The Forgotten War Page 6

  ‘What tobacco do you put in those things, now that we’re home again?’

  ‘Ringers. Why?’

  ‘Just asking. Waiting to find out what you really want.’

  ‘Stan says that you haven’t been demobbed; that you’re going back to the RAF . . .’

  ‘That’s right. They want me to hang around for a few months until they’ve trained a few more radio ops. I was bloody wild at first, but then I thought that it would give me few months to sort myself out.’

  ‘Not still going Down Under, then?’ I could sense him getting closer to whatever it was.

  ‘I haven’t given up on that altogether yet. I met a girl who says she can get me a passage for ten quid, but I’m not sure I believe her.’

  ‘Maybe she just wants shot of you. What about your kids?’

  Bugger!

  ‘Christ, Les. I’d forgotten them.’ There was a big gap in the conversation.

  ‘Good job I’m here askin’, then, isn’t it? You know, a lot of people wouldn’t believe you, but I know you better than that. You got the sort of mind that forgets people when you’re not with them, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t think you noticed.’

  ‘Why don’t you pour yourself a decent drink, Charlie? We got some serious talking to do.’

  I never had an elder brother: if I had I suppose that he might have been like Les. It took a couple of hours, and I was a bit crocked before we finished. Les completed it with a summing-up, like a judge at the Bailey.

  ‘Either you got to be a decent father to those kids, Charlie, or you got to get outta the way an’ let someone else do it. An’ the Major’s making a fair stab at it so far. What’s more, he’s getting on well with Maggs – I was there in Paris in ’44 when they first took a shine to each other, remember. The sea air’s doing her wonders – she looks ten years younger.’

  ‘I thought that she was supposed to be with his cousin?’ Les’s Major England had a German cousin who had been removed to Britain at the end of the war. Maggs had been his mistress in Paris before it was liberated.

  ‘The cousin was married, wasn’t he?’ Les reminded me. ‘The Major isn’t. Kings over tens.’

  ‘So you think that I should step back, and let Maggs, the Major and the boys play happy families?’

  ‘Unless you got strong feelings about it, yes . . . an’ I don’t think you have. In fact I don’t think you have strong feelings about anything much, have you? Did you ever?’

  ‘Yes, Les. I did.’

  ‘Where’d you leave them?’

  ‘In Grace’s pocket. She took them when she left.’

  ‘You’re fucking pathetic.’ That was the worse thing that Les ever said about anyone. Then he asked, ‘So why didn’t you go to see her for a last try before we left Siena?’

  ‘I was tired of being pathetic.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.’

  We agreed that Les would take the Singer, drive down to the Major’s place on the South Coast the next day, and negotiate the details. He’d get the Major to open a drawing account into which I could pay a chunk of the boys’ keep. Les asked me if I wanted to go with him . . . see the kids was how he put it. I suddenly pictured their faces: Dieter would be seven now . . . and Grace’s son Carlo – he’d be nearly three, I supposed. In my mind both boys wore expressions of reproach and regret and, selfishly, I didn’t want to face that. I’d promised Dieter a father, and hadn’t been one. Anyway: I told Les no, he could make the trip without me. He looked away for a moment, as if he was disappointed. Bad one, Charlie. Les was always the responsible one.

  His dark mood lifted after that, and we went over to the Hollybush to get really sauced. The only other reference he made to the children during the evening was oblique. He said, ‘If ever you have proper kids of your own, Charlie, you’ll ’ave to do better than this.’ I couldn’t trust myself to reply, so I just lifted my glass to him. It was my turn to look away.

  Stan shouted up the internal staircase to tell me that there was a telephone call for me. It was Piers Fortingale. He said that my plans had changed. That didn’t surprise me – in my limited experience, planning was never an Armed Services strong point. Apparently they wanted to test my abilities before posting me, so he asked if I could find my way to somewhere in West London without getting lost.

  ‘I’ll try . . . where?’

  ‘RAF Eastcote. That’s near Ruislip: it used to call itself the Government Code and Cipher School, now it’s just a government communications HQ. You can either use the Tube, or get a bus from Archway Road. Even you should be able to find Archway Road without getting lost, it’s barely five minutes’ walk for you.’

  I wondered where this new-found distrust of my navigation skills had come from. Maybe it was how they had squared my service record – I hadn’t been AWOL in Europe for a couple of years: merely lost.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Ten-thirty. Go to the entrance in Lime Grove near the television place. Have you seen television yet?’

  ‘Only in a shop window.’

  ‘My aunt just gave me one for my thirty-fifth birthday, made by Puratone. Useless piece of junk. They’ll never catch on.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. What are these people going to check out?’

  ‘Your radio skills. Morse – that sort of thing.’

  ‘I could do that anywhere.’

  ‘These people are good. Trust me, Charlie.’

  Why the hell should I? So much for the rest of my leave.

  What seemed odd to me was that there was a television set standing in the reception area of RAF Eastcote. And simple lounge chairs. Maybe I’d walked into a private clinic by mistake. And then there were those guys in brown or blue warehouse coats, flapping around the corridors like dull-coloured birds – it was more like a laboratory complex than an RAF station. The security was old-style RAF, though – a desk run by a gigantic Warrant Officer policeman who took about four minutes to notice me: the sort of thing that happens to you at an unfriendly bar. I paid him back by delaying my salute until he looked. Then I threw him a sloppy one.

  ‘Call that a bloody salute, airman?’ he snarled. He examined my pay book as if it was evidence, consulted half a dozen ledgers, and made a couple of telephone calls. It didn’t make any difference; I was still expected, and there was nothing he could do about it, but he tried again. ‘Where did you learn to salute like that?’

  ‘Over Germany in a Lancaster, WO, whilst you were chatting up the grass widows at Victory Corner.’ There were three other-rankers beside the WO behind his imposing desk: they froze. They smiled, but they froze. Before he could come over the desk at me, I was rescued by a small white warehouse coat wearing a pass that read Dr Junor, but the WO hadn’t quite finished with me. He grinned and said, ‘Wotcha, Charlie, you look a fucking sight. Three years ago I would have broken you for being dressed like that.’ And he stuck his meaty hand out.

  ‘Hello, Alex. When did they make you an officer?’ This was God’s week for teaching me that it’s a small world after all; I knew the man from my first operational station. He was almost a friend. Shaking his hand had always been like trying to do one-arm press-ups.

  ‘When the rest of you were demobbed. It’s not a real promotion. They just messed around with what work was going to be done by which rank, and you followed the job you were doing at the time. When my work moved onto the warrant officer rung, so did I. I didn’t complain.’

  ‘Nor would I. I was an officer once, but when I came back they took it away again.’

  ‘When did you come back?’

  ‘About three months ago.’

  ‘A bit late, then?’

  ‘So they tell me. It’s a long story.’

  Alex laughed loudly. ‘As I remember it, most of yours were.’

  I didn’t qualify for the pass with my name on: Alex kept back my pay book and said I could have it when I left, if I was lucky. Junor had followed t
he conversation keenly throughout. He was a small man, like me, probably about thirty and as bald as a coot. He had an accent: European.

  He gestured for me to follow him. ‘You’re with me today,’ he told me as we walked down one of several parallel corridors, each as long as an aircraft carrier’s flight deck. He said, ‘Remarkable; I’ve never seen him smile at anyone.’

  ‘We were on the same station in 1944. Where were you?’

  ‘1944? Peenemunde,’ he told me. ‘Junor’s not my real name.’

  I’ve noticed it for years now – no one seems to use the name they were born with any more. I said, ‘I bombed there in ’44.’

  ‘Then thank you for not killing me. My room’s the next one on our left.’

  Junor had a long laboratory with radio sets rigged in tandem and parallel, along a bench that ran along one wall. I recognized the set-up: I had built a smaller version of it for myself when I was flying a bench at Tempsford. Junor made me a cup of Camp coffee, which tasted just like the junk they drank in Germany, sat me at one of the rigs, and took the one alongside me.

  When he turned to me his opening gambit, after a smile, was ‘Let’s just assume that you know your business, Pilot Officer, and that I know my business, and get straight on to the difficult material . . .’ There was nothing about my decrepit clothing to indicate rank, previous or current, so how much did these bastards know about me? I didn’t put him right.

  ‘Bastard’ was right. The bastard put me through it. By the end of the day I felt as if my mind, and my hands, had been wrung out and hung up to dry. We stopped near midday to eat in a room that was a mess room for the military and a canteen for the civvies. I was interested to note that the civilian men were outnumbered by young and pretty female counterparts, but I didn’t get a peck at any of them because Alex joined me for lunch. Junor left us and sat opposite a very tall, pretty blonde. They laughed a lot, and she stole a couple of surreptitious glances at me. Alex and I brought each other up to date. The only difference was that I believed his stories, whilst he shook his head over mine. Policemen have suspicious minds. I asked him about Eastcote.

  ‘Designed to be a hospital. The government built them all over the place in 1940 – seriously, at least twenty of them. This one was never needed.’

  ‘But it’s huge!’

  ‘Standard design: long parallel corridors with opposing wards off each side.’

  ‘I can see that now. Why wasn’t it used?’

  ‘Some boffin convinced the government that German bombing was going to create more than two million wounded, so they went on a hospital-building spree. I told you: at least twenty of them. As it was, the casualties were in the high tens of thousands; maybe not even that. This was going to be the new London lunatic asylum for the war-damaged, but they gave it to us instead.’ When I looked up, he added, ‘Don’t say anything, Charlie.’

  Back in Junor’s radio lab I told him, ‘That was an exceptionally pretty woman you sat with at dinner time.’

  ‘I thought so too, Charlie. That’s why I married her. In the cathedral in Bremen in 1943.’

  ‘I bombed Bremen once, too. I think that the cathedral may have copped it later on.’

  ‘Then thank you for not killing her, also.’

  Back in the labs the light was fading when Junor at last let us shut down the rigs. He lit up a cigarette: Woodbines in a dirty green and dirty orange packet. They were ready-made, but almost as small as Les’s roll-ups. I filled a pipe. Then I asked him, ‘Am I still any good, then?’

  ‘Fishing for compliments, Pilot Officer?’ Junor smiled. I didn’t answer. He continued, ‘Yes. You know that you are still good. But I suppose the real question is, are you good enough?’ Again he paused, before going on. Then: ‘Yes: I shall tell the people at Kingsway that you are good enough.’

  Good enough for what? I wondered.

  I slept late. Stan woke me. That bloody phone again.

  ‘ ’Ere!’ Piers said, trying to sound like Tommy Trinder: it didn’t work. ‘Who said you could knock off?’

  ‘You. I’ve got a couple more days.’

  ‘That was when you still had a couple more days, old son; now you haven’t. Besides, you’re not doing anything.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘I might have been getting across your Australian bird.’

  ‘Don’t think so, old son; she said that you were a mite disappointing.’ Cow. ‘You can climb back into your pit, though. I just phoned to tell you that you sit your Part Two tomorrow.’

  I sighed. ‘Where do you want me to go now?’

  ‘Hendon. There’s an airfield there. Straight up the A1; you can’t miss it.’

  ‘I can if I haven’t got a car; I’ve lent mine to someone else for a couple of days.’

  ‘Damn! Wait one, won’t you . . .’ There was a clunk as he put the handset down. In the background I could hear Workers’ Playtime belting out of a radio in his office. Someone was doing ‘The music goes round and round’; it was very popular . . . and he must have had the volume racked right up. When Piers picked up the telephone again he said, ‘That’s fine – I just fixed you a car and a driver; one of mine, in fact. Get in here for ten, OK?’

  I agreed – it wasn’t like I could really do anything else.

  That time I didn’t get past the lobby at Kingsway. A copper waved me to a hard seat in a waiting area, after having handed me a small brown envelope. It contained a transport chitty – a small form authorizing me a car and a driver for a period not exceeding twenty-four hours. It was signed by an Air Vice-Marshal. Was that what we paid the bastards for?

  I hadn’t anticipated Dolly Wayne walking in, but it didn’t surprise me that much, either. It was a logical development. We walked down a wide internal stairway that led to a car park, without saying much. She chose a big brown civilianized Austin. It had been polished until it shone.

  She told me, ‘It’ll take me an hour or so, sir. Bank-holiday traffic.’

  ‘Cut the sir, please, Dolly. No need. You outrank me anyway. I didn’t know that it was a bank holiday. Which one?’

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ She stopped the car at the foot of the dark ramp which led up into the daylight, turned to watch my face as she spoke, and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. ‘It’s Good Friday. What did they do to you over there?’

  ‘It wasn’t what happened over there that was the trouble. It was what happened when I got back: the brass flung me into prison. Can I come and sit in the front?’

  ‘Give me ten minutes to get out of the city first. What did you do?’

  ‘I was late for the ball: late getting back for the end of the war.’

  ‘How late?’

  ‘Coupla years.’

  ‘Golly.’

  I must have smiled, and Dolly must have glanced at me in her driving mirror because she asked defensively, ‘Are you laughing at me?’

  ‘No. I’m pleased. Pleased that someone can still show surprise without swearing about it, that’s all.’

  ‘I can eff and blind if you want me to: I’m getting better at that.’

  I suppose that I smiled again.

  ‘No, Dolly. “Golly” will do just fine for me. Thank you.’

  I was watching Dolly’s legs again, and wanting to pull her skirt back to check them out. Bad one, Charlie. Was I wrong, or were skirts already a couple of inches shorter than those that women had been wearing in 1945? I asked her, ‘So what’s the plan? Nobody briefed me.’

  ‘I drive you to Hendon, and hand you over to a Squadron Leader Rees. He has a patch over one eye, only one hand, and a very fierce manner – but don’t let that fool you; he’s a pussycat, really. Then I cool my heels in a mess somewhere for a few hours, I suppose, and wait for you to finish.’

  ‘What’s he going to do to me?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to know, but if you’re the same as a few others who have come this way you’ll be doing the same sort of thing you did yesterday, but in an aircraft this
time . . . see if you still have the knack.’

  ‘They’re going to want me to fly again, then?’

  ‘That I don’t know, Charlie.’

  ‘Then do we get the rest of the day to ourselves?’

  ‘Not quite. I have to take you to Woolwich Arsenal, and after that I can drive you home.’

  ‘Long day for you.’

  ‘That’s another thing that I don’t know, Charlie.’

  I’d missed something somewhere, hadn’t I?

  ‘What does the Arsenal want with me?’

  ‘Uniform, Charlie. They’ll give you a new issue. You look like a pirate in that get-up.’

  ‘You like pirates?’

  ‘I was always on Captain Hook’s side when I was a girl. Peter Pan behaves like a hysterical old virgin.’

  ‘Is that why you have a soft spot for Squadron Leader Rees?’ She smiled and said, ‘You’re a sly one, Charlie Bassett.’ I asked her, ‘Have you noticed how the world seems to have gone to hell in a bucket, now that all of the pirates have gone? I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t cause and effect.’

  I still had my battered old RAF cap. I slouched back in the seat and tipped it over my eyes – as if I was going to sleep.

  Squadron Leader Rees had my RAF file in front of him on his desk. It was a lot thicker than the last time I had seen it. He stood up, and offered me a metallic handshake.

  ‘Welcome home, Charlie.’ He was the first person to have said that. For the second time in a couple of weeks I nearly blubbed. Stupid. The effect was spoiled by his eye patch, which was pink and had a livid blue eye painted on it. The original, on the other side of his face, was brown.

  He wore a set of very clean white coveralls, with his rank boards on epaulettes on the shoulders. I had never seen that before. There was a similar set over the back of an upright chair in front of me: it had no insignia. On his desk were two shanghaied ammo pouches, a soft cloth flying helmet, and a face mask with the usual attachments for ox and a radio pip. ‘I suppose that that damned girl has already told you that I’m a pussycat?’

  ‘If she did, then I didn’t hear it, sir.’