Back to Battle

by Max Hennessy

  ‘Bombed out, Biddy,’ he said laconically. ‘She’ll be staying here until she can find somewhere.’

  She nodded and vanished and he hurried to what had been his mother’s room to make sure it was in order. He could hear splashing from the bathroom next door and Biddy’s low voice.

  His coat, smeared with dust and spotted with blood, lay on the bed. Alongside it was the silver frame Charley had clutched to her all the way from Harwich and he picked it up to put it where she could see it, wishing he could produce in her the same devotion she seemed to feel for this dead airman. But, as he turned it over, he saw that the face staring out at him through the cracked glass was his own, the press picture taken when he’d been to the Palace to collect his CB.

  Deliberately he kept out of the way and Biddy, her face still showing her own grief, arrived soon afterwards to say that Charley was sleeping.

  ‘Best leave her alone,’ she suggested. ‘She’ll probably be all right in the morning.’

  He ate the meal she set in front of him without noticing it and slept badly, finally falling into a restless doze in the early hours of the morning. When he woke, he bathed, shaved and dressed hurriedly before going to his mother’s room. Charley was sitting up in bed, wearing a dressing gown belonging to Biddy. There was a piece of sticking plaster on her forehead and a red weal on her cheek. The ordeal had marked her and shadows like bruises lay beneath her eyes against the mask-like pallor of her features.

  ‘Hello, Charley,’ he said quietly.

  She gave him an uncertain smile and he noticed that the silver frame was on the table near the bed facedown.

  ‘That’s a lovely shiner you’ve got.’

  She nodded her smile tremulous and doubtful. ‘I’m sorry to be so much trouble,’ she said, avoiding his eyes. ‘I’ll find somewhere to go as soon as I can.’

  ‘No! Stay here. The place’s enormous and there’s nobody in it. Stay as long as you wish.’

  He was cheating a little, trying to make her dependent on him so that she’d be unable to leave, but his hold on her was too tenuous and he was determined not to let it slip from his fingers again, especially after he’d seen what was in the picture frame that she’d clutched to her so determinedly.

  ‘I’m grateful for what you did,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you ever since 1941,’ he said. ‘I even tried to find Mabel in the hope she’d know.’

  Tears welled up in her eyes but she managed a smile. ‘You became an admiral after all, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I’m so pleased.’

  ‘We might have celebrated it together,’ he said gruffly. ‘But I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘I knew where you were,’ she said. ‘Always. I knew when you were bombed in the Mediterranean. I was watching the signals in the Ops Division when Impi was sunk and I followed the fight against Ziethen and Müffling every bit of the way. I wasn’t supposed to read the signals but I did. I told them–’

  ‘Told them what, Charley?’

  She was silent for a while. ‘I told them that I knew you. I was terrified.’

  ‘Why?’

  He sensed an advantage and decided to have it out of her. He believed in himself and, confident now that he’d seen his own photograph in the silver frame, he was determined to push it to the limit.

  ‘Why, Charley?’ he persisted.

  ‘I thought you might be hurt.’

  ‘They can’t touch me,’ he said briskly. ‘I’m fireproof. But why should it worry you?’

  She stared at him with enormous eyes, a black fear like a physical presence in her body. Before she could answer, he spoke again, forcefully, and with no sign of humility.

  ‘Marry me, Charley.’

  She looked at him. ‘You sound as if you were on the bridge giving orders.’

  ‘I’m not on the bridge,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to give orders. I need you. I love you. I’ve loved you all my life.’

  She looked at him wonderingly and he had a sudden uneasy thought that, in all the years he’d known her, in all the years of telling her she meant something to him, he’d never managed to tell her that. His briskness dispersed.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ he said uncertainly, ‘that that’s something I’ve never said before. I’ve told you a lot of things – that I needed you, that I depended on you, things like that – but never that.’

  ‘No, Kelly,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t think you ever did.’

  ‘Well, I do, Charley. Now you’re here I want you to stay here.’

  She still said nothing and he went on, almost desperately, feeling he was making a very bad job of it. ‘When you arrived last night, I happened to pick up the picture frame you brought with you – the only thing you brought. I thought you’d want it where you could see it, but then I saw it was me. Why, Charley?’

  She hesitated for a moment before speaking in a whisper. ‘Because I loved you, Kelly,’ she said.

  It didn’t make sense because she’d behaved as if she were totally indifferent to him. He’d been desperately jealous at Dover of the other men who’d been in her company, able to see her and talk to her while he was away at sea. He’d wanted to be brutal, violent, demanding that she be faithful to him, a late manifestation of passion that he could only guess had been held back by his ambition and his devotion to the Navy. He’d held it in check because he’d felt it would only have produced coldness.

  ‘Marry me, Charley,’ he said again. ‘There are such things as special licences and I couldn’t bear to lose you again.’

  For a long time she was silent and he decided she was going to refuse him again and felt a surge of despair in the uneven stroke of his heart. Then her body trembled as if an electric current had passed through it and there was the sudden bright shine of tears in her eyes.

  ‘Yes, Kelly,’ she said. ‘Yes. I want to. Please.’

  He was bewildered. It was impossible, he felt, to understand women. If he’d asked her before the bomb had dropped, he felt certain she’d have refused him. Yet he knew she wasn’t just accepting him now because he was offering her a home and a measure of comfort. Somehow, the flying bomb had snapped some resistance, cleared some final obstacle that lay between them, exposing to both of them their need for each other.

  ‘Stay here, Charley,’ he said. ‘Don’t move.’

  She looked up. ‘I hadn’t thought of going away,’ she said.

  He went to his room and rummaged in his drawers until he found a small faded red box. He’d almost forgotten it and had never expected to use it.

  Returning, he took her hand and slipped the ruby ring on her finger. It looked enormous and he saw her eyes widen.

  ‘Kelly, it must be worth a fortune!’

  ‘It probably is,’ he agreed. ‘It was given to me in 1919 by the Grand Duchess Evgenia Vjeskov when we fished her out of Russia. I thought then it would make a good engagement ring. It’s just taken a long time to arrive.’ He paused. ‘Christina never wore it, Charley. I never offered it to her.’

  She seemed awed by it and she lifted her face to his, a lost look in her eyes, then the tears welled up and she flung her arms round him.

  ‘Oh, Kelly, we’ve been such fools!’

  Seven

  They went to the Lake District to see Mabel, the only relative in the world either of them possessed. Her husband had returned from India and was now running the local Home Guard. As she kissed him, Kelly saw there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘why did it take you two bloody idiots so long?’

  They were married a fortnight later at the Esher Registry Office. It was a quiet wedding because Kelly Rumbelo’s ship had gone to Trincomalee and Hugh said he couldn’t get leave. Since it was so soon after Paddy’s death, Kelly suspected he preferred it that way. Verschoyle was there with Maisie, Rumbelo and Biddy, whose face still wore a tremulous expression of her own grief.

  In view of wartime restrictions and inability to get petrol, they spent th
eir honeymoon at Thakeham, and almost immediately Kelly flew to Ramsay’s headquarters at Granville in Normandy. By September, with all the Channel ports captured, he was told it would be his job to make sure that all the demolished equipment was removed and the ports put in working order as quickly as possible.

  ‘Europe has to support itself as quickly as possible,’ Ramsay explained. ‘It’ll be your job to see that it has the port facilities to do so.’

  It was Verschoyle, as usual, who put him in the picture.

  ‘They’re looking for an active, alert and determined senior naval officer for Germany after the surrender,’ he said. ‘Ramsay turned it down on the grounds that the man should be younger and fresher. I suggested you.’

  By this time the army was moving swiftly northwards. Paris fell and, soon afterwards, Brussels and finally Antwerp. The perimeter of the German fortress was shrinking every day. By the end of the year they stood on the German frontier and Kelly was in Brussels with Archie Bumf and two Americans as part of the allied committee of recovery, and seemed to spend most of his time flying to and fro between there and London in an assortment of aircraft from old Dakotas to spanking new Liberators.

  A Russian Order of Ushakov, first class, arrived, much to his astonishment.

  ‘Who’s Ushakov?’ he asked.

  Latimer grinned. ‘Led the Black Sea fleet into the Adriatic in 1798,’ he said. ‘He must have been good. Even Nelson congratulated him.’

  They’d set up headquarters in a large house just inside the French border, handy both for France and Belgium, and had just christened it HMS Darius, in accordance with naval orders that all headquarters must be ships, when Boyle discovered his parents-in-law at Ushant. For the next week he virtually disappeared as he arranged for them to travel to England. They were almost destitute, with all their possessions looted by the Germans, but they were in good health, even if hungry.

  ‘Perhaps they’re lucky,’ Kelly said dryly. ‘The hospitality since we landed’s been more than my stomach can stand.’

  On Armistice Day, he stood behind Ramsay in Paris at a march past led by Moroccan troops with a large white goat, mounted bands, Scottish pipe bands, French horn bands, and an American band in which the big drum was mounted on wheels and pushed by the drummer. He was travelling long distances by air now, from the Bay of Biscay to the Scheldt, often in freighter Liberators which contained no mod cons and he had to lie in the bomb bays or on the floor. It was cold and congested and he was glad when the trips took him to London.

  By this time, the blackout had been partially lifted and they seemed to be waiting only for the last dying kicks of the Nazi regime. Despised by his soldiers, hated by the Germans and succoured only by the sycophants of his court, Hitler clearly hadn’t much longer to reign.

  Only an occasional German aircraft appeared, sneaking across in the dark to drop anti-personnel bombs, whose sole purpose seemed to be the killing of inquisitive children. There had been a certain amount of euphoric reaction after the race across France and Belgium and a certain slackening of effort, but it had soon been realised after Arnhem, that whatever Hitler’s position, the German army at least was far from finished. Short of men and short of fuel, it was still highly professional and still managed to produce resistance where there should have been none; incredibly, in the middle of December, it even managed to launch an offensive in the Ardennes.

  Kelly had to spend Christmas in France, and by then the alarm about the Ardennes had dispersed, because the Germans were clearly going to be defeated and with defeat would come the final collapse. Boyle had managed to get his parents-in-law into a house near Amiens and they all went there for Christmas Day, eating and drinking what everybody openly admitted was black market food. For the New Year Kelly flew to London with Verschoyle and went to Thakeham feeling like a bridegroom. He’d seen remarkably little of Charley since his marriage and was pleased to see the house had become gracious once more under her touch.

  The New Year went well but on January 2nd, when they were all a little euphoric at the news that the Germans were in retreat in the Ardennes, Verschoyle rang up.

  ‘You’ve lost your boss,’ he said. ‘Ramsay’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ Kelly said. ‘How?’

  ‘He was flying from Toussus-le-Noble to see Monty. They crashed on take-off. Nobody seems to know why. The sky was cloudless and they got up to about three hundred feet then side slipped in and burst into flames. Perhaps the cold had something to do with it.’

  Flying back to France for the funeral, Kelly walked behind Cunningham and Eisenhower. The accident threw more work on his shoulders and he found he had little opportunity to go to England again. Nothing seemed to have come of Corbett’s suggestion about the Far East and he’d heard that Philip Vian had got the job.

  He felt no resentment. He’d had a good innings. Most boys entering Dartmouth dropped out before they’d reached commander and the number who achieved their broad stripe was very small. He’d been extraordinarily lucky. From being in danger of vanishing into limbo as a passed-over commander in 1936 he was now a rear-admiral. With the war drawing to its end, however, he could expect little more.

  Latimer didn’t seem to agree. “‘Self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting,”’ he said. ‘“Henry V.” It’s as bad to be over-modest, sir, as it is to be over-bold. You need have no fear. They won’t let you go yet.’

  Kelly grinned. ‘When I retire, William, I think you’d better join me as resident minstrel.’

  Latimer grinned back. ‘I expect to see you admiral of the fleet before I die, sir.’

  As it happened, what Latimer had said came home within days. Verschoyle arrived in a SHAPE car driven by an American WAAC driver who looked as though she’d left a good job as a Hollywood starlet to join the war.

  ‘Where did you pick her?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘With the Americans,’ Verschoyle said, ‘they come in bunches of a dozen. I think they breed ’em in litters, because they always seem to find enough to decorate headquarters.’

  He was fishing in his brief case, deliberately brisk and, pulling out a signal flimsy, he looked up.

  ‘Kelly, old son,’ he said. ‘You’re for home.’

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Not what you’ve done. What you’re about to do. We still have to sort out those little yellow bastards in Japan. The Yanks have finally agreed to help us organise a task force for the Pacific and Winston’s determined to get into the act on political grounds, so that when it’s over he’ll have some say in what happens to the peace.’

  ‘And–?’

  ‘You’ll be ordered to strike your flag and go home to help set it up. With a step up in rank. I’ve come to warn you not to get too much involved in this job.’

  The promotion came as Verschoyle predicted and with it the news that he was to get a KCB. It brought an immediate signal from Verschoyle. ‘Twice knightly. You always were one to overdo it.’

  In the same gazette, Kelly was pleased to see that Verschoyle had finally made rear admiral. With his skill, knowledge and technical ability, it was something he deserved.

  He flew home on leave, half-expecting to be called to the Admiralty, but there was no sign that anyone had even noticed him and he spent his leave in a curious frame of mind, tense because he was expecting his new post, and frustrated because it didn’t arrive.

  ‘There’s something in the wind, isn’t there, Kelly?’ Charley said.

  He nodded, wondering how she’d take the news he brought. She was still not quite the old Charley as if she’d been too much hurt and was wary of giving too freely.

  The pain of Paddy’s death was dying at last and it was Charley who was helping it to go. When he felt most stricken and shivering at the thought, she was there to take his mind off her, almost as if she were Paddy.

  But while the old undemanding warmth had returned, there was something else too. Sometimes she drew a vast breath that seemed to hurt as it filled her lungs,
and he never knew whether it was relief or anguish. Women never seemed to have full control over their hearts and even the most intelligent seemed to have a small exposed spot, which was never secure. It was a draining, weakening thought that he could still not be sure of her and he knew he was not very patient at studying areas which he knew nothing about.

  ‘You’re going back to sea,’ she said slowly.

  He looked up, unsure of her. ‘Do you mind, Charley?’

  She stared at him, her eyes frank. ‘No woman likes to see her man disappear into the blue,’ she said. ‘I never did. But it is different now, Kelly.’

  ‘It might be the Pacific,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a long way away.’

  ‘I can turn it down if it’s important to you.’

  She gave a sudden smile that reminded him with a jab at his heart of the way she’d grinned at him as a young girl, when she’d been the only member of her family able to see any promise in him.

  ‘It would be nice to be the wife of an admiral of the fleet,’ she said quietly.

  He smiled and she went on. ‘The war’s almost over, Kelly, and according to what Seamus Boyle tells me, the Japanese won’t last long. So go and enjoy it. When the war’s over, there’ll only be me.’

  There was a long silence because he’d been desperately afraid that she wouldn’t see eye to eye with him. The relief almost took his breath away.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought I’d have heard by now. Perhaps somebody’s shoved a spanner in the works.’

  But they hadn’t. He had no sooner arrived back in Antwerp when a signal came instructing him to report to the Admiralty. With it came another signal informing him he was to leave for Trincomalee where the Far East fleet was gathering. It was personal and it came from Corbett who added his congratulations.

  A farewell party was held in Antwerp. The brass was dazzling and a great many people said enough nice things about him to raise a lump in his throat.

  They headed for Orly the next morning and as they stopped at the airport, Rumbelo began to pass out the baggage from the boot of the car.