When We Were Warriors

by Emma Carroll

  ‘Supper time!’ I yelled, from the top of the lighthouse ladder.

  The view from up here was terrific, once you’d got used to being so high. You could see almost all of Budmouth Point village in one swoop, which was how I came to spot the tents – twenty of them at least, pitched just beyond the beach in one of Mrs Henderson’s fields. Milling about between them, carrying boxes and calling to each other, were the American soldiers.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Esther. Both of us were fascinated by the GIs. Apparently, they carried sweets in their pockets for us local kids. They had money to spend too, and people said they’d pay anything for a decent cup of coffee, which was what they missed most about home. The fact they were camping at Mrs Henderson’s meant she might let us actually meet a few, or at the very least spy on them from her living-room window.

  Meanwhile, Cliff still hadn’t heard me. In the end I had to go down to the beach, and even then he didn’t notice until I was standing right in front of him.

  ‘Crikey, Olive!’ He clutched his chest. ‘Talk about giving a lad a heart attack!’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me calling?’ I was a bit tetchy, to be honest. All I wanted was to eat my supper and then curl up with a book, not be chasing round after my little brother.

  Yet Cliff looked as if he’d just won a hundred pounds.

  ‘I’ve finally got her to do the trick!’ He grinned. ‘In time for tomorrow!’

  He meant Pixie, who was sitting expectantly at his feet. So this was what he’d been up to the past few days – teaching her something special for the wedding. It was such a sweet idea and so typically Cliff, I couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I said, hugging my cardigan against me, because the wind off the sea was fierce. ‘Let’s see her do it.’

  From his pocket, Cliff pulled out a stale crust of bread. Pixie licked her lips.

  ‘Now stay.’ Cliff started walking backwards, still holding the bread out so she could see it.

  He kept going until he was dangerously near the water’s edge. I wondered what he was doing, but thought it best to keep my gob shut. Especially as Pixie seemed to know exactly what was going on. She sat very still, every muscle quivering.

  ‘Bring ’em here!’ Cliff called.

  And just like that, she was up, not with her usual mad scrabbling but picking her way daintily across the shingle. She managed it for all of five or six yards, before something in the sea behind Cliff caught her eye.

  The shingle went flying. In a whirl of white fur, yapping wildly, Pixie charged down the beach.

  ‘Oi!’ I shouted. ‘Come back here!’

  She ran straight past Cliff and into the sea until she was chest deep in the water. I sprinted after her. Cliff spun round, confused.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ he cried. ‘What’s she found?’

  She was about ten yards out, at the spot where the waves foamed just before the sea got deeper. Beside her something was floating in the water. Something big. Person-sized.

  ‘Oh no.’ I pulled at Cliff’s arm, as it hit me what it was. You heard stories sometimes of bodies turning up if an enemy plane got shot down and the pilot had ejected. This one looked as if he had drowned. I didn’t want to go any closer. ‘Come away. We’ll fetch Ephraim. He’ll know what to do.’

  But blasted Pixie wouldn’t budge. She kept barking. And barking.

  ‘She’s trying to tell us something,’ Cliff said. ‘She wants us to pull it in.’

  The body lay face down in the surf. Though I was trying not to, I could see it was a man in a dark coat, with a bag strapped across his back. He was tall, and waterlogged. Between us, I didn’t think we stood a chance of getting him out of the water.

  But Pixie was right. We couldn’t just leave him there. If the sea carried him too far up the beach, he’d end up caught in the razor wire and that would be horrid too. I pushed up my sleeves.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll give it a try.’

  Before we could, a huge wave broke over Pixie’s head. For one terrifying moment we couldn’t see her. The sea rushed towards us, and suddenly we were knee deep in churning, foaming water. Then Pixie bobbed up again, paddling to stay afloat.

  ‘Grab her!’ Cliff yelled.

  I was able to get my arms around her and pull her up on to my hip. The man’s body went spinning past us up the beach. As quick as the wave came in, it pulled away again, leaving the body high and dry.

  Cliff reached it first.

  ‘Don’t look. It might be horrible,’ I warned as I struggled up the beach after him. But he was already standing over the person, who seemed to have paperwork spilling soggily from his pocket.

  Cliff poked the papers with his toe. ‘Do those say what I think they do?’

  Warily, I crouched down, still keeping a tight hold of Pixie. The writing was typed. But the name was the same on each sheet, and even the envelopes: ‘Ephraim Pengilly’.

  Clear as day. There for anyone to see.

  ‘I don’t like it, Olive,’ Cliff said.

  I didn’t, either. In fact, I felt like I’d been slapped in the face.

  ‘Why would a dead man be carrying letters for Ephraim?’ Cliff asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I glanced back along the beach at the lighthouse, standing tall in the thickening dusk, and could hear that little doubt-voice again.

  Ephraim, who had secrets of his own.

  I told myself to stop it. Just because there was a war on, it didn’t make it all right to question everyone over everything. Ephraim was decent through and through, and always had been. There was probably some quite ordinary explanation for all this.

  ‘Here, hold the dog a sec.’ I handed Pixie to Cliff. ‘I’m going to check his pockets.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we get a grown-up to do that?’ Cliff sounded nervous.

  ‘I’ll be quick,’ I assured him.

  Kneeling down properly, I prodded the lump of paper. Everything was so wet, it was impossible to peel the letters and envelopes apart.

  ‘What do they say?’ Cliff demanded.

  ‘I don’t know. Everything’s in German.’

  ‘But Ephraim doesn’t know any Germans,’ Cliff insisted.

  ‘Not that he’s told us about,’ I said grimly.

  That wasn’t the worst of it. In between the letters was a card – like an identity card, I supposed, with a name and address on it – the sort of thing we all had to carry these days. I didn’t have a torch, but in the gathering dark, it looked valid enough. There was an official stamp with a date and the word ‘Hamburg’ on it. Beneath were what seemed to be personal details. It was the name – an English name – that jumped off the page.

  Name: Ephraim Pengilly

  Adresse: Elberstrasse 10, Dresden.

  Alter: 23

  Beruf: Kommunikationsnetz

  I didn’t understand. How could there be two men with the same unusual name? If this stranger, lying face down on Budmouth beach, was Ephraim Pengilly, then who was the person at the lighthouse with whom we were about to eat our supper?

  4

  Normally I’d have run to our Ephraim for help, but Queenie was our next best option. Esther was the only one downstairs when we arrived.

  ‘What on earth’s eating you?’ she said, seeing our shocked faces.

  I took a long breath. ‘There’s a drowned German man on the beach, and the papers he’s carrying say he’s called Ephraim Pengilly.’

  It sounded even more ridiculous saying it out loud. Esther made me repeat it twice over before she grasped what I was trying to tell her.

  ‘Wait there,’ she said then went into the hallway and bellowed up the stairs. ‘Queenie! Sukie! Mrs Bradshaw! You’d better get down here!’

  *

  Sukie didn’t believe a word of it.

  ‘What a load of baloney! Someone’s using his name!’ she insisted. And still in her hair curlers and old slacks, she ran straight out of the door for the lighthouse.

  ‘The dead m
an could well be a spy,’ Queenie said. ‘I bet Hitler’s behind this.’

  Just the mention of his name made Esther flinch. ‘He’s the one we can’t trust,’ she said bitterly.

  No one considered for a second that Ephraim himself might be involved. Why would they? He was everyone’s very dear friend. But we still had the problem of a dead German on the beach, and Sukie running about the streets.

  ‘I’d better let the proper people know,’ Queenie said, sounding thoroughly fed up. A dead body meant telling Mr Spratt the coastguard, and the fact the man was German meant the army would also have to be alerted.

  As Queenie went to raise the alarm, and Esther made a pot of tea, I noticed how quiet Mum was. I’d assumed it was because she was reassuring Cliff, who’d told everyone he’d never seen a dead person before, then burst into tears. But I sensed something else was bothering her.

  ‘Mum?’ I said. ‘You’ve got your thoughtful look on.’

  ‘Have I?’ She shook herself out of it. ‘Sorry, love. I was miles away.’

  ‘Thinking about Dad?’ I asked, because up until this evening, he’d been on my mind a lot too.

  ‘No, Ephraim, actually.’ Shifting her arm from around Cliff’s shoulders, she sat up straight. ‘How much do we know about him, really?’

  ‘Oh come on, Mum!’ Cliff groaned. ‘We live with him. We know him as well as anyone. He’s the bee’s—’

  ‘Pyjamas,’ I cut in.

  Esther, who’d been clanking teacups in the background, agreed. ‘Honestly, Mrs Bradshaw, he’s a diamond,’ she insisted. ‘He’s done so much to help people. My papa wouldn’t be here in England if it wasn’t for Sukie and Ephraim.’

  ‘Nor would plenty of others,’ I added.

  ‘Fair enough. Point taken.’ Though I could tell she wasn’t entirely convinced.

  And it bothered me. If Mum didn’t trust Ephraim, what did that mean? But who was I to question her? I’d had my own doubts about him too and it made me feel mixed up and horribly guilty. This was meant to be a happy time, but everything had turned on its head.

  Queenie, meanwhile, returned all too quickly from making telephone calls.

  ‘Typical!’ she cried, taking off her glasses and giving them a furious polish in her sweater hem. ‘Mr Spratt can’t come until the morning. I’ve never known such a useless coastguard!’

  Esther, in disgust, muttered a foreign-sounding word. None of us liked Mr Spratt, and with good reason. He was a small-minded, self-important bigot.

  When, last spring, a boatload of desperate Jewish refugees had landed here from Occupied France, he’d claimed it was all Ephraim’s doing and that he was breaking the law. Because he had no proof – the boat wasn’t recorded in the lighthouse logbook – he’d had Queenie arrested instead. Of course, it was Ephraim’s doing: getting that boat in safely was all of our doing. But rather than a mission to help frightened people, Mr Spratt saw it only as a criminal act. He’d been dying for a chance to get one over on Ephraim ever since. This situation, I could see now, would be the perfect chance.

  ‘Do we really want him poking around?’ I asked.

  ‘We can’t just leave the body on the beach, out in the open,’ Queenie replied, raising her eyebrows at Cliff. ‘It’s rather distressing for people.’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Cliff lied.

  Mum stood up. Swapping her dressing gown for her overcoat, she motioned for Queenie to do the same. Even though it wasn’t her house, it was obvious who was now in charge.

  ‘Let’s fetch him in,’ Mum announced. It occurred to me this probably wasn’t the first time she’d come across a dead body.

  ‘Don’t expect me to help carry him,’ Esther warned. ‘I’m not touching a Nazi.’

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to, either.

  *

  Down on the beach, darkness had almost fallen. The wind was still strong, the surf pounding. It was hard to imagine this was a summer’s night, when it felt almost as tense and grim as the time last year we’d been down here in the dark, pulling people from the sea.

  ‘Why don’t you wait up by the road?’ I whispered to Cliff, who seemed to be hanging back.

  ‘I’m not a baby,’ he replied huffily.

  The truth was none of us wanted to pick up the body. The man lay where we’d left him, his coat spread out like a cape. He looked thick-set, as if he’d be a fair old weight to carry, and at a guess about thirty years old. His hair, already starting to dry, was blond and recently clipped at the neck: you could just about see the white line above his suntan. I wondered if he feared, when he got that haircut, that very soon afterwards he’d be dead.

  The more I looked at the body, the more ridiculous it all seemed. If this man was a German spy claiming to be an English lighthouse keeper, then he’d really not done his research. He didn’t look remotely like the real Ephraim.

  We’d just agreed who was going to grab which arm or leg, when another torch beam came swinging towards us across the beach. I hoped it might be Sukie, or Ephraim himself, but it was Mrs Henderson. With her, we quickly saw, was a group of American soldiers. The one who seemed to be in charge introduced himself as Colonel Bagatelli.

  ‘Ladies,’ he announced, ‘if you could all stand back. We’ve got this.’

  There was a split second where I thought Queenie and Mum weren’t going to move. But I think even they could see the benefits of someone else carrying a sopping-wet corpse up the main street.

  5

  Back at the post office, it was agreed the body should stay outside overnight. The coolest, safest spot was on the path that ran through Queenie’s vegetable patch. As the man’s pockets were emptied, the soldiers became especially interested in one particular piece of paper, crowding together to pore over it and talk in voices so annoyingly hushed we couldn’t hear what they were saying. Soon everything – the letters with Ephraim’s name on, the identity card – was in Colonel Bagatelli’s hands.

  ‘Do NOT touch anything else!’ Colonel Bagatelli addressed Mum and Queenie as if they were halfwits, which was almost funny, all things considered.

  The Americans, up close like this, had rather lost their film-star sheen. A lot of them didn’t look much older than Sukie, and they were tired, jumpy, a bit bossy too, making it clear we weren’t needed any more. It felt as if things were slipping away from us too fast.

  Queenie glared at the colonel, unimpressed. ‘What will happen to Mr Pengilly? The real Mr Pengilly, I mean, from the lighthouse?’

  ‘Assuming he is the real Mr Pengilly,’ he replied. ‘The military police will speak to him as soon as possible, ma’am.’

  I caught Esther’s eye: she looked as troubled as I was.

  ‘But he’s getting married tomorrow afternoon to my sister,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a security matter now, miss.’ Colonel Bagatelli was unmoved. ‘He’ll be taken to Plymouth for questioning.’

  Which was when I noticed how few soldiers were still here. They’d gone to arrest Ephraim, hadn’t they? It was already too late.

  ‘Are you taking my sister as well?’ I asked, in panic. ‘Because neither of them has done anything wrong.’

  Out in the street – as if in answer, almost – a vehicle went past. Though we couldn’t see it, I could tell from the rattly noise that it wasn’t a normal motorcar but something bigger and rougher, like a truck. Another followed behind it, accelerating up the hill towards the main Plymouth road. I couldn’t believe what was happening – and so quickly.

  ‘What about Pixie?’ Cliff was worried too. ‘We can’t leave her on her own.’

  Mum put her arms around him, telling him to shush. Colonel Bagatelli had sense enough to see our distress, spreading his hands out like we were unpredictable animals he was trying to calm.

  ‘Ladies, please, leave it to the experts. Go on inside, now. Have a cocoa, listen to something swell on the wireless. We’ll know more in the morning. And,’ he added, ‘don’t forget to lock the back door.’

 
‘Whatever for?’ Queenie scowled.

  I was wondering the same thing. Was he expecting more Germans to wash up on the beach?

  Apparently he was.

  ‘We’ve had intelligence of an incursion planned for tonight,’ he said. And from the way his grip tightened on the papers in his hands, I guessed where that intelligence had come from. I felt sick. ‘Our dead man was carrying a map of a location just west of here along the coast. My men and I will be taking a little trip down there to check it out.’

  So this was what the soldiers had been poring over.

  ‘A map? Of where exactly?’ I demanded.

  ‘Olive!’ Mum snapped. ‘That’s not your business!’

  But it was all so frustrating. And I couldn’t understand why Mum was playing along with things, thanking the colonel graciously and taking Cliff inside, just like she’d been told to.

  ‘She’s picking her battles,’ Esther whispered to me. ‘You don’t want her arrested as well, do you?’

  True enough, I didn’t. But I couldn’t understand why no one was speaking up for Ephraim or Sukie.

  ‘Come along, Olive,’ Mum called over her shoulder. ‘You’ll have to sleep here tonight.’

  Queenie, who clearly didn’t think much of American soldiers or having her house invaded by us Bradshaws, followed with a sour look on her face.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ Esther asked me.

  Wherever I went, I knew I’d be too churned up to sleep. No one had actually said that the wedding was off, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how it could possibly be on. Reluctantly, I went inside.

  A single soldier remained outside Queenie’s back gate. I wasn’t sure if he was protecting us or being our jailer, but he was instructed to stay there until morning.

  ‘You’re not driving any trucks, Johnson,’ the colonel had said to him. ‘Not after last time.’ Whatever that meant.

  Cliff, meanwhile, wouldn’t shut up about Pixie.

  ‘She’s not used to being left on her own at the lighthouse,’ he moaned. ‘She’ll be terrified.’