Tuesday's War Page 3

  He leapt out of his car, ran towards us and shouted, ‘And where the fuck do you think you’ve been? Bloody AWOL? . . . and where’s your bloody aeroplane? Throw the Toff in the ambulance, you lot take the bus down to debrief – the IO has been waiting all bloody morning for you – and where’s the tart? She’s with me.’

  ‘The tart’s here,’ answered Grace, stepping from behind Grease, pulling off her flying helmet and ruffling her hair, ‘and she’s got a bloody name, if you’d care to use it. Unless you want to start collecting your own bloody Lancasters.’

  One of those frozen moments. No one speaks to Bushes that way. Grace is smiling icily, and the rest of us are pretending not to have heard. Then Bushes – bright red in the face, rather than just the nose, for once – snorts some sort of a laugh, claps a hand over his mouth and says, ‘Oops! Sorry, Miss,’ for us all to hear.

  Then embarrassment number three that day. Bushes grabs Grease’s hand as if to shake it, but doesn’t – they just hold. He doesn’t have to say, I’m so pleased you all made it, because it’s all there in the gesture, and written all over his ugly mug. Fergal had a big happy grin, and Conroy turned away with watery eyes. We’d all joined the Silly Buggers Club, I think. The Pink Pole looked bemused and fumbled for cigarettes because he’d left most of the feelings he’d started life with in Warsaw.

  We weren’t as gentle with the Toff as we should have been. The wince-and-moan show he put on for the MO would have been worth at least a ten-day leave ticket on any other station. As we climbed over the tailgate of the Bedford, Grease asked Bushes, ‘Are we on for tonight?’

  Bushes shook his head. ‘Naw. You’ve no kite, have you?’

  Grease glanced at the new one.

  Bushes followed his glance, and shook his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but you’ve no bleeding chance. I’ll give it to someone who’ll look after it. You’re only good for cast-offs at the moment. Anyway, it will take three or four days just to get her ready. They need work before they’re ready to go – or didn’t anyone tell you that? A complete set of radios and a bombsight would come in bloody handy for a start.’

  ‘So what do we do, whitewash the coal until you find us some bucket to fly in?’ Then he added ‘sir,’ after just the right length of pause. The bastard Canadians are real aces at insolence when they want to be. Anywhere else, and with anyone else, that would have earned him five days cooling his heels.

  ‘What’s today? ‘asked Bushes.

  Conroy supplied. ‘Friday. Pay day, sir.’

  ‘Well then, you’re stood down until, say, Tuesday. Crash leave. Fuck off to London and get drunk. Just keep out of my way.’

  Just as the WAAF driver was about to start away with us Bushes stepped back again to the tailgate of the truck. His question didn’t seem to be addressed to any specific one of us. Grace had just spoken to him, but we hadn’t heard what was said. Something was happening and I had missed it. Bushes indicated the new Lanc and asked, ‘You’ve flown in her: what’s her name then?’

  Grease started to say. ‘Gr—’ but he was stopped by the Pink Pole, who surprised us by saying, ‘Tuesday’s Child. We called her Tuesday’s Child.’

  Bushes just shrugged and walked away to his car, where Grace was standing by the passenger door, smiling prettily.

  Marty offered, ‘D’ye think we’ll get crash leave for every one of your landings we walk away from Skip? They’re bad enough, most of the time.’

  Grease hit him. We scrummed around enough for the truck to swerve in response. Marty asked, ‘Do you think that Grace’s a bit of all right?’

  ‘Pretty,’ Pete said. ‘Pretty well used. Pretty clever. Maybe pretty damned dangerous.’ Pete was good at women. He asked, ‘What does Charlie think?’

  ‘She’d never look at me,’ I told them. I probably looked away.

  There was one thing to remember about the debriefing with the intelligence officer, apart from the fact we each insisted on our post-raid rum from the padre, even though we’d been back thirteen hours already. We heard the Pink Pole saying, ‘. . . so I let the bastard get in very, very close, so I knew that I could hit him, and then I pissed all over him with my .303s. Then pouff, he blows up, just like a firework!’ Then he shut up, because he could see that we were all staring at him.

  The IO looked unimpressed. ‘Any witnesses?’ he asked.

  ‘I saw the glow. There was the rear turret firing away, then a goddamned big explosion behind us,’ said Conroy.

  ‘It flung us forward about thirty feet, then down about 10,000,’ Grease added.

  ‘The Toff saw the whole thing. He’ll confirm it. The Pole got his Kraut all right,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ said the IO, ‘I’ll put him up for it.’

  And Grease again. ‘And put Charlie up for being a gallant gentleman. He almost froze his bloody fingers off keeping the radio open.’ He glared at the Pink Pole, who looked away. I tried to hide my bandages, but the IO took them in with a glance, and nodded.

  Outside the IO’s office the station seemed dead. No people; no vehicles. No sense of urgency. No ops tonight. Grease said, ‘You got your Kraut then?’ to our rear gunner.

  Piotr nodded – guardedly, because he could sense something odd was coming.

  Grease said, ‘But he could have got us. All of us. You realize that?’

  ‘Killing Krauts is all that matters to me Grease, you know that. Poles killing Krauts is all that matters. Sure, he could have got me first. So what? A few Poles more or less do not matter.’

  ‘Canadians do,’ said Grease. We were just rounding the corner of the parachute shed, and he hit Pete so hard in the body that he lifted his feet clear off the ground. The only other person I had seen do that was my old man, ten years before. The little Pole seemed to crumple while he was still in the air, and fell to the ground like a half-filled sack of something. Grease didn’t even break stride. Neither did we. Piotr had to see the way things stood. Firstly, Grease was the leader, and what he said went, and secondly we didn’t appreciate near-death experiences. This meant that the Pole had to co-operate in order to prevent them happening to us. No grudges. Finis. That was the end of it. Piotr caught up with us as we reached our Nissen hut, and the conversations jerked back and forth as if nothing had happened.

  I should say something about the hut. One of the advantages of having an all-sergeant crew was that we all lived in the same place. At Bawne we were lucky enough to get one of those small, eight-bed Nissens – which meant that the crew did literally everything together. Going out to fight together, coming back to a hut which had become like a home to us, to weep together – yeah, we did that a couple of times – eating together, drinking ourselves stupid together. It formed the sort of blood connection that those mixed-rank crews of ponces (officers) and NCOs could only dream about. Even if they try to tell you otherwise.

  The lads were better than brothers to me.

  If you think that having a mad Pole in the rear turret was a bit of a downer, I have to tell you that it had its upsides as well. He was an ace finder. He found things before their previous owners knew they’d lost them. And we didn’t complain about the things he found, because they included coal for the stove when the rest of the station had run out, and only the officers’ mess was supposed to have any. He could also find fresh eggs, and potatoes we could roast. He found petrol for Grease’s Red Indian motorcycle, and extra blankets when the Cambridgeshire winter was trying to freeze our balls off. And he always had a stock of fags and whisky, and nylon stockings to bribe girls with – when only the Yanks had them. What I liked best about him was that he was free with the things he found. We didn’t ask, but he always hinted that he had political sources. Although he spent some time each leave with us, he always went up to London or Edinburgh for the rest of it. Sometimes one or two of us went up with him to London, but never saw much of him because he was with other Poles most of the time – he had contacts in the embassy: a ‘Government in Exile’, Mr Churchill used to call it.

  He always went away with a couple of empty kit bags, and always brought them back full. It was a bit like sharing a hut with Father Christmas – something for everyone. Maybe it was black market. Maybe it was Polish government largesse – you know, keeping the gallant allies happy. Maybe it was a bit of cloak and dagger. Or maybe it was just a bit of blagging. Who knew or cared? Not me; not till later. We didn’t complain when he appeared with a huge French box radio in the back of a small Tilley pickup. I had to retune it, but it had great range, and we could get all of the English stations, some Yank ones, and even the illegal Kraut propaganda broadcasts. They were good for the news our people were too scared to broadcast. It was the only news service that gave a halfway decent count on the aircraft we were leaving in Germany each night. Mostly it was tuned to music, though. The Savoyans, and the dance jazz the Americans played. I asked him once where he’d got it from. He said from an English infantryman who brought it back from Dunkirk. There were a lot of French souvenirs knocking around soon after Dunkirk, but nobody talked about that.

  Later the afternoon that Grease had hit him, Piotr wandered over to my bed and sat on the edge. Big Hearted Arthur was belting out ‘Get in Your Shelter’ and ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’ on the radio. How could the Kraut hope to beat people who thought that the war could be funny? I was stretched out reading a Zane Grey, and shoved over to make room for him.

  ‘Hello, squirt. Wanna smoke?’ he said.

  ‘You call me squirt because I’m small, or because I’m younger than the rest of you?’

  ‘I call you squirt because I don’t have a younger brother any more.’ That was a new one. Something was eating him, because he launched straight into, ‘You know that I like you all, Charlie? You do know that?’ He offered me a Players Airman cigarette from a new packet. I took one.

  ‘Of course we do, Pete. You’re the best tail gunner there is. We wouldn’t change you for anyone.’

  ‘I should hate it if anything happened to any of us.’

  ‘I know, Pete. You just forgot that up there for a sec. I don’t suppose it will happen again.’

  Everyone else was earwigging us, of course – as they were supposed to – this was Piotr saying sorry, and me saving face for him. I expected him to get up and amble away, but he sat quiet for a while and then he said, ‘I don’t think Krefeld likes me, Charlie. I was scared up there last night.’

  Looking back, I should have paid attention to what he was saying. But I didn’t. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Pete. When Kraut bastards are trying to kill us all night long scared is probably a very sensible thing to be. Situation normal.’

  I started to turn back to my book. He gave a sad little smile and stood up. Grease was waving our dog-eared pack of playing cards at him from the far end of the hut. Pax. He left the cigarettes on my bed. He always made sure that we never ran out.

  So why, you ask, hadn’t we packed our kit and shot off for four days’ leave already? It was because of the dame, of course.

  Take-off was delayed by unspoken consensus, which is one of those things that happens when seven people live together. Someone must have said, I think I’ll go up tomorrow, and that made up everyone else’s minds for them. That night we smartened ourselves up, which meant a shave and borrowing one of Grease’s clean shirts – he always had bloody dozens of them – and fetched up in the sergeants’ mess just after seven, refreshed by a sleep sponsored by knowing that you were going to stay alive for another few nights at least. Pete had clipped his moustache back to a thin line; I thought that he looked just the thing.

  Grace had a good sense of timing: we weren’t through the first pint before she walked in to the bar looking for us. She was wearing a plain uniform with an ATA flash, similar to a navy blue Senior Service uniform, except the skirt was cut shorter – to just below the knees – which showed off her shapely short legs, and hinted at the fine black stockings which covered them. Her dark curls bobbed as she walked. She looked wonderful, and when she gave her tight little smile across the room and marched directly to us, I was proud enough to die.

  ‘You still here?’ she said. ‘Gin and tonic, please.’

  The mess boy, who had immediately started to hover, would have normally laughed that one off, but he blushed, turned his back, and produced one from nowhere. Yeah; it was going to be an all-right night. She didn’t leave our table, which made all of the other types jealous. Bonza. I remember Conroy, who was usually the soberest of the lot of us, being six months older than me, sort of giving her a quizzical look across the table and asking, ‘We got it then? Tuesday’s Child?’

  ‘Yes, of course you did,’ Grace said. ‘What do you take me for? This Tuesday’s child has a rich daddy who never says no. Few men do!’

  Grease asked, ‘What d’ye have to give for it?’ He wasn’t being moody. He was just finding his way with a new woman. It was his way, and he wasn’t being facetious, either.

  ‘Well; let’s say that it might have been not so much a case of Tuesday’s child being full of grace, as much as Grace being full of something else. He’s an energetic old sod, by the way.’

  She said this in a conversational tone that said situation normal. Grease looked away: maybe not as concerned as he thought he’d be. She could have been shooting a line, of course.

  ‘Dirty sod!’ Marty said.

  Grace gave him a cheeky grin and said, ‘Don’t worry. Wait around and maybe you’ll get your turn. I can be choosy, without being fussy.’

  No. She wasn’t shooting a line. Grease had got his girl. He’d been making a pitch for her since he had first seen her – and she had accepted his offer, but it wasn’t a one-to-one. It’s just the way she was. I’m not sure that I believed it at the time; I remember worrying about what it could do to us. Then I got a hard-on, and in a man’s game that’s the trump card, isn’t it? I can recall several conversations from the evening before we started to fall down all over the place – except the Toff, who, drunk out of his skull, started to walk straight for the first time in twenty-four hours.

  That night she slept with Grease in berth eight. The one that belonged to no one. Being a crew of seven we only needed seven beds – and in our eight-bed hut, the eighth had become the guest quarters. It was a slightly larger bed than the others, and we had hidden it behind green curtain partitions liberated from the medical section. Fergal was a passionate water colourist on the quiet and had painted the insides with fantastic flowers and creatures like unicorns and centaurs. There was a utility bedside cabinet with a vase for flowers (and when appropriate, a drawer for rubber accessories), and a battered armchair that the officers’ mess had discarded. It was the berth on the left as you came in, nearest the door – the furthest part of the hut from our pathetic stove, and the coldest, but the way we saw it was that when we slept there we weren’t likely to be bothered by the cold. You see, it was where you took your girl if she didn’t have a room and you couldn’t afford one of the local hotels. I hadn’t used it much. I didn’t have a regular girl, and it’s not much fun sleeping alone in a whorehouse bed. To be honest it was Pete the Pole who used it most frequently, then I suppose it was Grease, because he always worked so much harder at it than the rest of us. Anyway; that was something like privacy in a country which no longer had any to spare.

  I told you before that I have early habits. Just as the Toff was the last sleeper, who invariably topped up the stove at night, so it was me who stoked it in the morning; not a job I relished. Marty once pointed out that I was the baby of the outfit, and that kids were always up early. He got that wrong: I just never saw the point of lying awake in bed on your own. After rattling up the stove until it roared, and putting the two kettles on to boil, I did what I always do with my headaches: went outside and stuck my head into the fire bucket until the cold water crushed my brain. You know the old joke – it’s not much of a cure, but you feel much better when you stop. Mind you, I sniffed it first. It wouldn’t have been the first time that someone had pissed in it. It takes several days to get the smell of urine out of your hair.

  Grease stepped outside in his singlet, shorts and running shoes. ‘Some night,’ he said, shook his head from side to side, and performed his warm-up routine.

  He had been a professional hockey player in some dick Canadian town before the war, and had an obsession about physical fitness. He was more serious about it than about the war effort. He was always at his peak, and did what was needed to retain it. That meant punishing his body most mornings. He was going back to the game after all this was over. Ergo, he was not only fast, but also as strong as an ox – which suited us, because you sometimes needed a brute to wrestle a bent Lanc back from Krautsville.

  I guess I nodded some sort of reply. He ran and jumped up and down on the spot until he was wreathed in steam, and the sun climbed above the horizon into a yellow and grey sky.

  Then I remembered something. ‘How’s Grace?’

  He gave me the Grease done it toothy grin, which made me want to throw up, and said, ‘I guess I’ll run the full five miles this morning Sparky. Should take about, say, thirty-five minutes or so. You may find that our Grace needs her radio tuning while I’m away.’ I’d never been invited to help myself to a woman before. Then he ran out on me. Literally.

  As I turned back I experienced a real man’s reaction to an unexpectedly available female: I was scared. Inside the hut, the stove was glowing pink with the heat, and wispy steam was just beginning to show near the kettles. And near Grace. She was standing close to it, wrapped in one of Grease’s shirts. She faced the stove, her back to the door, and me and as far as I could make out she was holding the front of the shirt open, gathering in the heat the stove pumped out. From five beds came snores and sleep noises at an acceptable level: Marty was asleep fully clothed under his, his body convulsing periodically with erotic shudders. My opening the door let in frozen air, and Grace turned.