Civvy Street

by Fiona Field

  She opened the door of her fridge and contemplated the huge chicken she’d bought to feed her house guests for lunch the next day. If she cooked it as planned, she thought, there wasn’t going to be much chance of her and the two kids getting through that in a couple of sittings. The leftovers would be epic and she and the children would be eating chicken for a week. While chicken was nice, she also liked a varied diet. Maybe she ought to joint it and think of different things to do with the bird; she’d checked the freezer and there wasn’t a hope in hell of cramming it in so she’d have to do something with it before the ‘use by’ date. In the meantime, she needed to get on with tonight’s supper for her and Luke – fish pie.

  She heard Luke coming down the stairs – she needed to crack on if they were going to eat before eight. She pulled out the bag of smoked haddock and another one of cod, shut the fridge door and turned.

  ‘Hi, Luke, I was just about to start supper. Fancy a glass of something?’

  ‘Only if you’re going to join me.’

  ‘Hell, yes. And thanks for reading Nate his bedtime story. You are a wonder.’

  ‘But it was great to revisit The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s an age since I read it.’

  ‘Not much call for it at Sandhurst.’

  Luke laughed. ‘Not a lot. The required reading was rather more serious.’

  ‘Beer?’

  He nodded. Maddy reopened the fridge and passed Luke a can of Spitfire. He popped the tab.

  ‘There’s a glass in the cupboard behind you. And if you could pass me a wine glass...’

  Luke got out the glasses and passed one to Maddy. He went over to the kitchen window and peered out at the darkness, past the drops of rain running down the glass.

  ‘Poor old Sam and Seb – out in this.’

  ‘I know, vile weather.’ Maddy poured herself a glass of white from the fridge. ‘It’s been a rotten autumn.’

  Luke took a sip of beer. ‘We had a big exercise in Germany in September, out in the field, and it wasn’t too bad. Can’t think why your CO chose November for an exercise.’

  Maddy started to peel potatoes. ‘Because he can.’

  Luke picked up on her tone of voice and looked at her. ‘You don’t like him.’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘And his wife is a piece of work too.’

  ‘Sam’s not a fan of them, either.’

  Maddy told Luke what Seb had told her in his earlier phone call.

  ‘That’s not good,’ said Luke.

  Maddy shrugged and cut the peeled potatoes into chunks before dropping them into a pan of water. ‘But there’s nothing we can do. Let’s not worry about it.’ But she did worry about it. Jack – and to a slightly lesser degree, Camilla – seemed to be getting increasingly dictatorial in the way they treated 1 Herts; like it was their own fiefdom and all the officers and men were their serfs. Maddy worried that someone was going to lash out and she just hoped to God it wasn’t Seb. But she was sure someone would get pushed too far and probably in the not too distant future.

  *

  Susie paced up and down the sitting room. It was getting late and the girls weren’t back. OK, it was only half six but it was pitch dark, it was still raining, and, when all was said and done, they were only twelve. She was tempted to go out with a torch and call for them, but would it do any good? Maybe confiscating their phones hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

  She consoled herself with the knowledge that they would be together so if something bad had befallen one of them the other would have come to get help. Realistically, she told herself, they were probably safe and warm and with friends and putting off coming home because of the trouble they were likely to be in. They were not, Susie thought firmly, under a lorry on the main road at the bottom of the hill nor had they been abducted by white slavers. And where was Mike? What was happening with him? God, today was turning out to be a nightmare.

  She heard the click of a key in the lock. Mike, or the girls? The door opened and there were the twins. She told herself not to raise her voice, to remain calm. She would not have a row with them, she would not lose her temper but, dear God, it was going to be tough.

  ‘Good, you’re back in time for supper.’

  The twins exchanged a look and then giggled.

  ‘This is no laughing matter,’ said Susie, struggling to maintain her calm.

  ‘No, Mum,’ said Katie, her mouth twitching.

  ‘We won’t wait for your father. I have no idea when he’s going to be home.’

  At this perfectly ordinary sentence both girls burst into laughter again.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ Susie demanded.

  But her daughters just laughed all the more.

  Susie wanted to shake them but she didn’t have the energy to have a full scale row with them, not without Mike’s back-up. She stamped off into the kitchen and fetched the casserole out of the oven and put it on the table.

  ‘Come and eat,’ she told the twins as she fetched a bowl of mash to accompany it.

  ‘Not hungry,’ said Ella.

  Susie turned. ‘But you didn’t have lunch.’

  ‘So?’ said Katie with a shrug.

  ‘So you can have supper. You must eat something.’

  The two girls slouched over to the table and sat down while Susie began to dish up. Silence reigned while she dolloped beef stew and dumplings onto their plates

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask us where we’ve been?’ said Ella taking a spoonful of mash and dropping it, with a splat, onto her plate.

  ‘No,’ said Susie. ‘Frankly, I’m not sure I care.’ It was a huge lie but she wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of letting them know how worried she’d been.

  The girls exchanged a glance. Susie ignored them and ate her stew while the girls picked at theirs. It was a pretty miserable meal because Susie was well aware that her indifference was worrying the girls more than if there had been a row. They weren’t expecting it and it was unsettling them.

  Finally, Susie cleared her plate. ‘I am going to have a cup of tea and then I am going to have a soak in the bath,’ she told them. ‘If you want to use the bathroom I suggest you do so now.’

  Again the girls exchanged a look and they trailed upstairs as Susie cleared the table and wished, for the umpteenth time that day, that she had something stronger in the house than tea.

  *

  After Maddy had fed Luke and she was pottering about in the kitchen clearing up, she thought again about the enormous chicken she’d bought. It was ridiculous to cook it for herself but it wasn’t going to last till Seb got back. She made a decision, picked up the phone and dialled Jenna’s number.

  ‘Hi, Jen,’ she said when it was answered.

  ‘Hi, Mads, how’s tricks?’

  ‘Apart from being mightily pissed off at what the CO’s done now, you mean?’

  ‘Yup, apart from bloody Rayner. Dan and I had so much planned for the weekend and it’s all gone to rat-shit now.’

  ‘Same here – and I had Sam Lewis and her fiancé to stay and, now she’s gone, Luke has decided he might as well go back to his own unit. Can’t say I blame him; I can’t imagine that if I were young and single I’d want to be trapped in a house with two toddlers.’

  ‘No,’ said Jenna. ‘You have a point.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s the reason I’m ringing. How about you and Eliot come over here for roast chicken tomorrow? Unless, of course, you’ve got food in your fridge which is going to go to waste.’

  ‘Come off it, Mads – me? Food in the fridge? Domestic goddess? And so yes, we’d love to come along.’

  ‘Brilliant, see you then. About midday.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  *

  Mike trudged out of the pub and down the steps that led down the steep slope to the road and then crossed it to look at the river Bavant. He lit his path with a powerful flashlight which made the falling rain glow white, like showers of sparks in a steel foundry. And the noise of the
rushing water was at an industrial level too. Mike could barely hear himself think as the river thundered alongside the road. He splashed through the puddles in his wellingtons till he reached the white railings that separated the road from the river bank and shone his torch on the rushing water. In the summer, this was a beauty spot and visitors flocked to the pub to sit at the outside tables, basking in the sun, supping on good local beers and watching the little chalk stream drift by. Kids could play in it, paddling in the ankle-deep water off the pebbly beaches at its edge, dipping jam jars for minnows and sticklebacks, and the grassy banks were a haven for wild flowers and butterflies. But not now. Now the river was a muddy torrent, made worse with branches of trees being swept down from upstream, and which threatened to make things worse as they got caught in the low bridges that crossed it at intervals, impeding the water and causing it to back up.

  Mike switched the beam of his torch from the water to illuminate the black and white stick, put there by the Environment Agency to measure the water level. A metre and a half. Maybe not so very deep for some rivers but this was a dangerously high level for this one; a level which threatened the safety of all the villages along its course and the livelihood of the farmers in the valley. It was now pretty obvious that it was a question of when it burst its banks and not if. Mike turned around and clumped up the steps back to the pub. Outside, in the car park to the side, were several police cars, a couple of fire engines and a satellite van from a TV station which Mike had to weave between to get to the door of the public bar where they had set up their HQ. He shouldered it open, switching off his torch as he entered the warm fug of the country inn.

  ‘It’s getting worse,’ he told one of the policemen as he took off his dripping waterproofs in the small lobby.

  A senior police officer came over. ‘Worse, did I hear you say?’

  ‘Up another ten centimetres, by my estimation. I think we ought to get the army out to help with sandbags. We simply haven’t the manpower for this – the police and the fire brigade are stretched to the limit as it is. The guys we’ve co-opted from the refuse disposal companies are doing their best at the depot but...’

  ‘Bin men?’ asked the chief inspector.

  Mike nodded. ‘Yeah, we suspend refuse collections and transfer the manpower to this. The guys are happy to help and the overtime they’re going to earn will be fantastic. Besides, I think people would rather have dry houses than empty bins, don’t you?’

  ‘Makes sense, I suppose. Do you really need more manpower if the Grundon chaps are already doing the job?’

  Mike nodded. ‘It’s getting pretty desperate in places. As I said, the guys are doing their best but we just can’t keep up with demand. It’s not just filling the sandbags, it’s distributing them. If we leave them for householders to collect you get the people who snaffle dozens more than they need. We need people to ration them out and we need boots on the ground to do that. If you can go to gold command and ask...’ He willed the chief inspector to agree with him.

  The chief inspector scratched his chin. ‘OK, I’ll take a look. Can I borrow your torch?’

  Mike hoped the policeman would see reason when he’d been down to the river himself. He handed over his flashlight then scrubbed his boots on the large doormat. No point in making the flagstones of the pub worse than they already were – a dozen or so policemen tramping in and out in muddy boots had left the place looking more like a cow byre than a hostelry.

  He went into the public bar which had been transformed into an operations room with maps pinned up on the walls and whiteboards showing the hotspots at greatest risk of immediate flooding and the evacuation centres for the threatened villages written on them in marker pens. Numbers for the RVS and local loo hire companies were also prominent. It seemed to Mike that, with the exception of a labour force to fill and distribute sandbags, most of the immediate bases had been covered.

  A couple of minutes later the chief inspector was back with him.

  ‘You’re right, I’ve never seen the river like that before.’ He picked up the phone and started dialling. ‘Time to ruin a few soldiers’ weekends.’

  Chapter 39

  Seb and his soldiers, loaded up with all their kit, were trailing around the hills and valleys of Salisbury Plain on a pointless map-reading exercise – or at least, Seb and his sergeant major felt it was pointless.

  ‘It’s as if, having crashed us all out he couldn’t think of anything else to do with us,’ grumbled Seb to Mr Riley.

  Riley pulled at the straps of his Bergen to hitch it higher onto his shoulders and peered at the compass he held in his hand. ‘What a way to spend Saturday night, eh? Getting wet through and sleep deprived all in one hit.’

  ‘Just think, if we weren’t doing this we could be sitting at home, in front of the fire, with a glass of wine and watching the TV.’

  ‘Never mind, sir, we’ll appreciate it all the more when we get the opportunity again.’

  ‘Like when you stop banging your head against a brick wall?’

  ‘That’s it, sir.’

  Behind them the hundred and fifty soldiers of B Company straggled along, heads down against the persistent drizzle, some of them yomping in silence, some of them muttering to their buddies about this or that but all of them fed up and disconsolate.

  Seb’s radio headset cracked into life. ‘Hello, all stations, hello, all stations, this is zero, return to base immediately, return to base immediately. Acknowledge, over.’

  One by one all the sub units of the battalion responded to the order as Seb halted his troops and got them to gather round.

  ‘It seems we’re to go back. I’ve no idea why but the CO has ordered that we return to base.’ A swell of derogatory remarks along the theme of piss-ups being badly organised in breweries ran through the ranks which Seb pretended he didn’t hear. He felt much the same way himself as he and his men about-turned and headed back the way they’d come.

  An hour later, sodden, miserable and tired, Seb and his men came back to the point they’d left a couple of hours earlier. As they trudged back into their company position the men rolled their heavy Bergens off their backs and began remaking their bashers for some sort of shelter or lighting up their hexi burners to get a brew on.

  ‘Want one, sir?’ said a soldier waving an empty mug at Seb.

  ‘Later,’ he replied. ‘Got to go to another O group.’

  ‘Righty-oh.’

  Seb rummaged in his Bergen for his mug and a notebook and pencil and, having given the soldier the former, he tramped off to where the CO was about to issue more orders to his subordinates.

  The officers were gathering around the CO’s Land Rover. Seb stood next to his second in command.

  Andy, the adjutant, joined them. ‘The CO will have a word when everyone’s here,’ he told them.

  ‘Many left to arrive?’ asked Seb.

  Andy checked the millboard in his hand. ‘Just a couple and I’ve heard on the net they’re nearly back here – just a few minutes out now. I’d better tell the CO that we’re nearly all assembled.’

  They watched Andy move off to talk to his boss. Over the muted hubbub of the quiet conversations going on around them Seb heard the CO’s voice cutting across the noise.

  ‘This is ridiculous. They’re late. Everyone should have got here by now.’

  ‘But, sir, they may have travelled further in the time than the other companies, which is why they’re taking longer to get back.’

  ‘Rubbish. They’re just slacking. Five extra duties to the 2IC and ten to the OC.’

  Andy scribbled a note on his clipboard.

  Will raised an eyebrow at Seb. ‘Always a brickbat at the ready, never a bouquet. And Andy’s probably right; I bet they zoomed off and now they’ve got much further to get back. No wonder morale is shit if the CO won’t see basic stuff like that.’

  Seb recalled what his CSM had said about everyone being fed up. 1 Herts had once been a pretty happy battalion – it was any
thing but these days. Although, that said, the atmosphere in B Company HQ had lightened up a lot over the past weeks now that Will seemed to have accepted_having Seb as his boss and Caro and Maddy were back on speaking terms.

  ‘You know, Seb,’ said Will, quietly, ‘this exercise is making the Grand Old Duke of York look like he knew what he was doing. Talk about shambolic.’

  ‘It seems a trifle unplanned,’ agreed Seb.

  ‘Unplanned? That’s a prize understatement.’

  ‘Shh,’ said Seb, not because he disagreed with Will but because Will’s voice was getting louder.

  The final two officers panted up to the assembled group to be greeted by Andy with the glad tidings. Seb could tell by their expressions they were not impressed with their summary and unwarranted punishments.

  In front of them the CO climbed onto the lowered tailgate of his vehicle to be visible to everyone.

  ‘Can you all hear me?’ was his opening line.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ said Will very quietly to Seb.