‘There are plenty of those,’ said Barrington but less forcefully. ‘That might be useful.’
‘Bryant here is my liaison officer. He’ll call you and fix a date.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Bryant.
Barrington said: ‘I’ll wait to hear then. Good morning.’ He walked back into the courtroom.
Parker muttered, ‘Don’t they just think they’re so superior, these British.’ Schorner realized Parker never swore.
‘Hold it,’ smiled Schorner. He nodded towards the grinning Bryant. ‘You have one here.’
‘I mean the civilians,’ amended Parker. ‘They milk the US Army of every last cent, everything from the price of a cup of their lousy tea to compensation for land. Land for training men who are fighting a goddamn war. And then they belly-ache. How they belly-ache. You should see the cases I get to deal with. Women screaming rape when they’re so ugly they ought to grab anything they get and be grateful.’
Bryant said: ‘I’ll see if I can do something about fixing that date, sir. The old lady, Mrs Mahon-Feavor, and Mr Barrington ought to be able to work it out right away.’
‘Make it in the next couple of weeks,’ said Schorner. ‘We’re getting busy.’
Bryant left. Parker was still angry. ‘You’d blow through the roof, colonel, if you knew the things about the British that I know. Give me our niggers any day.’
The jury appeared selfconsciously from the kitchen at the side of the hall and led by Jenks, at an undertaker’s pace, they trooped back into their benches. Everyone else followed. As Schorner went in Howard Evans approached. ‘Am I allowed to speak to you now?’ he whispered. Schorner grinned and eyed Parker who was making for his seat. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Now the big boss is out of earshot.’
‘Will you come to supper on Saturday?’ said Evans. ‘We’ve been promised a fresh chicken.’
‘Sure. I’d love to.’
‘We’re inviting Dorothy Jenkins from the school as well. You’ve met before. Is that all right?’
‘It’s fine. Thanks. I’ll be there.’
‘Eight o’clock,’ said Evans.
They returned to their places. Constable Burridge eyed the door for the coroner’s return. At the moment he saw what he took for his shadow he bellowed: ‘Oyez! Oyez! …’ He faltered. Through the door, as the people obediently rose, sauntered Daniel Pender.
He gave a diffident smile and called down the court, ‘Oi’m back. Oi’ll just stand by ’ere and say nothing.’ The Wilcoombe people laughed and sat down.
‘You mind you do then.’ The warning came from the coroner who entered while attention was on Daniel. Burridge shouted, ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,’ again and spectators, witnesses and jury jumped to their feet again.
When all was finally settled the coroner said: ‘Have the jury reached a verdict?’
Jenks stood importantly and said: ‘We have, sir.’
‘What is your verdict?’
‘’Tis an open verdict, sir. We don’t know what happened – and we thinks that nobody ever will.’
*
Each day Schorner’s men were on the assault craft, on the long beach, or advancing hopefully over the lakes by pontoon and into the rising hinterland. Another day, another drill. Gradually they were becoming soldiers but it was taking a long time.
As the days in March grew longer, the weather became dry and fair. The great invasion build up increased, until it seemed that every field and road in the south and west of England had become a store-house or a supply route for the great army waiting to move. These preparations had a codename – Bolero – for, like Ravel’s music, they increased in volume as time went on.
The clocks of England had been adjusted to permanent summer time, a matter which had given rise to caustic comment from troops camped in deep mud during the winter. The device was said to assist the farmer and the production of war materials by providing more daylight hours. In March double summer time, a two-hour adjustment, came into being.
Each day now the pretended battle raged and rumbled across the western countryside. Plumes of smoke rose into the springtime sky like black trees. Thousands of men lay in holes and trenches while shells from their own guns fell close, sometimes too close. Eight infantrymen died in two separate accidents of misdirected gunfire in the course of a three-day exercise. Thirty others received wounds, some were taken to the new hospital prepared for the invasion where they provided useful practice for the military doctors and nurses.
The civilian population could only watch from afar, although each day they heard the rumble and crump of heavy guns, although the sound of small arms fire hushed the birds, and aircraft breaking low across the trees scattered cattle. A mis-aimed shell struck near a hen house a mile outside the evacuation area and there were stories of feathers floating as far away as Salcombe. A donkey in the next meadow to the hens was never seen again.
Rumours ran wild in the small towns and hamlets: a mad pilot had deliberately dropped a bomb on Eisenhower during a tour of inspection; the GIs were dying like flies of cholera; there had been a mutiny and many officers had been butchered. The truth they saw was in the blackened faces and fatigued eyes of the men in the jeeps, trucks and tanks which daily used Wilcoombe Hill.
At Wilcoombe the Home Guard company had, with official sanction from its divisional headquarters and a long, patient, sigh from the Americans, undertaken patrols around the perimeter of the 30,000 acres of occupied area. It had become another country of different people with barbed frontiers and armed squads patrolling both sides of the wire.
Colonel Schorner had been to supper at Howard and Beatrice Evans’ house, with Dorothy Jenkins, the schoolteacher, as the other guest. He had driven himself and, having delivered Dorothy to her door, he drove back along the coast road to the checkpoint.
It was eleven o’clock and a seasonal moon was hanging low over the Channel, spreading its neutral light on the soldiers on both shores. For the first time since he had been in England he felt a sureness, an expectation amounting almost to happiness. Things would be all right soon, the battle would start, they would win for certain and the war would be over. He could go home. He ought to go home. In an odd way he was actually getting to like this alien place.
As he approached the barricade he could see there was something happening there. Lamps and torches were dipping and dancing and in the general moonlight he could see two distinct groups of figures. He drove closer and saw that his military police, their white helmets bright as mushrooms in the moon, were confronting and bring confronted by a haphazard section of soldiers which he realized at once were members of the Wilcoombe Home Guard.
He stopped the jeep and unhurriedly clambered out. His men were relieved to see him. ‘What’s the trouble?’ he asked, walking casually. He saw that Tom Barrington and the vicar, Eric Sissons, were in the short British contingent. There were half a dozen others, oddments of men, wearing battledress, woollen commando hats, and with black spots on the highlights of their cheeks. They looked curiously like a group of travelling players.
Barrington, a sten gun lodged below his arm like the top bar of a gate, and with a revolver on his webbing belt, stepped forward and saluted stiffly. Schorner returned it. ‘We are carrying out assigned duties, colonel,’ said Barrington. ‘I am in command of this patrol and we have our orders to check the perimeter of the occupation area. Your men in the white bonnets don’t seem to want to let us carry out these duties.’
‘Sergeant,’ called Schorner. The military police sergeant, as wide-fronted as a truck, a westerner with a stony face, emerged from the guard hut.
‘Sir,’ he said, saluting, ‘I’ve just called the British civil police. Standard orders, sir. These people have been trespassing.’
A clamour of argument rose from the Home Guard patrol, all speaking at once like boys at a football match. Barrington, embarrassed when he saw Schorner’s quick grin, ordered silence. The vicar looked sulky and kept tugging at his woollen hat. Instead of a gun
he carried a wooden club.
‘Okay,’ said Schorner patiently, ‘what exactly is the trouble?’
‘One of these men was under the wire,’ said the sergeant quickly before the other side could speak. He nodded. ‘The little guy there. The one holding the raccoon.’
Horace Smith, the poacher, parcelled in a large uniform, the belt and webbing ringed around him like string, crammed his face with enormous anger. ‘Raccoon!’ he exploded. ‘Rac – fucking – coon! Oi’ll ’ave you know this be the best bloody ferret in Devon.’
‘It got under the wire,’ explained Sissons, wanting the matter over. He made a wriggling motion with his hand. Barrington glared belligerently at the vicar. ‘And he went to retrieve it,’ finished Sissons bravely.
‘In that case,’ said Schorner firmly, ‘he was off limits.’
‘I didn’t know he had the ferret with him,’ grumbled Barrington. He glowered towards the flickering-eyed Smith. ‘He won’t come again.’
‘Sure. If he’d stepped on an anti-personnel mine he wouldn’t be in a position to come again,’ pointed out Schorner. He looked at Barrington. ‘Is it really necessary, Mr Barrington, to patrol this boundary? We do it pretty thoroughly from the inside.’
‘I know you do, colonel. So we do it outside. Our duty is to check that everything is all right. Those are our orders.’
‘Great,’ sighed Schorner feeling his anger rising. ‘Then make sure that your Home Guard obeys orders. If your men have to bring pets on patrol see they keep control of them. Goodnight, Mr Barrington. I apologize – Captain Barrington.’
The Devon farmer tightened his mouth. Then he bawled an order for the patrol to fall into line, followed by a shout to bring them to attention. The first order was so accentuated that it startled not only the Americans but his own men as well. They clattered to a disorderly line and then to attention. They lumbered off into the moonlight, Horace Smith wrestling with the ferret under his battledress blouse.
The Americans watched them move silently away. Schorner said: ‘Okay, get the gate up. I want my bed.’ He drove through not looking at the guards. But he had scarcely gone a hundred yards when he heard their whoops of laughter. He grinned and, shaking his head, muttered to himself in what he could summon of a Devon accent: ‘Raccoon. Rac – fucking – coon.’
The Home Guard were by then beyond the first rise and fall of the sloping ground so they heard the laughter only faintly. Barrington grunted: ‘They’re kids. You wait, the Germans will have a field day.’
They marched up a defile going north from the moonshone sea. At one point they could see a segment of Telcoombe Magna village. Sissons automatically looked towards his church. He stopped abruptly, causing the man behind to collide with him. ‘Hark,’ he said, raising his wooden club. They all stopped and listened.
‘Somebody is playing the church organ,’ he whispered. ‘I can hear it clearly.’ They stood and they could all hear it.
‘My God,’ breathed Sissons. ‘What is it?’
Horace Smith, clutching his ferret, made a tentative answer. ‘Sounds like that “Twelfth Street Rag” to me,’ he said.
Mrs Cecily Sissons had listened to the start of the news, as she always did, and smiled her fond, daft smile as a greeting to the voice of Alvar Liddell. ‘Good evening, Alvar,’ she said with exaggerated softness and a little bow of the head. It was, ‘Good evening, John,’ if the announcer were John Snagge, or ‘Bruce, how are you?’ for Bruce Belfrage. At times she felt they were her only reliable friends. She spoke to each one with the same gushing familiarity except Wilfred Pickles, a late-comer. She liked neither his accent, which was northern, nor his common-sounding name. By the end of the news, however, it never mattered for she had invariably abandoned both her devotion and her attention to the warring world that day, and had slumped forwards or backwards in her chair, the emptied bottle and rimed glass brushed by her limp hand. If she went to sleep hanging forward either Sissons or his father would give her a push so that she toppled back into the deep chair because she had been known to tip out of the seat and had once brought the bulky radio set crashing from its bamboo table, a catastrophe that had scarcely roused her. Sissons had found her sprawled with her arms about it as though she had found a wooden lover.
The wireless set and the bamboo table were theirs, but most of the things in the house were not. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever go back,’ he had forecast to his father. ‘The place will be ravaged, wrecked; church and vicarage. Nothing will ever be the same again in these parts.’
The older his father got the less he cared. ‘I don’t see that it makes any difference where we are,’ he pointed out. ‘Life’s no different. Every day another bit falls off me, a bit of my ear fell off today; she gets her bottleful down her gullet, and you prance around like a woman in your cassock and bray at those tomfool services of yours. What difference is there?’
Sissons stemmed his bitter reply. Each day he found less point in communication with both his wife and his father. He spent lonely hours in his emergency study, much of the time reading through the books he had loved in boyhood and had kept, but had only rediscovered during their enforced move from Telcoombe Magna. Henty’s Wulf the Saxon, Percy F. Westerman’s brave adventures and the Biggles books by the renowned Captain W. E. Johns kept him occupied if not enthralled. There were ecclesiastical matters to be dealt with but far fewer now he had lost his own parish. He thought of volunteering for one of the services but he believed the war would be finished by Christmas. Sometimes he read the Bible, but not often because he had read it before.
That night he was waiting for Horace Smith, the poacher, and occupying the time with Henty, although he had little mind for reading. It was nine-fifteen so Cecily would be well slumped by now, although he would need to check before he went out; his father also dozed readily about this time. That was to the good. The less people knew about his movements for the next few hours the better.
A soft but assured tap came on the window, and although he was expecting it, the sound caused him to start guiltily. Like a spy he crept to the casement and, turning the oil lamp as low as it would go without going out, pulled the curtain. He could only see Horace Smith’s face as a pale patch but the sabre-toothed grin was close against the glass. A spectral finger beckoned against the pane. Sissons felt his courage slide, but after a brief thought he pulled himself together and went stealthily round to the front door.
‘Wait here a moment,’ he ordered in a whisper before Horace could speak. He did not want the poacher in the house, even as an accomplice. The thin man nodded cagily. He looked like an elf standing in the darkness, guile folded into every crease of his face, his clothing purloined from the Wilcoombe Civil Defence storeroom. His rubber boots had been intended for use following a poison gas attack.
Sissons was clad in a blue siren suit, a thick one-piece overall with a line of odd buttons from the fly to the throat. He turned into the house and glanced into the dim sitting-room. They were both lolling in sleep. Cecily was hanging forward; he pushed her back softly, not through any late-occurring tenderness but because this might be the one time in her sad and soaked life that she could wake and spoil everything.
Alvar Liddell was saying that the Russian Army was advancing on four fronts. Sissons made to switch him off but then changed his mind. Instead he turned the volume down, went to the front door and out into the Devon darkness.
Horace was awaiting him mischievously. ‘Now you’re certain about this, Smith, aren’t you?’ said the vicar. ‘I mean, you’re sure of getting through the wire and finding our way to the church?’
‘Sure as I be about anythin’,’ replied Horace. He looked straight at the vicar, a challenge. ‘Surer than I be about a lot o’ things, reverend. Like Jesus.’
‘All right, all right,’ sighed Sissons petulantly. ‘This is not the place to discuss theology. As long as you do have a way. It’s not just one of your fancies.’
‘If ’tis a fancy you can have your ten
bob back,’ said Horace sincerely. ‘But oi reckon it ought to be five bob now and five bob when ’tis done. You might step on one o’ they mines.’
‘Oh, wonderful. I thought you knew the way.’
‘Aye, but I b’aint been right to the church these last weeks. There be no call for me to go to the church now, be there? But I been through the wire and right to Telcoombe Magna, tons of times. There’s a lot o’ trade over there now, rabbits, hares, pheasant, partridge, even a few hens what people ha’ left behind. I done better since they Yanks been ’ere than ever afore in my life.’
‘I’m not here to hear your confession,’ said Sissons rudely. ‘I just want to know what’s going on in my church. And I want to make sure that you know what you’re about. Get me in and get me out again and ten shillings is yours. It can come from the organ fund. Ten bob’s not going to make that much difference now.’
They were walking from the house, through the garden, untidy even in the darkness. ‘Most people is countin’ on the insurance, reverend,’ said Horace conversationally. ‘They reckons they Yanks are going to pay out so much there’s everybody in these parts is goin’ to be millionaires. They’ll have to pay a few hundred quid for the likes of the Telcoombe Beach Hotel, I ’spect. Not a brick left on top of another brick. I reckon your church must be worth near as much.’
Sissons contained his wrath at the man’s idiocy. ‘Come on,’ he ordered. ‘Let’s get a move on. There’s a moon tonight.’
‘Eleven, seven, first quarter,’ recited Horace. He grinned with grotesque pride. ‘I knows about the moon.’
They moved along the lanes, in a curious, short, indian file. Horace took a sack from inside his blouse and carried it in his hand. ‘Listen, Smith,’ said the vicar. ‘You’re not going poaching tonight, are you?’
‘Why not, reverend? I do near every night, ‘cepting Sundays. I listens to the hymn-singing on the wireless on Sunday nights.’
Sissons, ignoring the remark, caught the little man’s shoulder. ‘But I can’t be found with you with stolen game in the sack. How would that look? What would I say to the bishop?’
The Magic Army Page 36
