Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘. . . and does Grace know that someone’s chasing after her to get her back?’

  ‘Almost certainly. Someone must have tipped her the wink. That’s why she’s on the move all the time.’

  ‘Does she know it’s me?’

  ‘That’s another question. And a particularly stupid one. You said two questions.’ I let that hang, and Cliff eventually said, ‘. . . anyway, I don’t know that. This all seemed so simple when I waved you off. How did I get to be hiding in a bomb hole in Germany explaining myself to you?’

  He sounded tired. Almost as tired as James’s old street map looked. James glanced up, folded it and said, ‘See that spectacularly large heap of masonry over there?’ He gestured vaguely to the north-west. ‘That once could have been a main telephone exchange.’

  The Scottish soldier said, ‘There must be two or three cellar doors around it. There’s folk under there: I’ve seen civilians diving in and out.’

  I borrowed his helmet, and cautiously poked my head over the lip of our crater. No one shot at me. The heap of rubble was about fifty yards away: a mixture of brick and stone the shape of the long barrows you can still see in Wiltshire, but about a hundred times that size. The original building must have been as big as the Bank of England. There was another bomb hole just this side of it. I couldn’t hear any fighting. They must have run out of shells for their Bofors, or were saving them for afters. When I slid down, and gave the Scottie back his helmet, I told James, ‘Fifty-yard sprint, to another crater just alongside it.’

  Cliff had put his pistol away, and had been prodding the ground thoughtfully with a three-foot length of half-inch piping he’d pulled from the crater wall. He said, ‘. . . and if they’ve a Bren zeroed on the space between we won’t get halfway. I have a better idea.’ He had finished tying a grubby white handkerchief at the end of the pipe. Then he stood up, and was immediately head and shoulders up, with his flag hanging limply above him. ‘Let me get halfway before you follow.’

  James wasn’t that stupid. He let him get to the rim of the next bomb hole before he moved us. The Scottie came with us. We crouched, and moved fast. I asked him, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Alan. Sanderson. Gordons.’

  ‘I’m Charlie, and that’s James and Cliff. We don’t belong to anything.’

  James turned for a half-pace, and gave him a nod. A Sunday stroll.

  Our new pal asked, ‘What’s the matter with your army, sir? D’y’ hae no use for ranks?’

  I explained, ‘It’s the work they do. Sometimes things get mixed up. I’m just along for the ride.’

  ‘That’s my first mistake then, sir. I thought that they were looking to you for their orders.’

  ‘We are,’ James told him. ‘Charlie just hasn’t worked that out yet.’

  There was a foot of water in the bottom of the new hole. Cliff was up at the face of the crater. The heap of brick intruded into one side of it: I suppose that the water was burst main pipe – it looked clean enough.

  ‘What I want to know before I get my boots wet,’ James told us, ‘is what that bloody horrible rustling sound is. Sounds like rats.’

  That’s when I noticed it myself. It was the noise that your boots make when you kick your way along gutters full of dried leaves in autumn. I bent to the bricks to listen, and then I heard them. Voices. The murmur of many voices. We needed a breather anyway, and I hadn’t actually worked out what I intended to do – stroll down the cellar steps, and ask if anyone knew Ingrid Knier – always remembering to spell it with a K.

  I asked Cliff, ‘Whose baby did Grace have then? It wasn’t mine, or any of my lot. We came along too late.’

  ‘That leaves an American flyer, and the old man, doesn’t it?’

  ‘And once they worked out Grace might have had her stepfather’s baby, they changed their minds about getting her back? I wonder if they ever played Happy Families when she was a kid?’

  When Cliff eventually responded he asked, ‘What are you thinking now?’

  ‘I was thinking What a cock-up. Sir.’

  Cliff sniffed. So did James. It was probably some public school coded message.

  Alan said, ‘There’s still no shooting,’ and, ‘I can see one of those cellar doors from here. It’s one of those big double wooden ones, like they have in front of the pubs on Rose Street.’

  I said, ‘If we wait until the next time they open it, James and I can drop down there – I’ll need you because of your German, James – Cliff, you could stop at the doors: watch our backs, and Alan you can cover us all from here.’ None of them said anything so I added, lamely, I thought, ‘. . . unless you can think of anything better?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no.’ That was James. I had forgotten that he actually knew why we were here, whereas the others didn’t. ‘Shit or bust, eh?’

  I could have thought of better similes. Cliff asked me, ‘Who do you expect to find down there?’

  ‘Just one of my contacts, sir.’

  He gave an amused little smile, and said, ‘I was right about you, young Charlie. You have promise. Only been out in the field a few weeks and you’re already building your own little network. Nice stuff.’ I suppose that that was better than him knowing the truth.

  You wouldn’t believe the number of wide, worn, red-brick steps that led down from the cellar’s doors to its floor. I nearly choked on the smoke from small fires, candles and oil lamps, and nearly gagged on the smell of unwashed bodies, and what would have been sewage if there had been a connection to a sewer.

  Two teenaged boys had come up to scavenge, and we were up alongside them as they were closing the flat doors. As usual, James was on them before they heard him. Cliff had stayed with them at the top of the steps. I stopped counting the steps at fifty. The murmur of humanity died progressively as more and more of them saw us. I carried my Luger in my right hand. Remember that I’d already seen what their Home Guard could do at that castle in Holland.

  Funnily enough, it didn’t feel dangerous. As we descended James whispered, ‘Remarkable. Bloody remarkable.’

  ‘What is, sir?’

  ‘This place. Enormous. Roman bloody brickwork.’

  ‘Not that again.’

  ‘ ’s true. Water cisterns I think. I saw this in Istanbul before the war. They must have just built the telephone exchange on top of it.’

  It wasn’t a nineteenth-century cellar at any rate. It was a series of huge vaulted brick caverns supported on massive brick pillars as far as the eye could see. The floor, where I could see it, looked dry and sandy. People were gathered in groups. Families? I wondered. Neighbours? Near the bottom of the worn steps an old lady caught at my ankle, and asked in English, ‘All right now, Tommy? War finished?’

  I said, ‘War finished for you, Mother. War nearly finished.’

  To make sure that she understood James repeated me in Kraut, and we stood, still not at floor level with them, and watched his words move from group to group. There were absolutely no soldiers that I could see; just women, children and old folk. My brain registered a couple of children crying, and a woman sobbing close by. James murmured, ‘What next?’

  I nearly replied, Fucked if I know, but retreated a step or two up from him, and looked out over the crowd. They had joined up, silent now, pressing closer to the steps. Cliff’s voice boomed hollowly down to us, ‘OK down there?’

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Still they didn’t say anything. Still a couple of children cried, and still a woman in the darkness sobbed. I used the thirty-foot voice.

  ‘Is Ingrid Knier present? Is Ingrid Knier here? K-N-I-E-R.’ I hated the incongruous rhyme. I wasn’t trying to be funny.

  James repeated it, and then said something else in Kraut. There was an odd experience of watching our words rippling out through the crowd, like a shock wave. Nothing seemed to happen. James murmured again: he said, ‘Long shot anyway, old man,’ and coughed.

  Then I sensed some sort of movement t
hat started at the back of the crowd. It parted as a figure moved forward, closing up again behind it. Bloody silly really, but I found that I was holding my breath.

  The woman who stepped to the front spoke very quietly, but everybody in that place could hear her: one of those pin-drop moments. She didn’t look up. ‘Here is Ingrid Knier,’ she said. ‘I am her.’

  She was small – even smaller than me – but roughly the same age, and dressed in baggy grey overalls, under a soldier’s jacket which had had its insignia and buttons removed. She had long dark blonde hair. I couldn’t say from where I stood whether she was plain or pretty, because a gash across her right cheekbone had been very roughly stitched: it pulled her face out of shape. She tried to smile but couldn’t make it.

  I said, ‘I’m Charlie Bassett. Do you remember me?’ I’m always coming up with original chat-up lines. It sounded ridiculous, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

  ‘Yes. Of course. Pilot Officer Bassett. I did not believe that you would come here.’

  How do you explain yourself to a girl you’ve never met, in front of a crowd of a hundred or more? I felt a lot of tension leaving me. I wondered what I was doing with a gun in my hand. I didn’t mean to sound pompous as I said, ‘I don’t make many promises, Fräulein Knier. When you know me better you’ll know that if I do, I keep them.’ I was particularly pleased to have remembered to say Fräulein.

  James murmured, ‘And if I’m not mistaken it’s your doing just that sort of thing with your Grace last year that got us here in the first place.’

  The woman moved forward, and stood up to the step below me, alongside James. Then she turned outwards, and spoke in German too fast for me to follow. One of the old men clapped, and another couple of the women began to sob. I asked James, ‘What did she say? I couldn’t follow it.’

  ‘She told them that you’d made a promise to her to come and save her from the Russians, and that now you are here with your Army. She told them that they are safe.’

  That’s when the noise came. It was almost as if they all began talking at once. Their voices filled the cavern.

  ‘Fucking hell, James, what have I got us into?’

  The crowd didn’t exactly disperse. It just moved back out into its component parts. I sat down on the step. James sat alongside me. Ingrid sat about two steps down. After a suitable pause James said, ‘I hope that you don’t mind me observing this, but now it seems to be my sort of a problem, rather than your sort of a problem.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Well, these people are starving, aren’t they?’

  ‘Are they?’ It hadn’t occurred to me. I asked the girl, ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘What did you eat?’ That was James.

  ‘Soup. Everyone had a bowl of soup.’

  ‘What was in it?’

  ‘Cabbages: six cabbages and a few potatoes. The boys did well yesterday.’

  ‘Between a hundred people?’

  ‘Two hundred and nine,’ she said. She pronounced the words very precisely. ‘It was two hundred and eight, but a baby was born yesterday. It is not old enough for soup.’

  ‘No,’ said James, and, ‘Six cabbages between two hundred people, Charlie. They had a bowl of flavoured water.’ Then he asked Ingrid, ‘How long have you been down here?’

  ‘Twenty days.’

  Then he said to me, ‘I’ll have to radio in. Get some trucks in here if the Canadians let us.’

  The girl Ingrid had been following the conversation – probably better than me.

  ‘But you will need to go away . . . to bring help?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You cannot use our telephone?’

  ‘Is it still working?’

  ‘Of course. It is the Deutsche Telephone Company.’

  When she led him away I experienced an emotion I hadn’t met properly since my school days: jealousy. I sat and watched the crowd. They watched me back: she’d told them I was their saviour. It was a curiously uncomfortable experience. He returned alone.

  ‘Food and blankets here by close of play today, provided the Canadians agree to stop shooting at us.’

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like a Major again: you didn’t sound like one when we were in the bottom of those bomb holes.’

  ‘I suppose I am really.’

  ‘Then it’s sir, again?’

  ‘For the time being, if you don’t mind, Charlie.’

  ‘My pleasure, sir.’ As long as he didn’t try to pull rank on me over the girl, that was all right by me.

  ‘Would you mind cutting up the stairs to Cliff, and getting him down here?’

  ‘No problem, sir. What shall I tell him?’

  ‘Tell him that there’s a live telephone switchboard down here, one of the last that’s left in Germany . . . and he can listen in to some of the calls that are still being made between the remains of Jerry’s armies and their commanders, in what’s left of Germany. Still time to win him a medal for initiative. Your girl Ingrid is going to be busy.’

  I had nothing to do. My brief experience of being in charge hadn’t prepared me for relinquishing it again. The girl Ingrid, who I had never truly expected to meet, threaded her way back between the groups. She sat on a step beside me and took my hand. It was the sort of gesture I remembered of my sister. Did that show on my face? Eventually she said, ‘I did not say Thank you. Thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You came.’

  ‘I explained that. It felt like a promise. I keep promises. Don’t Germans ever keep promises?’ Even for me, given her circumstances, that was a bit bloody brutal.

  ‘Germans do; men don’t.’

  Me put in my place, wasn’t it? I wanted to change tack.

  ‘I expected I might find you, and maybe a few others hiding down here . . .’

  ‘. . . and instead you have a multitude to feed.’ She sounded pleased.

  ‘The Major says that the loaves and fishes will be here before nightfall.’

  ‘I didn’t know that you were a priest.’

  ‘I am not. I’m just an ordinary man in a priest’s jacket.’

  She didn’t say anything for a time, but didn’t let go of my hand either. When she did it felt cramped, and I rubbed and squeezed my fingers together. She spoke very quietly as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear,

  ‘Sorry, Charlie Bassett. I thought that if I let go, you might disappear. I am afraid that I will awake, and not know what else to do except wait for the bombers again.’ Then she said something in German that I failed to understand.

  I asked, ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said that your Major was a very good man.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘He values you also.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You are wrong.’

  I asked her, ‘Is this our first argument?’

  She didn’t understand the joke but laughed at it anyway.

  She asked, ‘When will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tomorrow probably. The Major will want to stay until his food and blankets are here. Tomorrow the fighting will have finally stopped. I have to visit someone in a hospital in the Hanseatic Hotel, in the docks, do you know it?’

  ‘No. I know where it is. You will find many people there also. Their telephone link failed.’

  ‘Of course. It was not Deutsche Telephone Company.’

  ‘Now you are making sport of me.’ Her face set like concrete.

  ‘Now I am making sport of you.’

  ‘So, I will go.’ She moved to get up. I pulled her gently down again by the arm.

  ‘No. Please stay.’

  She looked directly ahead, and smiled a little smile: as if she knew a secret.

  ‘I was making sport of you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but I wasn’t sure.’

  Again there was a pause, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable. Ingrid said, ‘Th
e other officer in the RAF uniform . . .?’

  ‘Mr Clifford. Yes?’

  ‘Yes . . . he asked your Major who I was. Your Major said that I was Charlie’s bint. Does that mean anything?’

  ‘Now you are making sport of me again.’

  ‘No. Tell me.’

  ‘The Major was making a mistake. It is an old Arabic word. Charlie’s bint, means Charlie’s woman. He made a mistake.’

  When she spoke again her voice was small, and so quiet that it could have been the voice of a child. I had to lean close to her to catch the words. She said, ‘No. He did not make a mistake.’

  Charlie’s little heart stopped.

  We had visitors. I scrambled up the steps with James close on my heels. Alan’s voice had floated down with, ‘Soldiers, sir. Those Canadians, I think.’

  James just carried on past me. ‘Don’t move, Charlie, I’ll handle this one.’

  The South African, Major Ira Hendriks, stood in the light. His immaculate uniform was a little muddied about the edges. We could see that he had a pair of white undies tied to the end of his leather-covered cane. Either they were some girl’s, or he was a very peculiar man indeed. At about fifteen feet James said, ‘Close enough, Mr Hendriks,’ and, ‘I thought you were some kind of a policeman.’

  ‘I am. But to do my sort of policing you need all the medical stuff first, so I’m also a qualified doctor. I have another doctor, and two Corpsmen with me. Can they come down too?’

  ‘What about the bloody Canadians?’

  ‘That’s all calmed down a bit. They’ve pulled back to the docks . . . apparently a barracks full of Jerries has surrendered to them there, so they have their hands full anyway.’

  ‘How did you know we were here?’ James was obviously pushing it a bit.

  ‘Apparently your ranker phoned my ranker. We were at the hospital. He said that you were stuck out here with two hundred refugees, and needed help. Can my . . .?’

  ‘ ’course they can, old chap. Pleased to see you again.’ He stuck out his hand for the ritual. Explanation accepted. Pax.