The Forgotten War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘What about that boy who joked about putting his hot dog in my roll?’

  ‘He’s OK. He’s on the aircraft, sleeping. We’re all very tired.’

  ‘You tell him that next time he comes through Hamburg we’ll talk about it.’

  ‘OK. I’ll tell him that.’ I blew on the surface of the coffee and sipped it. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Marthe.’

  ‘You are a very pretty woman, Marthe.’

  ‘I know.’ But she still looked sad.

  ‘How about giving me a date?’

  ‘No. I said before.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll have a hot dog this time.’

  That didn’t work either.

  The airfield they took us into looked familiar. They all do. If you’ve spent time in the RAF anything with runways, hangars and Nissen huts looks familiar. This one was on care and maintenance: it had been mothballed for at least two years. It was populated by ghosts: a Mary Celeste of airfields.

  I’ve told you before that Claywell was an enormously accomplished pilot: he put the heavy Hudson on the deck as sweetly as silk drawers dropping away from a French stripper. Memories are made of landings like that. We were met by two RAF ambulances – sleek new Daimlers – an Army one-and-half-tonner, and one of those malevolent brown Austin staff cars.

  Tim was whisked away first, in one of the blood wagons. He had woken up, smiled dreamily at everyone, but didn’t know who he was. When I leaned over him to say goodbye he was humming a tune: I think it was a calypso. Neil, Dai and Morgan were ushered into the other one. The last I saw of Neil was his hand waving from a window. An Army officer got down from the lorry, and before he reached the aircraft the Jedburgh had drawn up in line on the tarmac. They came to a very smart attention, and their big guy saluted.

  The officer saluted back. All he said was, ‘Well done, Roland.’ Then, ‘Stand easy, boys, and welcome back.’

  The genuine pleasure in his voice made you want to weep. Then I realized that we had done what he’d wanted someone to do for months: we’d got his team back. That was the good news. The bad news was what and who we had left in France in order to do so. I wondered about the top gunner whose name I had forgotten. Tony. Was he still evading on his own, or was he just a man-shaped hole in the ground somewhere?

  The staff car was for me, of course. Dolly sat behind the wheel, trying not to smile. Piers was in the back, glowing with anger.

  ‘What the fuck happened to you people out there?’ he asked me. It was nice to be one up on him for a change.

  25. Pasadena

  Bella fell upon my neck, the way they do in books. Ming poured me a glass of cider – their stock seemed inexhaustible, and I never asked about it. Alison burst into tears and ran away to her room. I wasn’t back from the dead, but I might as well have been Lazarus Bassett.

  When I eventually went up in front of Watson he said, ‘Funny old job, isn’t it? No man can serve two masters, and all that.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we do most of the time, sir? We work for Piers on one hand, and the WD on the other.’

  ‘Don’t you think that Piers is War Department as well?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I told him truthfully. ‘I think that he’s with some people way out on their own, somewhere halfway between GCHQ and the RAF. Some unit where the services dump their unreliables – which includes us, by the way. Where’s Mrs Miller, sir?’

  He ignored the question.

  ‘I never asked about Piers myself,’ he said gruffly. ‘I thought it safer that way.’

  I nodded impatiently. ‘The need-never-to-know system? Where’s Mrs Miller, sir?’

  Watson studied the desk in front of him. ‘You are going to get your wish, Charlie: you’re going to be demobbed. I understand you’ve secured a senior radio operator’s job with one of the new airlines. Congrats: wish that I was coming with you.’

  I started to lose it. ‘Sir, where’s—?’

  He cut me off. ‘I heard you the first time, Charlie. I’m trying to phrase an answer. Shall we have a drink while I think about it?’

  He wanted to know what it was like to visit France by parachute. I told him it was a bit rough-and-ready; not my idea of a Cook’s Tour. When I got to the bit about the Jedburgh he said, ‘They weren’t a real Jedburgh, you know. I don’t know who they were, but they weren’t a real Jedburgh.’

  ‘Can you explain that, sir? Unless it will take too long to phrase an answer.’

  He gave me the look. I’d only said it to tell him that I hadn’t forgotten.

  ‘Real Jedburghs were just what you’ve already been told. Gallant gentlemen who linked up with partisans behind the lines in order to harass dear old Jerry. Your lot was something else: one of several groups that landed from a submarine in 1944, deliberately lost themselves, and then went Nazi-hunting – they forgot how to stop, that’s all.’

  ‘They were proper soldiers. I saw the officer who met them. He was old army – one of the old school. Anyway, I thought that there were at least two teams operating out there?’

  ‘There were. The thinking is that the last chappies will jack it in off their own bat, now that they’re on their own. I know that you didn’t plan to finish it this way, Charlie, but there are a lot of people at the War House rather pleased with you.’

  ‘I’ve just noticed what you said before, sir. Our German enemy is now dear old Jerry . . . whilst our Russian allies have become the dangerously threatening Reds.’

  ‘Yes. The Red menace or the Red peril. I’ve heard talk of both. It’s because you notice things like that, Charlie, that you’d be better off out of the service . . . although there’s another reason.’

  Ask me another. I didn’t ask: Watson was going to tell me anyway.

  ‘When a service aircraft is lost in peacetime, the law of the land demands a board of inquiry into the loss. It’s not like when we’re at war and dropping them all over the place every day.’

  I thought about the CFS at Little Rissington, but didn’t mention it. ‘What about when personnel are lost?’

  ‘Then too; but they’re more worried about the aircraft, actually. The point is that if you are still in the service when the board convenes, you will be ordered to attend. If you’re not – then it will be up to you whether you attend or not . . . even though you’ll still be a reservist. Kingsway thinks it might be just as well to demob you as quickly as possible, to give you a choice.’

  I suppose I laughed cynically. ‘You mean Piers doesn’t want me to appear and give evidence?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like, but the real answer to that is yes and no. If it looks as if you will be unavailable to the formal inquiry, standing orders require you to be examined by a personal board before you demob. They will decide which of your evidence is relevant and should be submitted to the inquiry.’

  ‘And I expect that Piers or someone like him would be on my personal board, sir?’

  ‘I should expect so: head it up, probably.’

  ‘They get you all ways, don’t they? What happened to Mrs Miller?’

  ‘Suspended, Charlie. She used her initiative: very bad form. She’d been warned about it before, apparently. She should have asked permission before she passed information about your crash to the Jedburgh.’

  ‘Which wasn’t a Jedburgh.’ I looked out of the window and then back to Watson. ‘It wasn’t a crash either, sir. The Frogs shot us down.’

  ‘I think that you’ll find it was a crash, Charlie. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pilot and navigator had become disorientated in bad weather over Germany and had strayed unintentionally over the border into France where the aircraft crashed.’

  ‘The weather was perfect. You could see for bloody miles.’

  ‘Weather can be a funny thing, Charlie.’

  ‘Both the pilot and the nav survived.’

  Then Watson said it: ‘Then they’d better be careful too, hadn’t they, Charlie?’

  A few ordinary little words can change your w
orld-view if you let them.

  I kicked my heels with damn all to do, and the girls did Russian trawlers. Russian trawlers did us. Mrs Boulder had taken up knitting: she was knitting a man’s scarf the colour of venous blood. Elizabeth had painted her finger- and toe-nails the same colour. We all pretended not to miss Miller, but without her the station felt as if it had had its lungs ripped out. Jane sat at Miller’s desk, answered her telephone, and made out the requisition slips that I had to sign. I hadn’t ever bothered to check an item number, so I still didn’t know what I was signing for. It would be good to find out that I had just requisitioned a brand new battleship for a bored sea cook stationed at Scapa. Anyway, Jane sent me far less than Miller had done, and the answer to that mystery wasn’t too far away.

  After about a week I received a formal signal from the WD saying that an unexpected opportunity had occurred to advance my demob. It did not leave me feeling unloved. I received another telling me that I would be examined informally before then by a panel of officers who would report on to the board of inquiry investigating the loss of Tim’s Lincoln.

  Then my new boots arrived: it was the highlight of that week. If old men like me look back on their service lives for you, the bits they forget to tell you are the excruciating periods of boredom. The little box radio in my office took a bashing: Wilfred Pickles and Mabel were almost on first-name terms with me after a while. One afternoon I sat with my feet on the desk and a glass in my hand, heard an old recording of Florrie Desmond singing ‘The Deepest Air Raid Shelter in Town’ and never stopped laughing. The BBC had just started censoring risqué songs again, so I guessed that the song’s days were numbered.

  I helped Bella and Ming brew cider in a steading I hadn’t been allowed into before. She confessed that she made more money from selling cider to the local pubs than from her chickens. So I was living with a bootlegger. I told her to stop being mean in that case, and buy a new van to replace the wreck she drove around in. She said the wreck was part of her image of abject poverty. Together with a thousand scraggy chickens and their associated chicken shit, it deflected the attention of the tax collectors. Unfortunately it attracted the attention of Miller’s number one, but she could live with that.

  Eventually I asked Ronka, ‘Do you have an address for Mrs Miller? I can’t find one.’

  ‘Yes. But she made us promise not to give it to you.’

  ‘Watson made me promise not to contact her while she’s under investigation. I’m not very good at keeping promises.’ OK. That was a lie. I just wasn’t very good at keeping that promise.

  ‘I am, Charlie, but I can hardly keep you away from the telephone, can I?’

  ‘Did she ask you not to give me her telephone number either?’

  ‘No, she forgot to do that. She may have intended me to understand that when she asked me to refuse you her address, but I am foreign, you see. English is my third language – I still take words at their face value.’

  ‘You speak better English than I do.’

  ‘I have the better brain.’

  ‘Thank you, Weronka.’

  ‘But a brain that is curiously bad at remembering telephone exchanges and numbers. That’s why I write the important ones in pencil on the wall above my radio.’

  ‘Hello, Miller,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Hello.’ I noticed that she didn’t use my name. She sounded small: defensive.

  ‘Are you alone? Can you talk?’ One of my old bosses had cautioned me against asking the second question before getting an answer to the first, but Miller knew how to cope with it. She was more experienced at this sort of thing than me.

  ‘Yes. But I’d rather not.’

  ‘So put the phone down.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You saved my life.’

  ‘No. Your parachute did that; I think the company that made it will send you a little gold caterpillar badge to celebrate it. I only called the taxi.’

  ‘And you are being investigated because of it.’

  ‘Is that what they’ve told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘The Jedburgh, or whatever it was, came back with me. We don’t need to mess with them any more.’

  ‘I know. That was the deal. If they brought you back, no one would ask what they’d been doing for the last couple of years. Ari Joopeman came to see me last week; he took me to lunch.’

  ‘That was part of the deal, too; he told me. I was jealous. When can I see you again?’

  ‘You can’t. I was allowed to stay at home on condition that I should have no contact with potential witnesses if they prosecute me.’ That was too stupid. After a pause – neither of us seemed to know what to say next – she said, ‘Charles has got to go to Town for a couple of days next week. Maybe I could see you then, and explain.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Monday night.’

  ‘OK. Where?’

  ‘That pub we were at before, the one near Little Rissington. Where I met your friend Tommo.’

  ‘The Lamb. OK.’

  ‘Don’t be angry if I’m not there.’

  ‘Don’t ask the impossible, Miller.’

  I kept on expecting a call from Piers: not about the board of inquiry, but about Grace. It didn’t come, which made me vaguely uneasy. The truth was that whenever I thought of that great lump of people living on the Bishops Avenue a slow smile came to my face. I hoped they’d been left in peace, and I wished them well.

  I phoned Dolly from the farm one evening, when Bella and Alison were out at a church concert. I’d lent them the Singer. Bella looked the very example of rural propriety as I showed them to the car.

  ‘Hello, Dolly – it’s me.’

  ‘Oh. Hello, Charlie. Hail the conquering hero.’

  ‘Don’t take the mickey; it’s not fair. When can I come round, and come again? And again and again: if you see what I mean.’

  Her pause wasn’t a refusal.

  ‘Weekend after next? That sound OK? I’m pretty tied up until then.’

  ‘I didn’t realize that you did that sort of thing. Is Den in?’

  ‘No, Ike’s here. They’re up in Scotland somewhere. I think that they’re giving Ike a castle, or something. Leave it until Saturday week. Give me a call first.’

  ‘OK. Is Piers saying anything about me?’

  ‘Whenever he does, he jolly well swears a lot. I’d wait until he cools down if I was you.’

  ‘I didn’t know that I’d done anything especially wrong.’

  ‘That’s always the problem with Piers, isn’t it?’

  When the call came it wasn’t exactly a yorker. It was a medium-fast delivery that strayed out on the leg side. I got my bat to it, but the second slip was waiting. I was leaning on one of the paddock fences watching Alison and the dogs herd chickens. Bella came to the door wiping her hands on a towel and called out, ‘Charlie – phone . . .’

  When I picked up the handset a voice from a hundred years ago asked me, ‘Mr Charlie?’

  ‘Barnsey?’

  Barnes was the butler from Crifton – the barracks block of a house near Bedford that Grace’s mother shared with her stepfather. It was as big as that new aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. The first time we saw it we called it Fuckingham Palace. I won’t say that Grace’s parents didn’t exactly get on, but being in their presence was like sitting in the Emperor’s seat at the Colosseum. The real thing, I mean; not that bloody theatre in London.

  ‘How are you, Mr Charlie? Mrs Baker mentioned that you are recently back from another trip to France.’

  ‘That’s right, Barnsey. How did she find out?’

  ‘It’s the circle she moves in, Mr Charlie. You know how people talk.’

  ‘Worse than Old Mother Riley.’

  ‘She wouldn’t like to hear you say that, sir.’

  ‘But it made you smile, didn’t it?’

  Barnes had been good at his job too long to answer a question like that. ‘They want to see you, sir. They t
hought that you could drive down on Saturday, and stay until Sunday.’

  ‘Do I have much choice?’

  ‘Probably not, sir. That’s the burden of the underclass.’ At least he’d worked out that we were both on the same side. ‘Mrs Barnes will look forward to your being with us again.’

  ‘Tell Mrs Barnes that I look forward to her cooking; especially breakfast in the kitchen on Sunday.’

  ‘That may be in order, Mr Charlie.’

  ‘Dress for dinner on Saturday?’

  ‘I’m sure that your best uniform would be appropriate, sir.’

  And that was bloody that. You get it, don’t you? They were the last people I expected to hear from, and it’s always the one you don’t see quickly that gets you. Caught at second slip, I’d say.

  I have never got away from the idea that Crifton glows in the sunset, but less and less as each evening falls. It’s like the light fading as you turn the gas down: like some bloody great metaphor for the British Empire, I suppose. I had intended to drive around to the back and slide in unannounced, but Barnes must have been on the lookout for me – he was out under the portico as I drove out of the trees and onto the wide gravelled road that went down to the house. You could build one of those new towns on the sloping lawn in front of it. Mrs Baker once told me that she’d married her husband in order to get someone wealthy enough to support the house and estate: she couldn’t bear the thought of giving them up. Peter Baker once told me that he’d married her because she had the house, and was a better poke than Grace anyway. They were a complicated bunch. What annoyed me was that there was a side of me which actually liked them.

  Barnes started with, ‘Welcome back, Mr Charlie.’ The grins on our faces possibly said it all. ‘Mrs Baker wonders if you would join her for tea.’

  ‘In the bloody Orangery again, I suppose.’

  ‘Just so, sir. You remember the way?’

  ‘If I’m not back by Tuesday, send out the search party.’

  ‘No need, sir. Nancy will take you.’