by Thomas Wood
But still, even while I was there with these detestable rats of society, I did not think of myself as one of them. None of them could even imagine what I had been through, mainly because I refused to tell any of them.
I was petrified of them going to the police and revealing who I really was, forcing me back into the life that I had run so far to avoid.
In reality, I was just as bad as them, abandoning the chaps who were fighting the hardest battles and burying my own head in the sand. In many ways, I was even worse than them. I had made some terrible mistakes that had led me to Telwyn Farm.
I thought about how long I would have continued there, if the police officer had not turned up requesting my presence. I liked to think of myself as a better man than the others at the funk hole, that I would have eventually returned to 249 Squadron and resumed my duties there.
But, deep down, I knew that that wouldn’t have been the case. I would have carried on there until the day that I died, if I had been able.
In many ways, the phone call that Detective Sergeant Calhoun had received had saved my life.
I had never been inside a police station before in my life, and there I found myself, for many hours, sitting at the desk of the local inspector, as he frantically began trying to get through to the man who had summoned me.
“Flying Officer Parker?”
I confirmed my name, with the most crackled voice that I had ever heard, as if it was being played out through a wireless set that had not been tuned correctly.
“My name is Captain Langham. I need you on the very next train to London. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Captain. I understand.”
I waited and waited for the inevitable revelation that I would hereby be placed under arrest and escorted back to London by some of Cornwall’s finest officers. But no such revelation came.
Only an address. And a time. And Flying Officer Michael Hope’s name.
The phone line went dead. I was then handed a train ticket for an hour’s time, alongside a small card, which repeated the address and time.
“I reckon here is as good a place as any,” Mike’s voice spoke, as he interrupted my meanderings. “Johnny?”
My body shuddered as I tried to bring my thoughts out of the past and into the present.
Michel was stood before me, the old royal blue uniform that he had once proudly worn, now replaced by the underwhelming clothes of a French labourer.
His face was darkened further than usual, on account of the lack of moonlight that was able to make its way through the treetop canopy above us. It was what had made it perfect for what we were about to use it for.
Mike ran his hand through his floppy mop, trying to replace a wayward streak of hair that was defying the order to stay flat to his scalp. His hair was always inch-perfect, but not tonight.
It seemed a little more ruffled, rushed even, which was reflected in the slight stubble that had begun to sprout over his chin. But even so, despite his dishevelled appearance, looking more like a vagabond than a soldier, his eyes continued to glisten, alert as ever, and his warm smile was still enough to light the way of my feet.
“Yeah. I should say so.”
“Good. Then let’s get cracking.”
He wasted no time at all in flicking open the catches on the large suitcase, before fumbling around with a key to open the lock. Looking up at me with a mischievous grin, he flicked the case open.
“Here we go then. This is when the real work starts.”
“So up until now has all been a test run?” I scoffed.
“We’ve passed so far. Wouldn’t you say?”
He chuckled away to himself as he observed the equipment that lay before him. Without hesitation, he began pulling and tugging at rolled up pieces of wire, expanding them out full length before even starting to put the stuff together.
I watched him as he plugged in the coil that we had so nearly left behind, as well as the batteries and headset. Finally, he plugged in the Morse key and the antenna, which was wound tightly on a thin piece of card, which he passed to me.
“Here you go. Make yourself useful. Nice and high.”
I took it from him, and began unwinding it, looking for a branch that seemed suitable.
“Oh, but not too high,” he muttered, “Remember that we need to get it down again.”
“Yes, I know,” I said with agitation.
“Good. It’s just I know how terribly awful your arm was back when we played cricket. Don’t want a repeat of any of those misfields now, do we?”
I tried to take some comfort from the fact that he was enjoying himself, but I simply couldn’t. We were about to transmit a radio message back to London, which was, as I reminded Mike, deemed an enemy country. An act which could get us shot if we were to be caught.
“Lighten up, would you?”
I couldn’t help but be as serious as I was, as I was truly petrified of what might happen to us, as I began to see figures moving in the midnight trees. There was no explanation at all as to why we were out here this late at night, apart from the fact that we were enemy agents preparing to contact our headquarters for orders.
Mike, on the other hand, seemed freed by the fact that we were finally getting to put into practice exactly what we had spent months training to do. It just worried me, however, that his joviality could quite easily lead to a slip up in procedure, missing something perhaps that was standard protocol, all because he was too busy having a good time.
As a result, I watched his every move; from moving the tuning dials around to the desired frequency, right up until the point that he was ready to transmit. Fortunately, I could not spot any errors.
His lack of mistakes, however, was not enough to quell the paranoia that was burning within.
“Relax, will you?” he said, as he watched my head spinning on its axis like an owl’s. The more that I looked, the more I managed to convince myself that there was someone out there, watching us, waiting for us to simply switch the set on.
I recalled the night that we had landed, when Suzanne Seguin had approached us out of the darkness and how, by the time that we had spotted her, it was already too late to run and hide.
That was exactly how I was feeling as I watched Mike sitting by the set, finger poised over the Morse key.
“Thirty seconds,” I said, looking down at my wristwatch.
“Alright,” he replied, as he fumbled around searching for the piece of paper that he had prepared his transmission with.
“Right then, Mike. That’s one-thirty exactly.”
“Okay, old fruit. Let’s hope they jolly well answer, eh?”
17
The ‘dits’ and ‘dahs’ of Morse code was something that managed to confuse me no end. I had mastered it eventually, but that was in a training environment, where lives did not necessarily hang in the balance.
But, out there, in a dingy forest in central France, lives most definitely were at stake. Namely, Michael Hope’s and John Parker.
It was why, after a little negotiation, that Mike had taken the reins on the wireless transmitter, as it meant that we had a reasonable chance of deciphering the message and staying alive for as long as possible.
I quickly glanced over Mike’s shoulder as he prepared to send his message. It was a complicated code, worked out using two numbers that we had been given before we had departed. If we had forgotten those, then we wouldn’t have been able to contact London at all. Not without breaking so much cover that even they would have to run for their lives.
Mike started tapping out the first few letters to London. Circuit Fortunae was in full flow.
The wireless operators back in London would then take our coded message, use the same two numbers, only working backwards, to reveal the message that we had sent them.
“That’s the security check done,” Mike said, peeling his headset away from his ear for a moment. “Now for the main show.”
Despite his earlier enthusiasm and ease, it appe
ared that the situation was getting to Mike, a thin bead of sweating just dribbling over the precipice of his nose. His hands too were clammy, as I watched them briefly working their way over the surface of his trousers, trying to rid himself of even the slightest reminder of his nerves.
We had decided on our message earlier on in the day, in a graveyard of all places, as it gave us the best excuse of being somewhere, but also afforded us a little privacy to talk freely.
Due to the urgency with which we would need to send and the length of time that it took to decipher a coded message, we could only really afford to send and receive one message per night. If there was a requirement to talk more at length, we would simply have to do it over several transmissions, which could quite easily take days.
We simply did not want to be stuck in one location, with the set switched on, while the Germans were around. They apparently were in possession of highly-sophisticated range-finding equipment, that meant that they could listen to and locate a sending transmitter within twenty minutes.
Looking at my wristwatch, I could see that we had already spent ten minutes, and we had only just completed the security checks.
“I’m going to go further down the track,” I mumbled into his ear. “Keep a watch.”
“Don’t go too far.”
“Why, will you miss me?”
He chuckled softly, before flapping me away with his hand. Forcing the paranoia and apprehension down to the pit of my stomach seemed like the best way to go; Mike’s perspiration had already seemed to slow.
Crouching low, making sure that my footsteps did not make too much noise or disruption, I made my way down the path that ran about twenty yards or so from our sending location.
There was a slight bank, which I hoisted myself over, which would allow me to look further down the track and spot any unwanted visitors sooner rather than later.
I lay flat on my stomach, allowing the midnight chill to really pierce through into the centre of my bones. Propping myself up on my hands, I felt quite comfortable, not in the conventional sense, but comfortable with how I was.
I was in pain, the cold chill merging well with the scratching arm and attacking thorns, but that suited me just fine. It seemed almost like a punishment to me, one that I deserved and gladly took upon myself.
I had made mistakes in my life, and now I felt like I was repaying that debt.
The paranoia was slowly subsiding, as I stared straight down the track for what felt like hours, not seeing a single living thing, not even some kind of woodland creature, scurrying around, foraging for food.
There was no one coming.
I closed my eyes momentarily, the lover’s embrace of my eyelids returning for a meagre moment.
I thought of my childhood, my home, my family. There they all stood, shoulder to shoulder, staring back at me with the cheesiest grins stretched out across their faces. My father, a Major in the Last War, was a proud man, standing taller than all the rest while somehow being a good six inches shorter than my younger brother.
I looked at each one of them in turn, taking in the features of their faces like I had never actually forgotten them. It was difficult to see them, because of the haze, which had descended around them like a curtain of mystery.
But, at the end of the row, there was one, unmistakable figure. I could not make out the face, nor the features, but I could tell, by the way that she stood, the way that she held herself, that it was my wife.
She stepped forward from the cloud, as a rumbling thunder suddenly began to bellow behind her.
Reaching out to me, I could hear her speaking, but the words were muffled under the sound of the thunder, which sounded more like a motorbike roaring in earnest than a furious Mother Nature.
Then her voice, more decipherable, yet still obscured by the belch of thunder.
“John. Look up, Johnny. Look up!”
Her voice turned into a shriek, as I shocked myself awake, my head bolting upright, just as the motorbike flew past me, a passenger in the sidecar.
The lights blinded me for a moment, as if I was watching some sort of heavenly apparition, my eyes taking a few seconds to adjust before they were assaulted again, but this time by a larger, more formidable light. The lights of a truck.
The squeal of the truck’s brakes told me everything that I needed to know. We were in trouble. Serious trouble.
Every instinct in my body told me to leap up and run, run as far away from these soldiers as I possibly could. But, as I saw more and more of them pour out of the back of the truck, equipped with torches, I knew that my best friend right now was the darkness.
A light beam was flicked on, testing the strength of the torch. I buried my face in a pile of leaves. The light glanced across the ground directly in front of me.
You fool. You fool.
I berated myself over and over again in my head, as I realised that I had allowed my mind to wander off, so far away from this land that I had forgotten the true perils that I was vulnerable to.
You fool.
More than that though, I had allowed myself to let my guard down. I had fallen asleep. I had let Mike down. We were going to be killed.
I looked across at the soldiers, all young men who took their task with little sincerity, which infuriated their commanding officer.
One young boy, holding the torch under his chin, lit up his face in a ghostly way, his face becoming more akin to a gothic statue than a human. A volley of laughter petered out and, as one slapped the torch from the young boy, the light momentarily bounced off the face of another.
A face that I recognised. It was the face of the German soldier that I had made eye contact with when we first arrived in Tours.
My heart was uplifted for a moment, as if there was a vague possibility that, if I was to be caught by that man, then maybe there was a chance that he would let me off. But I knew how futile a thought that was. I was being wishful, childlike.
I needed to change the way I was thinking. I needed to act in the way that I had been taught.
The men milled around for a moment, as the commanding officer stood with the man in the motorcycle sidecar. There was a problem, as the man gesticulated as if something was not working.
Hoping that it was the equipment that they were using to locate Mike and his set, I took my chance. All the lights were off. The men were smoking and chatting. I needed to move now. Fast.
Slowly standing up, I crouched, as if I was simply relieving myself in the undergrowth. But, as soon as I was able to turn, without too much noise, I did, half-sprinting, half-tiptoeing my way back to Mike. It caused an excruciating agony, but I had done the easy bit.
I kept my eyes strained for Mike, as my feet began to bellow in pain to stop. But I kept going. There was a more urgent need right now.
I ran around for what felt like forever, encircling the place that I had been convinced I had left Mike. But he was nowhere to be seen. Mike was gone.
My breathing began to falter, as the mucus at the back of my throat suddenly threatened to turn to bile. I was all alone. I was weapon-less. And there were twenty German soldiers no more than two hundred yards from where I stood.
Still, with no real direction or conviction, I ran around, my senses heightened as I hoped to see the back of Mike’s head as he made his getaway.
Suddenly, I felt my head bash against a tree, a hole immediately opening up allowing blood to gush forth from it. A great weight landed on me, in a perfect rugby tackle that sent me straight to the ground, with my assailant on top of me.
I crashed into the ground with an almighty impact, as I felt the wind knocked out of my lungs and the leaves blown from the trees.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Johnny. I panicked. I’m sorry.”
The weight on my back was instantly lifted and, as I fought with earnest to retrieve the air lost from my lungs, I found myself staring at the darkened, moody features of Mike’s face.
“What’s all that about then? Ru
nning around like a cow at the slaughterhouse.”
“The…track,” I gasped, each syllable a frightful agony to my chest. I struggled to get anything else out, but I only needed one more word to pass over my lips, for him to spring into action. “Germans.”
He stared at me for a few seconds, as if he didn’t quite believe me, which I did not blame him for. I was uncertain that I would even trust myself after what I had just done.
But, soon after, he was bundling the kit up, hauling things around to get them all back in the case. Finally, he unhooked the aerial from the branch that I had strung it up over and, without rolling it back up neatly, bundled it back into the case with the rest of the kit.
By the time that he had finished packing up, I was able to breathe again, albeit with considerable difficulty and pain.
“The message. What did it say?”
“Priorities, Johnny. Come on, we need to get out of here, now.”
“Where are we going to go?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t much care. But come on!”
There were voices now, behind us and, as I looked behind, I could just about make out the first few beams of light just dancing off the trees some way behind us.
Picking up the case, I checked to make sure that we had left nothing incriminating behind us in the leaves.
“Come on then,” I said puffing as I heaved the case over my shoulder. “I’ll carry it first, then it’s your turn. Lead the way.”
Like a pair of naughty schoolboys, we began running away from the scene of the crime, hoping that the bruised lungs would be the only injury that we sustained that night.
18
“Johnny! Let me take over!”
I could not find the energy within myself to argue with him any longer, as my arms burned with such a fierceness that I thought they would give way at any moment. I had carried the case for what felt like days, but had, in fact, been merely an hour.
I dropped the case where I stood, from such a height that Mike thought it pertinent to open the case and double-check that nothing had been smashed.
