As the Crow Flies

by Jeffrey Archer

  Some cradled young children in their arms, while others tried to sleep. Two regulars in a corner continued a game of chess as if the war were no more than an inconvenience. A couple of young girls practiced the latest dance step on the small space left unoccupied in the center of the basement while others just slept.

  They could all hear the bombs falling above them, and Becky told Charlie she felt sure one had landed nearby. “On Syd Wrexall’s pub, perhaps?” said Charlie, trying to hide a grin. “That’ll teach him to serve short measures.” The all-clear Klaxon eventually sounded, and they emerged back into an evening air filled with dust and ashes.

  “You were right about Syd Wrexall’s pub,” said Becky, looking at the far corner of the block, but Charlie’s eyes were not fixed on the Musketeer.

  Becky’s gaze eventually turned to where Charlie was staring. A bomb had landed right in the middle of his fruit and vegetable shop.

  “The bastards,” he said. “They’ve gone too far this time. Now I will join up.”

  “But what good will that do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Charlie, “but at least I’ll feel I’m involved in this war and not just sitting around watching.”

  “And what about the shops? Who’s going to take charge of them?”

  “Arnold can take care of them while I’m away.”

  “But what about Daniel and me? Can Tom take care of us while you’re away?” she asked, her voice rising.

  Charlie was silent for a moment while he considered Becky’s plea. “Daniel’s old enough to take care of himself, and you’ll have your time fully occupied seeing that Trumper’s keeps its head above water. So don’t say another word, Becky, because I’ve made up my mind.”

  After that nothing his wife could say or do would dissuade Charlie from signing up. To her surprise the Fusiliers were only too happy to accept their old sergeant back in the ranks, and immediately sent him off to a training camp near Cardiff.

  With Tom Arnold looking anxiously on, Charlie kissed his wife and hugged his son, then shook hands with his managing director before waving goodbye to all three of them.

  As he traveled down to Cardiff in a train full of fresh-faced, eager youths not much older than Daniel—most of whom insisted on calling him “sir”—Charlie felt like an old man. A battered truck met the new recruits at the station and delivered them safely into barracks.

  “Nice to have you back, Trumper,” said a voice, as he stepped onto the parade ground for the first time in more than twenty years.

  “Stan Russell. Good heavens, are you the company sergeant major now? You were only a lance corporal when—”

  “I am, sir,” Stan said. His voice dropped to a whisper. “And I’ll see to it that you don’t get the same treatment as the others, me old mate.”

  “No, you’d better not do that, Stan. I need worse than the same treatment,” said Charlie, placing both hands on his stomach.

  Although the senior NCOs were gentler on Charlie than they were on the raw recruits, he still found the first week of basic training a painful reminder of how little exercise he had done over the previous twenty years. When he became hungry he quickly discovered that what the NAAFI had to offer could hardly be described as appetizing, and trying to get to sleep each night on a bed of unrelenting springs held together by a two-inch horsehair mattress made him less than delighted with Herr Hitler.

  By the end of the second week Charlie was made up to corporal and told that if he wanted to stay on in Cardiff as an instructor they would immediately commission him as a training officer, with the rank of captain.

  “The Germans are expected in Cardiff, are they, boyo?” asked Charlie. “I had no idea they played rugby football.”

  His exact words on the subject were relayed back to the commanding officer, so Charlie continued as a corporal, completing his basic training. By the eighth week he had been promoted to sergeant and given his own platoon to knock into shape, ready for wherever it was they were going to be sent. From that moment on there wasn’t a competition, from the rifle range to the boxing ring, that his men were allowed to lose, and “Trumper’s Terriers” set the standard for the rest of the battalion for the remaining four weeks.

  With only ten days left before they completed their training, Stan Russell informed Charlie that the battalion was destined for Africa, where they would join Wavell in the desert. Charlie was delighted by the news, as he had long admired the reputation of the “poet general.”

  Sergeant Trumper spent most of that final week helping his lads write letters to their families and girlfriends. He didn’t intend to put pen to paper himself until the last moment. With a week to go he admitted to Stan that he wasn’t ready to take on the Germans in anything much more than a verbal battle.

  He was in the middle of a Bren demonstration with his platoon, explaining cocking and reloading, when a red-faced lieutenant came running up.

  “Trumper.”

  “Sir,” said Charlie, leaping to attention.

  “The commanding officer wants to see you immediately.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Charlie. He instructed his corporal to carry on with the lesson and then chased after the lieutenant.

  “Why are we running so fast?” asked Charlie.

  “Because the commanding officer was running when he came looking for me.”

  “Then it has to be at least high treason,” said Charlie.

  “Heaven knows what it is, Sergeant, but you’ll find out soon enough,” said the lieutenant, as they arrived outside the CO’s door. The lieutenant, closely followed by Charlie, entered the colonel’s office without knocking.

  “Sergeant Trumper, 7312087, reporting—”

  “You can cut all that bullshit out, Trumper,” said the colonel, as Charlie watched the commanding officer pacing up and down, slapping his side with a swagger stick. “My car is waiting for you at the gate. You are to go straight to London.”

  “London, sir?”

  “Yes, Trumper, London. Mr. Churchill’s just been on the blower. Wants to see you soonest.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  The colonel’s driver did everything in his power to get Sergeant Trumper to London as quickly as possible. He pressed his foot to the floor again and again as he tried to keep the speedometer above eighty. However, as they were continually held up en route by convoys of troops, transportation lorries, and even at one point Warrior tanks, the task was daunting. When Charlie finally reached Chiswick on the outskirts of London they were then faced with the blackout, followed by an air raid, followed by the all-clear, followed by countless more roadblocks all the way to Downing Street.

  Despite having six hours to ponder as to why Mr. Churchill could possibly want to see him, when the car came to a halt outside Number 10 Charlie was no nearer a conclusion than he had been when he left the barracks at Cardiff earlier that afternoon.

  When he explained to the policeman on the door who he was, the constable checked his clipboard, then gave a sharp rap on the brass knocker before inviting Sergeant Trumper to step into the hall. Charlie’s first reaction on being inside Number 10 was surprise at discovering how small the house was compared with Daphne’s home in Eaton Square.

  A young Wren officer came forward to greet the middle-aged sergeant before ushering him through to an anteroom.

  “The Prime Minister has the American ambassador with him at the moment,” she explained. “But he doesn’t expect his meeting with Mr. Kennedy to last much longer.”

  “Thank you,” said Charlie.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you.” Charlie was too nervous to think about drinking tea. As she closed the door, he picked up a copy of Lilliput from a side table and leafed through the pages, but didn’t attempt to take in the words.

  After he had thumbed through every magazine on the table—and they were even more out of date at Number 10 than at his dentist—he began to take an interest in the pictures on the wall.
Wellington, Palmerston and Disraeli: all inferior portraits that Becky would not have bothered to offer for sale at Number 1. Becky. Good heavens, he thought, she doesn’t even know I’m in London. He stared at the telephone that rested on the sideboard aware that he couldn’t possibly call her from Number 10. In frustration he began to pace round the room feeling like a patient waiting for the doctor to tell him if the diagnosis was terminal. Suddenly the door swung open and the Wren reappeared.

  “The Prime Minister will see you now, Mr. Trumper,” she said, then proceeded to lead him up a narrow staircase, past the framed photographs of former prime ministers. By the time he reached Churchill he found himself on the landing facing a man of five feet nine inches in height who stood, arms on hips, legs apart, staring defiantly at him.

  “Trumper,” said Churchill, thrusting out his hand. “Good of you to come at such short notice. Hope I didn’t tear you away from anything important.”

  Just a Bren lesson, thought Charlie, but decided not to mention the fact as he followed the shambling figure through to his study. Churchill waved his guest into a comfortable winged chair near a roaring fire; Charlie looked at the burning logs and remembered the Prime Minister’s strictures to the nation on wasting coal.

  “You must be wondering what this is all about,” the Prime Minister said, as he lit up a cigar and opened a file that was resting on his knee. He started to read.

  “Yes, sir,” said Charlie, but his reply failed to elicit any explanation. Churchill continued to read from the copious notes in front of him.

  “I see we have something in common.”

  “We do, Prime Minister?”

  “We both served in the Great War.”

  “The war to end all wars.”

  “Yes, wrong again, wasn’t he?” said Churchill. “But then he was a politician.” The Prime Minister chuckled before continuing to read from the files. Suddenly he looked up. “However, we both have a far more important role to play in this war, Trumper, and I can’t waste your time on teaching recruits Bren lessons in Cardiff.”

  The damned man knew all along, thought Charlie.

  “When a nation is at war, Trumper,” said the Prime Minister, closing the file, “people imagine victory will be guaranteed so long as we have more troops and better equipment than the enemy. But battles can be lost or won by something that the generals in the field have no control over. A little cog that stops the wheels going round smoothly. Only today I’ve had to set up a new department in the War Office to deal with code-breaking. I’ve stolen the two best professors they have at Cambridge, along with their assistants, to help solve the problem. Invaluable cogs, Trumper.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Charlie, without a clue as to what the old man was talking about.

  “And I have a problem with another of those cogs, Trumper, and my advisers tell me you’re the best man to come up with a solution.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Food, Trumper, and more important its distribution. I understand from Lord Woolton the minister in charge that supplies are fast running out. We can’t even get enough potatoes shipped over from Ireland. So one of the biggest problems I’m facing at this moment is how to keep the nation’s stomach full while waging a war on the enemy’s shores and at the same time keeping our supply routes open. The minister tells me that when the food arrives in the ports it can often be weeks before the damned stuff is moved, and sometimes even then it ends up in the wrong place.

  “Added to this,” continued the Prime Minister, “our farmers are complaining that they can’t do the job properly because we’re recruiting their best men for the armed forces, and they’re not receiving any backup from the government in exchange.” He paused for a moment to relight his cigar. “So what I’m looking for is a man who has spent his life buying, selling and distributing food, someone who has lived in the marketplace and who the farmers and the suppliers both will respect. In short, Trumper, I need you. I want you to join Woolton as his right-hand man, and see that we get the supplies, and then that those supplies are distributed to the right quarters. Can’t think of a more important job. I hope you’ll be willing to take on the challenge.”

  The desire to get started must have shown in Charlie’s eyes, because the Prime Minister didn’t even bother to wait for his reply. “Good, I can see you’ve got the basic idea. I’d like you to report to the Ministry of Food at eight tomorrow morning. A car will come to pick you up from your home at seven forty-five.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Charlie, not bothering to explain to the Prime Minister that if a car did turn up at seven forty-five the driver would have missed him by over three hours.

  “And, Trumper, I’m going to make you up to a brigadier so you’ve got some clout.”

  “I’d prefer to remain plain Charlie Trumper.”

  “Why?”

  “I might at some time find it necessary to be rude to a general.”

  The Prime Minister removed his cigar and roared with laughter before he accompanied his guest to the door. “And, Trumper,” he said, placing a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, “should the need ever arise, don’t hesitate to contact me direct, if you think it could make the difference. Night or day. I don’t bother with sleep, you know.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Charlie, as he proceeded down the staircase.

  “Good luck, Trumper, and see you feed the people.”

  The Wren escorted Charlie back to his car and saluted him as he took his place in the front seat, which surprised Charlie because he was still dressed as a sergeant.

  He asked the driver to take him to the Little Boltons via Chelsea Terrace. As they traveled slowly through the streets of the West End, it saddened him to find old familiar landmarks so badly damaged by the Luftwaffe, although he realized no one in London had escaped the Germans’ relentless air bombardment.

  When he arrived home, Becky opened the front door and threw her arms around her husband. “What did Mr. Churchill want?” was her first question.

  “How did you know I was seeing the Prime Minister?”

  “Number 10 rang here first to ask where they could get hold of you. So what did he want?”

  “Someone who can deliver his fruit and veg on a regular basis.”

  Charlie liked his new boss from the moment they met. Although James Woolton had come to the Ministry of Food with the reputation of being a brilliant businessman, he admitted that he was not an expert in Charlie’s particular field but said his department was there to see that Charlie was given every assistance he required.

  Charlie was allocated a large office on the same corridor as the minister and supplied with a staff of fourteen headed by a young personal assistant called Arthur Selwyn who hadn’t been long down from Oxford.

  Charlie soon learned that Selwyn had a brain as sharp as a razor, and although he had no experience of Charlie’s world he only ever needed to be told something once.

  The navy supplied Charlie with a personal secretary called Jessica Allen, who appeared to be willing to work the same hours as he did. Charlie wondered why such an attractive, intelligent girl appeared to have no social life until he studied her file more carefully and discovered that her young fiancé had been killed on the beach at Dunkirk.

  Charlie quickly returned to his old routine of coming into the office at four-thirty, even before the cleaners had arrived, which allowed him to read through his papers until eight without fear of being disturbed.

  Because of the special nature of his assignment and the obvious support of his minister, doors opened whenever he appeared. Within a month most of his staff were coming in by five, although Selwyn turned out to be the only one of them who also had the stamina to stick with him through the night.

  For that first month Charlie did nothing but read reports and listen to Selwyn’s detailed assessment of the problems they had been facing for the best part of a year, while occasionally popping in to see the minister to clarify a point that he didn’t fully understand.<
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  During the second month Charlie decided to visit every major port in the kingdom to find out what was holding up the distribution of food, food that was sometimes simply being left to rot for days on end in the storehouses on the docksides throughout the country. When he reached Liverpool he quickly discovered that supplies were rightly not getting priority over tanks or men when it came to movement, so he requested that his ministry should operate a fleet of its own vehicles, with no purpose other than to distribute food supplies across the nation.

  Woolton somehow managed to come up with sixty-two trucks, most of them, he admitted, rejects from war surplus. “Not unlike me,” Charlie admitted. However, the minister still couldn’t spare the men to drive them.

  “If men aren’t available, Minister, I need two hundred women,” Charlie suggested, and despite the cartoonists’ gentle jibes about women drivers it only took another month before the food started to move out of the docks within hours of its arrival.

  The dockers themselves responded well to the women drivers, while trade union leaders never found out that Charlie spoke to them with one accent while using quite another when he was back at the ministry.

  Once Charlie had begun to solve the distribution problem, he came up against two more dilemmas. On the one hand, the farmers were complaining that they couldn’t produce enough food at home because the armed forces were taking away all their best men; on the other, Charlie found he just wasn’t getting enough supplies coming in from abroad because of the success of the German U-boat campaign.

  He came up with two solutions for Woolton’s consideration. “You supplied me with lorry girls, now you must give me land girls,” Charlie told him. “I need five thousand this time, because that’s what the farmers are saying they’re short of.”