The Forgotten War Read online

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘I’m serious. They just move into empty houses or office blocks and camp there.’

  ‘Are they organized?’

  ‘They’re run by the CP – the Communist Party: our friendly social democrats. They deny it, of course. Their aim is to destabilize the LCC, and then the rest of the country, into voting in a Communist administration that we’d never get rid of. The point of democratic socialism is that it never is democratic. Someone mentioned that moving in with them for a few weeks, and feeding us information back could be just up your street . . .’

  I made a production of filling and lighting my pipe again. ‘Not a bloody chance, Piers.’

  ‘What if I ordered you to?’

  ‘Instead of sending me back to jail? I fell for that line a couple of years ago, and look where it got me. No, I’d ask you to put the orders in writing and get them signed by an Air Vice-Marshal. I don’t think you’ll do that.’ I only stuck the word vice in to needle him.

  He gave me the little-boy smile. ‘No . . . I suppose not.’

  I could have also counter-threatened to talk about his romps in the bushes to the News of the World. But instinct told me that might be a dangerous thing to do.

  So I offered him a compromise. ‘Look; I’ll go to this radio research unit in Cheltenham that you mentioned, and serve out my six months.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘If you let me go, I’ll get a proper job, I suppose. When do I report?’

  ‘You got green lights from your examiners, so I suppose you could travel on Tuesday and report on Wednesday. That OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You got your car back?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘It’s nice country up there; you could tour a bit on your days off. Drink cider and sing folk songs. Marry a girl with a moustache, and grow cabbages. You won’t like it, you know. It’s not like the services up there: they’ve slipped off the edge of the world – it’s Ultima Thule. Anyway, sod off now, and leave me to my peers.’

  ‘But there’s no one here.’

  He looked at me and shook his head as if he was dealing with an idiot. He was. Pun.

  I have to admit that I felt well set up in an officer’s number one uniform. I topped it off with my old cap, so I looked quite the battle veteran. Dolly was in her number ones as well, and I remembered her distant floral perfume. The church was the Church of Scotland in Pont Street, and the walk, under glowering skies, took us twenty minutes. Dolly had a powerful marching pace; like a Girl Guide leader. She took my hand and held it as we filed through the door, straight off the street. It was roomier than it looked, and if we were twenty minutes early we needed them if we wanted to get a seat.

  By the time the mad minister appeared in the pulpit, apparently by an act of levitation, it was standing room only. The hymns were the old ones. I hummed along with them, the conregation bellowed like buffaloes a-wallowing, and I could hear Dolly’s voice rising above it all, like an angel. Dolly whispered that the minister was a visiting itinerant. All I can remember about his Easter sermon was the usual guff about sacrifice, and brotherly love, which he said should be offered to all human beings, except the communists. He obviously wasn’t all that keen on an understanding with the godless Reds: they featured in his splutterings several times. While I had been away people seemed to have forgotten that they were once our friends and allies.

  I was glad that we weren’t in the front pews, because the perspiration flicking from the minister’s brow as his head moved fell over them like a gentle shower. The congregation seemed to hang on his words, and I half expected a round of applause for his effort. I looked around: some of the folk, particularly the women, had rapt expressions on their faces, and looked ready to go out to fight the foe. Was I the last man left in England who thought that Europe had had quite enough of that for the time being?

  Back at the flat Dolly made me a cup of tea, and I was sipping it when Denys trailed in from her room still wrapped in her bed sheet. She was followed by a tousled man in his shirt tails, the way I had been a few days earlier. The shirt was an odd minty-green colour. He had a friendly smile, curiously hairless bowed legs and a soft voice. He introduced himself as Stephen, the landlord and dentist.

  ‘Any of that tea left?’

  I reckoned that Stephen was about twenty-four or twenty-five, and he looked soft. I suppose that he’d had a tough war learning how to be a dentist. I made one-off judgements about people all the time in the 1940s: it’s more difficult now.

  While Dolly was fussing over his cup of tea he asked her, ‘Doing anything tonight, love? I was introduced to a nice Rhoesian ridgeback yesterday. An artillery major, actually. He’s looking for a nice bit of sophisticated company.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Pretty girl, theatre and dinner. That sort. I can’t ask Den; Ike’s back in town, and wants her.’

  Everybody deliberately didn’t look at me; I was sure of it. Pause. Then Dolly murmured, ‘Love to. Tell him to pick me up at seven, if that fits in.’

  ‘Sure it will, love.’ Then Stephen could look at me again. ‘Why don’t we get dressed and all go up for a spot of lunch? There’s a nice new pub near Fulham – the Martyred Minnow or something like that. It was built on a site thoughtfully cleared by a doodlebug. There used to be a school there.’

  ‘The New Mitre,’ Dolly told him. ‘I don’t want to be back too late tonight, in case Piers wants me to work. It should be a day off, but with him you never know.’

  I privately agreed with her; with Piers you never knew.

  ‘That will be OK,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ll phone him and fix it: he must owe you an hour or two.’

  These people were as far up each other’s backsides as circuit judges, I thought. My old man wouldn’t have liked my thinking that: he was very mysterious about his membership of another brotherhood altogether. Stephen was an odious little shit, and I had already decided to cut it short and get away as quickly as I could. One of my dad’s rules was Whenever you find yourself out of your depth, get back to the shallows as fast as you damned well can. With these slippery people I was out of my depth. Time to swim for it, Charlie.

  PART TWO

  Beauty and the Beast

  5. Reckless Blues

  There was a fundamental difference between the country I left behind in 1945 and the one I returned to in 1947 . . . and it’s not one of those that you’ve already thought of. It was the bloody weather. In 1944 and 1945 rain followed me around the country like a homing pigeon streaking for its loft: it never missed. Maybe God had been trying to find out just how wet a human being would have to be kept before he started to shrink. However, after prison, wherever I went the sun seemed to shine.

  I took my time meandering the Singer up to Cheltenham with the lid off the car, between a couple of decent beer stops on the way. I thought a couple of pints always improved my driving.

  I had been given a number for my new station, to telephone before I arrived. I called it from a public phone box on the other side of Oxford – I didn’t know what was on the end of the number. I presumed that it was the guardroom, but it could have been the group captain’s mistress for all I knew. Not a bad guess, because it was a woman who answered the telephone. She asked me to hang on, and I had to punch more money into the slot. Then a man’s voice spoke. Deep voice; Home Counties.

  ‘Hello, old boy.’ RAF. Definitely. ‘Wasn’t expecting you until Wednesday.’

  ‘I thought I’d better tell you that I was in the area, sir.’

  ‘Good thinking. Fancy a beer later on?’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Stop when you get to the Lamb Inn at Great Rissington: it’s not far off your track. Book in for the night; there’s nothing ready for you here yet, but I’ll join you for a drink if that’s OK and give you an early hello. Useful, really.’

  Adjutant, I thought. Passed-over flight lieutenant and all-round Mr Fixit. One of the sad old g
uys.

  There was a pre-war AA atlas in one of the Singer’s door pockets: lodged there with a packet of johnnies by a previous owner. I’m good with maps and Great Rissington is a long enough name not to be easily overlooked – so I drove into the pub car park in the last of the afternoon sunshine, parked up, tipped my cap over my eyes, and snoozed until opening time. Even without a girl on your arm, or a drink in your hand, life doesn’t get much easier than that.

  The big man walked in at about seven, just after I had pushed my dinner plate away. A decent slice of gammon, broad beans – probably last year’s stored under brine – and floury potatoes. I hadn’t tasted gammon since before the war, and blessed the pig that had lost it. I should have said that the big man rolled in, because he had a rolling gait like a sailor’s. Tall, heavily built, ruddy complexion and stiff brown hair which stood up from his head. Maybe he was forty. He wore a brown tweed jacket, brown trousers and a silk cravat. He looked more like the lord of the manor than the lord of my manor, but his voice was unmistakable when he fitted himself into the other chair at my table.

  ‘Mr Bassett. I’m Watson, David Watson: your new boss. Welcome to peacetime Gloucestershire.’

  ‘Charlie, sir, if that’s all right with you. What’s Gloucestershire like in peacetime?’

  ‘Nice pubs, if you like pubs, but you’ll find most of the girls are spoken for . . . otherwise it’s just bloody dangerous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘CFS – Central Flying School. Just around the corner at Little Riss. They drop more aircraft around the county than Jerry ever did. Five last month – seven bods killed, including two passers-by.’

  ‘Will that concern me much, sir?’

  ‘No. Just duck if anything you hear gets too close. Although we park our communications flight up here, that’s an old Hudson – so you might be up here now and again.’

  He held up two fingers, Churchill fashion, to the landlord behind the bar. The man smiled, drew two pints of cloudy liquid into glass mugs and brought them to our table. Watson signed a paper chit for them, like in a mess, and nodded at the landlord. ‘Thanks, George. Quiet tonight?’

  ‘Mr MacDonald was very cross about the last accident, sir. We think that he’s ordered everyone CB until they pull their socks up.’

  ‘MacDonald’s the principal at the CFS now: he runs the show,’ Watson explained to me. ‘He’s a fine type: DFC.’

  The landlord rejoined the conversation. To Watson he said, ‘Didn’t recognize Mr Bassett as one of yours, sir; he’s much too smart. I thought that he was going up to the school.’

  Watson looked me up and down briefly. ‘See what you mean, George. We’ll do something about that later this week – in the mean time toddle off, and forget you ever saw him in uniform. Buy yourself a drink, if you like.’

  Watson eyed me, and then took a huge gulp of his beer. I copied him, but it wasn’t beer: it was something thicker and sweeter, with a bite that grabbed the back of your palate on the way down. I was instantly in love with it.

  ‘What’s this terrific drink, sir?’

  ‘Scrumpy. You’d call it cider. It’s made less than ten miles from here; scarcely has time to stop slopping around in its barrel before you’re a-drinking of it. I told you you’d like the pubs, but go easy with the cider – it’s twice the strength of beer; you can get seriously rat-arsed on it, and ill the next day.’

  ‘OK, sir.’

  I had gone from feeling good about my uniform to being worried. I asked him, ‘Is there a problem about my clothes? I’ve always been told to report in . . .’

  ‘No, Charlie. You weren’t to know, if nobody told you . . . I suppose that was Fortingale. I don’t know why he dislikes us so much. He’s such a little rat sometimes. We’re really an out-station of RAF Eastcote up here: you’ve been to Eastcote?’

  ‘Yes, they gave me the once-over. I met a policeman I used to know.’

  ‘Good for you. You’ll find that happens time and again. The RAF’s about a fifth of the size it was when you were on a squadron, and getting smaller with the day. You’ll keep tripping over bods you know. Anyhow – we piggyback on a Ministry of Pensions site at present. It’s called Benhall Farm: on the other side of Cheltenham. The civil servants are moving out, and Eastcote’s moving in, and because we’ll eventually be working alongside other ministries there, the service thinks it better that we don’t flash uniforms all over the shop. Fortingale should have told you. We’re not supposed to worry the locals.’

  ‘Why would we?’

  Watson looked around before he answered, and then lowered his voice. ‘Because there could be a couple of thousand of us out there eventually; and not everyone will welcome that with open arms. A soldier is popular when he’s fighting or marching . . . not when he’s living next door.’

  ‘I’m not a soldier; I’m still in the RAF . . . anyway, the people I met at Eastcote didn’t look much like soldiers either: more like boffins.’

  ‘Metaphor, old boy: do try to keep up, and welcome to the Listening Flight, by the way . . .’

  ‘Thanks. It’s just that this isn’t the RAF I joined, is it?’

  ‘It never was, Charlie, but nobody told us until now. Another mug of this wallop? And then I have to head home, before the supper’s burned.’

  Watson had given me a new Bartholomew’s Cyclists’ Map for the area, on which Benhall farm was marked. I used it to get over there in the morning. I’d gone back to the ragbag of uniform bits without insignia that I had returned home with, and hoped that it wouldn’t turn too many heads. I looked like a bloody refugee. The camp was mainly a series of temporary long brick office blocks surrounded by barbed wire, neatly mown grass, and concrete paths. The guardroom was manned by half a dozen hard-looking MPs, and half a dozen civilians. I was surprised to find that it was one of the latter who appeared to be in charge. I say appeared, because with these people you never knew. He was a neat fellow of about thirty, who wore wire-framed specs. He was obviously expecting company, because as I walked in he said, ‘Mr Bassett, is it? Welcome to Station, sir,’ and held out his hand. He didn’t hang on for too long, so that was all right.

  ‘Station?’

  ‘That’s what we call your part of the set-up, sir. Station . . . but you can’t proceed to it until you’ve completed the formalities.’

  ‘Formalities?’ I reused his word. He must have thought that he was dealing with a halfwit.

  ‘Sign you in, sir . . . security passes, and all that sort of thing. Then I’ll get Ming to show you round the site.’

  It took me nearly two hours to read, complete and sign the forms that the bugger produced for me, and I’m no slouch at that sort of thing, I can tell you. The gist of his continuous commentary was that if I ever spoke to anyone about anything after this, the government could fling me back into prison without a trial. He didn’t know the half of it. He took my Bartholomew’s map away, and locked it in a cupboard with a thousand others. Maybe it was a top-secret cycling tourists’ map.

  Ming was one of the military policemen. He was a British oriental with the build of a sumo: one of the few corporals I met who must have had his uniform tailored for him. It began to drizzle with rain as he walked me round: he didn’t seem to notice. He called the more permanent buildings TGOs – temporary government offices. Put up during the war, he said, but he didn’t know what for. Currently it was a teacher-training establishment run by the Ministry of Pensions. Most of the trainee teachers were ex-service types: swords being beaten into ploughshares – the phrase all the politicians were using: they didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know quite what the RAF had in store for me, but I wasn’t feeling like a ploughshare yet.

  Ming named off the different buildings for me. The only two that grabbed my attention were Female Students’ Accommodation and Civilian Refectory and Bar. Both off limits. I don’t know what the civvies were being fed, but it was bound to be better than what was being offered to the service personnel – it was the way of things.


  The RAF buildings were in a wired compound off the main camp, behind a padlocked wired gate. Ming let us in with a key on a chain, and locked the gate behind us. I was damned if I liked being locked into places any more. It was about six times the size of a doubles court. All but one of the small buildings were identical. The others were small creosoted wood huts on raised brick foundations. In the middle of them there was one that looked like a cricket pavilion, veranda and all. It was painted green to extend the metaphor. Watson, smoking a cigarette, came out onto the veranda to greet us, and Ming took his leave. Before he did so he insisted on shaking my hand, saying, ‘Welcome to Benhall, Mr Bassett. We’re pleased that you’re here: things will be OK now.’

  ‘What things?’ I asked Watson.

  ‘What things, sir, if you don’t mind, old boy. We still preserve some of the old niceties, even if we are at war again.’

  He’d made two distinct points. I liked neither of them.

  ‘What things, sir?’

  ‘Your last two predecessors didn’t stick around for long. The service police are superstitious old buggers when it comes down to it: they like things to stay the same. Pity is they never do. Do you want to come in, and take a pew?’ After I was sitting in the room that appeared to be his office he asked, ‘Char all right? Ready for one myself.’

  ‘Fine, sir. Thank you.’ I thought that sticking a sir on every sentence might be gilding the lily on this station. ‘Wing standard, if that’s OK.’

  ‘Wing standard’ was milk and two sugars. NATO adopted that in the 1950s, but that’s NATO all over: always at the back of the queue, and stealing the best lines. Watson rang a small handbell that stood at the end of the desk, and a smart WAAF appeared from a side door like a ferret out of a rabbit hole. She must have been waiting for it. He smiled at her, and she seemed to melt.

  ‘Two teas, please, Daisy. This is Mr Bassett. He’s joining us: Hut 7.’