The Forgotten War Read online

  I crossed the Channel in a borrowed Austin Tilley, on a shuttle landing craft that dumped us off at Deal. I sat in the front. Maggs kept the kid quiet in the canvas box behind me. We weren’t even asked for our papers. Two days later I settled Maggs and the kid into a guest house in St Neots, gave her some money, a couple of emergency addresses, and turned myself in at the local nick. I made sure she knew how to find Les or the Major if anything went wrong. Les fancied his chances with his old unit, so made for London alone in our old car. When I walked into the police station and told them that I was a bit late for the end of the war, they treated me like an everyday occurrence. You never know: perhaps by then I was.

  2. Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out

  I had been locked up in a cell in Paris by the Americans in 1945. The difference between the Paris and Bedfordshire cells was that although the volume of food they offered me in Paris had been greater than that in Bedfordshire, the quality was worse. For some reason that surprised me. I was the only person locked up in the small police station, and the sergeant and his wife must have felt some sort of responsibility for me because they fished me out of the cell to eat with them. My first supper in England was strips of braised liver and kidneys, under a thin crust of pastry. The sergeant’s wife was improbably plump – there had been a war on, you know – and still had a dab of flour on her forehead. The sergeant didn’t talk shop at table, and when he returned me to the cell I still didn’t know what the future held.

  The next morning when the sergeant moved me out of the cell and back up to his small tiled interrogation room, he looked shifty. He served me aircrew breakfast – bacon, real eggs and a couple of slices of fried Spam. He produced his notebook, and wrote in it as he asked me questions.

  ‘You said that there were people who could vouch for you. Give me their names again.’

  I told him about my dad and my uncle – and the address I last had for them near sunny Glasgow. I told him about the Tempsford Intelligence Officer – David Clifford – who was a bastard who had turned up surprisingly in Germany in 1945 and then nicked a girl I thought I loved – but that’s another story. I told him about the Lancaster crew I had flown my tour with – he already had my service number. I told him about racing through the Low Countries to Germany with Les Finnegan and James England. Any one of those people would have told him I wasn’t dead, although it did occur to me between the Spam fritters and the tea that maybe I was, and that this was purgatory.

  Finally I said, ‘If you can’t find any of those, try the Ralph-Baker lot at Crifton. It was them who had me chasing their daughter Grace all over Europe. It wasn’t my fault that when I eventually found her she told me to piss off.’

  The sergeant snapped his little black book shut and sprung the black knicker-elastic strip around it. I suspected he liked his number too much to risk approaching the Ralph-Bakers, but it was always worth a try. Then he started to collect up the breakfast things. I would have got up and stretched my legs if he hadn’t cuffed one of my ankles to the chair. I was fed up. He looked at me, and said seriously, ‘I’ll do my best for you, son.’

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ I said, challenging him.

  ‘I don’t believe many people these days. I think that I stopped believing people the day Chamberlain waved that silly piece of paper, said “Peace in our time”, and my eldest boy started sharpening his bayonet. He was in the TA.’

  ‘Did you get your boy back?’

  ‘Most of him. Lost his brother, though: DLI. Mother still hasn’t got over it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No reason why you should be.’ Then he said it again, ‘I’ll do my best for you.’

  I started to get concerned. ‘I’m sure you will, sarge, but I don’t quite know what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Two policemen from London are coming to fetch you away. They’ll be here by dinner time.’

  Then he locked me in. Get used to being locked in, Charlie, I told myself.

  According to my RAF documents I’m five feet four. Although I kid the girls I’m taller than that, they never believe me. The two London coppers were at least a foot taller, and they had dark brown felt trilbies on top of that. Giants. They both wore fawn raincoats that stretched almost to their shoes and were as friendly as timber wolves. They weren’t best pleased when my old sergeant insisted that they sign for me before they took me away to the railway station in a local taxi. They didn’t speak directly to me, either at the police station or in the car.

  Something about England had bothered me for a couple of days and on the journey I realized what it was. There were road signs. During the war they had all been taken down to confuse Nazi parachutists. The Nazi parachutists had missed their cues, but we had succeeded in confusing each other and the Americans. We sat outside the station in the car until the train drew in. They took me onto the platform after the Bedford passengers had embarked, into a compartment at the back with a ‘reserved’ notice in the window. The first time a train had ever been held for me.

  After the train had started moving the bold boyos pulled down the window blinds, put their hats and raincoats on the netting luggage rack, and gave me bit of a doing-over. It wasn’t much of a doing-over because it was finished quickly, and I could still speak afterwards. My face was unmarked. I slumped in a corner as far from them as I could get.

  ‘I suppose you’re wondering what that was for?’ Tweedledee asked me. I nodded. Tweedledum smirked at me: ‘Education.’

  ‘We’re taking you to an old aircrew interrogation centre in High Holborn, where they’ll sort out who you are. Until then we are prepared to be your friends . . .’ Tweedledum told me. ‘But we want you to believe that if you try to escape, or embarrass us in any other way—’

  Tweedledee interrupted: ‘We’ll beat the living shit out of you. Understood?’

  I nodded again. My ribs ached, but I’d live.

  ‘Good. Let’s all sit back and enjoy the trip. My missus made us up some sandwiches.’

  They took me off the train at a small London station before the main terminus. I was bundled into the back of an old Bedford ambulance whose stretchers had been replaced by two wooden benches that had brackets for handcuffs. Neither Tweedles spoke to me, and when the back door was opened it was onto the courtyard of a high old building. We might have been in London. I could hear heavy traffic from somewhere. There was a small reception room with a big reception officer dressed like a city copper – where did they get all these big guys from? The thing was that neither the Tweedles in their civvies, nor this uniformed copper, looked like coppers. They looked . . . sort of military. The uniform had a book and papers to complete. When I gave him my name and service number he consulted a black-bound loose-leaf booklet, sighed, and told me, ‘We’ll write you down as A. N. Other.’ He consulted another black-bound volume: ‘Number 4741. Until you tell us who you really are. Then we’ll update them. OK?’

  I shrugged. All I had to do was wait until somebody came forward to bear witness for me. Then the real trouble could start. Maybe I was better off as A. N. Other 4741. Albert Norman, maybe. I always liked the name Norman: there was something dependable about it.

  I had a cell of my own, and a dirty blue-and-white-striped suit they said had come from Germany. There was an enamelled bucket with a lid in the corner, for life’s little inconveniences, a bed with a hard flock mattress, a Gideon Bible and a single dingy warehouse wall-light that went off soon after dark. I don’t know at what time because they had taken my wristwatch – treasured war booty – but I estimated that they switched the time around to disorientate us. ‘Us’ were me and a thin German named Gunther Schlicht. We met for an hour each day in the exercise yard – a small enclosed space overlooked by other cells and offices. I never saw or heard any other prisoners. For all we knew we were the only two. Gunther spoke fair English. He seemed shy at first, and accused me of being set to spy on him. That was exactly what I had thought about him. When we unwound h
e told me that Schlicht meant ‘honest’ in German. I told him that Bassett was a kind of dog. Hund. He smiled when I told him that. He had a better name than me. I asked him what he was there for – the war had been over for a couple of years.

  ‘I didn’t go home when I was supposed to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I worked on a farm in Somerset. Fell in love with the daughter. Nobody wanted me to go back to Germany when the time arrived, so they hid me. Eventually the police found me . . . it was like being rounded up by the Nazis.’

  ‘Weren’t you a Nazi, then? Back home.’

  ‘I had a letter from my brother last month. He lives near Hanover. He says that no one was a Nazi in Germany. Even people who can remember the Nazis are difficult to find these days.’

  ‘Like Chelsea supporters,’ I told him.

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Don’t worry – English joke.’

  ‘Ah – comedian. I told you: you must be working for the police.’

  Days before we’d agreed that all policemen were comedians, but the trouble was that he was almost right. I’d been interrogated twice by then: no rubber truncheons, but they didn’t need them when they woke you in the early hours of the morning and then shouted at you until your head felt like it would burst. The odd thing was that no one seemed interested in me. All they asked me about was my conversations with Gunther. I wondered whether or not to tell him. Best not. Look out for yourself, Charlie, because it looks as if no one else is looking out for you. On one occasion Gunther told me, ‘They think I’m a spy. Fuhl! Idiots. What do I spy? How many cabbages it is possible to grow in a field?’

  ‘You’d be surprised: I knew someone in the war who spied like that.’

  ‘This is peacetime, Charlie.’

  ‘Is it? Can’t say that I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Why have they captured you?’

  ‘They didn’t: I walked in. I didn’t go home when I was supposed to either. They don’t believe I’m who I told them I was. I told them I was a deserter. I’m supposed to be dead.’

  ‘So they think you must be a spy.’

  ‘Idiots,’ I told him. The conversation had run full circle.

  It seems daft now, but I soon lost track of the days so I don’t know how long I was there, or when a couple of superior types stopped asking me questions about Gunther. Maybe two or three weeks. One afternoon I was taken back up to the interrogation room to find Tweedledee and Tweedledum sitting there. Each of them had a small suitcase, and the clothes I had walked in with, including my American flying jacket, were neatly folded on a side table. It looked like someone had cleaned them.

  ‘Get changed,’ Tweedledee said. ‘You’re moving.’

  ‘Where to this time?’ I asked.

  He ignored me, and read from a typed sheet on the table in front of him. He read aloud, ‘Prison number 4741. You have been tried by courts martial and found guilty as charged. You will serve a period of imprisonment with labour in a civilian penal establishment. Your transfer to civilian authorities will be effected today. Do you understand that?’

  I looked at him with astonishment. ‘No. There was no trial. What was I charged with? What did I do?’

  Tweedledee didn’t answer me directly. He read the paper slowly. Then he turned it over and read something that was preprinted on its reverse. I could see a blurred round stamp, and an untidy signature. Finally he looked up at me. He had watery blue eyes. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Buggered if I know. It doesn’t say. I’ve never seen one of these before.’

  ‘How much did I get?’ I asked him. ‘How long?’

  ‘It doesn’t say that, either. I told you to get dressed. We’ve a plane to catch.’

  Welcome home, Charlie. At least I didn’t have to worry about where my next meal was coming from – unlike about twenty per cent of the population.

  I recognized the airfield when we got there: Croydon Airport. I was back where my chase across Europe in 1945 had started. We were admitted through a side gate on Purley Road, and driven away from the main areas of the terminal. Most of the scattered aircraft were converted ex-services jobs, although I noticed a lovely tubby BEA Vickers Viking airliner, which reminded me of the old Wellington bomber that I had done some of my early training on. There was also a huge American job that looked like a pregnant Boeing Superfortress. I wondered if they could get across the pond in that. What was waiting for us was a drab Airspeed Oxford with its engines ticking over. Even its fuselage number had been painted over. It had lost its identity, like me. In happier times Grace had once flown me from Manchester to Twinwood in one of those.

  I think that that was the worst moment, because they handcuffed me to the wireless operator’s table – my old seat behind the pilot. I could see the back of his head, which rolled with his jaw movement, and the gum that moved around in his mouth. The cops strapped themselves into the seats for VIP passengers about ten feet behind me. Tweedledee pulled his hat over his eyes, leaned back and feigned sleep. Tweedledum stared at me. Every time I turned to look at them, he was staring. He didn’t look as if he harboured particularly friendly feelings towards me. Glancing at the back of the pilot’s head, I got the feeling that I had seen him before. When he threw back, ‘OK, bud?’ over his shoulder, I knew I had. It completed the circle of jokes really, because – if he was who I thought he was – he actually was supposed to be a dead man.

  He made a good take-off over the bumpy grass at the back of the airfield. I could see the terminal laid out beneath me as he banked us back over it. There were maybe twenty aircraft scattered about the terminal building, all in distinctive different liveries. The Tweedles didn’t seem to object when the pilot continued to talk to me.

  ‘You see all them crates?’ he asked me. ‘All private. Half the RAF has started up its own bitty airlines with their demob money.’

  ‘They’ll lose it,’ I told him. ‘The government will muscle in.’

  ‘Happen we will.’ Then he said, ‘Sit back and enjoy the flight . . . boy. It looks like the last you’ll get in some while.’ For a moment there I could have sworn he was going to say ‘Charlie’, rather than ‘boy’. I might have been wrong. The weather thickened a bit after Birmingham; I heard Dum and Dee getting a bit restless, and then the sound of one of them throwing up. It gave me a great surge of delight. The pilot spoke to me again, his soft American accent flowing back like honey.

  ‘Don’t I know you, son? Ain’t we met before?’

  In 1944 I had hitched a lift to Ringway with him, and Glenn Miller had been strapped in behind us. If he’d been Glenn Miller’s pilot, then he was supposed to be dead – like the band leader. I could have answered truthfully, but my instinct kicked in. I could feel a pair of Tweedle eyes boring into my back.

  ‘No. Sorry, I don’t think so.’ I answered with a lie. ‘I would have remembered you if we’d met.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s what I thought.’ The pilot made a noise that sounded like a sigh, and then he turned his attention away from me and spoke to a traffic controller a mile or so underneath us. When I turned to look, Tweedledum was no longer staring at me. He had a small notebook on one knee and was writing in it. I’d either just failed or passed a test. I asked the driver what his flight plan was. Neither Tweedle vetoed the answer.

  ‘Charterhall. That’s just inside Scotland; we’ll refuel there and fly on to Evanton. That’s north of Inverness. You know Charter-hall?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your Richard Hillary killed himself there. Night flying. You heard o’ Richard Hillary?’

  ‘No.’ I had an urge to look back. I was sure that Dum was scribbling in his little book again. I asked, ‘What’s at Evanton?’

  ‘Fuck knows. Nothing good as far as you’re concerned, if those ’cuffs are anything to go by. Easy let-down over the sea and the Cromarty Firth. That’s good enough for me.’

  North of bloody Inverness. A girl I had once known called that area the Forbidden Zone. What the hell w
as up there that was worth flying me to?

  A prison was.

  A prison at Inverness. It was small and discreet as prisons go, but a prison nevertheless. Porterfield. The most northerly prison on the British mainland. Bastards.

  The most northerly prison on the British mainland was, in a word, cold. They took away the service clothes and the flying jacket I had surrendered in, and gave me a summer-weight battledress blouse and trousers in navy blue and a couple of pairs of black socks, one pair of boots, a few vests and rough shirts, pants with slack elastic and a grey pullover that had seen better days. I figured that the only way to stay warm, unless I was working, was to wear it all at once – I looked as if I was pregnant.

  After I had been kitted out and written into the records of the dismal place, I had a one-sided interview with the governor. A short fat prison officer stood alongside me. He had a hefty black wooden truncheon, and an old .38-calibre service pistol on a lanyard. Maybe I was considered to be dangerous. The governor didn’t look at me – he looked out of his office window towards a distant sea sparkling in the evening light. He was a skeletal man with thinning black hair and a small square moustache – moustaches like that were creeping back into fashion now that the Dark One had snuffed it. He sniffed dolefully and then stated, ‘4741 . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ I yawned. Not because I was tired or ignorant, but because I was scared.

  ‘Yes, sir . . .’ the warder corrected me, but the governor ignored him and ran on.

  ‘. . . 4741, we live in a fair country; a just country. I’ve always believed that that’s why we won the war.’ He had a gentle voice – and an unrealistic view of the world. I thought we’d won because we’d dropped their own weight in bombs on the German civilian population, and killed half a million of them.

  All I said was, ‘Sir.’

  ‘. . . And part of that fairness dictates that all prisoners are told precisely how long their sentences will be. You’re expected to have a release date to aim for, unless you’re in for life – or condemned to death, of course.’