’s rather good here, don’t you?’ Then he added, ‘Your perfectly respectable airline is on the move – to Panshanger, I hear – where most of your kit will be put into mothballs. I expect that’s what Halton wants to see you about. He indicated that you might be kicking your heels for a couple of months, and we thought you’d be pleased to have something to do.’

  ‘Indicated to whom?’ Although Lord God Almighty Halton was my employer, almost a patron you might say, I wasn’t surprised he’d discussed my future with strangers: in his world there was him, and everybody else – the everybody else were pawns to be moved around in his chess game.

  ‘One of the ministers, I expect. He moves in exalted circles, doesn’t he? What’s he like?’

  ‘Almost as small as me and twice as nasty. He coughs kerosene.’

  ‘He has a reputation for looking after his people; rather old-fashioned.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ It was a grudging admission I had to make. ‘I just wish he’d tell us about it first . . . Did he know in advance about this job you’re offering me?’

  ‘No. You come recommended.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘A rather highly placed officer in RAF Intelligence. They were among the departments we canvassed when the need arose: she advised us to get you if we could . . . Apparently you ran an intercept station at Cheltenham before it went all Cold War on us, and became GCHQ. Correct?’