Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  When I stood outside on the steps, with Les, the Major and the Scot, Alan, around me, Les popped the question. He asked me, ‘What next?’

  From near by came the sound of weird music. It was something between the sound of a barrel organ and the Northumbrian pipes. Ingrid stood at the foot of the steps wearing a thick topcoat that someone had given her. She was talking with Cliff, who had popped up from somewhere, and they were standing alongside Chasseur. There was a familiar small boy sitting in the back of it, alongside the big radio: he wore a camel-coloured coat with a dark brown velvet collar. Someone had tied a label to his sleeve as if he was a parcel. He looked cold and tired. Cliff was as interested in my reply as anyone. He cocked his head on one side, and looked up at me. I found that my voice wasn’t shaking, nor betraying any emotion.

  I said, ‘That should be the bloody finish of it, of course. I’m not sure. This is where the rest of you get off, if you like.’

  Ingrid pointed to the boy, and said, ‘This is Dieter. You will remember him. It was confirmed that all of his relatives are dead, so he was sent to you.’

  ‘That was quick. Does he know all that?’

  ‘Of course. He believes that you are to be his new father. Did you tell him that, Charlie?’

  ‘I may have done.’

  She didn’t reproach me. Not even with her eyes.

  Les asked, ‘What did you mean, not sure?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I’m ready to finish this until I’ve actually seen Grace.’

  Cliff looked away.

  Les said, ‘We’ll need a car then, won’t we?’ just as James sat down very suddenly on the steps.

  James sat down so quickly that for a moment I thought he’d been shot again. It was like the air being let out of a balloon. He put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. That bloody music was on us, and James was crying. There was no grief or noise or anything embarrassing like that. The tears just ran down his cheeks. Poor old sod. He said, ‘That’s a bloody hurdy-gurdy. We’ve played them across Europe for four hundred years or more.’

  It was always the damned history that got to him.

  The sky was blue; pulverized brick danced in red columns in the air like dust devils. A line of people picked their way across our front, across the rubble and around the bomb craters. The civilian who led them was incongruously tall and thin. His legs moved with an angular deftness; like spider’s legs. He was a walking scarecrow with some sort of dark visor around his forehead and over his eyes, and a dirty tattered trench coat, bleached white by sun and age. It can’t have kept back an icy wind. The scarecrow carried a long wooden box around his neck on a heavy leather strap, and wound a handle on its side. It leaked the weird music I had heard. Partially sighted, I’d guess, he stumbled occasionally, but otherwise moved slowly and deliberately, almost as if he was feeling his way with his feet. The figure behind him had one hand on the musician’s shoulder, and the person behind him had a hand on his shoulder, and so on. They all had dark glasses, or patches or dirty bandages on their eyes. Except one close to the tail. He had two old healed pits where eyes once rested. What it reminded me of was photographs I had seen of gas-blinded soldiers in the First World War. James was looking far further back than that. I squatted down alongside him, adjusting my balance for the child’s weight on my shoulder.

  ‘What’s the matter, James? What is it?’

  What he said was, ‘Can’t you see it, Charlie? We’ve bombed the whole fucking continent back into the Dark Ages.’ He looked incredibly tired, and for once I thought about him, You shouldn’t be here: you’re too old for this. Les had known that all the time, of course.

  ‘War, famine and pestilence,’ I told him. ‘At least you’re doing something about the last two.’

  My bones creaked as I stood up. The hurdy-gurdy man had stopped hurdy-gurdying, and shuffled on with his blind platoon. Maybe the fourth in line had heard my voice. I don’t think so, because we were too far away. Anyway, he turned his face in our direction. He had a heavy bandage over most of his face, which covered his eyes. He wore a black eyepatch over that. He was a tall man in olive drab coveralls. He sported a German officer’s cap, and a short leather jacket, cut not unlike mine. One of its sleeves was empty and pinned up, and it was blackened by burning or oil on one side. He walked with a marked limp that I didn’t remember. He cannot have seen us: I don’t believe that there was anything left to see with. I wouldn’t have minded, but he was grinning as if he had put one over on us. They were marching in the direction that the dead woman’s arm had pointed: Berlin. Faced front again, and limped on. I thought that it was Albie, and I never saw him again. You can read his name on the huge wall of the dead that looks out over the US Forces cemetery at Madingley, but I don’t think that he died in Germany. I think that he made it.

  The kid in the jeep must have been fiddling with the radio. A kid’s life is a perpetual fight against boredom. Music exploded; shockingly real. Les said, ‘I know that. It’s coming from the ARC Grand Central Club in Paris. It’s that black bloke.’

  That was when I heard Sidney Bechet for the first time. The double-time march he played was ‘Maryland, My Maryland’. I know that because I heard him play it live in 1952. What happened next was that the line of blind men picked up the rhythm. First they picked up the step of the march, and their shoulders went back; then they picked up the rhythm of the jazz, and they began to strut and weave a little. They moved away from us like a conga line, kicking up red dust, and disturbing the scent of putrescence that speared head-level across the rubble plain. It wasn’t the country of the blind we were in; it was the country of the mad. I bent down to James and told him, ‘It’s OK: you can come out now, Major, they’ve gone: you’re safe. We’re back in the 1940s.’

  He kept his head down. He wouldn’t even look at me. No one else found it funny either. Black mark, Charlie.

  It was Les again. He said, again, ‘We’ll need a car. Can we take Kate?’

  ‘What about James?’ I asked him.

  It was Les who squatted down by him this time. He put a hand on James’s shoulder. James twitched, but didn’t look up, or say anything. The tears had stopped.

  ‘The Major’s fucked out. Aren’t you, guv?’ Les said. ‘He’s been fucked for days. He shouldn’t have been sent out here again. Mr Clifford can arrange for him to be looked after, can’t you, sir?’

  Cliff nodded, but before he could reply I added, ‘And Ingrid, and the boy,’ I told them. ‘You’ll have to look out for them until I get back.’

  Cliff smiled the tiger’s smile.

  ‘Any reason why I should, old son?’

  ‘So that you can justify staying on in Germany for a few more months. It’s where you want to be: Tommo always said that this is where it was all going to happen after the war.’

  ‘I should imagine he was talking about organized criminality, old boy . . .’

  ‘Isn’t that what you do, Cliff, only on a larger scale?’

  He dropped the insolent smile then, shrugged, pouted, but then switched it back on. He looked like a little boy caught stealing apples. His smile could be quite dazzling.

  ‘OK. Why not?’

  *

  Later. Ingrid asked me, ‘You have sold me to him? Is that what has happened?’

  ‘No; I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘You have given me to him then?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t do that either. I haven’t given you to anyone.’

  ‘Do you want me to sleep with him?’

  ‘No. I don’t want you to sleep with anyone. Anyone except me. I want you to wait for me. Mr Clifford will look after you until I come back. You will look after the boy.’

  ‘Can I trust Mr Clifford?’

  ‘For the small things, no: for the large things, yes. He is a good man who pretends to himself to be a bad man.’

  ‘Is wanting to sleep with me a big thing?’

  ‘No. That will be a small thing. Keep your door locked at night.’


  ‘Now you are making sport of me again. I have no door.’

  ‘Yes, I am making sport of you again.’

  ‘How long before you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know: months.’

  ‘When will you leave?’

  ‘Soon.’

  We were drinking wine from small mugs. The bottle had come from Kate’s cavernous backside. It was a thick, heavy red that made me sleepy. We sat on stools either side of a barrel in a small vaulted alcove in the cellar. The old ladies had prepared it for us, and had screened it with a hanging threadbare blanket: an illusion of privacy. Dieter snored in a nest of coats against the wall. He had refused to take his own off. The luggage label on his sleeve bore my name and service number – nothing else. On the other side of the blanket screen the baby was awake in a crib made from an ammunition box. I could hear the blonde woman, Gretchen, murmuring to him. Eventually Ingrid asked me, ‘Charlie, when are you going to have me?’

  ‘I thought about now would be all right. Do you have a place?’

  Her smile danced in the candlelight. She had a dimple on her chin. I noticed it for the first time.

  ‘Yes. I can find a place.’

  ‘Will the boy be all right?’

  ‘He will be fine. Both your boys will be fine. Now they have a brave father and a clever mother. They will sleep.’

  So did we.

  We said our goodbyes in the cellar. The boy hung his arms around my legs and would not let go. He yelled, and I could not understand him. Ingrid and I knelt on either side of him, and put our arms around him.

  ‘When I return,’ I told them, ‘I shall never leave you again.’ It was an exceptionally stupid thing to say. She repeated it in German so that Dieter understood. In her voice the words sounded soft and loving. The yelling dampened to a teasing grizzle, and then stopped with a last sob. Before I stood up I realized that something odd had happened in my brain. I wasn’t thinking Kraut or Jerry; I was thinking German. It’s what happens when wars finish, and you start sleeping with the enemy.

  *

  The sky was blue, with puffy white clouds, as I strolled over to the smashed-up houses where we had left Kate. The stove had gone from the Scotsman’s bomb crater. I hadn’t seen him for a few days either: he had left as abruptly as he appeared. Moving on into Germany behind his battalion, I guessed: but never too close. He’d catch up with them just in time for the victory parade in Berlin.

  James stood beside Les beside Kate. I hadn’t seen much of him either. His flesh, where I could see it – his hands and face – looked yellow and bloodless. We shook hands with an odd formality. His hand felt icy cold.

  ‘Silly, isn’t it?’ he told me. ‘Do you think I’ve caught something?’

  ‘Demob fever, I hope, sir. Did you hear that Hitler is dead? It was on the radio yesterday.’

  ‘Déjà ruddy vu. I seem to have heard it before, but just can’t seem to recall where. What are your plans?’

  ‘Les wants to go back to Paris, and leave Grace’s boy with Maggs. He says he trusts her; then we’re heading south. Grace is travelling with an Italian who comes from near Siena: I’ll start there.’

  ‘Clifford has arranged a plane for me from Paris. Mind if I cadge a lift?’

  ‘Of course not, sir.’

  ‘Of course not, James.’

  ‘If you insist.’

  ‘I do. It’s too late to pull rank on you now. You’re leaving your bint with Cliff: do you trust him?’

  ‘I think I do. I think that it’ll be all right.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He trusted me with something recently, when he didn’t have to. It’s just a feeling.’

  We pulled out onto the street past half a dozen fivetonners. A Staff Sergeant left off shouting at his drivers to snap James a smart salute. James nodded pleasantly from his place on the back seat, as if he was royalty. It was the third or fourth supply convoy since our arrival. When I glanced back a little later he was already sleeping.

  Les told me, ‘I went back to the forward depot yesterday; that’s funny, isn’t it? I wanted some spares.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘I met that snapper of yours: the American woman with the cameras.’

  ‘Lee Miller. What was she doing?’

  ‘Same as me. Spares and petrol. She had enough booze to stop the Russian Army.’

  ‘Good old Lee.’

  ‘She was a bit pissed, and looked shagged out. A bit like the Major here. She was driving a ruddy great staff car about ten sizes too big for her.’

  ‘She got a Chevy then?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  After a longish silence he asked me, ‘Where we going then?’

  ‘Paris first. I wonder how Maggs will cope with the baby.’ It was in its ammo box alongside James England. It seemed to sleep a lot, thank God.

  Epilogue

  I finished writing this book in the same place I finished my first one: sitting in the garden, with a rug across my shoulders to cut away the north breeze that curls over the forest and hill behind the house in September. I’ve told you before that I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve also told you that I’ve seen men walking who I knew to be dead. I don’t do anything with these two opinions; I just let them snarl at each other across my brain from time to time. It won’t be long before I find out for certain, I guess. The old lady who brings me my morning dram sees them more frequently than I do. Which is why I am surprised that she hasn’t seen my most recent visitor. Today she walked right past her.

  A big old plane tree sits at the far edge of the garden, in front of the house. Beyond it the hillside drops out of sight into the blues and greys of the Cromarty Firth. My visitor is sitting on the ground under the tree, looking out to sea. Her arms are wrapped around her knees, and she is wearing the same clothes I once saw her in: frayed fatigue pants, and a skimpy khaki vest that clings to her body. The other thing she is wearing is that smile that’s maybe a smile, and maybe not. She doesn’t appear to feel the cold. I suppose that means that she’s gone, at last. It won’t be long before we’re all gone.

  I don’t care as much about that as I used to.

  Springtime in Germany: a recipe, and a little history

  Charlie Bassett’s journey through northern Europe in 1945 has been a much more personal trip than any of those I flew with him from Bourn Airfield in Tuesday’s Child in 1944 – I knew some of the men who actually did it, you see. There actually was a car named Kate, and they took her to Germany.

  The airfield at Tempsford, which was the trigger of his headlong rush across the Low Countries, was once referred to by Winston Churchill as the most secret place in England. He was sandbagging, of course; there were far more secret locations than that – perhaps Tempsford was just the most secret place he felt he could trust us with. The function of the two squadrons that used it was flying personnel and supplies to agents and Resistance fighters operating in Axis-held territories. The aircraft they used were frequently unarmed, and the work was dangerous. It is to the RAF’s great credit that it made room there for a few pilots whose personal beliefs conflicted with killing other human beings, but who still wanted to serve. Tempsford still has its pub, but another two that the aircrews used are now private houses, and the Hall is a corporate HQ. The village’s best-kept secret is the small medieval manor farmhouse on the south side of its main street – it looks as if it hasn’t changed in five hundred years. Everton village, just east of the airfield, has the Thornton Arms, the pub that Charlie knew; it still serves one of the best pints of bitter in England. A time traveller can lunch there, then walk almost from its front door, down the wooded footpath, to the skeleton of the airfield. There you will find sections of runway and perimeter track, a parachute store camouflaged as a barn, and a clump of trees, each planted and labelled in memory of an agent, or an aircrew, who didn’t return. Waterloo Farm still endures, and the farm cottage at which Charlie was billeted can be seen from the track that spears past
it.

  Charlie set off for France from Croydon Aerodrome, which was the original London Airport – and a far more civilized terminal than the municipal toilet we built at Heathrow to replace it. Before the war one could see over the airport perimeter from the top deck of a passing bus . . . and that’s how my mother and father saw a new squadron of Spitfires arrive in August 1939, and realized that another world war was imminent. The old man joined up a couple of weeks later. The prewar airport terminal has been sensitively conserved, and converted for commercial use. The visiting public are welcomed, and there is usually a display of artefacts and memorabilia demonstrating its history. A society has been formed to preserve and promote its heritage.

  Sadly, the last time I looked you could no longer get a pint at the Propeller. The watering place of choice for many of the defenders of London in 1940 is boarded up and falling to pieces. Shame on the owners and the council; that should never be allowed to happen to a decent pub.

  Charlie recalls the old prewar Imperial Airways biplane airliners that dominated the air route between Croydon and the Continent. Like most large aircraft in private hands, they were pressed into RAF service in 1939. One, named Scylla, ended up at Drem Airfield in East Lothian, Scotland – just twenty minutes’ drive from where I write this. It was blown over and wrecked by one of our northern storms in 1940, and the fuselage, with its galley and first-class seats, turned into a dispersal hut for the pilots of 605 Squadron who were defending Edinburgh. They cut a glade into the woods close to their Spitfires, and hoisted it up on bricks. Who knows, perhaps a schoolboy poking through the thickets and woods around the old airfield will yet come upon its mouldering frame.