The Forgotten War Read online

  I yawned again.

  ‘No, I’ve been out being cowardly.’

  ‘Freddy was always out being brave on Thursdays. Do you wear clothes in bed? Freddy always slept with his shirt on, with the rest of his clothes in a bundle on the end of the bed – in case there was an air raid.’

  ‘Freddy sounds like a bit of a nutcase. I don’t wear anything in bed. Can’t be bothered.’

  Her face fell: realization:

  ‘He’s not coming back, is he?’

  I’d stopped yawning. I felt grubby.

  ‘I don’t know, love; probably not. Maybe he’s been posted somewhere important.’

  Like Heaven. Alison was old enough to recognize when a man was lying to her. She pouted.

  ‘Do you really go to bed without any clothes on?’

  This had gone on long enough.

  ‘I’m going to count to ten and then get up. If you’re still here you’ll find out. One . . .’

  She fled, laughing. A diminishing shriek that concluded with a door slamming. She seemed a nice kid. Her mum must be proud of her. I was smiling as I closed the bedroom door.

  There was a large handbasin behind a curtain in the corner. In luxuriously hot water I treated myself to a decent stand-up wash. The girl didn’t come back, but Bella returned at about seven. She looked tired, but happy. Her cheeks were flushed, and a few thick strands of brown hair escaped from the rough bun she had tucked it into. She had sold eighty dead chickens, and twenty dozen eggs to the three university colleges she usually dealt with, and had been stopped in the street by a butcher looking for another supplier. Success – and money in her purse. She said that it was an excuse to get out the sherry bottle.

  I shared their supper in a kitchen lit by two tilley lamps. The electricity in the house hadn’t reached there yet. Bacon omelette, chips and HP Sauce. I remembered that my mother made a fine omelette, and the memory silenced me for a while. The tilley lamp hissed on the table and perfumed the air with traces of burnt paraffin. In its light our faces gleamed almost yellow, whilst their hollows and angles were cast into shadow: like one of those Rembrandts that I’ve seen in the V & A.

  Alison didn’t say much: her mother explained that she was shy, and needed taking out of herself because she studied too much. The little smile that Alison gave me occasionally made me feel as if I shared a secret with her, which was probably how I was supposed to feel. They let me do the washing-up, and Alison dried the dishes afterwards. Then we sat in what Bella called the small sitting room, played crib, and listened to the radio. Arthur Askey had his own show, told risqué jokes that had us giggling, and sang some of his wartime songs. When he sang ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’ I was transported in my mind back to Bawne, and the men who flew Tuesday’s Child with me. I still missed the bastards. Bella caught my change of mood, and said that that was a good reason to get out the port bottle. Alison had half a glass, and went to bed at nine: I found a book on Bella’s shelves that looked promising, and she and I spent the next hour or so reading on either side of her stove. When I finally stumbled upstairs Germany had retreated back into my imagination, and I slept without dreaming.

  I followed the music back to the farmhouse kitchen the next morning. Alison was waiting to feed me. Bella was riding herd on the chickens. When she came back for a cuppa I was tucking into fried eggs and fried bread. When I’d finished I said, ‘Isn’t it about time I started paying you for some of this?’

  ‘That would be good, Charlie, but I’d expect you to be home for supper, or let me know that you weren’t going to be here. We don’t waste food.’

  ‘Nobody does. Thanks. What should I give you?’

  ‘Five shillings a day all right? You can settle up at the end of the week.’

  ‘Great . . . and thanks for making me feel at home.’

  ‘Thank Ming,’ she told me, with a smile. ‘He recommended you.’

  I gave her a few pounds to be going on with, and my ration book. That was probably worth more to her than the cash. The RAF was paying for my bed, but the board was down to me: I’d see how it went. I was sitting in the small sitting room again when Ming strolled in. ‘Ready for another cup of char, sir?’

  ‘No, thanks, Ming. I’m up to here.’ I put my finger to my throat. ‘And you can call me Charlie when we’re off duty. I’d prefer that. And I can’t keep on calling you Ming. What are your other names?’ All the Orientals in the Charlie Chan films I’d seen seemed to be called Li, or Chang, or something easy to say but impossible to spell. The chair he neatly fitted himself into creaked with his weight.

  ‘It’s Eric, actually . . . but I’m comfortable with Ming, if that’s all right with you. Everyone else calls me that.’

  ‘Thanks for getting me in here.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir . . . Charlie, I mean. I know Bella quite well. I try to give her a helping hand when I can.’

  ‘Why did you recommend me?’

  ‘I looked at your service record. Policeman’s perks.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Mainly that you are an argumentative bugger – but something that an acting Squadron Leader Brookman wrote impressed me. He wrote that you were a good man.’

  I looked away. Poor old Brookie had burned in Tuesday the first time he flew her.

  ‘What happened to Mr Abbott?’ Ming looked uncomfortable. I’d asked him about his friends, and he didn’t want to answer. I liked that. I waved a hand. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. Forget it.’

  He met my gaze with a level one of his own. ‘Bella would tell you, anyway. There never was a Mr Abbott. She’s a Miss Abbott.’

  ‘That must have been hard for her. How old was she when Alison came along?’

  ‘Eighteen. Aye; it would have been hard – but her people were all right. They stood by her, even when she told them that she would keep the baby. Farming folk, you see – they’re different. They put city folk to shame half of the time.’ So Bella was thirty-four – she looked older; maybe forty. Maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

  ‘Her mum and dad both died of that flu in 1938,’ Ming continued. ‘It almost broke her, and she’s still mourning them. Rotten luck. She sold off most of the land for a nest egg, and kept enough ground for this idea she had about chickens – she wanted something small enough to do herself, you see.’

  ‘What about you, Ming? Is there a Mrs Ming?’

  He gave me that level, guileless gaze again, pausing before he said, ‘There’s a Miss Abbott. That’ll do for me for the time being. What about you?’

  ‘I’m good at making a fool of myself over women, Ming,’ I admitted to him. ‘There was a special girl when I was on the squadron: she buggered off. Then there was another special girl in Germany, but she buggered off as well – with one of my mates that time. I’ll sit back and think before I ask another girl out.’

  There was a wide patio of old bricks surrounding the square house. Grass grew between them. You felt that they had been there for five hundred years. I sat in the sun on a kitchen chair, leaned it back against the wall and smoked a pipe. The truth was that I was buggered if I knew what to do with myself.

  Alison came out, drying her hands on a dishcloth. She said, ‘Why don’t you go and buy yourself some clothes? You can’t go around in those rags all the time; besides, they need to be dumped in the tub and washed.’

  ‘That bad, huh?’

  ‘That bad,’ she agreed, and then she giggled.

  ‘Another woman said that to me two days ago. And another, the week before that. I could drive to Oxford, couldn’t I?’

  ‘That would be best. Could I come too, if mum says yes?’

  ‘No.’

  She pouted around a wild smile, and said something that sounded like ‘Pou . . . ff . . .’ as she flicked the tea towel at me.

  My chair overbalanced. So did I. I fell into a flower bed. Alison fled, laughing. I heard more laughter, and when I struggled up I saw Ming and Bella in a cloud of dust in a field, waving
at me. They were surrounded by hens. I felt good. I had to keep reminding myself: this is peacetime. Things are different.

  I drove to a men’s outfitter in the centre of Oxford; the sun was warm enough for me to keep the hood down all the way. Men in black gowns, looking like Dracula, flapped along Holy-well Street. They brought Fergal and his priest’s gear to mind. I found a pub there, and swallowed a pint to steady my nerves. Then I went out and bought a load of civvies. That included a couple of Fair Isle pullovers. My last major had worn one of those under his uniform jacket; I’d liked him for that. It felt poncy buying clothes without either my mother or my kid sister to advise me.

  At a shoe shop I bought a pair of overpriced brogues and had my feet measured for two bespoke pairs of shoes. They were going to cost me as well, but the shop assistant told me that they’d last my lifetime. All the girls say that. I was less intimidated by the bookshops, and finally chose a small leather-bound copy of John Donne’s poetry and a James Hadley Chase – I fancied the girl on its paper cover. The other thing I bought was four more pints of beer in a riverside pub, and I scraped the Singer against a milestone on the way back.

  I detoured by way of Benhall because I had nothing else to do. The guys at the front were polite but firm: they weren’t keen on my turning up when I wasn’t rostered, but they made an exception and let me in. Both my huts were locked, so I didn’t bother with them. Only one other hut in the compound had people in it. Duty team, I supposed. I didn’t know them, so I didn’t bother with them either.

  Watson was sitting on his veranda, wearing a white suit. He was smoking a long cheroot, and had what looked suspiciously like a whisky and soda on a small table alongside his chair. He looked like an off-duty District Officer from nineteenth-century Simla. He hailed me with a ‘What ho!’ as I fetched to.

  ‘What are you doing? Practising for a posting to Singapore?’

  ‘What are you doing, sir.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Better. No: Dutch courage. Chairing the cricket club AGM in an hour or so, and there are some frightful types there. What are you here for, on your time off?’

  ‘I’m not used to time off. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Go and buy some decent clobber.’

  ‘I’ve already done that, sir. Why does everybody make remarks about my clothes?’

  ‘Because you look such a bloody sight. It might have been good enough for racketing around the Continent in, but it’s not good enough for sunny Cheltenham.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ve done it, sir . . . but I’m glad that you’re here. I can tell you what I was going to tell you on Monday.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘It occurred to me that if we didn’t insist on flying weather flights only on Thursdays maybe the Russians wouldn’t be able to guess that we’re coming, and be waiting to dance. That way maybe we wouldn’t be losing our bloody aircraft, and the bloody people in them. Sir.’

  ‘Why should you think that we always fly on Thursdays?’

  ‘Because the teenage girl at my digs told me, sir: maybe the Reds have teenage girls, too . . . or maybe they can even work it out for themselves.’

  Watson stood up and sighed. He picked up a panama hat I hadn’t noticed, and his glass. ‘Why don’t you come inside and have a drink, Charlie? Maybe they’ll listen to you.’

  He connected me to two different staff officers who obviously still worked Saturdays. I used a green telephone that he kept in his desk drawer. I hadn’t seen a green telephone before. I hadn’t seen a telephone that lived in a desk drawer before, either. There were some strange people around.

  Both officers listened politely, said ‘Thank you, Pilot Officer Bassett,’ and hung up on me. I decided that if people like that had come into the top jobs, then the RAF was too dangerous a service to stay with. Roll on demob.

  Watson asked me, ‘I don’t suppose that you used to play a bit of cricket?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I did. But it’s a bit like bombing Germany to me now,’ I told him.

  ‘How’s that?’ He didn’t see the joke. ‘How’s it like bombing Germany?’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t want to do it any more.’

  I walked back to the guardroom to collect my car, locking the compound behind me. Maybe I could get the hang of all these locks and keys after all. I had to wait after they lifted the barrier for me, because a man with a dark raincoat that reached to the ground was doing a song-and-dance act for them in the road outside. He held a small bowl in one hand. Coins rattled in it. He sang and danced to ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, his shoes tapping at the tarmac like machine-gun fire. He had a croupier’s dark visor over his blind eyes, and a greasy dark felt hat. His hair was lank, and flopped around his shoulders as his feet tapped out the rhythms. When I dropped a two-bob bit in his bowl he doffed his hat to me, and sidestepped. The world wasn’t quite back to normal; not quite.

  Ming was still at the farm when I returned, but his feet were under the kitchen table, and a mug of cloudy cider was in his hand. He said, ‘I forgot to tell you. A Yank turned up yesterday, asking for you. I think that he was an air-force sergeant of some kind. They have funny ranks, don’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, they do. Did he say what he wanted?’

  ‘He wants you to look after a big parcel for him for a couple of weeks. He’s going up to Ganda, and will see you on the way back. I had it put in your office, alongside the desk. Was that all right?’

  I said, ‘I suppose so,’ before I thought it through. I’d looked after things for Tommo Thomsett before. I asked him, ‘Just how big was this parcel?’

  ‘Big: about three by four, and wrapped in brown paper. It wasn’t at all heavy for its size, but something loose inside makes a very strange rattling noise.’ Then a nasty thought crossed my mind. I should have listened to Dorothy Squires more closely when she sang ‘There’s Danger Ahead’. It was too late to do anything about it now. I just hoped that no one opened the package out of curiosity before I turned up on Monday.

  ‘Anything else you forgot to tell me?’

  ‘Yes. Joe Humm came by a couple of hours ago. He’s going to a jazz club near Priors Norton tonight; at the back of a pub called the Good King Richard. He says it’s six moonlighters from London bands, and that they’re quite good. He says to join him there at eight to eight-thirty if you fancy it.’

  8. Snag It

  I was late, and the evening was drawing in. The pub car park was overflowing, so I parked close to a bridge nearby. It was still unseasonably warm, and there was a hatch of flies dancing a living cloud above the slow-moving river. Couples sat on the river bank, cooling their feet in the water. I stood in the car park for ten minutes, listening to the buzz from inside, and the music. It sounded brilliant. This had been worth fighting for. Was there a jazz club somewhere in Germany, with a retired night-fighter pilot lurking outside thinking the same? Joe was near the door with a mug in his hand. There was another on a narrow shelf alongside him, and he shoved it at me. ‘Didn’t think you’d resist, old son. Here – this one’s yours.’

  ‘What would you have done if I hadn’t turned up?’

  ‘Drunk it myself. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheerio. What do I do – buy a ticket from someone?’

  ‘Half a crown, up at the bar. Pay when you get your first round in.’ He inverted his mug and added, ‘And you can get your first round in now. This is Avril, by the way; she drinks sweet cider in halves.’

  A pretty girl with her dark hair in bunches had been standing with her back to us all the time. Tapping her feet to the syncopated rhythms. She turned and said, ‘Hello, Charlie. Joe said that you’d be here.’

  Joe put his arm around her waist, and pulled her close. ‘Go and find your own!’ he warned me. ‘My drink’s a dry cider, by the way. I should go easy on it if I was you – until you’re used to it. We’ll get a dance while you’re getting the drinks.’

  When I returned from the bar the girl was still there. She offered me a de Reske Minor from a
white fag packet: they were cheap, and popular with the girls. I shook my head, and put the drinks down.

  ‘I usually smoke a pipe,’ I said, having to shout to make myself heard over the music.

  ‘I like men who smoke pipes. The smell doesn’t cling afterwards.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to dance.’

  She shook her head. ‘Joe did. I’m resting my feet. Besides, I was thirsty.’

  Twilight had reached inside to touch us. The club was probably the pub’s function room, and it extended towards the river. The only lights were above the busy bar, and the band. The rest of us hid in the darkness at its periphery, or jived it up in the centre. Avril was content to rest an arm against mine, sip cider and tap her feet until the clarinettist started up a slow number. Then she took my pint, set it down, and pulled me onto the floor.

  ‘Dance with me. Don’t worry,’ she assured me. ‘Joe won’t mind.’

  I still resisted. ‘Can’t jive properly; I don’t know how.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we won’t . . . and I can always teach you.’ By then we were dancing anyway. Her head was on my shoulder, and the old man with the licorice stick was giving it ‘When it’s sleepy time down South’. I thought that I saw Brookie drift past, dancing with his tall WAAF, but they’d both been dead for years. I’ve often been troubled by ghosts on dance floors: you ask anyone from my generation and they’ll tell you the same. A foot above our heads the smoke was layering out like fine cirrus clouds.

  When I walked Avril back Joe said, ‘Oh, good. There you are,’ and he asked me, ‘Good band?’

  ‘Great. Who are they?’

  ‘The band with no name. I don’t think that any of them is supposed to be here.’

  ‘I’ve heard the clarinet player before, on the radio. I was standing on the steps of a hospital at Bremerhaven at the end of the war. The programme came from Spa.’

  ‘That’s possible: he’s a French guy. The trumpet player was an officer in the Grenadiers. Front-line job. Mad as a monkey.’

  The man in question started another slow number. When his sleepy, brassy notes began to hang in the air in rows above us, we stopped talking to listen, and the dancers stopped moving. He had us. Afterwards I asked, ‘What’s that called?’