‘Don’t worry about Mr Bonner,’ Bryant assured her. The Americans looked amused. ‘We don’t want any fuss. Just whatever you happen to have for lunch.’
There was a glass door immediately behind him. A small, crooked, black painted door, the panes half muffled with a faded flower curtain. First the curtain moved, then the door opened and an old face appeared. A nervously smiling elderly lady emerged.
‘King George the Fifth once stayed here,’ she announced. ‘He said he enjoyed it. He wrote it down in the visitors’ book.’
The officers turned and examined the shrivelled and stooped figure. ‘Yes, Mrs Katlin,’ said the waitress with subdued impatience. ‘But I don’t suppose these gentlemen would be very interested in that. They’re Americans.’
‘They ought to be,’ said the old lady stoutly. ‘If they intend to blow the place up … Our late gracious King laid his head here. Nothing seems to matter any more.’
She closed the door with a finality which suggested she could not bear to discuss the story further. The waitress frowned apologetically. ‘Mrs Katlin is our oldest resident,’ she explained, indicating that said everything. ‘She was actually here when the late King stayed. She’s never forgotten.’ The woman led them into a low dining-room. It was tatty but clean. A table with a white cloth had been set near the window. The cloth was so starched it looked like cardboard. A glass jug of water stood among the shining cutlery. ‘She’s our only resident now,’ went on the waitress as she led them to the corner. ‘And of course she will be having to move on.’ She had been holding back a sniff which now escaped. ‘Or be killed,’ she sobbed dramatically. She turned away still sniffing.
The men grimaced at each other. ‘I’m beginning to feel suspiciously like a louse already,’ muttered Georgeton. He glanced at Bryant. ‘Do all the folk react like that?’
‘A great many,’ nodded Bryant. ‘But they’ll get over it. Some of them may even enjoy it. Particularly the younger people. They won’t feel so trapped. It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened around here since Drake played bowls.’
‘Sure,’ said Georgeton as if he personally recalled the incident. ‘On Plymouth Hoe. That can’t be too far.’
‘About eighteen miles,’ said Bryant.
‘And the Pilgrim Fathers, they sailed from Plymouth, right?’ put in Scarlett.
‘I think they cheated,’ smiled Bryant. ‘Or somebody has. The truth is they sailed from Southampton. They only put into Plymouth because of a storm.’
‘I wonder how they felt,’ ruminated Schorner. ‘They set off for the New World and they land in their own country. I bet some of them felt like walking straight back home.’
Bryant thought a quick look went between them. He coughed and passed the menu, pounded out on a near-blind typewriter, around the table. A second waitress, a fair representation of the menu smudged on her apron, appeared and stood with apprehensive obedience at the table. ‘Sprouts?’ asked General Georgeton. ‘I am about to display my ignorance. What is a sprout?’
Scarlett and Schorner looked towards Bryant. The young Englishman said: ‘Sprouts, sir? They’re green and sort of oval.’
‘Like small cabbages,’ put in the waitress quite briskly. ‘Boiled.’
‘Gee, I must taste them. And what’s this “meat of the day”?’
‘Spam,’ she replied defiantly. She gave a huffy little glance at Bryant now, her former nervousness gone, as if to ask how these men thought they were going to beat the Third Reich if they were not even aware of the existence of sprouts and Spam.
‘It’s American, I believe,’ put in Bryant tentatively.
The first waitress, the woman who had been at the front door, sidled towards the table. ‘It’s Tang today,’ she informed Bryant from the corner of her mouth.
He looked up, embarrassed, and said to the Americans: ‘Sorry, it’s Tang.’
‘What’s Tang?’ inquired Schorner after a look at the general.
‘Same as Spam,’ said the woman firmly.
The second waitress nodded like someone whose language was being interpreted. ‘It’s the same,’ she said.
The general said: ‘There’s no point in coming from America to eat American Spam or Tang. I guess I’ll take the sausages.’
Bryant shot a warning glance towards Scarlett. But it was too late. The first waitress said: ‘That’s all there is. Apart from Tang.’
The second waitress wrote the order laboriously on her pad. ‘Everybody?’ she said briskly.
The three Americans nodded. Bryant attempted to say something but the woman darted to him challengingly and he miserably acquiesced. ‘Four sausages,’ she enunciated triumphantly. ‘Sprouts and boiled.’ Nobody argued. She looked up from her pad brightly. ‘Egg?’ she suggested. ‘We do have egg today.’
‘It’s dried egg,’ said Bryant, desperately shaking his head at the Americans. ‘It’s not like real egg.’
The waitress regarded him as she might regard a traitor. ‘Nothing’s like the real thing these days is it, sir?’ she puffed. She violently crossed out the word Egg from her pad. ‘Dessert?’ she said. She paused. ‘I suppose nobody wanted the soup, did they?’ she said. Even she was against them having the soup. Her unhappy eyes turned down to Bryant, now seeking him as an ally. ‘Brown Windsor,’ she whispered. She shook her head in warning.
Bryant’s eyes went around the puzzled American faces. ‘The soup is Brown Windsor,’ he announced.
‘Sounds like a horse,’ said Scarlett jocularly.
‘It probably is,’ muttered Bryant.
The waitress sniffed fiercely. ‘No soup then,’ she said. ‘Now, dessert.’
‘I want Yorkshire pudding,’ said General Georgeton decisively. ‘I heard all about Yorkshire pudding. Is it on the menu?’
The waitress returned her face to Bryant. ‘You tell him,’ she suggested.
He nodded. ‘Well, sir, Yorkshire pudding is not actually pudding. You eat it with meat.’
‘We’ve got some,’ the waitress put in stoutly. ‘From yesterday. But we’ve got no meat to go with it.’ She brightened. ‘You can still have it, though.’
Bryant rolled his eyes, but the general was pleased with his own show of initiative. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I’ll take it.’ The others nodded. They would too.
‘Good,’ said the waitress like a schoolteacher getting through at last to a class of backward pupils. ‘Now, dessert. How about gooseberries?’
‘How about them?’ said Schorner. He leaned towards Bryant. ‘For Christ’s sake, what are gooseberries?’
‘They’re green,’ replied the waitress before Bryant could speak. ‘Sometimes a bit hairy. You have them with custard.’ She paused and leaned forward confidingly. ‘That’s yellow.’
‘I guess we’ll stick with the Yorkshire pudding,’ decided the general.
‘But …’ began the waitress.
Bryant leaned heavily towards her. ‘Yorkshire pudding,’ he said.
‘For pudding?’
‘For pudding,’ he confirmed.
She slapped her notepad shut, sniffed and turned. ‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘It’s your funeral.’
When she had disappeared through yet another lace-curtained door, this one apparently to the kitchen, for the lace was adhering to the steamed panes of glass, Bryant spread his hands apologetically. ‘It’s the war …’ he began.
‘I didn’t know it was that serious,’ mentioned Scarlett. ‘Can you get a drink in this hotel?’
‘Oh, I should think so.’ The first waitress was hovering near the back wall of the dining-room. He motioned her to the table. ‘Could we have something to drink,’ he asked. Her eyes went to the table but he forestalled her. ‘Apart from the water,’ he said.
‘There’s wine,’ she said confidingly. ‘Norwegian.’
‘Norwegian? I didn’t know …’
‘Well, we don’t know for sure. There was some Norwegians here and they said it came from Norway, but I
thought it was odd myself. It didn’t have a label on it, so I don’t know what it is. They were nice boys though, pilots. Two of them got killed over Salcombe …’ She hesitated guiltily. ‘Though we’re not supposed to say that, are we.’
‘Do you have anything else?’
‘Beer,’ she said. ‘And scrumpy.’
The general, using his initiative again, asked: ‘Scrumpy?’
‘Cider, sir. Local brew,’ said Bryant quickly.
‘Okay, let’s try that. When in Rome …’
‘Four half-pints then,’ ordered Bryant cautiously. ‘Not the rough stuff.’
‘It’s getting near the bottom of the barrel,’ muttered the waitress. ‘There’s all sorts of muck down there. At the bottom.’
‘Four halves,’ repeated Bryant firmly.
He was beginning to feel like someone besieged, repelling relays of attacks. No sooner had the first waitress retreated than the second reappeared, new stains on her pinafore, bearing a tray which, from a distance, appeared to be on fire.
‘Red hot,’ she called cheerfully as she advanced on them. ‘Sausages, sprouts and boiled.’
The first waitress brought the four half-pints of cider and put them on the table as the food was being passed around. She stood, with a sort of perverse proprietorial attitude, while the wood-like sausages, the steaming green sprouts and the weeping potatoes were placed in front of the strangers.
‘Thank you,’ they chorused. ‘Thank you.’ Bryant looked down through the steam rising to his face from the plate and covered his eyes. Jesus, what a mess.
General Georgeton nodded cheerfully at him through the steam. It had begun to make his eyes water. Scarlett and Schorner examined the food with their forks.
The waitress produced a gravy boat and poured a libation over Scarlett’s plate. Schorner watched with silent concern and then raised his hand. ‘No soup, thank you,’ he said.
The General followed quickly. ‘No soup, thanks. I don’t want to ruin it.’
Bryant thought it was best to be silent. Resolutely, he kept his eyes down while he began to eat. The wordlessness from the Americans, however, eventually forced him to look up. Schorner had opened a sausage and tasted the sawdust-like filling. He quickly picked up his cider and drank just as suddenly, swallowing the sausage debris and the cider together, a combination that set him coughing. Scarlett was eating something and patently not enjoying it. The general said quietly: ‘When we start to bomb this area, let’s make sure we hit the sprout fields, okay?’
Annette Barrington had moved her father’s herd of Devons into pasture near the tight lane that led to the main Totnes road two miles away. She shouted at the cows as she got them through the gates into the wet meadows. It had been raining for an hour, the flimsy rain of the west, moving in stealthily from the sea, creeping over the fields and low hills, darkening the sky.
The girl, who was seventeen, was wearing a red scarf knotted into a turban. Women who were war workers, especially those in the factories, had adopted the turban almost as a uniform. She wore blue dungarees tucked into an ungainly pair of riding boots. They were splashed with the wet and muck of the farmyard. She looked down to her feet as she moved the herd. Soon she would be moving them for the last time. Thank God.
She knew that her father was businessman enough to get them to sale quickly. There would be no point in waiting until the market was saturated and they would have to be moved to further parts. Prices, as everyone knew, were going to be low. And once they were gone, and the other animals, the farm locked and abandoned, her parents installed somewhere in Wilcoombe or some other town outside the area – then she would be gone too. She was going to volunteer for the ATS on her eighteenth birthday. After working all her life among cow dung she wanted to escape.
One of the contrary red Devons had become entangled with the hedge and was lowing and wheeling. Annette moved in and slapped its hind quarters. ‘Get on, you cow!’ she shouted, making the last word sound like a curse. God, would she have some life once she had kicked the mud of this place from her boots.
Her father appeared from the house. She knew he was going to a funeral at Telcoombe Magna. Her mother was going also. They came from the door in the worn black they took out on all such regular occasions. They were in their forties but they looked and seemed older.
Barrington called to her but she did not hear because at that moment the large American staff car appeared in the lane and turned into the farm drive. ‘The occupation forces,’ the farmer muttered to his wife.
‘Be reasonable with them, Tom,’ said Jean Barrington. ‘They’re only obeying orders.’
‘That’s going to be the excuse for all sorts of travesties,’ he returned bluntly. She was a woman quiet to the point of being colourless.
The American car drew up and Bryant left it first. ‘Ah,’ said Barrington, ‘it’s our cricketing lieutenant. Deserted to the other side, I see.’
Bryant was embarrassed. ‘I think we’re all in this together, Mr Barrington,’ he said. ‘This is General Georgeton who will be commanding the US forces in this area. This is Captain Scarlett. I think you already know Colonel Schorner.’
The Americans saluted and shook hands. Jean Barrington was impressed and, after glancing towards her husband, smiled. Annette began walking up the track from the herd. She wiped the dung from her toe-caps on the legs of her dungarees.
‘I understand that you are the chairman of the civic authority in these parts,’ said Georgeton politely.
‘The parish council,’ said Barrington, making it sound like a correction.
‘Sure. The parish council. Colonel Schorner has explained to me that you are none too happy about what’s going on here.’ He held up his hand to forestall any immediate rejoinder. ‘And I understand that, Mr Barrington. I can’t say I’d like my home taken from me either.’ He paused again and looked at the ugly farmhouse. ‘But just look at it like this – a lot of guys, like myself and like these three fellows here, have been taken from our homes. We didn’t go crazy over the idea, but there it was. You’ll come back here one day. Quite a lot of us won’t be going home.’
Jean Barrington looked sideways at her husband, who had never been a soldier. Annette arrived, standing at the side of the bulky car until her father nodded her forward. She introduced herself to the officers. Bryant remembered seeing her on market days in Totnes, the unhappy face beneath the folded turban. Barrington said: ‘It’s such a mad waste, that’s all. It’s typical of the bureaucracy that runs this damned country.’ He threw his hand out taking in the fields and the hills. ‘This is the best all-round farming country in Britain, and we have to clear out so that you can have a game of soldiers.’
‘I wish I could think of it like that,’ replied Georgeton evenly. ‘A game of soldiers.’
‘Christ Almighty, there’s the whole of Dartmoor. Miles of it. Empty. Why not that?’
‘As far as I’m aware from my reading, Dartmoor has no landing beaches,’ said the general. ‘We are rehearsing for an invasion from the sea.’
Barrington looked at his watch. ‘We have to go to a funeral,’ he said. ‘So perhaps you’ll excuse us.’
He walked by their car and made for the barn. His wife smiled uncertainly at the Americans and then, separately, at Bryant and prepared to follow her husband. ‘His whole life’s been in this farm,’ she said as though making an excuse. She walked towards the barn. To their surprise Barrington emerged at the reins of a pony and trap. His wife climbed in beside him and they went through the thin rain towards the farm gate.
The Americans were left standing awkwardly with Bryant and the girl. As the trap reached the gate and turned into the lane they shuffled around to face her. ‘What arrangements has your father made?’ asked Schorner. ‘Will he go on farming?’
‘He’s bought a smallholding,’ she said. ‘Hannaford’s. The old man was ready to give it up anyway. It’s nothing like this, but he’ll get used to it, don’t worry.’ She grinned at th
em from beneath the wet headscarf. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she said, ‘you can blow the whole bloody place to smithereens. And the sooner the better.’
*
General Georgeton was silent-faced when he left the farm. Bryant thought he was angry but, as they moved through the countryside, not only the Americans but the British officer himself realized for the first time the full scope and implications of what was happening. An old traction engine, like something from a museum, its tall trembling funnel topping the hedgerows and snorting black smoke across the land, pulled three rattling wagons loaded with farm implements and uprooted mangolds. The man driving it whirled the wheel of the contraption violently to get it around a bend in the lane. Its great banded iron wheels ground into the surface.
In every village there were trucks and vans being loaded with human chattels. They saw an old man carrying a bag of coal from a shed. ‘They’re taking everything,’ said Scarlett after the long silence. The man had dropped a few lumps and he stopped patiently to retrieve them.
‘Coal’s rationed,’ mentioned Bryant. ‘He won’t leave that behind.’
At every village, almost every house, there was the puzzled slow activity of people preparing to leave their homes. Bryant recited the name of each settlement as they reached it. On they drove through Burton, Sellow, Normancroft, Mortown and eventually back to the sea at Telcoombe Beach and then inland to the camp at Telcoombe Magna.
At Sellow two British army trucks were squatting under the dripping trees of the small village green. ‘Ah, British soldiers,’ said Georgeton with a small surprise. For some reason Bryant felt a touch of pique at the way he said it.
The Magic Army Page 14
