Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  I emptied my stone jug. The publican must have had half an eye on us all the time, because as I replaced it on the table he looked towards the bar and waved his tablecloth. The woman who served the next two pots was clean and wholesome-looking, if not pretty. Her thick hair was a dull, burnished blonde colour. She reminded me of France, and the type of woman James went for. Then she smiled, and her missing teeth made me think of France again, and the family from Laon.

  I asked Les, ‘OK, so we’re up at the Front, doing what you came out here to do. What happens next?’

  Les shook his head as if I was a pupil who could never remember his lesson.

  ‘The same as we’ve been doing all the way through Froggie Land, Cloggie Land and Belgium. Clocking intelligence and signalling it back: don’t tell me you never noticed?’

  ‘I noticed, but I thought you were practising for now,’ I told him lamely. ‘What happens next? Tonight?’

  ‘Major’ll fix us up with digs, or we’ll sleep in the car. I think it’s been harder for the Major to fix up the three of us, than when we were just the two; although he ain’t said anything. He’ll sit in the back of Kate, code up his notes, and tap them out back to base. Then we’ll eat if we can find someone with something to sell.’

  ‘And if we can’t there’s always spam and beans in Kate’s boot?’

  ‘There you are, Charlie. You were watching all the time.’ I was back to Charlie again. Les must have been relaxing. God was in his Heaven, and all was well with our twenty square feet of the world.

  James worked his magic. We finished the day with a thin mutton stew, and mountains of powdery potato. You had to ask yourself how the Highland Division had managed to miss that, when they swept through a couple of days earlier. It made you wonder what else they might have missed. I know that it made Les tense.

  We billeted in a detached wooden barn behind the bar. The yard between was rough-cobbled from coaching days. All of the accommodation was on the first floor. The ground floor was open, as if the building was on stilts. There was a neatly stacked log lump, a few roughly squared bales of straw, and room beside them for Kate if her blunt radiator stuck out. After we had eaten I noticed that Les went outside to her to run his maintenance checks. I took him out a piece of black bread and lard, pressed on us as a treat. He was working by the light of a small shuttered oil lamp sitting on Kate’s bonnet.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. Twitchy.’

  ‘Any idea why?’

  ‘If I had, I’d tell you and the Major, and we’d be out of ’ere, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll leave you to it.’

  He had her plugs out, and was washing each one carefully in a small tin of petrol.

  ‘No. Don’t mind me. I get like this sometimes when we’re near the Front. I got this feeling for weaknesses in the line; I don’t know how.’

  ‘You feel that now?’

  ‘Yeah, Charlie, and I’ve felt it every time Jerry has come back at us and we’ve been sent scarpering.’

  I sat alongside him on Kate’s running board, filled and lit my pipe. If I didn’t get some tobacco soon I would be suffering.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Make sure the Major knows I’m serious – sometimes he treats me just like I’m an old woman – and have everything you don’t need for the night stowed in Kate. Just in case we leave in a hurry. That OK?’

  ‘You’re in charge.’ I punched him lightly on the arm. The petrol slopped on his trousers. ‘Sorry.’

  It was dark by seven. The inn didn’t have any other customers: probably because we were there. James helped the owners with the washing up, and gave the old man a paper that made him Chief of Police, or Master of the Municipal Sewer or something. There were a lot of bows and smiles after that, and the deal was sealed with a glass of syrupy, clear spirit that tasted of raspberries. I wasn’t that keen: it stuck to my teeth. James had met it before. I noticed that he tossed it right to the back of his mouth. Then he wiped his lips on the back of his hand. The hotelier poured us another round of the thick stuff in little glasses, but made it plain that that was the last. He wiped a fat finger around the neck of the bottle to catch a drop, and put it in his mouth. We were sitting around a small fire on smaller three-legged stools in the small bar. Our landlady’s cheeks were rosy: that must have been the heat. James was showing off for her. Were these people the enemy? It seemed ridiculous, but a week ago they had been, and if God’s Grey Jerries came back, they would be again. Did Winston and Adolf ever sit with their feet to the fire, and wonder how it had ever come to this?

  The crude sleeping accommodation above the first floor of the barn was a single room, entered through a hole in the floor from a wide wooden stair. Long ago the animal feed would have been stored there. Our hosts had built a simple raised sleeping platform across about a third of it, and a stack of thin pallet mattresses stood in a corner. A heavy rope hung along one wooden wall; over it about twenty things like grubby eiderdowns were draped. There was a wash hand basin with a rust stain in one corner, and a toilet partitioned off with plywood in the other.

  The woman showed us around the facilities. She made up one bed by pulling one of the straw mattresses onto another and dropping a couple of the quilts on them. James tried his luck by pushing her face-first onto them, rolling her over and lifting her skirts. He can’t have believed his luck when her legs opened so easily. I thought they looked plump and white and welcoming. Then she rolled over again, and gave him a haymaker around the side of his head that laid him on the floor alongside her. Then she offered him a big hand on the end of an arm the size of a ham, to haul him back onto his feet. Definitely nothing frying tonight.

  When he asked, ‘No hard feelings, old girl?’ she plainly didn’t understand, but laughed, so that seemed to be all right.

  I asked her, ‘What’s this for?’ and when she looked blank, used my hand to indicate the room we were in: you could have slept about thirty in it.

  ‘Jugend,’ was all that she would tell us. Then in accented English, ‘Like boys. Boy Scouts.’

  Les smiled, and nodded a thank you at her, but what he actually said, still smiling, was, ‘Boy Scouts my arse! She’s talking about the Hitler Youth I think.’

  It didn’t stop us sleeping.

  Until about six, I suppose.

  Twenty-Two

  I was sleeping nearest the large hole in the floor through which the steps climbed, so I was the first that the big woman stumbled over. As she fell on me – which was like being knelt on by a horse – my arms went naturally to her waist: but this was no romantic assignation. She cursed, which I failed to understand, and pushing me away whispered hoarsely, ‘Schnell, schnell,’ a couple of times. Then, summoning up most of her English vocabulary, blurted, ‘The Boche are coming. Schnell!’

  Part of me was thinking, This is ridiculous, you are the Boche! Another part was scrambling out from under her as quickly as I could manage it. That wasn’t so easy. Les and the Major were quicker. They crowded the room’s one small window that looked to the east. I joined them. The sky was dark grey, and shot with paler grey, and pale yellow streaks. There was just enough light to see the dark shapes, maybe about a mile away, moving in the fields – and a couple of small lights on the road. I learned quickly that there was no chance of beating Les and the Major when they were in running-away mode. No contest. James actually managed to pause as he passed the woman, to plant a peck on her cheek. His turn of speed impressed me. She was still smiling as I tumbled past her.

  I’ve explained that Kate was more or less at the foot of the stairs? For once we operated more or less as a practised team. James went straight into the back of Kate, Les behind the wheel, whilst I got to the front and swung the handle. The engine caught about one and a half turns on, and I scrambled in alongside Les as she moved out of the barn.

  I suppose that there was always the temptation to race off west as fast as we bloody well could,
but Les had done this before remember? He kept his head. Damned good job: I was gibbering by then. Kate had a fairly quiet motor: Les put this down to a big silencer, which he called a muffler. He nosed us slowly back up the alley alongside the inn, and did a forty-five-degree turn to port – that meant we were moving away from the men in grey who wanted their country back. He left the lights off, and moved us as fast as he dared without revving the old dear. That just left the lights on the road to worry about, and he reckoned that we could outrun them if the push came to a shove.

  There’s that Blake poem, isn’t there? ‘Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night’? It was the wrong bloody day to forget it. As we came gently up to the section of housing into which we had seen the Tiger tank backed the day before, two small lights came on; narrow yellow bars across the road. From somewhere behind them came the ghastly clattering sound of a big diesel trying to fire up, and the gun barrel we had seen before almost stooped to the road began jerkily to lift itself. It was like watching a dead dinosaur come back to life. I began to dribble with fear as the bastard started to lurch spasmodically out of the front living room in which it had been parked.

  James hissed, ‘Right.’

  Between two houses on the right was another alleyway. The question was, could we get into it before the bastard spotted us? The answer turned out to be not quite. The Tiger was turning to face us as we turned off the main road away from it. I reached for Les’s Sten, which was on the floor between us. He had time to put his hand over it, and snarl, ‘Don’t be so wet!’

  All James said was, ‘Quickly. Forget the rest of them.’

  I thought that we’d made it in time. The beast was three-quarters on to us as we turned into the black alley. Les knew differently. He growled, ‘Fuck it!’ and put his foot down.

  This was an unmade road, and we were on a deeply rutted surface between house and garden walls. Kate bounced. I hit my head on her ceiling. If the big T was after us, and got into the alley before we could get out of the other end, then it was all over: even I was educated enough in the ways of artillery to work that one out. Les had to slow down for a turn at the end of it. We were at a T junction facing open fields, with a rough road running around the village stretching to the west and east. East was no good to us; it was full of unfriendly Jerries with guns. Les turned left and west. As he did that I looked over my shoulder and back up the alley. It was lit up with a bright flash that illuminated the house walls, and instantaneously the field beside us erupted. Then we were round. Les screamed; it was noises, not words. My teeth were chattering. I could hear James heavy-breathing like a man having sex. Les said, ‘Fuck it!’ again.

  That was because the problem was the same. If the Tiger emerged from the alley and caught us on the open road, or in the fields less than half a mile from him, then we’d had it. It all depended on us being able to turn left again, back up into the village, before the Tiger came out of the lane we’d just exited. In theory we could travel faster, but not necessarily over a road as terrible as this. Les put Kate’s lights on: time for subterfuge was over, and besides, this next alley narrowed as we climbed it. I picked up Les’s Sten. This time he didn’t stop me. Les was scraping Kate’s wings on the house walls: she bounced like Tigger. I couldn’t stop looking backwards for the great tank. We must have been three-quarters of the way up the alley before I saw him, and I thought it was all over.

  But he made a mistake: it was a tight turn, and he hadn’t made allowances for his gun barrel sticking out ahead of him, which didn’t make the corner. He stuffed it into the garden wall. He had to back up, and swing again. He fired his main gun at us again as we turned out into the main street. The shell passed a foot behind the back window and at right angles to us, shrieking like an express train. I don’t know where it went. You have no idea how quickly the mind works in situations like that. As soon as we turned back onto the main street I knew that we would make it: the Tiger couldn’t possibly get all the way up that narrowing alley. Then there was one of those Hey, that’s not fair, moments. There was some fairly slow popping, which I didn’t at first recognize as the firing of a medium machine gun, and Kate shuddered. James said, ‘Ow!’ or made some noise like that, Les just gave a sharp intake of breath, and I felt a sudden dull pain in my upper right arm as the windscreen disintegrated away from us, and the window alongside me exploded.

  Les said it for the third time, ‘Oh, fuck it!’

  I leaned out of the car window, looked back and saw a motorcycle combination about twenty yards behind us. It had yellow lights dancing over the sidecar. That was the bastard in there shooting at us. I gave him back a full mag of the Sten held loose with my southpaw, and screamed aloud when he suddenly turned left at speed, and hit a house front head-on. The best sound in the world is the smack of motorcycle and flesh against good old German stone.

  Then it was just Kate’s noise, and the wind racing past my open window. It was getting light. How long had all that taken? Not much longer than it takes to write. I put the Sten on the floor. My whole body was shaking. That’s when I saw for the first time that Les hadn’t any trousers or boots on. Behind me James gave a quiet chuckle. Les soon joined him. Then I did, too.

  Eventually Les asked, ‘Major? He get you?’

  ‘Just a graze, I think, along my thigh. It’s a bit sticky, but there’s nothing broken and nothing pumping. What about you?’

  ‘In the arse again: I’m sitting in blood. Then it hit the seat frame before it went out through the glass. I think it got Charlie on the way.’

  I realized that my upper right arm was numb. When I touched it I found a tear in my jacket, and there was some squishy stuff between my jacket and my shirt sleeve. James asked, ‘How far back to Löningen?’

  Les said, ‘Thirty miles odd. With a bit of luck we’ll run into friends before then. Some Canadians were moving out behind us. They could have a field medical team with them.’

  ‘I can smell petrol,’ James said. ‘I don’t know if they got the main tank or one of the jerrycans in the boot.’

  ‘I’m not bloody well stopping to find out, sir,’ Les told him. ‘Not until there’s ten miles between us, anyway.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have dreamed of asking you, old chap. Stop at the first thing that looks like a nurse. I think we need a maintenance team. Do you really think that one bullet got all three of us?’

  ‘Pretty certain, sir. You all right, Charlie? You’re pretty quiet.’

  ‘Yeah. Fine. My arm feels numb. Will it hurt later?’

  ‘Ask me again in an hour, sir. Try to stay awake.’

  Les was doing a job on us, calling us both by the regulation sir. Don’t let that kid you: he was the one in charge now. James said, ‘I’m still worried about that bullet. Do you think they have new homing bullets, and that one went for each of us in turn, one after the other?’

  It was such a stupid idea that we didn’t answer him, so he mused, ‘. . . bloody magic bullet. I’d write that down if I could find my book, and Kate stopped leaping about.’

  Les sounded almost fatherly.

  ‘You write it down later, sir,’ he told him.

  The first thing that looked like a nurse was a nurse. We stopped at a checkpoint wooden barrier part of the way back to Löningen. We were pushed off the road to let a column of tanks go forward. A lovely khaki Bedford ambulance was on the other side of the road. A driver and a couple of nurses were enjoying fags alongside it. I got out of Kate, and stood upright by leaning against her bonnet. They laughed at Les, and pointed, when he climbed out, although men without trousers can’t have been that unfamiliar to them. Then, when he turned away from them to help James out of the back, they must have seen the black blood caked on his legs and buttocks. That was when they stopped laughing, and ran between the tanks to help us. I bent at the waist to lay my head on Kate’s warm bonnet, and went to sleep.

  The next morning I found a heavy machine-gun bullet in Kate, in the wheel well where my feet had been.
It was an odd shape: it must have been tumbling and running out of steam as it struck me, because although it tore a gap in my leather jacket, it failed to break my skin. The squishiness I felt the night before was the pulpy bruise on my upper arm. It hurt like hell. They stitched up a small hole in Les’s backside, and found him some trousers. They were bandsmen’s pants in navy blue, with a red stripe down each outside seam. James wasn’t pleased I found the bullet: it undermined the magic bullet story – the one he was already telling anyone who asked. If there was a bullet in the car, what took Kate’s windscreen out?

  Later Les said to me, ‘That bullet was tumbling when it reached you? Yeah?’

  ‘Yes, Les.’

  ‘Then it could have clipped you, blown out the screen without enough energy left to actually pierce it?’

  ‘So it goes through Kate’s tank, along the Major’s leg, through your bum, bounces off the seat frame, bounces off my arm and tears my jacket, hits the windscreen, breaks it, hits the door window, breaks it, and then bounces back into the car? Is that it?’

  ‘I think so, Charlie.’

  ‘Is this important?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s one of the stories you tell afterwards. Know what I mean?’

  I didn’t. This was still my first war. I hadn’t had an afterwards. I said, ‘Yes,’ because a future was not something I wanted to talk about.

  James hobbled up on a light cane stick he’d borrowed from someone, milking it for all he was worth. He said, ‘I heard that the British tank squadron that passed through us last night got a bit of a doing in a valley the other side of Korne. I’ve got a feeling I know that valley. The Yanks are coming through in half an hour. Your pal Albie could be with them.’

  He was. Well, most of him was, anyway.

  It was a nasty flat-looking tank. All tanks are nasty tanks. As soon as someone opens a door you get that smell from them like a partly blocked latrine. The name Marlene had been painted out, and replaced with the words past caring and a sloppy exclamation mark. A forward hatch swung open, and thumped back against the armoured decking. It sounded like the tolling of a large church bell. A head popped out of the hatch, like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. The head was small, had brush-cut black hair, olive skin and slitty little eyes. I’m sure that we mustn’t call them slitty little eyes these days.