by David Black
‘What do you want?’ was the extent of Janis’s response.
‘I’m home on leave,’ said Harry.
‘So I’ve heard. From several people.’
She had a knack of making him feel guilty and lumpen so that he gibbered away while a punishing chill emanated down the phone. However, once he’d demonstrated a sufficient level of abnegation, it was arranged he should present himself at her place: Daddy was having people round. Be there by 7 p.m.
Harry obeyed. The door was answered by Mr Crumley, a dapper little fellow with pomaded hair and a moleskin waistcoat under his barathea blazer. Everything about him was expensive, which would have been impressive on a man who could carry it off. Hector Crumley couldn’t; not that such a truth would ever occur to him.
‘Ah. Why it’s Harris Gilmour, back from the wars. Janis is expecting you.’ All delivered in a polite accent that hadn’t quite been mastered.
Hector Crumley stood aside to let Harry pass into a huge hall, all tartan wallpaper and antlers. He was pointed to an open door that led to the main reception room, too crowded to reveal the décor, a blessing as Harry had been in it when empty; even allowing for youth’s insensitivity, the place had made him feel queasy with its sheer weight of fripperies and folderols.
Everyone who should have been there, was. Dunoon was a small town.
‘Harry!’ An excited screech from Janis as she appeared from a dense huddle of guests and wrapped him in an effusive, territory-marking embrace.
Christ! She looked stunning in a figure-hugging mauve dress, with a back split to reveal shapely calves, and her blonde tresses piled up and not too obviously dyed a rich golden colour. When she gave him a brief smacker he could taste the sweet perfume from that deep red gash that was her mouth.
Crumley thrust a drink into his hand, from which he took a swift slurp to steady himself; a gin with Indian tonic; and ice! Harry wondered where Crumley had got that; the Gilmours didn’t own a refrigerator. Who did? Crumley, obviously. He led Harry to the big bay window overlooking the Firth, and began engaging him in one of those conversations that are just preambles to the main event. He began by talking about the war; not Harry’s war, his own war.
‘It’s a very anxious time, Harris,’ said Mr Crumley. ‘You young chaps off doing your derring-do have no idea. Very anxious. We’re just waiting for the Hun to come. No idea what is going to happen, what the future will hold. Now that Herr Hitler has all of France and Holland and Norway it’s just a matter of time. Invasion! We all know it’s coming! And of course, the Germans! Their reputation precedes them. Look at Poland, what they did to Rotterdam. A very anxious time, Harris. Especially if you have a daughter. I mean, just what will they be capable of? Tell me that, Harris, tell me that!’
Harry didn’t know how to reply. All Winston had been saying was that it was going to be tough. Even he seemed to think a German invasion was imminent. Blood, sweat and toil, with the only consolation on offer that they were all in it together. Nobody doubted him, just as nobody doubted Jerry was going to come, and they were going to fight. As for what the future held after that; Harry didn’t want to think about it.
‘You chaps in the navy, you’ve got options,’ said Mr Crumley.
Harry squinted at the little man whose jowls were working with emotion: ‘I’m sorry, Mr Crumley, I don’t follow. What kind of options?’
Crumley’s jowls stopped moving and he fixed Harry: ‘I’m sure you’ll all do your duty, fight them off as long as you can. But when they’re marching up Argyle Street, you’ll be sailing off to Canada with the King and all the nation’s gold reserves. Everybody knows that.’
‘I’m not sure I understand you, Mr Crumley,’ was the absolute best Harry could do.
Crumley was silent, then, full of pent-up emotion and anxiety, he began, ‘The Germans, Harry. They’re coming. Everybody knows it.’
Well, indeed. His mother and Auntie Eleanor had thought so too. But they didn’t seem to be quite as terrorised by the prospect as Mr Crumley. Invasion did seem almost an inevitability. But Harry had been too busy lately to think about that, and anyway, everyone else he’d been around seemed to treat the idea with a sort of decorous sangfroid. Harry didn’t know what to say.
He didn’t have to. Crumley turned square on to Harry, all emollient smiles.
‘You made the right choice, Harris,’ he said, still using his full name. ‘The navy looks after its own. I’m sure all the plans are made for the evacuation. It won’t just be the ships, will it? All the equipment and the stores and the paperwork it takes to run an enterprise like the navy . . . it’ll all have to go with you . . . you don’t have to tell me about it . . . you don’t build a business from nothing without learning a thing or two. You university men . . . you don’t know everything, you know. And of course I imagine all that . . . stuff . . . will include the officers’ wives. Can’t leave the ladies behind . . . can’t expect you chaps to fight on if you’ve been forced to leave the ladies, or the children. Isn’t that right, Harris?’
‘I’ve no idea, Mr Crumley, what the plans are.’
But Hector Crumley wasn’t listening: ‘Right indeed. That’s why now is the time young men should be thinking of their sweethearts, of what’s best for them. With this war going the way it is, they won’t get another chance. It’s time for young men to make their minds up, and act! Or forever more regret what they will have left behind. You think on that, Harris. How would you feel sailing off to Canada, knowing you’d left your sweetheart behind . . . at the mercy of the Germans!’
Harry’s mother was still up when he got home, in the kitchen with a pot of tea, knitting in candlelight.
‘He practically told me to marry Janis,’ said Harry, taking a seat at the table. ‘Father’s right about old man Crumley. He’s frightful.’
‘He’s just worried,’ said his mother, ‘about his only child. He wants you to snatch her away, out of the path of the approaching German juggernaut. He imagines all the unspeakable things the Hun might do to his little girl. Are you thinking about it?’
Harry was back in the Crumleys’ garden, strolling with Janis; remembering their brief disappearance behind the rhododendrons when she had expertly spun herself into his arms and kissed him. Thinking: If Janis is totally gorgeous in that mauve dress, what would she be like without it?
‘I dunno . . .’ he said, thinking about it.
‘Oh Harry. Please don’t tell your father. At least, not just now.’
Harry knew exactly what she meant; what she was thinking: Am I going to have to sit opposite that complacent, self-obsessed, etc. etc. at my kitchen table for the rest of my life?
‘Can I tell him about all the electric lights Crumley’s got burning behind the blackout curtains?’ he said.
There was no mains electricity on the Cowal peninsula, so old man Crumley must have had a bloody great generator somewhere churning out the amps. Begging the question: how did old man Crumley manage to swing enough petrol to power that generator, to generate all that bloody light?
‘No. Don’t tell him that either,’ said his mother.
Chapter Twelve
Growing up, one thing Harry had cottoned on to pretty quick was that the Gilmours were a popular family, probably down to the fact that there was indeed a whiff of the exotic about them.
Duncan, his father, was head of modern languages at the grammar school where he was known as Dr Gilmour, for Duncan was also a PhD in French literature. A mystique compounded by the fact that in his spare time he wrote books and pamphlets on French literature and philosophy. Books that were actually published. Also he wasn’t a local boy, but a child of empire.
Duncan’s father, Harry’s grandfather, had been someone senior in the Indian Civil Service, and died of a fever in Calcutta. Duncan’s mother, in her bereavement, had returned to live in Dunoon in genteel poverty, managing to support him and his sister, Eleanor, on her late husband’s pension with a Calvinistic stoicism that had never failed to be admire
d. That admiration meant that Mrs Gilmour’s position had never been what one might call arduous: she and her delightful children were seen as fitting people, readily accepted into society and most deserving of whatever one might do to lend a hand. Duncan had been such a clever boy, sitting scholarship exams the same way ordinary people filled in forms, accumulating the funds and then the learning with seamless ease.
Then there was Duncan’s war, which infuriatingly he never talked about; his two years on the Western Front and his Military Medal remained a mystery, never discussed; no clue as to how Harry’s father had won it. No one else ever talked about it either. In fact, Duncan Gilmour’s ‘Great War’ was something studiously avoided, almost as if some whiff of disgrace lurked there, somewhere. Despite the medal. The only fact the medal confirmed was that Harry’s father hadn’t been an officer. The MM was strictly an ‘other ranks’ gong.
Harry’s mother, Edith, was a few years younger, a little less bright but only just, and certainly no less attractive. One of four daughters of the County Engineer, she’d trained as a primary school teacher, and was a joiner-in at everything from amateur dramatics to licking envelopes for the local Liberal constituency party. Where she was dazzling and gay, Duncan was solid and considered, and they made a perfect couple, a golden couple, as they cut the rug together through polite Argyll society. Growing up, Harry had heard all the stories. For apparently, the man who had returned from France had not been the man who left. Beneath all the sangfroid, Duncan had come back a chaos of contradictions. He’d been a man anointed with charm, who now never used it; a writer on French literature and philosophy who refused to return to France. And of course, Harry’s father was a war hero; or was he? A war hero who refused point-blank to speak of his glory.
Duncan intruded very little on Harry’s upbringing and was never a very tactile or playful father. He would politely listen to the 5-year-old Harry recite poetry he’d learned for school, and clap where expected, but he would look puzzled rather than angry when the 8-year-old Harry misbehaved, as if he was watching a creature that had just arrived from another planet and was unsure how to communicate with it. Only Edith was aware of the tumult of emotions Duncan’s son evoked in him, and the fear he felt for the little mite’s existence; and she loved him for it.
It wasn’t that life in the Gilmour house was dour and joyless. Far from it. There was always a lot of laughter. Duncan would hold impromptu French nights in which everyone had to speak French around the dinner table, and failure to do so would incur a forfeit. Duncan also loved to discuss history and its parallels with life today. Everyone had to have an opinion, and when the discussion was over, it would be rounded off with Duncan conducting a finale in which everyone had to recite – everyone being wife, son, Auntie Eleanor, and every fortunate guest invited into the Gilmours’ rambunctious celebrations of man’s history and philosophy, ‘. . . for as George Santayana wrote in 1905,’ Duncan would intone, ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it!’ He loved to discuss Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes, Hugo, de Tocqueville and most of all, the works of Napoleon. He was passionate about Napoleon, admiring his social reforms, contemptuous of his conquests.
‘Discuss!’ he would bark with manic glee. ‘How can a man who could save his nation’s revolution from tyranny, create an entirely new system of justice in the Napoleonic Code, then sink into such utter self-aggrandizing melodrama? . . . “I did not usurp the crown of France, I found it lying in the gutter and raised it up with the tip of my sword!” What a silly, preposterous, preening little man! I ask you! Idiot! History’s full of ’em. Great men with feet of clay. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the millions they end up killing.’
And Duncan was capricious, in a devilish sort of way. During a ‘French night’ he’d once suddenly asked Harry something in Italian, and Harry, not thinking, had replied in Italian.
‘Forfeit!’ Duncan shouted. ‘You spoke in Italian.’
‘But you spoke Italian first!’ an outraged Harry yelled back.
And with a wave of his hand and an insouciant smirk, his father had replied, ‘In this house, my power is absolute, like Napoléon’s . . . and my character, flawed!’
All this to much eye-rolling from all around.
Then in 1936 came the Spanish Civil War and things began to change in the Gilmour household. Duncan seemed to discover anger. He espoused neither the republican nor fascist cause; it was the war itself he railed against. Incessantly. He could become embarrassing in his intensity, butting into people’s conversation in shops and on the street. Ranting about the sheer barbaric, wanton stupidity and pernicious evil of organising sentient beings together for the indefensible purpose of killing each other . . . for a cause, for Christ’s sake! A cause! Were these people mad? It was their one and only life they were dicing with.
Any attempt to reason with him, or calm him, or god forbid, take a side, incensed him all the more. At the grammar school, the rector even had to have words with Duncan about him hectoring the pupils. It was a small town, and people began to talk; and that was when Harry first began to pick up the first odd asides, eyes looking away, conversations ceasing, and it all seemed to turn around Duncan Gilmour’s war. So Harry had asked his mum.
‘Your father has never discussed his war with me, and I have never asked,’ Edith had told the 16-year-old Harry, but only after a long and considered moment. When Harry’s level gaze failed to shift from her, she was forced to say more. ‘Your father is a very complex and intense man,’ she said, choosing her words as a surgeon might choose instruments. ‘I don’t think it’s any secret what he thinks about war and governments – he abhors them. Doesn’t get the arguments, doesn’t see the glory; only the death and hurt and waste, and for those left behind, the unbearable loss,’ she said, but they both knew that was just part of the story. ‘In itself, not approving of people killing each other isn’t exactly irrational, is it? That isn’t the point though, is it? It’s whether he’s ever explained to me why war and killing with him is more personal. That’s what you want to know. Well, it is none of your business. If he wants you to know, one day he’ll tell you.’
And that was it. It hadn’t really surprised Harry, for the other thing he had learned growing up was that although he was never in any doubt his parents doted on him, they doted on each other more. This had always been made plain to him by Edith, who told him the truth about everything. And that had been OK with him; not being the centre of attention all the time isn’t the worst way for a child to grow up.
Harry had a lot of freedom in his upbringing, more than most of his peers, which allowed him the option of being able to step back from things; made him realise that he didn’t always have to be on parade, and could get on with things for himself, and that had made him quite a sensitive, intuitive sort of chap. An adventurous one, too; something his mother always encouraged in him. She used to sit up after his father had gone to bed and talk to him long and often as he grew older, sometimes well into the candle-lit night over endless cups of Earl Grey tea, as if he was an adult, not a child. ‘To dream and not to act, Harry,’ she used to tell him. ‘That’s the greatest tragedy.’
Which was why he’d ended up hanging round the yacht builders in Sandbank where the members of the Royal Northern Yacht Squadron maintained their vessels. Because if you love the sea and sailing, there’s no point mooning about on the beach being jealous because you can’t afford a yacht. You make yourself useful to someone who can, and get him to let you sail his.
Then 3 September, 1939, had come. Harry had come home from his digs in Glasgow for Sunday lunch. Chamberlain was on the radio in the morning, and they’d all sat round the set, glum. After a lunch made all but impossible by his father’s anti-war ranting, Harry went for a walk. He called into see Janis, only to find her house in equal turmoil; but the rants there had been more about the cost of flour and where Daddy would get his labour if all the men were called up.
When Harry returned, he
went upstairs first, only later coming back down into the kitchen where his father was reading the Sunday papers and his mother was going through the domestic accounts as the late-afternoon sunshine flickered on the big oak table strewn with bills. He would remember the scene often in the years to come: his parents; peacetime. For no one would have guessed that the prime minister had been on the radio mere hours before, announcing the country was now in a state of war.
Harry hadn’t known whether to sit down or stay standing. His travel grip, packed and with his tweed sports jacket thrown across it, was in the hall; a voice inside his head said he’d be better turning right around, grabbing his stuff and heading out without more ado. But it didn’t seem good manners to go off to war without saying. So he stayed, rooted to the spot, until his mother looked up and asked, ‘What is it, darling?’ And the minute she did, Harry could tell she knew. His father stopped reading and lowered his paper, not because of Harry’s sudden appearance, but because his wife was the only creature on earth whose moods he was sensitive to. He frowned to mark his irritation that his own son had had the impertinence to interrupt his wife’s Sunday afternoon routine; and that was when Harry had told them what he was about to do.
His father had stared at his paper for a long time, his breathing heavy through his nose. Harry couldn’t look at him. And then suddenly his father had leapt out of his chair and stormed out of the kitchen, and then the house. As Harry had followed him into the hall and his father was disappearing out of the front door, Harry heard a sound from him that would haunt him for a long time to come. He did not want to admit that it sounded like a sob.
Chapter Thirteen
The day after the Crumleys’ party a letter arrived from Peter Dumaresq. He had replied to all Harry’s letters from training, and Harry had thanked him for the wise words that had put him there. From those letters Harry had learned Dumaresq was now promoted to Lieutenant Commander and executive officer of the light cruiser, HMS Wolverhampton. This letter congratulated Harry on the sinking of the Von Zeithen, and commiserated with him on his ‘little spot of bother’ – which meant he also knew Pelorus had been sunk but wasn’t saying, since like everyone else in the country he was keeping mum. It also explained why he knew where to send the letter – Harry would be on survivors’ leave, so he would likely be at home. And Dumaresq, it transpired, was close at hand; his ship in a yard on the Clyde, just completing a refit. The letter concluded: ‘. . . so why not pop over for some lunch in the wardroom? Bring a tin hat, Jerry’s been known to call too!’
