The Forgotten War Read online

  ‘What is this place, Piers? What’s it used for?’

  ‘Big Georgian house built for Lord somebody or other . . . Mansfield, that was it. It was used for all sorts of things in the war, but now it’s reverted to the LCC. I think that they have plans to open it up to the plebs. Tea rooms and table tennis – that sort of thing. Pity, really . . .’

  ‘Did you use it during the war?’

  ‘I told you. All sorts of folk did. Let me show you something . . .’

  The house stood on the rim of a landscaped basin fringed with dense woodland: specimen trees and shrubs – all gone over a little to the wild side. We had to push along pathways narrowed by bushes that brushed our shoulders. Eventually we came out into a small oval clearing. At one edge there was an old stone bench seat stained by lichen, and a couple of sawed-off stumps where two enormous firs must recently have been felled. Piers read my mind. ‘Redwoods. They blew down in a storm last year. A real shame. What do you think of this place?’

  There was something about the clearing, or about Piers, that was ringing all the warning bells. I felt the hair lift on my neck. That was odd.

  ‘Suitably rural. The shrubs are so high that you can’t see the house or the garden.’

  ‘Almost, Charlie, almost. Now turn your logic back to front. The point is that no one in the house or garden can see us in here, which is how it’s meant to be. This glade was designed into the original garden in the 1700s at the owner’s request. It’s the duelling ground.’

  ‘Duelling ground? You mean that people were killed here?’

  ‘That’s right, it’s a killing ground. It’s what it was designed for. Smashing, isn’t it? It’s my favourite place.’

  The duelling ground had a sombre, brooding air – even in the sunlight.

  ‘When was this place last used?’ I asked.

  ‘A few years ago. We executed some spies here with Home Guard firing squads. SOE also brought some of their own people out here for the old bullet-in-the-back-of-the-neck trick; they’d gone to the bad, don’t you know.’

  ‘You brought me here deliberately, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. It only seemed fair. You see, Charlie, if you go to the bad this is where they’ll bring you. I thought I should show you.’

  ‘Do you think that I’ll go to the bad?’

  ‘No, of course not. But you are a bit of a loose cannon. I just want you to be very careful while you are still in the RAF. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  I had read an article about labour relations in the Chronicle a week ago. The big new theory was called ‘the carrot and the stick’. I suppose that lunch at the Savoy was pretty much the carrot, and a killing ground in Hampstead was the big stick. By the time we walked out into the sun and down to the lake, I had the blues.

  I drove behind Piers out to the guard chain. I was chuffed to be able to turn my car around in a two-pointer down at the house, because Piers had hauled the Jag around in five. It was his own fault for driving a car that was thirty feet long. Once we were side by side on the other side of the chain Piers walked across to lean in over my car’s passenger door. He had a folder in his hands, but first he pointed out a road which ran away down the hill to the north. There were big houses on one side, and ill-kept playing fields and allotments on the other. He pointed to the houses: ‘That’s The Bishops Avenue. Those are some of the places I was telling you about. Half of them have been occupied by squatters – a legion of them. Some of them were slated to become embassies, but what ambassador wants to live alongside the hairies?’

  ‘I’ve seen castles smaller than some of those houses: they’re massive. What are they worth?’

  ‘Damn all at the moment.’

  ‘That’s the owners’ fault, isn’t it? Stands to reason that if a homeless family sees a big house standing empty, then they’re going to move in.’

  ‘That’s how we saw it during the war, old man, but it’s not during the war any longer, and the nobs want to come home. And now that the rubble rats have organized themselves it’s become very political. If the police move in to evict them we could end up with another general strike. Old Clem’s very iffy about it.’

  ‘Clem?’

  ‘Try to remember his name, Charlie: like everyone else in uniform, you work for him now – he’s the Prime Minister.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. I already told you once.’

  ‘One of our people was at a squatters’ party in one of those big houses about a fortnight ago. Said he was a reporter, and took some great photographs to illustrate an article he’s writing about the deserving poor. Nasty old world, isn’t it?’

  Personally I thought that he’d used the wrong word; it was a Nazi old world again. But I asked, ‘And?’

  ‘Loads of pretty girls. Some of them weren’t wearing very much. I thought that if you took a look at them you might change your mind. You know – a picture’s worth a thousand words, and all that?’

  I laughed at him; not unkindly. I lifted the folder he had dropped on the passenger seat, and handed it back to him unopened. ‘Fuck off, Piers. No hard feelings, but no means no. Let me serve out my time in peace; then I’ll take that civvy job you talked about, OK?’

  ‘Fine. You’re sure you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Of course not; it’s been a good weekend.’

  Well – some of it had been. Piers was standing alongside his car, clutching the folder to his chest, and smiling like the cat that had had the cream. Tricky bastard.

  The drive out of town took longer. I was baulked by a lot of flat caps and Sunday dresses in clunky old pre-war saloons, but once out of London I got up behind a couple of new upright Fords and was drawn along behind them at a steady fifty. Oddly enough I was looking forward to getting back to Cheltenham, Bella and Alison. I almost had a home again: that could be dangerous.

  When I pulled onto the bricks in front of the Abbott house the sun was still shining. Alison was sitting outside on a kitchen chair, with a school textbook in her lap. She waved lazily when I drove up, and wandered over to greet me. She eyed the parcels stacked around my bag on the back seats. Then she reached into the car between the passenger seat and the door. ‘You dropped a photo. Was this a party you were at? Lucky old you!’

  She handed me the photo. Eight by six. I didn’t know if that was the size that the press use, but I’d seen photo-reconnaissance pictures with those dimensions. This must have dropped out of Piers’s folder, unless he’d poked it there deliberately. It showed a table at a party: covered by beer bottles and glasses. The people looked as if they were having a great time: about twenty of them, and all smiling. It looked like a wartime party from any camp you’d care to name. The men wore bits and pieces of uniform, overalls or dungarees, and the girls had party clothes and that joyful, reckless look in their eyes. I tell a lie.

  The person at the very centre of the photograph wasn’t smiling, and the reckless air was conspicuously absent. She was a small woman who wore a stained working vest and combat trousers; the same clothes I’d last seen her in.

  Grace Baker: damn and blast her.

  PART THREE

  Reds

  10. I’ll Be Glad You’re Dead, You Rascal You

  I nearly tore the photo up. Instead, it ended up propped up on the small chest of drawers in my room. I was in a bad mood as I hung up my new clothes. When Alison walked in she took over, and smoothed them with her hand before she hung them. She said, ‘I’m sorry I annoyed you. I thought that I’d say so immediately. We can’t go around for days scowling at each other.’

  At first I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I saw my thunderous face in the wardrobe mirror, and understood. I had to laugh at myself.

  ‘Don’t be silly. You did nothing. Someone dropped that picture in my car by mistake, and there’s someone in it I knew years ago. It was a shock, that’s all: nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Was it one of the women in the photograph?’ she asked me carefully.r />
  There are times when it is best to tell the truth. ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

  ‘Is she very pretty?’

  ‘Not especially. Very striking.’

  ‘Were you in love with her?’

  ‘I thought I was: I’m less sure now.’ There was nothing left to say on the subject so I stuck in, ‘Let’s go down and make a cuppa.’

  Monday, Monday. Somebody wrote a song named that, a few years ago. Remember it? After less than three weeks I’d already found out that I wasn’t cut out for an office job. My introduction to the morning had been Alison putting her head around my bedroom door. ‘I’m off to school; it’s eight-fifteen. C’mon, Charlie – chocks away.’

  I think I groaned.

  ‘Who taught you to say that?’

  ‘Freddy did.’

  I washed, and then emptied the pockets of my old clothes into the pockets of my new ones. That was when I found the code-pad flimsy on which I had written down the bursts of Morse I hadn’t declared after my first flight.

  In the kitchen Bella said, ‘You’re late; do you want me to phone and tell the gate?’

  ‘No, thanks. Let them sweat. I was going to take some washing into town today: is there a laundry or something?’

  ‘Providing you’re not too embarrassed, your laundry’s named Alison Abbott, and Monday’s your lucky day. She’ll do your washing for you, and you top up her pocket money – five bob OK?’

  ‘Fine. What does she spend it on – Tizer and lipstick?’

  Bella paused before she replied: she wanted me to pay attention to what she said.

  ‘No: she’s saving – for university. We don’t want her married to a thousand chickens: not if we can help it.’

  ‘Will she get there?’

  ‘I think so, Charlie, if the amount of work she puts in has anything to do with it.’ Then she said, ‘I usually have a cuppa about now. Fancy one before you go to work?’

  Later she walked out to the car with me. About three hundred hens spotted her and came rushing over; the dust and the noise was tremendous. She shouted to make herself heard. ‘It’s been difficult for Alison, growing up with glamorous RAF boys all around her. Sometimes they turned her head.’

  ‘I’m sure that you both coped well.’

  The lives some people lead. I wasn’t going to make things more difficult for them, was I? She had a dab of dirt on her forehead. I licked a finger, and polished it away. Then I kissed the spot.

  ‘Everyone should have a landlady as smart as you,’ I said. Then I got into the Singer and told her, ‘See you tonight,’ as I drove away. As I bumped my old girl down the farm track, listening to her springs creaking, it occurred to me that maybe Freddy Timperley had been a bit of a snake, and the Reds had done us all a favour by knocking him off.

  Miller was sitting at Weronka’s radio sets, holding just one earphone to her ear. I was later to find out that that was her preferred way of listening in: she said that one ear was better than the other. They both looked OK to me. She looked over her shoulder. She didn’t actually say, ‘Phone me the next time you’re going to be late.’ She said, ‘I was worried about you.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m like your bad penny: always turning up. Privilege of rank. Where’s Ronka?’

  ‘Sick. I’ll stand her shift until Jane gets in.’

  ‘When will that be?’ I was asking officer-type questions and felt sick of them already.

  ‘About twelve. They wanted us to do overlapping shifts today: start monitoring at eleven-fifteen, and go on until eight this evening. Just our luck.’

  ‘What’s the matter with Ronka?’

  ‘She was mistreated during the war, and sometimes it catches up with her.’

  ‘What did the Jerries do to her?’

  ‘It wasn’t the Germans: Lithuanians, I think. Eventually she had a baby, but she gave it up for adoption immediately. Now she can’t have another.’

  I turned away, saying, ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Camp, please; black, no sugar. Take them through to my office if you like. I’m only pre-tuning here: I’ll be finished in a couple of ticks.’

  I thought I’d try the chicory blend the way Miller drank it. I decided that I could get used to it eventually; in fact, drunk that way it tasted more like coffee than when you slopped the milk in. When she came in to sit behind her desk she made a steeple of her hands and looked at me over them as if she was making up her mind about something. Without actually bursting out of her clothes she somehow looked as if she was . . . like a ripe fruit preparing itself for the dive into the harvest basket. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. It was an odd, tense, but not unpleasant moment.

  She paused for about a six-beat before she asked, ‘Do you have a raincoat, Charlie?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t.’

  ‘Try the one behind the door.’

  There was a man’s raincoat hanging on the back of her office door. I tried it on, and found that it fitted perfectly – a short length, cut from a heavy khaki gabardine, with shoulder tabs, wide lapels, a belt and a deep collar. It looked like army surplus, bang up to date and brand new.

  ‘It’s terrific.’

  ‘Then keep it.’ Miller smiled at me. ‘It’s American. I bought it for Charles at a rummage sale on Saturday. He doesn’t like it.’ I somehow got the feeling that maybe she wasn’t telling me everything. It was just like her to do something kind, and then talk it down so that she could keep you at arm’s length.

  ‘I’ll treasure it. Thank you.’ It was awkward. I’ve never known how to receive gifts graciously.

  ‘Don’t. Just wear it – but I’m pleased you like it.’

  ‘Won’t you let me pay you for it?’

  ‘It only cost me half a crown. Buy me something back some day.’

  ‘OK. What?’

  She put on that little smile, shook her head, and looked out of the window. ‘I didn’t mean it.’ When she looked back she said, ‘I haven’t got much to do until we start listening. Do you want another coffee?’

  ‘I’d love one in a few minutes. I’ll just pop over and say hello to Alice; what’s happening over there?’

  ‘Boulder’s hooked into a Polish trawler that’s stooging around off Scapa: just outside our sea limit. The Reds are using quite a few trawlers for the same sort of work that we do. One day they’re going to be a nuisance.’

  I produced the flimsy that I had found in my pocket before I left the Abbott place, and smoothed it out in front of her. ‘Perhaps you’d like to look at that while I’m gone.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something I heard when I was out the other night, but forgot to tell them about. It sounded just like another signal I heard when they were testing me out over the Bristol Channel a few weeks ago. The Captain of that aircraft said that they were my Jedburghs.’

  Miller gave me a very level look. ‘One day, Charlie, you are going to get into very serious trouble.’

  ‘Too late: I already am.’

  ‘How’s that? What kind of trouble are you in?’

  ‘I think that I’m falling for a married woman.’

  ‘That’s dangerous: there’s no future in it. You’ll get caught.’

  ‘I agree. Out. Dismissed. Leg before wicket. I always think that LBW sounds very sexy, don’t you?’

  ‘Stop messing about, Charlie.’

  She knew exactly what I was talking about, and although she hadn’t risen to the fly she hadn’t flipped me a put-down either. That was interesting.

  There was a pause in the conversation you could have launched a battleship into. Not a smile. Not even a twitch. Looking back I realize that there was a characteristic common to all the women I fell in love with before I was thirty: they lacked a sense of humour.

  At first glance you would have thought that Alice was asleep, her head resting on her coils. Then you’d notice a beady eye watching your every movement. She could lie like that for days when the mood took her. I don’t think t
hat she had much of a sense of humour, either. I said, ‘Hello, Alice. When’s Tommo coming back for you?’

  Her small forked tongue flickered out, as if in reply, but she really couldn’t be bothered. The water in her bowl had disappeared, and the sand around it was damp – she’d probably been sloshing gaily around in it until she’d heard my footfall. Now she looked pissed off, and was trying to make me feel guilty. I poured some more water in through the wire lid of her box. She lifted her rattle and shook it at me, but I could see that her heart wasn’t in it: she was sulking. Her attitude reminded me of Miller, when she didn’t see a joke.

  Miller herself came in an hour later, the inevitable brown envelope in her hand.

  ‘Out tomorrow?’ I asked her. I didn’t say ‘Told you so.’ That would have been cruel.

  ‘No – Wednesday. I’ll leave a sandwich for you at the gate.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Things were deliciously cool between us. I thought I’d try to break the ice.

  ‘I’m a bit worried about Alice. She’s looking a bit seedy.’

  Miller went over and squatted down to look. Alice didn’t rattle at her. Like recognizing like.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry too much,’ Miller said. ‘I think she’s got the snake equivalent of time of the month. Her skin is dry, and peeling in places – haven’t you noticed?’ I went and stood close to Miller, but not too close. ‘I think that she’s shedding her skin: there will be a beautiful new one underneath.’

  ‘I thought that you didn’t like snakes?’

  ‘So did I. I must have been mistaken. I came over to show you something, if they’re still there.’

  Boulder was still tied into the trawler. Liz was sitting in the corner of Boulder’s office, flicking through a copy of Picture Post. Liz’s own room was empty, and her radio array was silent. Miller led me into it, and fired the set up. I appreciated the economy of her movements. When she tuned into familiar bursts of Morse she handed me the earphones and moved away. I slid into her chair and chased the signal. Chased both signals: two remote stations chatting in brief regular bursts. It lasted for about ten minutes, and they went off the air simultaneously.