The Forgotten War Read online

  I looked at him pointedly. ‘We gave it all to the Yanks in 1941, and then borrowed against everything else we owned. We beat the Germans, but lost to the Americans.’

  ‘Don’t blame me because your lot are bad businessmen, son.’ Tommo never laughed in your face; he just used words that made you laugh at yourself.

  ‘I’m not. You asked, and I told you, that’s all.’

  ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘you didn’t used to be this lippy.’ He was grinning. I was grinning. He said, ‘I got you a drink standing on the counter – next to my empty glass. Remember that cider and beer we used to drink in Thurleigh?’

  ‘It’s good to see you, Tommo.’

  We lashed Alice’s Restaurant down in the back of the Bedford, and covered it with an old carpet to keep her warm. Tommo laced the canvas shut. Any local tea-leaf taking his chance with Alice was in for a surprise. The bar was empty apart from us. We sat at a table in the corner, beneath which he handed me a canvas ammo pouch. It still had a lethal cargo.

  ‘All I could get for you in a hurry,’ Tommo said. ‘Fifteen quid – all right?’ A pistol and two boxes. The small automatic looked as old as the hills, but well cared for. It smelled of gun oil. ‘Probably better today than the day it left the factory,’ he told me.

  ‘Tommo – it’s a woman’s gun!’

  ‘Almost, but not quite. It’s much bigger – can’t you see that? It’s a small nine point. It’s a German artillery officer’s pistol issued between the wars. Bloody wonderful piece. You got two big boxes of ammo, say sixty rounds, and spare springs and screws. Bargain.’

  ‘Tommo, this is a museum piece! When was it made?’

  ‘1919. What do you think?’

  ‘I think beggars can’t be choosers. Anything I should be careful about?’

  ‘It’s chambered for five shots but if I was you, I’d just load four. Make sure it don’t go off in your pocket and shoot your goolies off.’

  ‘Thanks, partner. Where’s the safety catch?’

  ‘Doesn’t have one: when they made these bloody things, Charlie, nobody wanted them to be safe. They were supposed to shoot people.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The bullets go exactly where you point it. It shoots straight. Don’t tell me what you’re going to do with it, but just take care. We’re pals, yeah?’

  ‘We’re pals, Tommo, all the way to the end.’

  ‘Maybe not that far,’ Tommo told me.

  I was talking about Miller again when she walked in, straight up to our table. She said, ‘Hello, boys. What can I get you?’

  Surprised? I was. She had on the same off-blue dress, but wore a man’s grey corduroy jacket over it and had heels that gave her another couple of inches. I’d like to tell you that my heart did a double somersault, except that it wasn’t just my heart. She stayed about an hour. I think that she was only there to give Tommo the once-over. We drank too much too quickly. When Tommo was up at the bar I said, ‘Thank you for coming. You look—’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I look like, Charlie. I know what I look like, and tonight I pass muster. Change the subject.’

  ‘Where’s Mr Miller?’

  ‘He’s at his club; he always goes to the club on Fridays. He doesn’t know I’m here. Change the subject.’

  ‘I want to peel that dress off your shoulders, and touch your breasts.’

  ‘Change the subject.’

  ‘I want to stand you up against that wall, and have you until bits start coming off.’

  It was a phrase that Grace had taught me.

  ‘Don’t change the subject, Charlie.’ I didn’t know that someone with a mouth as small as hers could grin as widely as that. Her eyes gleamed. I’ll bet mine did too. The odds were changing every minute. ‘I said, don’t . . .’

  ‘I heard what you said . . .’

  Then Tommo walked back with three jugs of cloudy mind’s ruin.

  ‘Am I interrupting anything?’ he asked. We laughed. I suppose it was that laugh together that did it.

  Tommo stayed inside when I walked Miller out to the car park. We raised the canvas on his truck, and she whispered ‘Goodbye, Alice’ into the darkness. I’m not sure, but there might have been a gentle rattle in response. Our hands touched as we replaced the covers. Hers was shaking almost as much as mine.

  ‘I have to go now, Charlie.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know that, too.’

  She touched my face once; my cheekbone. Then she ran to a nice Standard saloon parked in shadow. She stumbled once, and recovered. I was still standing frozen, anyway. I didn’t move until after the car had gone. All those emotional tricks I should have tried on her, she’d done on me first. Tommo was outlined in the lighted doorway of the bar. When I reached him he said, ‘Nice lady.’

  I nodded. ‘I think so, too.’

  He pointed a finger at me. ‘She don’t need no German pistol. She nailed you. Bang – you’re dead.’

  ‘Feels good, being dead,’ I told him.

  We got drunk together. Late in the evening I asked him, ‘Tell me about those Icelandic girls again.’

  ‘You never seen anything like them, Charlie. We got to get a posting over there. They’re all Carol Lombards, with tits like Jane Russell.’

  ‘What else do we have over there?’

  ‘We have a fucking big base.’

  ‘And the Icelanders?’

  ‘They got no fucking base at all. They don’t make war on anybody any more. They got over that a thousand years ago. They just eat, drink and copulate – and fight all the time. What you might call a seriously peaceful people.’

  ‘They sound like nice folks.’

  ‘They’re magnificent drunks . . . I love ’em.’ Tommo laughed at the memory.

  ‘When do we go?’

  ‘When you got your RAF off your back. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  The bar was quiet all night. Whatever happened to Friday nights? We got to the stage when we began to drink ourselves sober. You know: one stage before you collapse, and have to crawl home on your hands and knees. I’m good at that. I remembered that I’d asked Tommo about Pete, and that he’d been coy. So I asked him again: ‘How’s Pete?’

  Long pause this time. His drunk’s grin slipped away like a fried egg skittering over the rim of a greasy plate. ‘Dead. That Czech man got him.’

  ‘Don’t be dumb, Tommo. Pete can’t be dead.’

  ‘Why not? Nearly everyone else is.’ I bought another round, waited until I could put together a decent sentence or two, and told him, ‘He survived being shot at by the police, the Luftwaffe, and our own anti-aircraft people. Pete always walks away.’

  Tommo shook his head. ‘Not this time. You remember what he was doing last you saw him?’

  It took a couple of seconds of alcohol-crippled recall.

  ‘Yeah. He’d shifted into the Polish SPs – their military police – he was chasing down a Czech black marketeer in Germany.’

  ‘ ’Sright. The Czech got him. They faced off like gunfighters in a square in some ruined town last year. The Czech got him first. I saw it.’

  ‘No: not Pete.’

  ‘Don’t take my word for it. Remember the black doctor we called The Cutter? He was there, too. Couldn’t save him. We laid him alongside a statue in the middle of the square. I thought he said your name, but The Cutter thought he said Tuesday. That was the day he was killed on: do you think he didn’t want to die on a Tuesday? Then he died anyway. The Cutter had to sign off the death certificate before the Red Cross told Pete’s people. I tell you: we buried him. In a special coffin made of some funny wood he always wanted. It was called Lipa . . . trumna lipowa: that was it. Damned Poles! But he ain’t coming back this time.’

  I couldn’t believe it, but I agreed. He wasn’t coming back this time, and the last word on his lips hadn’t been ‘Charlie’. The Cutter had heard him right: it had been Tuesday. I told you already that Tuesday’s Child
was the name of the Lancaster we’d flown into Germany: we always called her Tuesday. She’d burned in 1944. Maybe she came back for him at the end.

  ‘Can we talk about this again, Tommo?’ I asked him. ‘When I’m sober.’

  ‘Yeah, ’course. Hey, I’m sorry, Charlie.’

  I whispered ‘OK’, but it wasn’t, of course. Neither of us said anything for a while. I filled a pipe, and lit it. It went out, and I said, ‘Fuck it; life doesn’t mean a thing,’ which was nothing to do with the smoke.

  Tommo replied, ‘I know.’

  ‘You off first thing, Tommo?’

  ‘Yeah. Crossing from Folk-es-tone on Sunday morning. I’ll give you this though.’

  He tore the end from his packet of White Owl cigars, and laboriously wrote two telephone numbers on it. He had difficulty forming the letters and numbers, and cupped his left hand around the paper like a child. I don’t think that it was the drink. It had never occurred to me before that writing or numeracy might have been a problem for him. It occurred to me now. Pete, our Pink Pole, was good at European languages, and had done a lot of Tommo’s talking for him.

  I said, ‘You’ll miss Pete.’

  One of us picked up on the tense wrongly. He said, ‘I already do.’

  He gave me the numbers, and we left it at that. He said that one was his apartment in Frankfurt, and the other a pal in London who usually knew where he was. I drove back to the Abbott farm, with tears streaming down my face. I had the Singer’s hood down, so that must have been the cold air rushing past my face.

  When I awoke the next day I stank of the sweat that had dried on me, had a colossal hangover, and my cheeks were still wet. I guess I was all cried out, but nobody noticed.

  13. Jazz Lips

  My old skipper flew twenty-eight straight trips into Germany in 1944. We all went with him. Before he got up into the aircraft each night he used to tell himself ‘Always expect the unexpected.’ You’d have thought that I would have learned that by now. I didn’t expect to hear from Tommo for months, if ever – that’s how it was with him. So I heard from him on the next Monday morning. I slouched into Miller’s office just as she was telling someone on the other end of the telephone to get up. She laughed as she said it, and hung up. It must have been a comfortable conversation. I asked, ‘Who was that?’

  ‘My business.’

  ‘I’m supposed to tell you who I’m speaking to whenever you want to know, but you get to keep yours to yourself? Is that it?’

  ‘Yes.’ The easy intimacy between us on Friday night was gone.

  Weronka’s voice over my shoulder said, ‘She has to call her husband every morning when she gets in – to get him out of his bed. She says that if she doesn’t call he stays asleep, and forgets to go to work. Then the country stops working because everybody starves. Isn’t that so?’ After a short pause she added, ‘Or maybe he just wants to know where Mrs Miller is; just checking.’

  I thought that was cruel, and was surprised when Miller didn’t rise to it. I asked, ‘What work does he do?’

  Miller’s mouth opened, but Ronka beat her to it. ‘Ministry of Food. He’s a local big cheese. That’s funny, isn’t it?’

  I guessed that Ronka wasn’t too keen on Mr Miller. Miller clearly didn’t think it funny. Her mouth made the upside-down smile.

  ‘Haven’t you anything to do?’ she asked the Polish woman.

  And now Jane joined in, and there were three of us jammed in the door of Miller’s office. She said, ‘No, but the officer has – there’s a call for him on my telephone.’ Balls! I think that she only used the word ‘officer’ to annoy Miller – who was one too, of course.

  The caller was Tommo, and the first thing he said was, ‘I’m in a spot, Charlie.’

  ‘Situation normal. Weren’t you supposed to sail yesterday? Where are you?’

  ‘London. Look, they won’t let me go any further. Your cops have released me into the custody of the Snowdrops.’

  The Snowdrops were the American Army Service Police – called Snowdrops on account of their white helmets, I guess. That, or because of their spotless reputations.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I killed a guy I didn’t mean to.’ Pause. Eventually Tommo asked, ‘You still there, Charlie?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m still here, Tommo.’ I took a couple of deep breaths, and then I felt better. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘When I went out to the truck yesterday morning the canvas had been slit, an’ Alice’s box was on its side.’

  ‘Christ, Tommo. She’s not on the loose, is she?’

  ‘Nah. She was under all that carpet. Not moving about much. I got her back in the box with a broom handle: she bit it twice – must be a bad time for her.’

  ‘What does “not moving about much” mean?’

  ‘I seen her like that before – after she bit some fella.’

  ‘I hope that it wasn’t a kid.’

  ‘So do I, but that ain’t the problem. I got outta there fast: skedaddled. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘So I guess that I was driving too fast when I came over the top of a hill, and there was this guy dancing in the middle of the road. I yelled at him.’

  ‘He have a long dark coat, and greasy hair?’

  ‘That’s the man.’

  ‘What did you yell?’

  ‘ “Wassa matter with you, bud? You blind?” ’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘I found that out after I killed him with the truck. He never got out of the way. I don’t reckon he felt a thing.’

  ‘What’s the situation now?’

  ‘Your country cops are gentlemen.’

  ‘Don’t let that fool you.’

  ‘They let me out on bail to the Snowdrops. I think that was because they didn’t know what to do with Alice. The SPs’ve taken my passes and everything. All I got is my ID and my tags.’ Some Yanks called the Snowdrops the Lootwaffe, but that was for a different reason, and was rather cruel.

  ‘Did the police actually charge you with anything?’

  ‘Nope. They said that when I came back to them I could be charged with causing death by driving, or somethin’.’

  ‘Tell me where you are, and let me make a couple of calls.’

  ‘Thanks, partner. I’m in a crappy little room in a crappy little ARC club for other ranks, in a place called Cadogan Square. It’s not much better than a toilet in a knocking shop. Ancient women for rent are prowling the corridors in packs.’

  ‘It has a telephone number, this club?’

  Tommo told me. I fished out the scrap of cardboard he’d given me on Friday night, and added the number to the others he’d written down. We let it go on a low note: I didn’t want to give him too much hope.

  I went back to Miller. The others gave me some space and went back to their rigs. I closed the door on them. Miller’s chin went up; maybe she thought we were going to get into a fight. I told her, ‘I was just told that your Mr Summit is dead. Had you heard that already?’

  All the fire went out of her. ‘No; that’s sad. What happened?’

  ‘The man who killed him just told me; the man we were drinking with on Friday night. My pal Tommo.’ At least I had her attention. She sat bolt upright, and didn’t look as if she’d miss a word. ‘Tommo was driving south yesterday morning. He drove over a hill, and the old man was dancing in the road. Bang.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ It was interesting that she assumed I would do something.

  ‘Phone Piers: from here if I may. You just sit there, and keep quiet.’

  ‘Is that an order?’

  ‘Yes – why? And why are you smiling?’

  ‘It’s the first direct order that you’ve given me.’

  ‘Then get used to it; I might get to like it.’ I guess that I was probably smiling too. The morning storm between us had blown over, and I still didn’t know what it had been about. It’s tight like that.

  Piers was immediately
businesslike when I spoke with him because I told him I could come to London for a few days to help him with a little project that he had mentioned to me if he could help out a pal of mine. And then I told him the story. He played hard to get, but it was all an act.

  ‘He will come back for the inquest, and to face charges if necessary?’

  ‘I can’t promise that, Piers. He’s a bit of a fast operator.’

  ‘Aren’t we all, dear boy? Can’t wait to see him.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’

  ‘Absolutely. If we’re going to scratch his back, then he’ll have to scratch ours. And don’t worry – he’ll probably be on his way by this afternoon. He’s taking that awful animal with him, I take it?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Good. There’s no way she would have been given a formal visa.’ Then Piers told me to be at the Cheltenham nick in my Number Ones in half an hour, with my pen in my hand in case I had to sign anything. I didn’t tell him what this reminded me of, but decided to take Miller with me: back-up if I needed her.

  I lifted Miller’s uniform from the back of her office door as I hurried her away, and briefed her in the car. I’d rather have debriefed her, but that was another thing. We drove up to the farm; Bella was out chicken-herding. I stopped the car to tell her, ‘We need somewhere to change.’

  She nodded, smiled and then shook her head, as if I’d said something funny.

  Miller and me. We changed our clothes in my room. Facing each other and watching each other. She had to take off her dark grey working suit. Once her jacket and skirt were folded and resting on the end of my bed I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Before she stepped into her WREN skirt she grinned cheekily, and asked, ‘Legs OK? Pass muster?’

  ‘Christ, yes.’

  She shook her head, but it wasn’t a rebuff because she smiled as well. She made a little face and said, ‘Put your trousers on – and next time take your socks off first; men look daft standing there in shirts and dark socks.’

  I pulled on my uniform. Miller straightened my tie, and kissed me for the first time. She had jazz lips. I can’t explain why she was so exciting and different. Her mouth had that musty sweet flavour that girls sometimes have.

  Miller knew where the cop shop was: a yellow-brick Art Deco palace with big windows wrapped around wide rounded corners. Built in the 1930s, I’d guess; it looked like a cinema. The Station Officer knew her; I should have guessed that too. He said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Miller. Long time since we’ve seen you in uniform.’