The Forgotten War

by David Fiddimore

  Breakfast was huge hunks of warm bread and marge, with dollops of crystallized honey ‘from our own hives’. Half a dozen other folk drifted in and out. Jokes and snatches of song bounced around, and the sun came out. Does a good spring drag a good summer along behind it? Grace showed up eventually, still rubbing her hair dry.

  They were somehow just not quite the same with her there – even Gary kept his distance. That was interesting. I was leaning against one of the ovens; Grace came straight over and kissed me on the lips. That was interesting too. Whenever Grace did that sort of thing she was saying something. The problem was working out exactly what. I’d known her long enough not even to try.

  ‘Take me for a walk?’ Grace asked.

  Kenwood again. Her idea. We sat on a long slatted chair at the back of the house, looking out over the lake and the sculptured woodlands. It bore a new bronze plaque dedicated to the memory of a Second Lieutenant Clare who had died in Africa with the Long Range Desert Group. Apparently he’d spent his earlier life sitting on this very seat composing poetry. I wondered if he was looking down on us now, thinking that he’d wasted his fucking time.

  ‘These dedications are all over the place,’ Grace said. ‘People aren’t satisfied with a name on a war memorial any longer.’

  ‘I think I can understand that.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe.’ She shut her eyes and leaned back. ‘Sitting with the sun on my face reminds me of Italy.’

  ‘I didn’t know that it could be as hot as it was out there.’

  ‘I did; I flew to Egypt in the 1930s. Even hotter.’

  ‘Do you miss flying, Grace? Being able to fly?’

  There was a definite catch in her voice when she answered. ‘Yes. Very much. It’s almost unbearable, so I don’t think about it.’

  So there it was.

  ‘I can get you a job flying; you’d be one of the very first female commercial-airline pilots. All you have to do is say yes.’

  Grace actually said nothing. She looked away from me and into the distance. Eventually she looked back at me, said, ‘There has to be more to it than that,’ and sighed.

  ‘Do you remember that I told you I’d seen a photograph of you at a party here . . . and that was how I knew where you were?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Who took the photograph?’

  She frowned as if she needed to dig into her memory, but I knew Grace. I knew that it was an act.

  ‘Peter . . . something or other. He lived up the road.’

  ‘Peter Williamson?’ Another Pete. I left it for a moment and then asked, ‘What happened to him, Grace?’

  Grace said, ‘Ah . . .’

  She stood up and stretched in the sun. I’ve seen old cats doing that. One arm and then the next. Then she walked away from me, and across the path to sit on the grass looking away from me at the parkland. She sat there alone for twenty minutes.

  When she stood up she went through the stretching routine again.

  She sat beside me. ‘I get it now,’ she said quietly.

  I was smoking my pipe. It was an American tobacco that Dolly had given me: very sweet and a bit hot – a little like Dolly herself, I suppose.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You’re still in the RAF, aren’t you? And they’ve sent you to find out what happened to Peter, just like they sent you to find me in Germany. Getting me away into the bargain would be a bonus for you.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  Grace asked, ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  I played at sending out smoke signals with my pipe. ‘You bought me this pipe, years ago. Do you remember? It’s probably on its last legs: you’ll have to buy me another.’

  She didn’t respond, and when I looked at her she was crying. That was the third time I saw Grace cry. I put my arm around her, and she laid her head on my shoulder. She didn’t cry for long. Then she asked, ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Harry told us that although the government actually wants to build new houses for everyone who’s living rough, they will be afraid to be seen to be giving in to pressure. Ordinary people would see it as common sense, but the government and the councils would call that anarchy. Harry says it means that they’ll have to break us up before they do anything. If you want me out of here, and he’s right, that means that they’re coming, doesn’t it? So – how long have we got?’

  I didn’t duck it this time. ‘About a couple of weeks, I’d guess, but I can’t be sure.’

  ‘It’s such a happy place, Charlie.’

  ‘I know that; I love coming here . . . It’s the way people were meant to live. No pressure. I’m sorry.’

  We walked around the lake, holding hands again. On the small bridge that crossed its outflow we stopped, leaned on the parapet and looked at the water. They had begun to clean it up. Grace said, ‘It’s a place before its time, that’s all: everyone will want to live like this one day.’ Then she asked me, ‘Why did you tell Harry that you were a thief?’

  ‘I didn’t. He made an assumption, and I didn’t correct him.’

  ‘Poor excuse, Charlie.’

  ‘I know it. What happened to Williamson?’

  After one of those six-beat pauses when a conversation can go anywhere she asked, ‘Do you trust me, Charlie?’

  I thought about it, and told her, ‘Not bloody likely.’

  ‘What if you had to?’

  ‘Then I’d bloody well have to. But I wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Then get used to not liking it. I’d tell you not to worry but you wouldn’t believe that, either.’

  ‘Exactly what are you saying, Grace?’

  ‘That I’m not going to answer your question now, but I might later. Either way you’re going to have to trust me, or bugger off. Who did you get that offer from, by the way – of a flying post for me?’

  ‘Pathfinder Bennet. He’s landed himself the licences to open a commercial route to Rio and the Caribbean. You’ll be suntanned all the year round.’

  Pause. She still hadn’t given me the yes I wanted.

  ‘I have to go now, Charlie. Walk us home?’

  ‘Of course. What happens next?’

  ‘You’re a bad spy, Charlie. So you can run . . . or you can trust me and hang around to see what happens next.’

  ‘I’m gonna run.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  Grace was right most of the time. I bloody hated that.

  I made myself useful by giving Matesy a hand in the garden: weeding.

  ‘What are these, Matesy?’

  ‘Early lettuces. The knack is keeping the slugs away from them now, and the butterflies later on.’

  ‘Are you good at this lark?’

  ‘Fair. My father was a gardener up at a big house near Gates-head when I was a boy. The sons were all killed in the war, so it’s a golf clubhouse now – can you believe it?’

  ‘Yes. Times change; sometimes it’s hard to keep up.’

  ‘I was just starting my apprenticeship when war broke out. I’ve been catching up ever since.’

  Every time we filled a wheelbarrow with weeds I took it to a big compost heap against a fence. Matesy would take a breather and walk with me.

  ‘You still see your old man?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘Mum and dad ended up down on the coast at Norfolk. He got a job on a farm, and was in the Home Guard. He went out on patrol one night and never came back; none of them did.’

  I hadn’t heard about Home Guard casualties. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Either no one knows, or no one’s saying. Ma’s convinced that they were captured by a German raiding party, and he’s gonna turn up from some camp in Germany sooner or later. It sent her a bit loopy.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘No. I used to, but since I’ve seen the way the Boss Class have behaved since the war I think that he copped it in some brilliant cock-up that will remain for ever an official secret to prot
ect the guilty.’ Then Matesy asked me, ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘You said the “Boss Class”. That’s what my old man always called them. He brought me up to hate anyone with authority.’

  ‘That can’t have been very handy when you were called up . . .’

  ‘I did get into bother now and again . . . but eventually you learn how things work. I was aircrew so they had to make me a sergeant anyway; then I lived too long, and they had to make me an officer. It was a bit of a laugh . . .’

  ‘Irony,’ Matesy told me. ‘It was ironic – time for a smoke break?’

  ‘Why not?’

  We were still smoking when Grace came out. She was wearing the olive KD trousers I remembered, a thin khaki vest shirt like the Americans favoured and a sleeveless leather tank jacket on top of them. She looked like the heroine from a comic book. She told me, ‘I’ve got to go down to the docks near Limehouse. Do you want to come along?’

  ‘Someone told me that it was pretty knocked about.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. It will make you feel less bad about what you did to German cities once you see what they did down there.’

  Grace had got a small ex-Army Hillman Tilley similar to the vehicle in which I had crossed from France. Someone had given it a quick coat of livid green paint.

  ‘Whose is this?’ I asked her.

  ‘Ours. Belongs to all of us. I think that we have three vehicles in the street. You just take whatever’s free.’

  ‘I think I saw one the day I arrived: a small lorry with half a dozen bods in the back.’

  ‘That would be right. They’d have been coming back from work.’ When I looked at her she added, ‘Just because they’ve nowhere to live it doesn’t mean they can’t work. We’ve got some men rebuilding the Tube, and some are working on the roads or the bomb-sites.’

  Grace was a competent driver: better than me. Being a passenger gave me the chance to take in what I saw. Acres of terraced houses reduced to rubble. On one pulverized corner site the bricks didn’t even look like bricks, just misshapen chunks of red stuff. Burned-out warehouses. One family was moving its possessions in three prams. There was a small street market on a road of bombed-out shops. I had a sudden memory of the feeling of futility that I had experienced at St Paul’s. It made me angry, but I had no one to be angry with.

  Grace stopped at a crossroads to ask a coloured guy directions to KG Five: it was a dock. Grace might as well have been speaking a foreign language, because he turned out to be a GI, on leave and rubbernecking. He had a camera around his neck, and couldn’t help us. Grace offered him a lift in the back of the Tilley, but he smiled and refused ‘No. Thank you, ma’am, but no. I guess I’ll walk.’

  Grace nodded.

  The insidious sweet smell of the unburied crept into the cab from the bomb-site alongside us. She wrinkled her nose and wound the pick-up window shut.

  ‘When do you think they’ll finally bury all the dead?’ I asked.

  ‘Years. When they finish finding them. It’s the dead children they still find that upset me. They make me numb inside.’

  ‘And yet you haven’t asked me about your own.’

  ‘I know. That’s a bit strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re all a bit odd. I think it’s on account of all the killing.’

  ‘What’s happened to Carlo? Did you put him in a children’s home?’

  ‘No. I brought him back with me. I also had a five-year-old German kid who I sort of inherited. They’re both with my old Major down on the South Coast. He has a pub and a restaurant down there: the last I heard the kids were doing well. I send them money.’

  ‘You don’t go to see them?’

  ‘No. That’s right: me neither.’

  ‘Fat lot of good we are.’ Grace said it ruefully.

  ‘We can’t be good at everything, can we?’

  ‘No, Charlie, we can’t. But you’d think that we could be good at something.’

  I needed to change the subject. I asked, ‘What are we going down to the docks for?’

  ‘I’m doing a favour for Harry. A ship’s captain he knows is taking his ship into the Med for the first time. I was volunteered to check his charts and make sure that he’d got everything he needed.’ Grace was A1 with maps. I remembered that.

  A uniformed man, with a single ring on the end of his dark sleeve, directed us around the dock to the vessel we were seeking. He wasn’t too smart, but he was cheerful – and that counts for a lot. He caught my glance at a group of massive brick arches that had been exposed by a bomb.

  ‘They were wine vaults built by Napoleonic prisoners of war in the 1800s. We used them for air-raid shelters, and never lost a single person.’ He sounded proud of it. ‘They’ll still be here when I’m gone.’ An optimist.

  The ship was named the Polly B. Underneath her name, on her old-fashioned raked stern, Boston was shown as the port of registration.

  ‘Polly B what?’ I asked Grace.

  ‘Polly B good, perhaps?’

  A man I already knew was sitting on a pile of hatch boards near the end of Polly B’s gangway, which was a steep set of light metal steps leading up to a gap in the ship’s rail. The port tally clerk. Why hadn’t I expected that? Grace parked up alongside him and we got out. He banged the bent pipe he had been smoking against his boot heel and wandered over.

  Grace said, ‘You two have already met . . .’

  We performed the ritual of the hands. If he was a Mason then he wasn’t letting on this time.

  His eyes twinkled like a weasel’s – we had not only met, remember, but he had offered to fence for me.

  ‘I’ll take you on board and introduce you to the Old Man,’ he said. ‘After that it’s up to you. OK?’

  Grace said, ‘Fine. Thanks for taking the time.’

  ‘Think nothing of it, comrade.’ It was just the way he said it that made us all grin. He was the first person I’d met who saw the funny side of being a Red.

  The captain of the Polly B was an eighteen-feet-tall red-headed Dutchman named Herman. He had scars all over his big hands, and from the moment we were shown into his small day cabin I was aware that he had a way with the ladies. I could feel Grace blossoming alongside me, even without looking at her. We drank thick clear Dutch gin with him and, despite what he had said, our dock worker stayed for a couple of rounds.

  ‘You’re registered in Boston: is that Boston, Lincs, or Boston in the USA?’ I asked Herman.

  ‘Nobody knows, Charlie – which is good for me. Maybe both.’

  ‘Herman owns this ship,’ Grace explained. ‘He’s an owner-driver. He just takes it wherever he pleases. Tramping.’

  ‘And he pleases to go into the Med now?’

  Herman waved a finger the colour and size of a beef sausage under my nose, and told Grace, ‘Your friend asks too many questions. He a policeman?’

  ‘No. He’s not long out of jail.’ Had I told her that? I couldn’t remember.

  ‘OK.’

  I said, ‘No more questions. I was just making conversation. I didn’t mean to offend.’

  ‘Why not?’ The Dutchman changed tack again. ‘That’s the problem with you English; you too afraid of offending someone. You steal someone’s wife, or take his money or his life, you don’t give a damn. You offend someone, and you get worried.’

  I had had enough. I stood up, and even then, standing over him where he sat, wasn’t that much bigger than him. ‘I could get very pissed off with you . . .’ It must have been the gin.

  Even Grace smiled at that. I must have looked like a mouse threatening an elephant.

  Herman laughed a series of slow explosive laughs – like, ha . . . ha . . . ha. Then he said, ‘Sit down, Englishman,’ and when I didn’t: ‘Sit down. Have a drink. You’re safe here.’

  He produced another bottle from a small cupboard alongside him. Rum. The label said Four Bells, and For export only. He asked, ‘You like this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let’
s find out. You ever been to Netherlands?’

  ‘Only once. In 1944.’

  ‘Ah!’ Herman said. ‘A liberator. It would be impolite to offend a liberator.’

  I wasn’t sure whether I liked this big man or not. But I liked his rum. He was married and had a huge family, he told us. He went to sea to get away from them. He had a girlfriend on board; a Portuguese girl named Victoria. She must have been sitting in his sleeping cabin, because she came out from behind a hanging bead curtain that guarded it as soon as her name was mentioned. She was about eighteen years old, had straight black hair that hung to her waist, and skin the colour of milky coffee. She was stunningly beautiful.

  Grace’s mouth dropped open, then went immediately into the upside-down smile. Herman said, ‘Victoria’s a nurse from the English Hospital in Oporto. They let her come on this trip to get drugs in England. Things they run short of in Oporto.’

  That didn’t help. Grace lifted a lip and asked, ‘But can she read maps?’

  Herman grinned at me, and shrugged. It was his show, and I wasn’t about to let him off the hook. ‘Probably not. Would you care to examine ours now?’

  We left Victoria in the cabin sipping a hefty slug of rum that she had diluted with ginger beer from a stone bottle. She hadn’t said a word. She hadn’t stopped smiling at me since she’d shown up, either. Herman’s mouth made the upside-down smile too, only it was bigger than Grace’s, and nastier. ‘You too, Charlie,’ he told me. ‘Not safe to leave you here. She eat you alive.’

  Up on the bridge he turned and grinned at me. ‘Ain’t she something, Englishman?’

  ‘Can she speak an intelligible language as well?’

  ‘Don’t know. I never asked her. Mostly she makes moaning noises.’ Then Herman roared his loud staccato laugh.

  ‘I prefer my girls a bit older than that,’ I said. ‘And a bit more experienced.’ I was tipping my hat to Grace, but it didn’t work because she swung round and glared at me. You never can tell.

  The chart house was a small windowless room aft of the bridge. It had just enough room for a chart table with wide drawers, and a high stool. Grace ignored the stool. She dragged out the charts one by one, scrutinized them, and seemed to pay a lot of attention to their publication dates. She screwed one into a big paper ball and tossed it in a corner, and made a list up as she went along.