by Peter Rimmer
When she was finished she pushed him away and looked up at him.
“That’s better. Should have done that long ago. You’d better introduce me to this Felix. Are you hungry? There’s roast beef for supper.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“When did you last hear from your father?”
“They wouldn’t let us take or make calls during the course. Dad couldn’t have got to my passing out parade anyway. They worked us night and day. We spent more time at our desks being taught the theory than up in the air. Then they had to teach you to behave like a proper British officer. Which knife and fork to use in the officers’ mess. You just wouldn’t believe it. Even the ranks in the Chinese air force for some reason. They think the Japs are coming into the war. This Chiang Kai-shek chap is important to them. One of the instructors was stationed in Singapore before the war. Did you know the Chinese have been fighting off the Japanese since 1937? They’ll never try attacking Singapore. The island is one big fortress.”
“When did you last write to your father?”
“I think of him in London every day. Letters take weeks to get to England. By the time I wrote him a letter and explained the rules and received a reply I’d be over in England drinking a beer together. He always took Tinus to the Running Horses. Now I’m eighteen we can go together.”
“They’ve bombed Hastings Court.”
“What?”
“An ARP warden saw the attack. One German bomber. The RAF had scattered the daylight raid. The bombers couldn’t get through to London. This one had turned round to go back. Dropped his bombs on our house to lighten his load. A deliberate bombing run, according to the warden’s report.”
“Is Dad all right?”
“He was in London. One of the bombs hit the old clock tower. High explosive and no fire. If it had been an incendiary bomb your father says the Court would have been burned to the ground. Another hit the stables killing the horses.”
“Patterson? He lives over the stables.”
“The groom had been called up at Easter. The dogs are all right. The warden said the German pilot was more interested in unloading his bombs than hitting anything. His fighter escort was in a dogfight. He was trying to get out. No one was killed. In all the centuries when the Court was a small castle able to defend itself before they built the manor house, the Mandervilles had never before been attacked by foreigners. Your father says he can’t do anything about the damage until after the war. There are streets in London bombed out. Every day it goes on. Why doesn’t he come here? It’s all a nightmare.”
“That’s why someone has to fight. At least he didn’t drop his bomb load on built-up London. Felix, old chap, come and meet my mother. Mother, this is Felix Lombard. He’s a Londoner, aren’t you, Felix? The bloody Krauts have bombed my great-grandfather’s ancestral home. Where Grandmother grew up. Where I grew up. Killed all the horses. I never thought of the animals getting hurt until now.”
Anthony watched his friend shake hands with his mother. Now he was annoyed. Now the war was personal. Now he knew for certain he had made the right decision. Like his father when they killed Uncle George, he wanted his revenge.
“Now I hate the bastards,” he said to Felix.
“Yes, I suppose you do. As we bomb the Germans they’ll hate us. My father says everything in life is tit for tat. Now you can go and drop bombs on Germany. Beth says she’ll bunk school tomorrow and go to the beach with us.”
“Oh no she won’t, Mr Lombard. Where are the boys, Beth?”
“Battling the wind back from Hout Bay I expect. I told them it was too far to cycle with a southeaster blowing. If the wind’s dropped tomorrow can I go after school?”
“If your brother flies an aeroplane I’m sure by now he can drive a car. You can take the car, all of you… There they are. Did you two get to the beach? Don’t you recognise your older brother?”
Whooping, Anthony’s two youngest brothers came at him in a rush, running straight into his arms.
“Felix, meet Dorian and Kim. Now you’ve met the whole family.”
“Not yet; your father.”
“Oh, you’ll meet Dad. Everyone meets Dad. They only knocked down the clock tower and the stables. You’ll come and stay at Hastings Court when they give us a spot of leave. There’s still a skeleton staff. Do you like roast beef? We’re having it for supper. Mum, are there any beers in the fridge? The first thing I’m going to do is change out of this uniform. Can Felix stay with us until we get the boat? We kind of took some leave hoping.”
“The spare room is always ready. You both go and change while I get out of my gardening clothes. Before you drink beer I want you to book a call to your father. Probably come through tomorrow.”
“I can book the call,” said Frank.
“What’s come over you all of a sudden?” asked his mother.
“Thanks, Frank,” said Anthony. “I’ll show Felix the spare room. It’s just so good to be home.”
2
The air-raid warning went off at half past six, the second that day, at the same time Frank was telling his brother the call was booked for eleven o’clock the next morning. Harry Brigandshaw had looked up at the clock on his office wall as the siren wailed.
He had a good ten minutes to get down to Charing Cross. What with all the interruptions, the papers in the tin tray on his right were piled high. Carrying on until he heard the crump of falling bombs, he picked up his bowler hat and rolled umbrella off the wooden stand where they both hung and moved to the door. At the first sound of the siren everyone in the office had complied with Standing Orders and gone down to the shelters. Only Harry preferred the Tube station with the ordinary people who kept his spirits alive. Two daylight raids in one day and the best of the night to come, he thought philosophically. Harry considered himself too old to worry about being killed. Most of his life was fulfilled he told himself every time the air-raid warning sent him to a shelter.
Downstairs in the street Harry walked along Whitehall in the direction of Charing Cross. He could hear the sound of machine gun fire. There were ack-ack bursts over behind Buckingham Palace from a battery in the Royal grounds. The machine gun fire came from the Vickers guns in the Spitfires attacking the German bombers. He could see vapour trails. The sky to the south was full of the sound of aircraft engines. Heinkel HE 111s and Spitfire Mk Vs. Harry could tell every aircraft in the sky by the sound of the engine, the sound of the guns.
The bombs were dropping nearer as the sun went down. He could feel the explosions coming up from the pavement through his feet. The wind brought the smell of the explosions, a mixed smell of dust and old age as London shuddered, the old buildings coming apart. Determined not to run, the sphincter in his backside tightened as he forced down on his nerves. The streets were emptying fast. Only when he went down the stairs into the Tube station did Harry’s arsehole begin to relax, the walls now giving him protection from a blast on either side. Then he was underground.
The lights were dim, the power off on the railway lines when he found his place under the advertisement for Wrigley’s chewing gum. His bedroll was still where he had left it. The first time had been a year ago. Propping his umbrella against the curved wall of the Tube station, Harry took off his bowler hat and waited for his eyes to get used to the light. After the last of the sun his eyes took time to grow accustomed so he could recognise other shelterers. To Harry it smelt like half the people were smoking to calm their nerves. The explosion from above produced a soft whimper followed by a strained silence. Later they would all start talking. It took time to grow used to the violent change in their lives.
When the pupils in his eyes were big enough to see, Harry looked around for his friends. There was nothing else to do but talk to each other or go to sleep. It was too dark to read a book. No one had even tried a radio. There was only war news on it. All of them knew what was going on without having to be told. Everyone had their own smell. Stale perfume. Dirty bodies. One had ba
d breath, the same bad breath night after night. There wasn’t a bathroom. They were lucky to still have flushing toilets. Six months before, the Germans had smashed the water pipes into that part of London making the Tube station stink from the toilets for a week until the water came on again and flushed them clean.
Harry was tired and hungry. Most of all he needed a drink. A big, long drink. As usual, he sat down on his bedroll and took his mind away to sundowners on Elephant Walk with the crickets singing in the long grass. Sometimes in his half dream he found Lucinda St Clair, his first wife, shot dead on Salisbury Station. Harry thought it was sitting on a railway station that brought her back to him. Not to be disloyal, Harry made himself conjure a picture of Tina in the house in Cape Town. The effort, in the semi-dark, did not always work. His eyes were closed and his shoulders drooped as he went off to sleep with his back slightly curved with the wall, the war overhead giving way to his dreams.
“Harry! It’s Mrs Coombes. You haven’t eaten lunch again, have you? Here’s a sandwich. Bit of a door stopper.”
“You’re very kind, Sarah.” Harry, woken from his tumbling dreams, took the sandwich. Mrs Coombes always gave him a sandwich. She knew about his wife living in Cape Town but not about his money. The way he spoke made her comfortable, his Rhodesian accent belying his position in the social structure of life. They always asked him to talk about Africa when the bombs were coming down. Harry was their comfort blanket when it got bad.
“Any news from South Africa?”
“The lines are bad and Tina hates writing.”
Harry knew it was better not to tell them the truth if he wanted to sleep at night among the people. The whole class structure in the Air Ministry shelter, despite its comparative comfort, put him off.
The truth from Africa had arrived on his desk by chance soon after Anthony turned eighteen. Squadron Leader Timothy Kent had gone off to fly aeroplanes the week after Dunkirk. The Air Ministry staff were now old. Some were older than Harry. All had had something to do with the Air Force in the last war. Harry was now in charge of keeping track of the sleepers recruited by Henning von Lieberman late in 1937. Potential security risks, like the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley Bart, were locked up for the duration of the war. Fools like Rodney Hirst-Brown were just being watched. Taking photographs of London Docks at ground level was as much use to the Germans as an old map of London. It was what his friend’s cousin had up his sleeve for the ex-employee of Rosenzweig Bank that interested Harry. The ex-bank clerk was more use to British intelligence out in the open. Behind bars, Harry had argued, Rodney Hirst-Brown would lead them to no one.
Vic ‘Ding-a-ling’ Bell had been given the physical task of watching Rodney Hirst-Brown. Ding-a-ling had been adjutant of 33 Squadron when Harry was the commanding officer. Major Harry Brigandshaw Royal Flying Corps in those days. Back then Ding-a-ling’s job had been to keep the flow of whisky and ordnance on schedule, administering the paperwork of a fighting squadron in the field.
Ding-a-ling had been born with a club foot so they wouldn’t let him fly. Being adjutant was the next best thing. Harry had got him the job at the Air Ministry when Timothy Kent was recalled to his squadron. After scouting the field, Ding-a-ling had made a friend of the landlord at the Crown having found out where Rodney spent his evenings. After that it had been a pleasant job listening and drinking beer. Deliberately never speaking to Rodney.
Ding-a-ling clumped his way into Harry’s office at the Air Ministry once a month. Rodney was only one of his jobs. It was in May when the daffodils were out in the small garden outside Harry’s window that Ding-a-ling now remembered.
“I was going through the list of new recruits for pilots, checking them off our list. There’s a Brigandshaw, Harry. Flying Training in Rhodesia. Now is that a coincidence or something?”
“Is his name Anthony?”
“I’m afraid so. You didn’t know?”
“Neither does his mother.”
“They kind of put them in quarantine during pilot training. Not allowed off the station. No phone calls. That kind of thing. I’ll keep you informed of progress. He’ll be posted to England if he gets his wings.”
“He’ll get his wings. I gave him flying lessons with John Woodall as his sixteenth birthday present, six months before Tina took the children to Cape Town. Ostensibly to keep him out of harm’s way. Went up to Rhodesia to look at Elephant Walk. Must have been side-tracked. Children are funny. Not a word. Spent his last year of school at Bishops in Cape Town. Top marks and an entry into medical school at UCT, University of Cape Town. Thanks for telling me. Anything on any of our friends?”
“Bugger all. Real sleepers.”
“Be careful. This is the time to watch carefully with the war overhead. When’s Anthony scheduled back to England?”
“End of September. They fly them from Gwelo to Cape Town and put them on a boat. Can’t afford to lose pilots before they get into combat. Sorry, Harry. I’ll piss off so you can read my monthly report. Is he any good as a pilot?”
“Funny how the law lets them fly a plane in the air but not drive a car on the ground until they are eighteen. They’ll change that law one day. I suppose I could say this is my own bloody fault. Taught Flight Lieutenant Oosthuizen to fly. My nephew. Madge’s son.”
“The chap they just gave a bar to his DFC?”
“The CO put him up for a DSO.”
“Well, I’ll be off.”
For months nothing had come out of Rhodesia. Then Ding-a-ling had put Anthony’s schedule in front of Harry.
“You think you could get me a rail pass to Southampton, Vic? I’ll teach my son to blindside his father.”
“Won’t he phone you from Cape Town?”
“Maybe. Why do I feel so bloody old?”
“We are a bit long in the tooth. Hirst-Brown was flush with money in the pub last night. Offered me a drink with the rest of the bar.”
“Watch him, Vic. I hate people with chips on their shoulders.”
“When he left drunk I asked the landlord, off-hand of course, where the chap got his money from. Henry, the landlord, said the man was probably a spy. We both had a good laugh. Why would the Germans pay a man for doing nothing? What’s the worst a fool like Rodney could do?”
“Why don’t you get into Mrs Leadman’s house and have a look through his drawers? He still hasn’t got a job. Where does he get his money? It’s fools that worry me most. Men with brains are logical. Fools get themselves killed and cause a lot of damage in the process. Fools never make sense. You can’t think in their heads. Why did I ever suggest to Klaus his cousin visit Janet Wakefield to cure his bloody stutter? Enemies then friends then enemies again. Now our families are back trying to kill each other. Klaus spent his honeymoon on Elephant Walk.”
“He’ll come out of it all right, Harry.”
“I hope so.”
Furious with himself and the stupidity of life, Harry began to eat his sandwich. There were always homemade pickled onions in Mrs Coombes’s cheese sandwiches. The onions crunched as he ate as good a meal as any he had enjoyed in the Savoy Grill. Only when he began to eat did he find out how hungry he was. He had missed breakfast as well as lunch.
“It doesn’t do your health any good not eating properly. Have another sandwich.”
“Do you make more for me specially, Sarah?”
“Of course I do. Someone has to look after you. Clerks in the War Office, or wherever you work, have their bit to do for the war effort. That one was close! You mind if I hold your hand, Harry? Start telling us one of your stories. I hate it when the lights go out. Jerry must have hit the powerline. Another bloody bomb!”
“They drop them in sticks.”
“How would you know?”
“Read it somewhere. Where shall I begin, everyone?”
“Tell us again your trip up the Skeleton Coast with your friend Barend looking for diamonds.”
“You remember that one, Fred?”
“You do s
peak with a funny accent but my missus reckons you read the story in a book.”
Harry settled back in the middle of an air raid to take their minds off the bombs. They were safe deep underground in the tube station.
“Every night we made a fire on the beach. You could hear the hyena scrounging for carcasses washed up on the sand. Sometimes they found a dead seal and went off with it back into the Namib Desert. The sharks get the seals. The seals get the fish. The hyena scavenge the seals. Now that’s nature for you, everyone. Back then Barend and I didn’t need electricity to see. Three layers of stars in the sky were so bright you could read a book by starlight. Moonlight was better but starlight with the waves crashing on the shore was just as good, if a bit hard on my eyes. I was younger then so it didn’t matter. During the day, after the fog from the cold Atlantic Ocean had been eaten up by the hot African sun, we collected mussels off the rocks. You never saw mussels like the mussels in South West Africa. Longer than a man’s hand and nearly as wide. The shells were bigger than the meat inside so you needed ten dozen to get a good meal. We were young and hungry, Barend and I. Sometimes we caught a big fish fishing off the rocks, standing all day. Collecting mussels was quicker. Then we had the time to look for the diamonds.”
“Did you find any, Harry?” asked a voice from the dark, down on the rails. They could all hear the aircraft directly overhead, there was so much noise in the night sky.
“Seven. We found seven diamonds. One the size of a chicken’s egg.”
“Blimey. Must have made you rich.”
“Never sold it. As I said before, my dad had an old house on a farm, if you could call it a farm. Dad was a hunter. The Great Elephant killed my dad. So I built that diamond into the fireplace for a rainy day. It was still there last time I looked, before I came to live in London. My old mother and my sister still live on the farm.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“My wife didn’t like Rhodesia. The bush. Too wild for Tina. Now she’s in South Africa and I’m here with you, dodging bombs. You’ll hear the all clear quite soon. They’re going away. Now, just look at that. The lights are on again. Jerry missed the powerlines. No, I’m wrong. I can hear another wave of Heinkels.”
