Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  The black cop sighed, as if depressed. When he asked, ‘Would you mind telling me what this is all about, before you kill me?’ he had a melodious, cultured voice. James smiled. It was a smile that veiled something else.

  ‘It would be helpful if you first placed your truncheon on the ground, and buttoned down the flap on your holster. But please move very slowly.’

  The cop moved so slowly, and in jerks, that he was taking the piss. He wasn’t scared.

  ‘That’s nice,’ James told him. ‘We can all relax now. I’m afraid that when we paid a visit, your man there made the mistake of spitting tobacco all over our car. It disturbed my driver.’

  ‘Is that serious, sir?’

  ‘It could be. I don’t always have him fully under control.’

  ‘That’s the problem with Bassett. He’s the man about to clean off your car with his tongue.’

  ‘Bassett?’

  ‘Yes sir. PFC Bassett. Passed out bottom of his class at Fort Benning. Now passed out in the gutter by the looks of it.’

  ‘He could be one of my relations,’ I told him. ‘I’m a Bassett too.’

  He gave me a shrewd look.

  ‘I hopes not. One is more than enough. So what was your problem, Mr Bassett?’

  ‘I need to meet with a woman named Rea. She asked me to look her up over here.’

  OK. So it wasn’t quite true. It was just the best I could think up at the time.

  ‘Miss Emily?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘Emily’s up at the Front for a couple of days. How come you didn’t know that?’

  ‘It wasn’t that kind of appointment. I last saw her in the ARC Club in Bedford. She said to call on her if ever I crash-landed in Paris. It’s become important because she’s also a friend of a friend of mine: someone who just happens to be important to someone important, and who may have run away to join the Red Cross somewhere in Europe. Am I explaining this badly?’

  The coloured said, ‘I’ve heard better, but I think I’m following you.’

  ‘I’ve been sent over to find a Miss Grace Baker, and Emily Rea is a person over here she might turn to.’

  The Negro stared off into middle distance, and then asked Major England, ‘Can I make a call? There’s a phone back in there. I could make a few checks.’

  ‘If you left your gunbelt at this table you could,’ James agreed. The man draped his white belt and holster across the back of his chair. He grinned us a set of teeth even whiter. James asked as an afterthought, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Simmer, that is Simms, McKechnie. My father came from Scotland. Who’s the dame you’re looking for again?’

  ‘Baker. Grace Baker.’ I told him. ‘She was a delivery pilot. English girl. She’s about twenty-eight. Dark-haired and pretty. I went to Scotland once,’ I added. ‘Glasgow. My family had been evacuated up there.’

  ‘You see any black folks?’

  ‘Some merchant seamen. That was all.’

  *

  The telephone in the bar made that god-awful sound that French telephones still do, and the man with the corkscrew moustaches picked it up, and called out to us.

  ‘It’s for you,’ I told the Negro.

  ‘I know that. Je parley. I was waiting for the man with the gun to say I could go fer it.’

  ‘What gun?’ James grinned.

  When McKechnie came back to us he said, ‘We have a Lieutenant Kilduff. People call him Binkie; I don’t know why. He asks if you can come back tomorrow after lunch.’

  The Negro coughed, looked uncomfortable, and looked away. James said, ‘What’s he do, this Binkie?’

  He looked England in the eyes; I’ll give him that. He replied neutrally, ‘Same sort of thing you do, sir, I’d guess. Only in my army we call it liaison.’ Then he asked James, ‘You would be Major James England, and his driver Private Finnigan, sir?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know that?’

  ‘We got a signal that you were out. There were photographs with it: I should have paid more attention to them. Lieutenant Kilduff thinks that it’s very amusing, us sitting here and waiting for you to give us permission to go.’

  James positively beamed. I didn’t ever like him in that mood.

  ‘Have another drink.’

  He said that to include everyone. That included Sweeny Todd and his demon moustaches, and even PFC Bassett sitting on the kerb cleaning the car door. I remember that it was several glasses later that McKechnie told us that he was a medical student before he was called up – but the Army had made him a policeman. The Army had no prejudice against black doctors. They had no black doctors either, because they thought that their smashed-up white soldiers might not like that. Wrong again. I noticed that the pads of his hands were as pink as mine. My namesake finished with the car door. The only time he took his eyes off Les was when he waved away a glass I offered him. There was a smear of dirt on one cheek, and he dabbed at the blood on his chin with a grubby khaki handkerchief.

  Eight

  Later, back in the car, Les asked, ‘Do you trust the black bastard?’

  Major England came back with, ‘Not wholly. But not because he’s black, because he’s cleverer than me.’

  I asked them, ‘Aren’t I holding you back? Aren’t you supposed to be going somewhere?’

  England told me, ‘No. We’re still ahead of schedule. We came back early to facilitate your little trip: Cliff arranged it.’

  ‘That’s the Cliff newly revealed to be a spy?’

  ‘A facilitator of spies. That’s the one. The Front’s static at the moment anyway; we don’t need to move until it does. Then we need to be up there with it. Monty’s stuck, Simp’s stuck, Horrocks is stuck, Brad’s stuck, they’re all stuck. Useless shower of bastards. Who’s not stuck, Les?’

  ‘The Russian General Zhukov. He’s not stuck, sir: it’s positively running out of him.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘I have my sources,’ Les said huffily.

  James then summed up for me. ‘So we’re in no hurry at present.’

  ‘What happens if you fall behind schedule?’

  ‘Ditch you, and steal all your money I should think.’

  Then they had this conversation as if I wasn’t there.

  ‘Shall we show the boy the Elephant bet?’

  ‘Yes, Les. Why not? As good a way to spend the afternoon as any; then go and see Mrs Maggs. She might put us up – should have thought of her before.’

  ‘Pushing your luck there, sir, I should have thought.’

  ‘We’ve been pushing our luck for months.’

  ‘About the Elephant, sir. Are you on for five bob again this time?’

  ‘Not this time, Les; half a crown. Half a crown says they’re gone.’

  ‘Half a crown says they ain’t.’ Then, ‘You’re a lucky little bugger,’ Les told me. ‘The Major and me don’t share the Elephant bet with everyone, you know.’ They both appeared to find this excruciatingly funny.

  I had noticed the whip aerial sticking up over the near-side rear wing before. Now was the time to show me what it did, or ‘earn your corn,’ as the Major put it.

  He and I swapped places. I was put in the back seats, and given a small leather suitcase. When I opened it I found a small transmitter/receiver.

  ‘German job,’ Les told me. ‘Smashing, isn’t it? Bosch and Schmelling. Its transmit is Morse only, but you can tune it to receive anything: it has a very nice little speaker. You can even hear the Brylcreem boys dying over Germany on it, if you want to.’

  I didn’t rise to the bait. In truth it was the neatest job I’d ever laid eyes on; and I’m a professional. I wanted it immediately. It connected to two small glass-cased batteries in a battered old doctor’s bag.

  ‘We borrowed it from a Jerry agent who parachuted on to the Isle of Wight by mistake.’ That was James again. ‘The Home Guard got him. I am afraid that they were rather robust with him; hence the stains inside the lid.’

&nbs
p; ‘It’s smaller than anything we do,’ I said, ‘and its build quality is amazing. What do you use it for? I mean what kind of message? Clear or code?’

  ‘Encrypted. One-time code pads. Nothing special. Old Raffles here drives me about a bit. I make a note of how many people I can see, and how much food’s lying about – usually sod-all. Then I do my sums, adding in soldiery and prisoners. Encrypt it, and tap out my shopping list back to base. They send it forward on five-tonners the next day. Couldn’t be simpler.’

  ‘That’s what Cliff told me. He also said that whenever it went wrong you got shot at.’

  ‘Cliff’s an old woman.’

  ‘What do you want me to do with it, James?’

  ‘Can you check that it’s OK? Then tune it to some decent station, and get us some music. It blows the knickers off the Froggie as we cruise past her with music pumping away like some portable orchestra.’

  The aerial lead plugged into a neat jack plug above the rear seats. It only took a minute to warm up, and then we were in business. I got them an American Forces station from Spa, in Belgium, in the middle of a Tommy Dorsey programme. I hummed along with ‘After You’ve Gone’, until the Major turned and frowned at me.

  Les drove us onto the Bois de Boulogne and somewhere beyond. Somewhere around the Bois we overtook a pretty woman cycling at the head of a short column of Boy Scouts. Her skirts billowed up as her knees pumped, and seeing us looking at her legs she waved and laughed. The boys laughed and waved as well. I had that thought again: This is what peace must be like. I turned to watch them out of the oval back window, but they were already stopping, and turning off the cobbled road.

  I met the Elephant at the other end of the Bois: a few miles on. You’ve heard that joke – when is a something not a something? When is an Elephant not an Elephant? In this case, when it’s a fucking great tank: the biggest you’ve ever seen. It was on the grass verge facing Paris, and had a strip of its metal track stretched out behind it. Grass was growing through that, so it must have been there some time. Its huge, long gun barrel pointed vaguely upwards in a sad show of defiance. Les drove past, pulled up and parked. I was still looking at the beast. I said, ‘Strewth!’

  ‘A few Tommies have said that. Big bastard isn’t it?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We told you: Jerry calls it the Elephant, an’ it’s not really a tank – it’s a self-propelled gun: the biggest fucker in the world. It doesn’t have a turret: just has that bleeding great gun built into the rear superstructure pointing forwards. To aim the gun proper you have to aim the vehicle, although the gun has a bit of lateral tracking, and it can elevate.’

  ‘It’s twice as big as anything we’ve got.’

  ‘Not quite. But it’s big enough. The Major and I got behind one by mistake on the last trip. We hid in the field next to it until they decided to retreat. That gun is so powerful that every time they fired it, the fucking thing leaped back about ten feet. That’s more than fifty tons of tank going backwards. Come an’ ’ave a butcher’s.’

  Les walked out on the smooth cobbles, and not on the grass verge. I reckoned he knew what he was doing, and copied him. Major England brought up the rear. Up close the tank was blackened by burning, but you could see that the circular door in its back plate was still closed, and in places some of its original ochre paint was blistered but still showing. There was already rust at the welded edges of its massive armour plate. As I walked alongside it I thought, ‘What the fuck does it take to stop one of these?’ and must have spoken aloud, because England said, ‘A gang of fourteen-year-old French boys with wine bottles full of petrol, apparently.’

  He pointed out a mass of twisted metal around the front driving sprocket. ‘It’s so bloody big you can’t see what’s going on alongside, unless you’re hanging out of the top waiting to get shot. That’s what you call an original design flaw. Someone told me that the kids just walked alongside, fed a short length of iron girder between the track and the drive sprocket, and waited for it to throw its track.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘They scrambled on top, and waited for Jerry to open the hatches. As soon as he did they tossed home-made firebombs inside – that’s soap which has been boiled up and liquefied, added to petrol in a one to two solution, if you’re interested – slammed the lids, and sat on them till Jerry stopped screaming.’

  That explained one of the smells I’d picked up: gasoline. I wasn’t as familiar with the other.

  ‘That smell . . .’ I said.

  ‘Old dead things,’ said Les. ‘I didn’t think you’d have met that before, and you’re going to have to get used to it where you’re going. Look . . .’ He was already up on its scuttle, and reached out a hand to pull me up after him. I stood with him looking down into two small open hatches that once covered a driver and a machine-gunner. The inside of the vehicle was coated with a greasy black substance that smelled of petrol and burnt pork fat. The mainly black things sitting on the seats inside smelled of putrefaction: something rich and dusty that caught at the back of your throat. ‘It makes some folk throw up,’ Les told me.

  ‘I think I can understand that. Flying sometimes does that to me these days.’

  ‘. . . and I can understand that,’ Les said. ‘. . . It ain’t natural.’

  I was fascinated despite myself. It felt oddly intrusive to be looking down on the corpses. The crown of both the skulls gleamed white as if polished, but elsewhere they were things of darkness: flesh and clothing, black and one substance. I tell a lie. The uniform was peeled back off the gunner’s shoulder. There was black stuff which could have been flesh or muscle, and then that sudden gleam of white again . . . ribs.

  Les said, ‘When we first came by, they were untouched. Like little black jockeys sitting in here. Curled up like babies, and strangely shiny, an’ the smell was worse. Real tart. I guess the rats are getting into them now. I can see grooves in the skulls, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re gnaw marks. I’ve seen that in Italy too.’

  ‘What was all that about half a crown, that you and the Major were arguing about on the way here?’

  ‘He always bets me that the Frogs will have taken the bodies away and buried them. I always bet him that they won’t have done. Three–nil to me so far.’

  Back in the car I switched on the radio again as Les turned us around on the cobbles without touching the verges. I tuned into the same US station at Spa. I heard the last few notes of ‘Weary Blues’, and when they started up again it was that fellow Sinatra singing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’. I knew immediately that, whenever I heard the song again, what I would be seeing in my head would be the inside of that damned tank and its foetal corpses. My dad brought memories like that back from the first lot: he used to call it going down nightmare alley. I knew that road now, and wondered where he was, and if he’d passed this way. Les drove slowly, as if he was watching for something, which, of course, he was. He stopped the car close to a jumbled heap of bicycles, which was a few yards off the road, and in the trees. He looked across at England, and said, ‘I’m not sure that the area’s been properly cleared yet. Would you mind if I strolled over and warned them, Guv’nor?’

  ‘No. Take Charlie with you, and show him the walk.’

  ‘What’s the walk?’ I asked him as we stood out on the road. We had to wait to cross because a column of light stuff – ugly little scout cars, and bren gun carriers – went bouncing past. It seemed to take forever.

  ‘Watch me,’ Les said, ‘an’ I’ll show you. It’s the way you walk through a minefield, if you haven’t a choice. Just let me go about six feet ahead of you, watch where I walk, and place your feet where I do. The walk’ll come naturally.’

  We set off across the trampled grass the Scouts had left behind them. The ground sloped down, and through a screen of trees. Les had a slightly longer and slower pace than mine, so I found copying him I had a loping movement. It was strange, but quickly comfortable. As we b
roke through the trees I could see the ground still sloped away, to a small pond in a natural basin, surrounded by thick grass . . . maybe fifty yards away from us. On the other side of it the ground climbed away again, and into thick woods. The Scouts were skylarking. Les didn’t go any further: he sat down in the lee of the tree ring. I dropped alongside him, sweating slightly. Some of the boys had stripped off, and were swimming. I supposed that the boys who’d killed the Germans in the Elephant can’t have been much older than this. The woman must have been swimming. She lay face-down looking away from us. Her bottom was very white, like the skulls of dead German soldiers.

  ‘It’s their Boy Scout Field Studies badge,’ I told him. ‘The French have a different approach to biology. It’s why they end up with less queers than us.’

  As we stood up to walk away one of the boys waved lazily to us. Why the hell should they care?

  I asked Les, ‘There never were any mines, were there?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. One time there were. It was one of the first areas they cleaned up. So many kids around here, see. A sapper got chopped down there. Blown to mincemeat.’

  ‘So why did we go through all that stuff about the walk?’

  ‘So you learned it, sir: I’m not going to be around forever, you know. Now you know how to walk through a minefield. Sometimes when you see a file of soldiers crossing a minefield from the distance, all doing the walk set out by the guy in front, it can look quite comical; like some old dance, with Death leading the way. Then the guy in front runs out of luck, and it doesn’t.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘And remember that more men get maimed by mines than killed by them; so if you find yourself in a minefield, don’t panic. The odds are favourable – if you can get along without a foot that is.’

  ‘I’ll . . .’

  ‘. . . I know: you’ll remember that too.’

  By then we were back at the Humber. The Major looked up from his little notebook and asked us, ‘Anything doing?’

  ‘No,’ Les told him. ‘Just those Scouts.’

  James had retuned the radio, and I could hear Tommy Handley from London.