In the morning Les produced enough bacon sarnies for the five of us. The makings had been in the boot of the Humber, scattered among spare parts. That accounted for the vague whiff of petrol as I bit into one. The boy smiled shyly at me. I gave him a bobby-dazzler in return. When he took my hand he said nothing except, ‘Monsieur,’ but made it plain that he wanted to take me somewhere.
In the full light I could see that the building was timber, framed in narrow red bricks: probably medieval. It had steep roofs and tall gables. On one gable end was a faded painted advertisement for Citroën cars, which included a legionnaire and a distant tricolore. It was even more distant now, because at some time since it was painted it had received a burst of small-arms gunfire. There was a large, partly cared for garden behind the house, with unfamiliar vegetables in hopeful rows . . . and an unkempt apple orchard, in a corner of which was an unmistakable something the shape of an adult’s grave.
The boy said nothing. He stood in front of the mound with his hands crossed; his head bent, praying. I copied him. Then he took my hand again, and led me back inside. Les, Jimmy and the woman were washing the sarnies down with clear, home-made cider – the family’s only contribution to the meal. They’d saved a share of it for me. As we left Les gave her some dollars, a small tin of coffee beans, a pair of stockings, and a small raincoat that would fit the boy. These were parting gifts. It was as he passed her the last item that she started to cry; silently. The boy put his arm around her waist and leaned in closer.
England muttered, ‘I hate this bloody war. Absolutely.’
After an hour the gloom had lifted. Les whistled ‘Lili Marleen’ again, and drove with his elbow out of the car window. I worked through my logic for them.
‘The boy . . .’
‘Mathieu: Matt . . .’ Les told me.
‘. . . Matt. He was scared that I was going to attack the old lady. That means he’s probably seen someone else attack a lady. His mother perhaps. That’s her grave in the orchard.’
England gave a wry little chuckle. Les told me, ‘No. That’s all right as far as it goes, but almost completely bloody wrong. You would never make a good tec, would you?’
‘Where did I go wrong?’
‘Almost everywhere.’
‘I’ll tell him.’ James England took over. He was James or Jimmy, again.
‘The Jerry took Demain’s son, Matt’s father, away to work in 1941. He didn’t come back. Someone told her that he was some sort of trustee at the camp at Natzweiler: there are mainly women there, so your average Frenchman will probably feel quite at home. After that, nothing. Now old Matt’s not too bright . . .’
‘I noticed that.’
‘About six months later he saw what he thought was a man attacking his mother in the orchard. Only the chappy wasn’t attacking her. They were having the horizontal meeting of parts.’
‘I see.’
‘I think that maybe you do, this time.’
‘What happened?’
‘Matt brained him. Gave him one over the napper with a ruddy great sledgehammer they kept for killing the pig. Every orchard had its own pig before the war.’
‘Was it some Jerry?’
‘Good Lord, no! It was his father’s brother. His uncle. The old lady’s second son. They buried him in the orchard to save fuss, and soon after that his mother left them.’
‘How did you find all this out, if you don’t speak the language?’
‘We know someone who knows someone who does. It’s how this business works.’
‘What business?’
‘Spying, of course. What else did you think Cliff does?’
Oh, I see, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
‘That reminds me.’ It was Les this time. ‘I need to stop for a slash. Anyone else?’
We stopped overnight at another grass airfield: Beauvais. Goering had watched the Battle of Britain from there, until he got bored with not winning. A squadron of Typhoons had arrived before us, and there seemed to be a lot of grumbling about nothing going on. There were no permanent messing facilities, but they offered us a big tent with a kerosene heater, Tilley lights, camp beds and blankets. There were eateries in the village. I looked over England’s shoulder at the map, and couldn’t help myself.
‘Beauvais. Look, Croydon was almost as close to Paris as this!’
‘Paris tomorrow, Charlie. Les knows what he’s doing. We piddle around these bloody side roads because the main roads have either been blown up by your lot, or are blocked to buggery by priority traffic. Trust him.’
Les chose where we ate. From the outside it was the least promising eating house in the town. There were chairs and tables on the paving outside some of the others, with drinkers and diners spilling out on them. Mainly servicemen accompanied by young women. I say mainly, because I saw one large elderly officer in German field grey, with all the silver buttons, dining at a small round table with a pretty woman in her thirties. The officer sat very erectly to table. A neatly dressed lad of about five stood patiently alongside the woman.
I asked, ‘Wait a mo’ – did you see that?’
‘Naw,’ Les said. ‘I’m off duty.’
‘It was a bloody Hun, sitting there.’
‘I’ve seen him before,’ Jimmy told us. ‘There must be a story behind that.’
‘Didn’t either of you ask?’
‘None of our business, old boy.’ He sniffed. He made it plain that it was none of mine either.
It turned out that Les was looking for a cafe where we could eat inside, and as far from the front window as possible. He found a place at the end of a terrace of more or less intact houses. Inside it, the tables were clad in red and white checked oilcloth, and the room was warm. It was dominated by a montage of three large national flags on one wall: American, British and French. The tricolore looked a bit tired and faded, but the other Allied colours were fresh and clean. From the nail marks in the wall behind you could see that the display had recently displaced a predecessor.
Les got us a table by the far wall, near the kitchen door. He sat with his back to the wall, whilst England and I sat at the ends of the small table on either side of him. They asked me to negotiate the eatings, and Les passed me a roll of dollars which made the fat Frog who owned the place’s eyes water. I gave him five eventually. Les said, ‘Jimmy wants to know what we’re going to have.’
‘Rabbit. Stewed with carrots and onions. It’s almost impossible to eat French without onions.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never been here.’
‘I read it in a book. It must be true.’
‘What else?’
‘Blackcurrant puddings. The blackcurrants will be last year’s leavings: pickled.’
‘Didn’t you ask him for a bottle?’
‘I didn’t pay him for the wine. I said that we’d taste it first.’
‘Oh, my lovely boy,’ Les told us. ‘I’m going to like travelling with you.’
I asked Les about sitting so far from the front of the building.
‘The Frogs aren’t as friendly as they’re cracked up to be. Some of the Maquis commandos want us out of their country even before all of the Jerries are gone. There’ve been drive-by shoot-ups at cafes with Allied soldiers in – just to encourage us, if you like. Then there are numerous Frog Pétainists who feel betrayed, and do the same. This is far from a liberated country, Charlie, despite what the nobs say. I like to sit where I can see what’s what.’
‘Wild Bill Hickok used to do that. I saw it in a film. The only time he didn’t sit with his back to the wall someone shot him.’
‘He was bloody right the first time then, wasn’t he?’
The Major regretfully licked his dessert spoon into submission, put it down, and informed us, ‘Nobody called him Wild Bill Hickok when he was alive; that was the invention of a journalist. His peers called him Duck Bill Hickok – because he had an enormous hooter. Not many people know that.’
‘They say that guys
with big noses have big pricks. I wonder if women know that?’ That was Les. I couldn’t resist the opening he’d left me; perhaps I wasn’t supposed to.
‘Don’t worry. You’ve a nice, neat, wee nose, Les.’
‘Our boy is getting bold, isn’t he?’ he told our friend Jimmy.
It was that sort of evening.
The heater must have run out sometime in the night. When I awoke my joints were stiff to breaking point, and my blankets hard with frost.
We joined an all-ranks queue for breakfast, which was bangers and mash – although the bangers were only soya links. The tea was good: brown as a Jamaican, and stiff with condensed milk. We visited the Beauvais petrol dump on the way out. Les did the deal with the Redcap guarding the stuff, and I gave him back his roll of dollars to finish it. We toured away with a full tank, two full jerrycans in the boot, and one lashed to each running board. That would turn us into a fireball if anyone shot at us, or get us to the border if need be, Les told us. I asked the silly one.
‘Which border?’
‘Germany, if necessary.’
‘And you’re ditching me in Paris?’
‘We’ll see. The Major’s decided to go wherever you want to go; so long as you’re travelling in the same direction as us.’
I looked away from him, and out of the window. The sun was shining, and Les had got quite a lick on, so the French countryside was dashing past. So England had become the Major again; there was a behavioural code at work here, which I couldn’t read. When I turned to look over my shoulder at the Major he was smiling a secret smile, and scribbling magic formulae into his small notebook again. He looked like a bloody alchemist. He was also whistling a tune under his breath so that you could only just hear it: I’ll swear it was ‘The Galloping Major’.
Six
Why did they call Paris an open city? Because it wasn’t; not if you were looking for somewhere to kip for the night it wasn’t: it was as closed up tight as a nun’s harmonium. Everyone seemed to have a girl and somewhere to stay, except us. England had a prewar Michelin street map. When he started to unfold it and fill the back of the car Les said, ‘Put the bloody thing away, Major. You can’t read it, and thanks to the war half the places marked on it aren’t there any more.’
I asked him, ‘Are you blaming that on my pals too, or is it down to Jerry?’ I noticed I had started referring to the Germans as Jerry, the way the brown jobs did. The odd thing was that there was a sort of grudging respect in the way that they said it. Anyway, Les told me, ‘Neither, I think. Once Jerry began to pull out of Paris, the Resistance came over all manly and onto the streets. They opened up on anything that moved. They used big stuff too: that’s why some of their own houses are missing. Funny, we’d been parachuting bombs and guns in to them for years, and they waits till after Jerry’s gone to use them. Then they uses them on each other. Remarkable how brave folk are when Jerry’s got his back to you. I’ve seen that before. That’s when the generals and politicians suddenly arrive, and start saying brave things about brave new worlds.’
‘How long did the shooting go on for?’
‘About four days proper. Me and Jimmy arrived on day one. We didn’t fancy all the bullets flying around, so we found a widow with a little house over in the Tivoli. We had a jeep then, so I hid it in her back garden under a tarp. I slept for three days. When we came out again, De Gaulle and Leclerc’s heroes were facing down the Maquis in the Place dew Concorde: each claiming they’d finished the war and beaten les Boches on their own – that’s what they call Jerry. Les Boches.’
‘I knew that.’
‘Not many people do,’ the Major told us, still wrestling with his map.
‘Why does he sometimes say that?’ I asked Les.
‘It’s something he does. Don’t let it worry you. He gets a few words fixed into his head, and worries them to death.’
‘On the squadron ours was “Just like that”, like that comic you told me about.’
‘I like that,’ England said. ‘I really do. I’ll remember that.’
‘Now look what you done,’ Les told me.
The Major put the map away, and Les drove us to three places they had stayed at before. No go. There were liberators everywhere: it cost you three dollars to sleep in someone’s garden. They’d even taken over a couple of the grand old churches for billets.
James England said, ‘No bloody good, Les. What d’y’reckon? Push on, and see if we can get something further out?’
‘How about a drink?’
Les stopped the car alongside an American Snowdrop who looked grateful that we’d distracted him from his duel with the traffic.
‘Aw, fuckit,’ he told us. ‘They can drive on whichever side they wants. I’m up to here with them.’ He held his white night-stick up to chin level.
‘We were looking for a drink,’ I told him.
‘Come far?’
‘From 1942.’
The Yank grinned.
‘Two blocks up, take a left. One block on, take a right. You’re on a wide avenue with trees, running parallel to this. So far?’
‘Yes, so far.’
‘You’ll come to a small square at the junction of three roads. There’s this guy there who sells vino from a sort of pushcart.’
There were two clumps of chairs and tables, under trees coming into early leaf, and a man with a small handcart – like an ice-cream cart – was parked between them, dispensing tencent glasses of wine from big, greasy jars. We parked up at the empty bunch of seats. There seemed to be a party from a heavily laden jeep going on at the other. American brown jobs and a couple of noisy civilians. The old man who sold the drink had moustaches which drooped to the floor and stringy yellow hair. He sold us a plain white wine, cooled by sitting the glass carboy it came in on a block of ice. He thanked me gravely for liberating him. I told him to thank General De Gaulle, and he told me that his grandfather’s oldest pig smelled better than De Gaulle. I held my hands up and surrendered to him with a grin. I wasn’t arguing with him, I said. He said, ‘Bon,’ but after he returned my smile, looked down into his cart. I followed his glance and found myself looking at a revolver. Lying just to hand.
‘I protect my customers,’ he told me, and shrugged.
‘What’s all the Froggie talk about then?’ Les asked me.
‘He wanted to know whether we wanted white or red wine. I told him white.’
‘I thought I could hear you talking about De Gaulle?’
‘He named one of his wines after him. I chose the other.’
‘Just so long as he keeps his mitt away from his gun.’
‘You saw that, did you?’
‘I looked for it. You and I are going to have to have a little chat about self-preservation.’
‘Yes, Les.’ I said it meekly.
‘. . . and stop taking the piss.’
‘Yes, Les.’ I said it even more meekly.
England laughed. He had a big deep laugh.
Halfway through the second glass I had that nervy feeling that I was being watched. Without thinking I said, ‘Someone’s watching me.’
Les said, ‘Get ready to jump, then,’ and casually moved his Sten onto his lap, as if to make himself more comfortable. Then I looked up at the other party. A woman in an olive drab boiler suit was staring at me from twenty-five feet away, a big wicked smile on her face. I knew her short, dark blonde hair. I knew without looking that she had a flash saying War Correspondent sewn sloppily on a place above her left tit, and that she had crooked teeth. She waved. Les tensed.
‘OK chaps,’ I told them. ‘Panic over. I know her: she’s an American journalist I met in England. Sorry about that.’
‘Never say you’re sorry,’ Les told me. ‘It’s a sign of weakness.’ He relaxed.
‘That’s good enough to be in a film one day,’ I told him.
‘I thought so, too,’ the Major said. ‘I’m going to write it into my notebook.’
I waved back, and she sauntered over
, rolling her hips like a Clydesdale.
I stood up to shake hands, but she gave a little laugh, and kissed me on both cheeks, Froggie fashion. I probably blushed. She said, ‘Hi, Charlie. Taking some rays?’
‘Rays?’
‘Sitting in the sunshine, dummy. How are you? Stopped flying yet?’
‘Temporarily.’ Then I told my mates, ‘This is Lee Miller. She’s an American photographer and war correspondent. She took my photograph mixed in with US aircrew, in October, I think.’ Then I told her, ‘I was in a bit of a crash. Got myself singed. They want my feet to stay on the ground for the time being.’
‘Best place for them, soldier, unless they’re kicking up in the air. What are you doing here?’
‘Looking for somewhere to stay, and looking for Grace Baker – you remember her?’
‘Sure. She was through here a few weeks ago. She was travelling with Albie the tank man. Remember him?’
‘Going where?’
‘I didn’t ask. She had some orphan kid with her, and she was wet-nursing it: ugh!’
‘How old was the kid?’
‘Few weeks, I guess. What’s the matter? She steal it?’
‘No, Lee. Nothing like that. Her family are worried about her, and I’ve been given time off to find her and take her home. Want a drink?’
‘You got absinthe?’
‘Where did you get absinthe?’
That was James England getting into the act.
‘One of my friends over there.’ She nodded back to the other table. ‘He makes it from paintbrush cleaner.’
‘He drink it himself, Miss?’ Les asked her.
Lee laughed. Her laugh was an awful lot like the Major’s, I realized.
‘No. He sticks to wine. He gives the absinthe to women, and undresses them once they’re out of it. He’s a sneaky sort until you get to know him.’
‘I’d like to meet him, Miss.’
‘Come on over. Who are you two?’
‘Ham ’n’ Eggs.’ That was the Major again. He meant to be funny. He actually sounded deranged. She trailed us over to her pals as if we were the train of her wedding dress. We picked up three more glasses of the white stuff en route. I suppose I felt like a tourist before I really knew what one was. Up close I didn’t realize that you could load that much luggage on a jeep without bursting its tyres. It had the word Hussar painted on the bottom frame of its windscreen.
Charlie's War Page 8
