by John Harris
‘Skegness us. Had a house there.’
Horndorff listened to them in amazement. They seemed quite mad. They all seemed mad. Just down the beach, a soldier with a trumpet was blowing a Germanic dirge which Horndorff recognised as the British national anthem. Judging by the noise, it was the only thing he could play. Not far away, a few soldiers were kicking a ball about.
‘Ought to introduce ourselves,’ the spectacled officer said to Conyheare. ‘Usual when you share sandcastles.’
‘My name’s Conybeare. RAF.’
‘York and Lanes. Mine’s Wren.’ The eyes behind the spectacles beamed. ‘I’m building St Paul’s.’
They continued to exchange pleasantries. ‘I decided to put my best uniform on,’ Wren said. ‘Had it made in Lille. Cost nine hundred francs. Big decision.’
‘Always difficult,’ Conybeare agreed.
‘Got my batman to make two piles, one of the stuff I could take, one of the stuff I couldn’t. Then we threw ’em both away.’
By the water’s edge, two men were tinkering with a small blue speedboat and Wren and Conybeare studied them interestedly, sitting on the sand as though they were taking the air.
‘Been at it since dawn,’ Wren said. ‘Say they’re going to have a go in it.’
The bombers came again – ‘For what we are about to receive,’ Wren said – and the bombs landed on a wrecked ship lying just off the beach.
‘They have a go at that every time they come over,’ Wren pointed out. ‘Luftwaffe must be a bit short-sighted.’
In the dunes just behind them two young soldiers were asleep, clutching each other like children.
‘Been there since last night,’ Wren observed ‘Bit young for this sort of thing, I suppose.’
As he turned away there was a cheer and they saw that one of the Heinkels was on fire. It swung back above them, trailing smoke, and then, as they watched, it disintegrated in a puff of flame. From the hole in the dunes, Horndorff saw a wing twisting down to splash in the sea and then a single parachute drifting over the beaches above them. He heard a clicking sound and realised that every soldier within a mile was working the bolt of his rifle and lifting it to his shoulder. As he watched, a steady pop-pop-pop started and the figure under the parachute went limp in its harness. As it splashed into the sea, the parachute fell over the body like a shroud.
‘Ah, well,’ Wren said. He flicked from his uniform flakes of soot that had drifted from the town. ‘Not much hope of sun-bathing. Too grubby.’
The shelling seemed to be increasing as the daylight grew. Dunkirk was being heavily hit and more buildings on the promenade were blazing, the smoke flattening out over the town.
‘Heavy guns,’ Wren said. ‘Got ’em on the front at Nieuport, I’m told. Business seems quite brisk.’
RAMC men passed them, carrying a corpse in a blanket. Parties of them were doing the same all over the beach, burying the bodies and carting the wounded off to hospital. The British army was keeping its areas tidy. It was a wonder some sergeant hadn’t started whitewashing the pebbles. If it moves salute it, if it doesn’t, paint it.
While they watched, a soldier determined to get some fun out of the situation rode past on a black farm-horse. He was wearing a general’s cap with its red band, a pyjama jacket and a pair of breeches and polished riding boots from some senior officer’s kit.
‘Which way did they go?’ he was shouting.
‘Thataway,’ someone yelled back.
It was a ridiculous piece of farce amid the tragedy of thirst and futility and fear, and Horndorf suddenly began to see why it was that people like Conybeare had so much confidence in ultimate victory.
It wasn’t quite the same for Allerton.
He’d been released from his duties as beachmaster the previous evening and he’d awakened in the dunes stiff and cold and, now that he had nothing to occupy his mind, with a new sense of worry he hadn’t experienced before.
A bunch of north-country soldiers were singing ‘I do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ and near them another man was dismantling a radio set for something to do. Two corporals were playing chess, and an officer curled up in a hole was patiently reading Zola in French. It was La Débâcle, which to Allerton seemed very fitting. Here and there a rifle was brandished as someone got out of line, but on the whole the affair was one of extraordinarily good manners, as though it simply wasn’t done to make a fuss and he was so moved he felt his eyes prick with tears. If this is the British, he thought, they can never beat us.
As the sun rose higher, the beach became hot and the dry sand among the dunes seemed stifling. He rubbed his bristly chin and decided to go for a swim. The planes had gone and the guns had stopped again in a brief respite of heavenly quiet as he headed down the beach, and the unexpected stillness of the air seemed to highlight the strangeness of it all.
As he reached the water’s edge he bumped into Temporary Acting-Corporal Rice who was paddling, his spectacles on the end of his nose, his boots hanging round his neck.
‘Hello, sir,’ Rice said. ‘Had a good night?’
‘Beds were a bit hard.’ Allerton was surprised at the casual manner he was adopting and he decided it must be infectious because everyone else had adopted it too. ‘How about you?’
‘Lost the other blokes, sir, so I had a prowl round. Thought there might be a night club or two.’
As they were discussing what they ought to do, they saw a small pale blue speedboat lying in deeper water nearby. There was a feather of exhaust smoke at the stern and the man at the wheel waved. ‘We’ve room for a couple more,’ he called.
‘Where are you heading for?’ Allerton shouted.
‘England. Care to join us?’
Allerton looked at Rice, then they nodded and they had just started splashing through the shallows when they realised the aeroplanes were back again.
‘Gets a bit tiresome, doesn’t it?’ the man in the boat shouted. ‘We’ll shove off until it’s over. Make sure you’re ready.’
As they ran for shelter, they heard the bombs splash into the water and the destroyers’ guns begin to bang. As Allerton turned he saw a vast eruption out to sea which caught the sunshine in multi-coloured rainbows of light.
‘That was a bloody big bomb,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t a bomb, sir,’ Rice muttered. ‘It was a mine.’
Allerton couldn’t understand his shocked tones until he saw a small pale blue piece of plywood fluttering down out of the waterspout, skidding from side to side like a leaf falling from a tree and catching the light on its wet surface as it fell.
He swallowed with difficulty. ‘We’d better go back up the beach,’ he suggested.
Rice nodded. ‘Perhaps it’s our turn, anyway,’ he said.
‘Yes, perhaps it is. I wish to God someone knew something definite.’
But nobody did, of course, and it was this very confusion that was worrying the admiral in his desperate uncertainty in Dover.
A curtain lay over the evacuation because there was too much distance between him and the beaches, and a dreadful weakness in ship-to-shore signalling that was leading to an immense waste of effort. The establishment of a senior naval officer afloat had brought some order, however, and his hand was at last being seen in the fact that the destroyers were now bringing back a thousand men at a time. The trouble was, there just weren’t enough of them.
Nevertheless, at Sheerness the Small Vessels Pool was beginning to work up to full speed, and the motor car engines of weekend yachts and cruisers were being made to turn over after the winter lay-up, while stores and accommodation were being produced for the stream of naval officers and ratings who kept appearing to man them. Rafts small enough to be manhandled but big enough to carry men were being constructed, and shipwrights were busy with ladders to load from the mole or from ships which had grounded in the shallows. Convoy after convoy was pushing out to sea, and from every quarter the numbers grew. London river had long since been swept clear of tugs a
nd all the great towing companies had sent everything they could spare to pull dumb barges. Long-forgotten gunboats, drawing only five feet of water and mounting ancient guns which had been built for river work in China, passed each other in the mist that lay over the Channel, dodging damaged ships that yawed wildly from side to side, unable to manoeuvre. Lifeboats, transporters belonging to furniture removers, firefloats, battleships’ boats from Portsmouth, cutters belonging to the 34,000 ton Nelson, even the admiral’s barge itself, its bright paint dulled to a drab grey; everything that would float and was handy joined them, their names and numbers arriving on the desks of the grateful officers at Dover.
‘What about Vital?’ the admiral asked. ‘Is she available yet?’
‘Later in the day, sir. They’ve had a lot of trouble.’
That was putting it mildly. The job had been far more complicated than Lieutenant MacGillicuddy had expected. That near miss as they’d gone astern from the mole had done much more damage than they’d thought. In addition to the trouble with the bearing, they also had leaking steam pipes, sheared bolts, and broken gauge glasses, and everything, both in the engine room and the decks above, had been covered with particles of paint, dust and soot. The damage had all to be cleared before they could get at the oil feed to the overheated bearing which was up against a bulkhead and barely within reach, so that they had to pick out the suspect pipe from a whole array of others, bent double in the stifling engine room at a point where there wasn’t even space for them to work side by side.
When they’d finally found the stoppage, they’d realised that whatever was causing it couldn’t be cleared with a piece of wire or blown out with compressed air. The message that had gone up to Hough had thrown him into a frenzy of impatience but he’d held on to his temper, knowing that no one could do the job as fast or as well as MacGillicuddy. Struggling to give some form to the sketchy picture of the problems in his mind, he was waiting like a caged tiger in his cabin, while down below in the engine room MacGillicuddy cursed Vital’s age and the politicians who’d allowed her to grow rusty with neglect.
‘We’ll have to saw it out,’ he said. ‘Bit by bit, till we find what it is.’
‘That’ll take all day,’ the chief ERA pointed out.
‘Then it’ll have to take all day, won’t it?’ MacGillicuddy snapped.
They cut the oil feed pipe nine times before they found a piece of cotton waste jammed inside with the consistency of a wooden plug. No one knew how it had got there and certainly no one was likely to own up. They simply removed it and set about brazing the pieces together again.
It was about this time that the message came down from the castle and Hough rang through to the engine room. ‘Request from the castle, Chief,’ he said. ‘They want to know how long we’ll be.’
MacGillicuddy drew a deep breath. ‘Midnight,’ he said.
The reply was received at the castle in icy silence.
The chief of staff tried to sugar the pill. ‘One bit of good news, sir. Vanquisher reports that the mole’s functioning again.’
‘Good. Make sure the personnel ships are informed.’ The admiral thought for a moment. ‘And lift the suspension of sailings. What about the beaches?’
‘They’ve got them working well now, I gather, sir. Royal Sovereign’s already completed loading and she’s on her way back. Do we know how much longer we’ve got?’
The admiral frowned. ‘A meeting’s been called in London. Between the PM and the Service Ministers. Gort believes it’s possible to bold the perimeter until June. We’ll build up a reserve for a final effort up to dawn on that day.’
As hopes in Dover increased, for the small boats navigation grew steadily worse. Several were run down in the confusion and the smoke, and the surface of the water was littered with every kind of wreckage imaginable that had floated up from sunken ships. There were bodies, ropes, planks and upturned boats. There were even floating torpedoes, relics of the previous night’s attacks; and, above all, the shallows were full of soldiers trying to be sailors for the first time.
Handling the little boats was growing progressively more difficult as muscles and minds protested, and unexpectedly the wind began to freshen from the north-west to lift an awkward surf; ignoring the queues, tired and anxious soldiers began to push out from all directions. Many of them drowned before they reached safety and here and there it was possible to see exhausted men praying quietly while, in an angle of the dunes, a group of young soldiers were listening to an older man reading from the Book of Common Prayer.
It didn’t seem at all odd. Because the sky was so incredibly blue, it didn’t even seem real.
All the time the planes rained their bombs down on the scattered boats and men, while batteries like Hinze’s bombarded the approaches. Shells now dropped constantly among the crowded shipping and, though most of them exploded in the water, they occasionally hit something. Just offshore, an elderly sloop, her stern blown off, was being towed away by a ship half her size while every tug and fishing boat and launch in the area of the explosion scurried towards her as she settled in a cloud of steam.
By this time everyone was growing hardened to the air raids. Like Scharroo they’d noticed that the bombs did considerably less damage in the soft sand than the noise suggested and they could time their dashes for the dunes to a nicety now. Fortunately, there was no shortage of cigarettes. Most men had at least five hundred from the looted NAAFIs, and some had thousands.
Many arriving on the beaches now had no boots and had marched miles on bleeding feet. Some officers worked themselves to a standstill for the safety of their men. Others concerned themselves only with their own safety. But still they were lifted.
At Dover, the admiral studied the lists, wondering what else he could do. They were still waiting for the final instructions from the meeting in London. When they came they were exactly as he’d thought they’d be.
‘Every man possible must be lifted before dawn on 1 June,’ he was told. ‘French troops must be given equal opportunity of evacuation – not only in their own vessels but also in British ships.’
For a moment the admiral was silent, then he drew a deep breath. ‘Then I must have the H, I and J ships back,’ he said.
There was a moment’s silence at the other end of the telephone. ‘We daren’t risk any more,’ the First Sea Lord pointed out bleakly. ‘We must preserve the balance of the fleet against the future.’
‘Sir,’ the admiral said, ‘I have to provide for the present. There are thousands of men still waiting to be picked up. These are the men who’ll have to defend this country against invasion, and round whom the new armies will have to be built.’
There was a long silence, then the First Sea Lord spoke again. ‘I take your point,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that you get them.’
Unaware of the concern of the admiral for the return of Vital, Hatton had unexpectedly found himself free from the war for a while. He was still dog-tired and he still hadn’t been to bed; his own job had been easily taken care of and he’d been at the beck and call of every department short of an officer. He’d helped to ammunition and supply ship and been sent about the town on a dozen and one errands, most of them frustrating and bringing only insults because Vital was still immobile. In his free moments he’d tried to write a report for Hough to pass on to the castle, but it was constantly interrupted and now he’d been sent ashore again to collect signals and sealed envelopes containing orders. At the castle, however, there was obviously some change of plan in the wind.
‘Vital might have to go to Southampton,’ said the elderly captain. ‘There’s a move towards Cherbourg and some of our chaps may be going with the French. How long will it be before you’re ready?’
‘The engine room thinks midnight, sir.’
‘Well, there’s no hurry then. Can you find something to do for three hours till we know?’
Hatton wasn’t certain how to answer and the captain waved him away. ‘Surely you can find something?�
�� he said. ‘Know Dover?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Got a girl here?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Go and have tea with her then. Do you good.’ The captain glanced at his watch. ‘Three hours. All right?’
Hatton grinned, ‘All right, sir!’
Outside again, he drew a deep breath. The instructions were so unexpected they’d taken his breath away and almost without thinking, he walked to the nearest telephone box. There was a queue of soldiers outside who’d just come from France and were telephoning relatives, and he had to wait for a quarter of an hour. It didn’t change his mind. After living through seventy-two hours of tension he needed someone near him whose flesh was soft and unmuscular and who didn’t stink of sweat or cordite or salt sea air. To his surprise, Nora Hart’s voice sounded much gentler than when he’d last rung her.
‘I’m free for a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘It’s official.’
There was a moment’s silence and he was terrified she wouldn’t respond. Then her voice came again. ‘Like to come round?’
Within five minutes he was knocking on her door. She opened it immediately and he felt his nerves relax as he saw the bright chintz in the little flat. She was wearing a yellow-and-white striped blouse and a neat grey skirt, but he noticed that her eyes looked tired. ‘Sorry I was a bit short when you rang before,’ she said. ‘I had someone here.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘Not really. Man I knew. Just got back.’
Hatton’s heart sank. He hadn’t thought there might be someone else with the same qualifications of bravery he now had. Jealousy dug at him. ‘He must have got back early,’ he said.
She smiled, sensing what was going through his mind. ‘He’s a born survivor.’
She lit a cigarette and handed the packet to him. ‘You look good in uniform,’ she observed.
‘Everybody looks good in uniform.’
They talked for a while, quite easily and with no awkwardness between them to remind him how badly he’d treated her. When he’d left for Fleet Street, she’d written heart-broken letters he hadn’t answered and he knew now that he’d been a bastard.
