The Forgotten War Page 4

  ‘Thank you, Fergal. Thank you, Les.’ They both smiled. It was good that they didn’t feel they had to say anything. I added, ‘I still don’t know what I did wrong, apart from going a bit AWOL, that is.’

  Les shook his head and said, ‘You’re a bit of a tit, Charlie: you did it the proper way; that’s what you did. Bound to end in tears. Didn’t you learn a thing from me and the Major?’

  ‘What yer gonna do, then?’ Les asked me. ‘I can’t afford to hang around here for the rest of the year. Stan has offered me a partnership.’

  ‘Cleaning windows?’

  ‘Cleaning windows, chimneys an’ a nice little contract, driving gang-mowers for the council parks offices.’

  ‘What are gang-mowers?’

  ‘Six or seven grass-mowers all linked up behind a tractor. That’ll do me.’

  My response had been all about delaying answering his first question. I was suddenly unused to making decisions for myself. They have a word for that these days: institutionalized, only it shouldn’t have happened that quickly. After a further delay Les asked, more kindly this time, ‘Still hard, is it?’

  ‘As the actress said to the bishop.’

  ‘Just bloody answer my bloody question, Charlie.’

  We were sitting on a long railway seat on platform one at Inverness station; less than thirty yards from the hotel and the bar. Watching passengers. We had been at the hotel for three days now. Fergal had slipped away to practise taking confessions in the Big House – he relieved the local priest, who usually ended up in one of the small harbour-side bars. I thought that I could get the hang of being a Catholic. I told Les, ‘Yes, Les. It’s still hard. I can’t seem to make my mind up about anything.’

  ‘Don’t be surprised. You’ve just spent weeks doing nothing unless you were told to. Besides; maybe you were sort of ill at the same time, but didn’t know it.’

  ‘How do you mean, ill?’

  ‘When I got back to the big house in Highgate there was no one there, just my brother Stan and his family living in the basement. He gave me the address and telephone number of the Major’s club. I phoned, and he was there . . . so I went round to him to report. He said for me to go home, an’ wait till I hears from him. To take a rest. Maybe he thought we were dead.’

  ‘Did you? Rest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘. . . And you never heard anything from the Army?’

  ‘No. I told you. What the Yanks would call a home run.’

  ‘Where’s home?’

  ‘Belmont in Surrey, out on the edge of the heath. Didn’t I ever tell you that?’

  ‘I think you did, once. Where’s all this leading, Les?’

  ‘So I went home to Kate and my kids, and my old man and mum, an’ most of my brothers . . . and was drunk for three weeks solid. I can’t remember any of that. I can remember waking up late one morning; the sun was comin’ in through the curtain. For some reason I touched my chin – I couldn’t have shaved for days, and there were a couple of fighting scabs. You listening?’ I nodded. Les continued. ‘Kate looked around the door. She looked tired: sort of pinched. She came back with a big cup of tea, just like we used to do on Sundays before the war. I asked her what happened? She just said, “You were ill for a couple of weeks, but I think that you’re all right now.” That’s all she said: “You were ill for a couple of weeks . . .” ’

  He had my attention, although I couldn’t quite make out what he was getting at. He was obviously uncomfortable talking about it at all, so I wondered why he was trying.

  ‘What do you mean, Les? How were you ill?’

  ‘Off my bloody head. Drunk . . . and raving most of the time. You remember that trench in Germany with all them dead boy soldiers in it?’

  ‘Yes. I try not to.’

  ‘I told my kids about it one afternoon. Scared them half to death. They don’t want to talk to me much now; I can see it in their eyes.’

  ‘They’ll come back; you’ll have to give it some time.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to say to you, Charlie. It happened to the Major at the end, didn’t it? He suddenly stopped giving orders. I think that it happened to us as well. I went to see my local doctor that evening, and all he said was, “Exhaustion.” Does that sound about right to you?’

  My mate Les was a very subtle man. It was what had kept him alive and only marginally damaged over nearly six years of war. So I said reassuringly, ‘Yeah. That sounds about right, Les. You all right now?’

  ‘Yeah. Next day we took a picnic down into the bluebell woods at Woodmanstern. I made the kids bows and arrers, and Kate and I started to talk about what we’ll do now. Panic over.’

  ‘Panic over,’ I told him. I meant for me as well. ‘I think I’ll go and see the old man in Glasgow now I’m up here, then go south again, find out if I’m still in the RAF and what happened to my back pay. Then I suppose I’d better find a job. Haven’t even begun to think about it, Les – but at least I have a starting plan, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yeah. Fergal will be pleased. He wants to get back to his parish.’

  ‘He has a parish?’

  ‘Yeah. Liverpool. Poor kids and an orphanage.’

  Fergal and I took the train south together – as far as Edinburgh. I slept most of the way with the sun on my face. I remember that there was a long set of stone steps from the station to Princes Street. I was out of breath before I reached the top. I needed some exercise, and healthy living. The last thing I asked Fergal was who had paid for the hotel at Inverness, and our bar bill. He told me that it had all been arranged for us, and that it was probably best not to ask too many questions.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you for what you did, Fergal.’

  ‘Then don’t. I’m supposed to ask you to go to church on Sundays, but you’d backslide sooner or later and feel guilty about it. That wouldn’t do anyone any good. Go to the Armistice Parade whenever you remember, and say a prayer for Tuesday and Brookie: they didn’t deserve what they did to each other.’

  Tuesday had been Tuesday’s Child. She was the Lancaster we had flown into Germany. Brookie was Brookman, the pilot who’d taken her after us. Tuesday hadn’t liked Brookman, and things hadn’t worked out for them. They’d burned.

  Les was practical – that was probably why the Major had chosen him to drive around Europe at the fag end of the war. He’d brought me my cheque book and bank papers: he’d found them in the car I’d left at Highgate before our trip. I went up to the Royal Bank of Scotland building in St Andrew’s Square. In a counting-house room so beautiful that I couldn’t take my eyes off it, a girl so beautiful that I couldn’t take my eyes off her either talked to me about how to get my money. She was slim, and her nose was as straight as the blonde hair that fell below her shoulders. She had a problem when I asked her how much money I had. Her small mouth made an upside-down smile, and she asked me to wait whilst she consulted. She consulted a very tall man in a baggy grey demob suit. He looked about thirty, although his hair was thinning already. He asked me to join him in an interview room.

  ‘Just need to ask you a few questions. Formality.’ His voice was clipped. Definitely ex-services. ‘Do you have any identity other than your bank book, old boy?’ They’d given me back my fibre tag and pay book. I gave them to him. When I think about it, I must have worried them, dressed as I was like a scarecrow in a ragtag of service-issue clothes and an old US flying jacket. All my other possessions were in a small pack at my feet. Grey Suit came to a decision. He stuck out his hand for a shake. ‘Allan Fraser,’ he said by way of introduction.

  He already knew who I was, didn’t he?

  ‘What’s the problem with my bank account?’

  ‘I don’t know if there is one. It isn’t our bank, of course, and yours doesn’t have a branch in Edinburgh, so I’m allowed to help you if we feel inclined. We have to check, because bods turn up from time to time with bank books they’ve half-inched from the honoured dead and then try to draw the cash out. They always a
sk how much they’ve got first. You understand? You mind sitting here while I call your branch – it may take a few minutes?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing else to do,’ I told him, and shrugged.

  He gave me a newspaper named the Scotsman. It was very optimistic about Scottish independence. I remembered a copper telling me that a bunch of Scottish Nationalists had tried to make a separate peace with Germany and let the Nazis in through the back door. That seemed a bit rich to me, so maybe Scottish independence would have benefits for the neighbours as well. That’s what I was thinking about when Fraser came back in.

  He brought a piece of paper with him but kept it under his hand, face down on the small table between us. He asked me a variety of security questions including my mother’s maiden name, the same questions I’d been asked when I’d set the account up in a little bank near Bedford. I seemed to pass the test because he smiled at me and told me, ‘You’re worth more than three thousand pounds. What was it? Pools win?’

  ‘A family property I inherited,’ I lied. ‘I rented it out to the Yanks.’ I didn’t feel good about lying to him, because he seemed to be a good-natured straightforward sort of chap, but it was the lie I had set the account up with. I would have felt worse if I had said ‘It was black market money from goods we inherited from our gunner when he was killed.’

  ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘Fifty quid will do for the present. Thanks.’ I wrote out a cheque for him. It was my first, but I didn’t tell him that. We didn’t have bank accounts in my family, just pay packets and cash.

  ‘Could you do with some investment advice? A sum like that could be making you some money, you know.’

  ‘Life’s too short.’ A girl named Grace had taught me those words.

  He shook his head. ‘Not any longer, but you can always come back.’ Then he gave me a shrewd sort of look which told me that he’d been an officer, and asked, ‘Before we go back out there is there anything else the bank can help you with?’

  It was my turn to shake my head, and I answered the question he hadn’t asked me.

  ‘No, but thanks all the same. I’m all right now; I’ll get by. You’re right: it’s hard to get used to being back home.’

  I spent two days in a bed-and-breakfast place on Calton Hill, saw the sights, and drank my way along Rose Street with some sailors from an aircraft carrier. I saw the girl from the bank in a Rose Street bar. She sat with her arm through that of a craggy-looking older fellow. She looked in love. They heedered and hodered away about how the world would be saved by the Reds and poetry, once the perfidious English had stopped running it. It wasn’t an argument I knew enough about to join, so I moved on to another pub that had an accordionist and a couple of singers. Life was too short.

  I smoked my pipe on a bench in Princes Street Gardens, and chatted up a pretty young nanny looking after two children in a huge Tansad pram. That didn’t go anywhere, and I found that I didn’t care, so I spent three bob on a bus ticket to Glasgow, and wondered if the old man would be pleased to see me. He’d moved to Hamilton to be near his brother’s family after we had been bombed out down south. I wondered if he would ever move south again.

  My mood lifted once I was on the bus; it was a single-deck Bedford that still smelled new inside. There weren’t many passengers, and across the aisle from me a small boy of about six read all of the notices displayed in the passenger area, mouthing the words silently. One was headed Diphtheria and Tuberculosis Regulations (1947) and read Spitting in this vehicle is prohibited. The kid suddenly looked up at the woman with him, and announced solemnly, ‘Hey, mam – you can’t spit in here!’

  The blush it brought to her cheeks was worthy of a music-hall turn. She didn’t look like a spitter to me, but you never can tell.

  I had to get another bus to Hamilton. My father had moved out of the red sandstone tenement my mum and little sister had died in and into another one, half a mile away. Part of me understood why, but another part wondered why he’d bothered: they looked identical. I arrived about half past five in the afternoon. Most of the doors on the tiled common stair stood open, and level by level I could smell what his neighbours were having for supper. Mostly cabbage.

  Dad’s door was open. I walked in and found him sitting in the kitchen, with the remains of a fish supper. He pulled off a new pair of glasses, put down his paper, and said, ‘You took your time.’

  ‘What are the licensing hours round here?’

  ‘That’s the best thing about Scotland, son . . . there aren’t any, not so’s you’d notice.’ That meant we were pleased to see each other, and that I’d said thank you. The truth was that I found it galling still to be got out of trouble by my dad when I was nearly twenty-three.

  There was a three-day-old letter from the War Department (RAF Records Branch) inviting me to go down for an interview at an address in Kingsway in London. They would welcome the opportunity to explain the problem that had occurred with my personal record, it said. Somehow I thought that I already knew the building from the back.

  I stayed with Dad for a couple of weeks, and let the bastards wait. What I noticed in that fortnight was that I didn’t look out of place. There were large numbers of men still wearing out the bits and pieces of uniform that we had fought across Europe in. It wasn’t the fabled Scottish frugality on display; it was just a reluctance to let go of the men we once were. Then the demob suits came out at the weekends.

  Dad said that you could see a few flash types now, up around Glasgow Green – but they were mainly gang members. They fought with knives and bicycle chains and bottles most Saturday nights, so succeeded in keeping their own numbers in check. We were in a pub named the Greenmantle one night when one of them walked in and shoved an older fellow off a bar stool. Three guys in khaki tops that had had their badges removed quietly took him out through a back door and came back without him five minutes later. They hadn’t even broken a sweat. The barmaid was a pretty twenty-year-old who had a nice smile for me, and didn’t seem to be with anyone. Dad said he was living in an area where, if you fancied a girl, you still asked her old man, or an elder brother, if you could take her out. It was good of him to give me the gypsy’s warning, so I decided to pass up on that one.

  Bloody London. Even in my eighties I still don’t know whether I love or hate the damned place. The train was a streamliner with corridor carriages, and took six hours. It was still painted wartime matt, and I slept most of the way. I was getting good at sleeping on trains. My pack was over my head on the luggage net. When I woke up there was a boy standing on the seat trying to get at it. My slap rolled him into the corridor, and he ran off crying. I don’t know what I’d expected. The Old Man had come home from Europe in 1919 to find the country wasn’t quite the ‘home fit for heroes’ he’d been promised, either. I couldn’t say that I hadn’t been warned. I hoped that the kid would take a lesson from being caught stealing. Or there again, maybe the lesson he’d take from it would be to start carrying a knife in case he met people like me again. I wasn’t exactly feeling like Captain Sunshine when I left the train, anyway.

  There were men in cast-off military-uniform clothes in London as well. What shook me was that many of them were begging. Some of them had their families sitting beside them in the drizzle. Mute. Shivering. You couldn’t pay them all off. What the hell had happened to the country in the last few years? I took the Tube to Highgate, and then hoofed it to the big safe house that the Intelligence Corps had run there during the war. I hadn’t met Les’s brother Stan, but he was expecting me.

  They looked like twins, although Stan was the younger by two years. Even their voices were creepily alike. I bet they had had fun with the girls on dark nights. Stan’s wife and children were down visiting the family, he told me, in Belmont. They would be back on a late train, and he would drive down to Victoria to meet them. Would I care for a mug of char? Would I. He warmed the pot, and put in three spoonfuls of dark fine tea from a wooden caddy which locked with a key. When I
picked it up and looked at it he said, ‘Spoils o’ victory.’ The metal stand he put the teapot on, to spare the table, was made of aluminium, and was in the shape of a swastika inside a geometric sunburst. ‘That too.’

  ‘Serves them right. Where were you?’

  ‘Not far behind you and Les. I drove tank transporters – Scammels.’

  ‘Didn’t Les do that once?’

  ‘Nah. He drove tank-recovery vehicles. Big Thorneycroft cranes. That was out in the desert.’

  ‘That’s right. He told me. I thought I’d see if my car was still here. Les put it up on bricks in a garage out the back whilst we were away.’

  ‘Course it is. Only it’s not on bricks. I run it once a month just to turn it over; hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No. I’m pleased.’

  ‘You left a couple of kitbags in it. They were collected by an American who says they were his. That kosher?’

  ‘Yes. David Thomsett. Tommo. They were full of money, did you know that?’

  ‘No, an’ maybe it’s better I still don’t.’

  ‘OK. What’s petrol like? Still scarce?’

  ‘Not if you know where to get it. Bloody tax cripples you, though.’

  We were in the basement service flat that went with the house. It had its own outside door under the front steps. The overshadowed windows were slick with drizzle. The light was drawing in.

  Stan made a decent cup of tea. Self-sufficiency must have run in the family. Sometime after dusk he asked me if I had somewhere to stay. ‘It’s difficult finding somewhere in town at the moment. Too much bombing, and too little building – an’ every building site’s on strike every other week.’

  ‘I thought a small hotel, or a B & B . . .’

  ‘You won’t get one, an’ if you do you’ll pay through the nose for the privilege o’ sharing your bed with bugs. Why don’t you sleep upstairs? There’s no one there, an’ I’ll give you the key. You’re almost an old boy, after all. No one would mind.’