The Hidden War Read online

Scroton just said, ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ and pushed the throttles forward.

  I thought that the props would come off, but they didn’t: Whisky began to move. Sideways. I’m sure that it was sideways. I closed my eyes.

  Take-off speed for a C-47 is somewhere between a gentle jogtrot and an amble, for a reasonably fit octogenarian. When I felt her tail come up I opened my eyes again. Scroton was not looking at where we were going, and the hedge rumbling towards us. He was looking back over his shoulder at me. He had concern all over his face.

  ‘You OK, Charlie?’

  I screamed, ‘Look where you’re fucking well going!’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said, without taking his eyes off me, and pulled the yoke back into his stomach, and gave it some rudder to counteract the yaw. Whisky cleared the perimeter fence like a blown horse finishing last in the National. Scroton said, ‘Great old girl isn’t she?’ Then he looked forward again, but it no longer mattered: we were over the sea anyway. Just. I knew another pilot who used to take his eye off the ball like that. What was the matter with these guys?

  Our field at Lympne was all grass, except for its perimeter tracking, and almost looked out over the Channel. One became airborne by the simple act of flying an aeroplane off the edge of England. I never got used to the bastard place.

  Mother Nature did the rest. Usually you dropped about fifty feet towards the sea, in a great lurch, before the air flowing over the planes was sufficient for flying speed and a bit of lift. Whisky was worse than most: I’ll swear that her wheels kissed the little wavelets below us before Dave powered away.

  Eddie said, ‘You look a bit green, Charlie. Were you always as windy as this, or is it something we did?’

  They both found that amazingly funny, and cackled like hens for miles. Eventually I grinned back at them. We were taking a cargo of tinned bully to the Americans at Frankfurt, and then going on to Celle to haul whatever the next customer wanted for the good people of Berlin. The next customer was either HMG or the Americans, hiding behind a charity and still pretending to the world that we didn’t yet have a problem with Berlin. Served us right, I suppose: it hadn’t been so long ago that I had been bombing shit out of the place, and killing their kids. Looking back on it from today it’s hard to understand why we agreed with the Russians that the line which was to divide Germany in two after the war was so far to the west of Berlin. It was probably some sort of tactical decision, based on the fact that if they had decided to keep coming it’s where we would have fought and stopped them anyway. That left the rubble of Berlin marooned in Russian Germany, and shared between the Yanks, the Reds, the Frogs and us . . . although what the Frogs did to deserve their bit I still don’t know. We supplied the Allied sectors of the city through the roads, canals and airfields, but you didn’t have to be Einstein to work out that the Reds could cut those threads any time they pleased.

  There was money in this airline business. The outward trip for the Yanks alone would pay for this operation. Anything we trucked to Berlin for the Brits would be sheer profit; as would be a return load if we could find one. Halfway to Frankfurt I smelled a strong stench of burning, clapped on my parachute and ran around shouting until they told me that it was the heater port. Apparently Daks often smelled as if they were on fire. I had a prejudice against burning aircraft because I had become too intimately acquainted with a couple of them. What it meant was that Eddie and Scroton laughed at me again, and the Wicked Witch was living up to her name. I vowed never to turn my back on her again.

  Dave let down more than fifty miles from Frankfurt, and we skimmed across the old Reich at about two hundred feet, crossing significantly buggered towns and villages. A lot of Jerries still flinched at the sound of an Allied aero engine overhead, so a lot of the pilots flew as low as they dared just to spite them. A man ploughing a field shook his fist at us, as his horses skittered away from the parallels: I saw his grey Wehrmacht cap and jacket quite clearly. I’ll bet he wished he still had his machine gun. One of the villages looked completely burned out, and deserted. Who’d lived there? I wondered, and, did I overfly it, unseen, at night in 1944? Like the poor, you see, the war was ever with us. If you’d ever been there you’d understand.

  My mate Tommo was there to meet us. He drove a jeep up to Whisky, behind the five-tonner they sent to unload her tinned-meat cargo. Both the lorry-driver and his mate were Negroes.

  ‘In 1944 they were flying fighter planes and invading Okinawa.’ I told Tommo. ‘Now that the war’s ended all they’re allowed to do is carry things for white people.’

  ‘If they weren’t carrying things for white folk they wouldn’t have a job at all. You want me to cry about it?’

  ‘No, Tommo. You know what I mean.’ I had climbed into the hard front passenger seat, which was on the wrong side of the jeep. Tommo turned to look at me. He always did that when he wanted you to listen to him. He pulled his cigar from his mouth.

  ‘Remember, when you were a kid, just how long time seemed to take to pass? You remember how summers seemed to last for ever, and Christmas never came?’

  I smiled at the memory despite myself: days down the rec playing cricket. ‘Yes. So what?’

  ‘The human race is like you were when you were a kid, Charlie. It’s a very young race. That’s why things seem to take so long to change. The Negro’s day is coming . . . don’t get me wrong about that . . . only it will be some while coming. They got some difficult times to get through first.’ He looked suddenly embarrassed. His black cigar had gone out, and he fiddled for a lighter. He asked me, ‘Your people want a lift anywhere?’

  ‘No. They’re walking up to the Mess; they’re booked in overnight. I think they were officers.’

  ‘How can they live with themselves?’

  I chuckled. Same old Tommo. He thought that anyone who hadn’t once worn the stripes was just so much dogshit to be scraped off your shoe. That thought reminded me of Fergal again, and I wondered if he’d stopped flying over Germany in his head yet.

  Tommo broke in, ‘A drink or a broad?’

  ‘You got a place where they both come together?’ OK – so that can mean more than one thing.

  ‘That’s my boy!’

  Good old Tommo. He’d fitted a really dinky radio alongside the jeep’s small dashboard and tinny music came out when he turned it on. AFRO. American Forces Radio Overseas, not a haircut – what goes around comes around. He said, ‘It came outta Kesselring’s staff car. You think ordinary folk’ll want music radios in family cars one day? I was thinking of patenting the idea if no one’s already got there first.’

  I looked out across the airfield. It was a great day. The windsock hung on its pole as limp as a used johnny. We bore down on the airfield gate guard house, with Bunny Berigan blistering the air with his old cracked trumpet, and ‘I Can’t Get Started’. He’d been dead for five years or more, so it must have been one of those new record programmes.

  When the war ended in 1945 Tommo was camped out in German Germany, having got in there in front of anyone else. By some complicated sort of arrangement he’d never adequately explained he had already been living in Hamm for a month when the Germans surrendered. Then he’d moved smartly over to Frankfurt. It’s why the Americans already had all the best places to live by the time the rest of us got there. He bought some houses for the US, requisitioned many others, and bought some for himself. He sold one of those to me, and the Yanks paid me to rent it back to them. I’ve told you before: what goes around comes around. Nothing was simple when you were dealing with Tommo.

  ‘The good news,’ he told me, ‘is that your rent just went up. You get thirty per cent more than you used to, because prices are going up all the time. They call it inflation. Remember that word, Charlie; you’re going to hear it a lot in the future. The bad news is that you give some of the rise to me, because I fixed it for you.’

  ‘OK, Tommo. Anything you say.’

  We were in a small drinkery in Kaiserstrasse. Tommo sat at the end of th
e bar in a white jacket, white shirt, black trousers and a smart bow tie, looking like he owned the joint. I thought of asking him when he’d last seen Casablanca, but decided against it: he usually had a job to laugh at himself. Instead, I asked, ‘You have gambling in the back room?’

  ‘Natch. Just craps: nothing flash. You stay outta trouble if you do nothing flash. You want to throw some cubes?’

  ‘No thanks, Tommo.’

  ‘Why’d’y’ ask then?’ But Tommo had always been quick on the uptake, so he stuck in, ‘Oh. I see. Casablanca.’

  ‘Sorry, Tommo.’

  ‘Don’t be. I think that I look kinda tacky myself, but my customers like it.’

  So: he did own the joint. The customers, bar me, appeared to be exclusively US servicemen and their women. A man with a guitar sat on a stool in the corner and strummed sad tunes. Tommo asked me, ‘You ever been to see the place that Uncle Sam’s paying you top dollar for?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘You should. It’d be polite. You got German tenants too. You should give them a look at their landlord’s face.’

  ‘Next trip, maybe.’ I didn’t mean it.

  Some couples wanted to dance, but there was no space, so they danced close to the bar and brushed us as they turned. Tommo said, ‘You got something on your mind.’

  ‘Yeah. Marty Weir. You remember him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was our bomb aimer; bit of a chancer . . . and you remember Fergal, the engineer?’

  ‘Uh-huh. He was the Mick wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Fergal took me drinking in Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, and we got a couple of ladies – for old times’ sake. We took them to a cemetery he knew. After they’d gone, he told me that Marty was lying in the corner; six feet under.’

  ‘Upset ya?’

  ‘I threw up, but it didn’t at the time: it does now. I always thought that the Tuesdays would make it. Now Marty’s gone, and Pete . . .’

  Tommo looked uncomfortable. Pete had been the rear gunner, and latterly a pal of Tommo’s.

  ‘I know whatcha mean.’ Then he asked me, ‘You going to Celle tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s the idea. Then Berlin.’

  ‘Light?’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘You take some unofficial sugar up for me, and on to the Big City? Seven sacks.’

  Flying sugar into Berlin was like being asked to fly in gold dust. He could name his own price.

  ‘What’s in it for us?’

  ‘Fifty bucks for you and your mates, and I give you the name of a club in Berlin where you can drink free for the rest of your life . . . from next month, that is.’

  ‘Why should anywhere let me drink free for the rest of my life?’

  ‘Maybe because I own it, old man. Maybe I’ll invite you to come in on the deal wi’ me.’ We shook on it: I’d carry the sugar.

  ‘Marty and Pete would have liked that.’

  ‘Yeah. You ready for the broads yet?’

  He held a hand up, and squeezed something metal in it that gave out an odd double clicking sound, like a metallic frog. He didn’t even look round as two women came through the bead curtain behind the bar. One was a small blonde, my size. The other was dark with legs so long that if she didn’t sit down I’d end up talking to her navel. She was very beautiful. Tommo chuckled and said, ‘Know what you’re thinking, Charlie, but once her legs are around you, you won’t notice how long they are.’ Then he turned to the girls, and in fluent local Kraut asked them what they’d like to drink. He told me, ‘They’re both called Elise. They’re twins.’

  I thought, First Fergal, and now Tommo: it’s about time that you started picking up girls for yourself again Charlie.

  ‘I suppose that they’re both countesses?’

  ‘Elise is,’ Tommo said.

  We flew a half-load of military cleaning products from Celle into Berlin Gatow. I had a hangover, and Crazy Eddie slept all the way. He didn’t even wake up when a Russian Lavochkin fighter buzzed us on the approach. The Reds had taken to flying their aircraft unpainted since the war: silver bullets with red stars on the wings. I was disturbed to see this one was painted a drab olive green all over – as if it was ready to fight. If the Reds got awkward, and the city wasn’t topped up with food and fuel, it would starve or freeze next winter . . . and we flew in the cleaning products. We had to overfly two cemeteries on the approach to Gatow, and over one of them I saw Whisky’s port wing navigation light literally fall off.

  I clicked the radio, and told Scroton, ‘Charlie, Skipper. I just saw a bit of us bloody well fall off. It fell off the port wing.’

  ‘Not an important bit, Charlie. Now shut up a min while I have my hands full, there’s a good chap.’

  I walked around the aircraft after we had landed, and on the left wingtip found the hole that the light had once lived in. Two wires had pulled clear, and dangled in the sunlight. Scroton wandered up and said, ‘Get on to the Yanks at Tempelhof as soon as we’re in the office, and find us someone who’ll sell us a spare. I’ll fit it.’

  I was worried about something else. It was the tenth time I’d landed at Gatow, and the first time Marthe hadn’t met the aircraft. I pushed the small parcel I’d brought her deep into my pack, and hoped that the Customs patrol wouldn’t pull me. There was something about the way the new German Customs guys looked at you . . . as if they’d all been in the SS in earlier lives. Only this was the New Germany, remember? Neu Deutschland. There had never been an SS, and none of our new neighbours had ever been Nazis. The Nazis all lived in the Russian Zone apparently.

  I was wrong about the Customs. The big guy in his dark green uniform picked up my pack unopened and handed it back to me. I had put it on the ground outside our office when I went searching for my papers. He handed me those back without looking at them either. He said, ‘Thank you for coming here, Mr Bassett. What you are doing will feed thousands if things get bad. We are all very grateful.’

  I could see Marthe’s little cafe lorry parked up against the terminal building. I tried, ‘Where’s the little Hotdog Lady? I missed her.’

  ‘You speak good German, Mr Bassett.’

  ‘Not really, but thank you anyway.’

  ‘She hasn’t shown up for a few days. She must be careful or she will lose her licence; you know what these Allies are like.’

  Despite what we were always told about the Jerry, this one actually had a sense of humour. I ought to get a photograph of him so that everyone would believe me.

  ‘Yes,’ I grinned back. ‘I know what these Allies are like.’

  I wondered what he’d done in the war. I wondered if he and I had ever looked at each other across the cold night sky. As I walked into the small Visitors office it did occur to me to ask myself how he knew my name without looking at my papers.

  Crazy Eddie was behind the single flimsy desk, an opened envelope with my name on it in front of him. He was reading my letter.

  ‘It’s from someone called Greg,’ he told me. ‘He addresses you as Comrade and writes like a Red. He says to go to a pawnshop before you visit your cousin. You mixing with some funny people, Charlie?’

  ‘No. I’m flying with them . . . gimme that . . .’ and I grabbed for the paper.

  A waitress with a magnificent figure and a disturbing moustache poured me a drink, while Russian Greg talked with me. The drink was a very fine St Petersburg Tokai. He said, ‘I want to talk about some sugar, and you want to talk about your girl. You first . . .’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘She was picked up by the International Patrol maybe three days ago. They dropped her outside the door here yesterday. She was in a bad way.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I got her into the American Red Cross place. I used your friend Thomsett’s name. Will that be all right?’

  ‘Probably. He wouldn’t mind. What happened to her daughter?’

  ‘I didn’t know she had a kid . . .’

  He must have seen my reacti
on, because he shouted at the door to the kitchen, and told someone to bring the GAZ jeep he used around to the front. As we walked out to it I asked him, ‘What about your sugar?’

  ‘Tell me on the way, English. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Was it Marthe’s papers?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It seems that her papers are kosher . . .’ It was a word that we used a lot to annoy the Berliners. ‘She didn’t buy her bullets . . .’

  ‘Are they making whores buy bullets now? Since when?’

  ‘Since a few days. She was the first to say no I think. Probably the last too.’

  He drove the GAZ as if he had his hands on the steering levers of a tank: you wouldn’t want to be in his way.

  It’s funny, the things that you notice. There was a bomb crack in the wall of Marthe’s bedroom. You could see it from the outside if you looked up as you climbed the outside steps. I always glanced to see if it had worsened. I looked up now by force of habit. It hadn’t opened any further. I always meant to bring her a sack of cement to plug it with: she had jammed the crack with newspapers. We ran up the internal stair – the neighbours must have thought it was the Patrol coming back. I used my key. It turned, but the door wouldn’t open more than a few inches. I rattled it. I thought I heard movement, but couldn’t be sure. I rattled it again, and shouted, ‘It’s Charlie. It’s Mr Charlie.’

  At first nothing happened, and then I heard a dragging sound as something was moved away. It seemed to go on for ever. Because of the cant of the bomb-damaged building, the door had always swung open on its own once the lock was tripped. Marthe’s place had been ransacked, but that was all right. It was all right because the child was standing in the middle of the mess. She had a dirty tear-stained face. I squatted down and held out my arms. She came to me, looking down, and taking small deliberate steps. She made absolutely no noise, not until the last minute when she threw herself at me. I hugged her. I could feel her trembling, and said, ‘It’s all right now, Lottie; it’s all right now,’ again and again, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Marthe was sitting up in bed in a short-sleeved hospital gown. Her face was bruised and puffy. Her forearms were also bruised. The bruises were days old – they were yellowing already. Lottie climbed onto the bed, and tucked herself alongside her mother. I sat on the end of the bed, Russian Greg took the only chair, and smoked a cigarette. Marthe said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what happened, Charlie?’