The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  Her reply was, ‘Fucking you, I think. That wasn’t half bad, Charlie; you’re getting better at it.’ Talking dirty never sounded dirty when Dolly did it. What she meant was I’m damned if I’m going to tell you.

  ‘You’re not so bad yourself. Do you want me to find you a meal? You always used to provide the condemned man with a hearty meal after you’d shagged him half to death.’ She smiled a smile as wide as the battered Brandenburg Gate; then a thought occurred to me. ‘Where’s your man? The one you brought in with you.’

  ‘Angus is in his kennel in the basement, counting his bullets. He’s very serious about bullets. He’s supposed to look after me, and do the unpleasant stuff when it’s called for.’

  She’d already told me more than I expected.

  ‘Will he be hungry too?’

  ‘He’s Scottish and doesn’t eat: I think that he lives on fresh air, and runs up and down mountains for afters: he’s the most boring man I’ve ever met.’

  ‘But good at his job, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Don’t know, Honeybunch: I’ve never asked him to do it.’

  There was an old exchange of information still dividing us, and now was as good a time as any, I thought, to put it straight.

  ‘If you’re in charge now, Dolly, why didn’t you come looking for me when Piers died?’

  Piers had been her boss once, and for a while, I think, mine too. I’d held his hand while he died. She rested her chin on her hand, and extended a forefinger so that it crossed her lips. There was nothing about her face that was smiling, and yet everything was. That was it. She said, ‘Turn away now, while I dress.’

  ‘I like watching you dress.’

  ‘I know you do. That’s why you should turn away.’

  I didn’t, and halfway through we started all over again of course. She said she was glad to see that I had my appetite back.

  They had given her a nice neat 4x4 command car with big wheels. I drove it clumsily, heading for the Leihhaus. We had to present our papers at an American checkpoint, but Dolly got a great salute from the corporal of the guard. She’d let her skirt ride up so high he could see her breakfast. I didn’t know if there would be any food at the Leihhaus, but if push came to shove we could always slope over to Tommo’s place and eat Alice.

  In the car Dolly told me, ‘I was temporarily promoted when Piers died, and nobody’s bothered to unpromote me yet. It can’t last.’ Only Dolly could take the word unpromote, and roll it around her mouth like that to give it a positively sexual charge.

  ‘Well done. So you’re in charge now?’

  ‘Looks like it . . . but only for the time being.’

  They’ve probably got an acronym of about thirty letters and numbers for her job now, and nobody talks about The War Office any more of course, because everyone knows that we Brits are a peace-loving bunch of sods. We call it the Ministry of Defence, but that fools nobody. Dolly Wayne was an RAF intelligence officer: and believe me, they are the very worst kind.

  I asked, ‘Still hungry?’

  ‘Starving. You’d better be worth it.’

  She slipped her arm through mine. We had once walked to a Sunday service at the Scottish church in Pont Street linked like that. It was a good memory. I had almost loved her then. She changed the subject.

  ‘Where do you put up when you’re over here?’

  ‘With a woman you’ll meet in about an hour.’

  ‘You might have told me before we . . .’

  ‘I don’t sleep with her. I just stay at her place. She used to drive the coffee and doughnuts van up to the aircraft when I arrived.’

  ‘Why don’t you sleep with her?’

  ‘Dunno. It never came up really. She’s a very strong personality . . . you’ll see.’

  ‘She’s saving it for Mr Wonderful then . . . poor Charlie.’

  ‘Not really. She was a Dankeschoen girl long before I showed up.’

  ‘Sorry . . . ?’

  ‘A Dankeschoen . . . a girl you shag, give a bar of chocolate or a pair of nylons, and some money to afterwards . . . and she says Dankeschoen.’

  ‘A whore, you mean?’

  ‘Nearly . . . not quite.’

  She worked it through and said, ‘You know, Charlie, you have very unusual relationships with women.’

  ‘No, I’m just lucky.’

  ‘That too.’ Her hand found mine on the steering wheel, and gave it a squeeze. It was my turn to work it through. I decided to tell her the truth.

  ‘I don’t think I understand the word relationship very well. I suspect it’s a word that doesn’t really mean anything.’

  She gave my hand another squeeze. That could have meant anything, I suppose. Women are good at that sort of thing.

  At the Leihhaus Marthe came to the table with her apron still on, and gave me a smacker. Russian Greg applauded. At first the two women sized each up like the mongoose and the cobra. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. I introduced them. Then Marthe asked me, ‘So, Dolly is your girlfriend?’

  I said, ‘No,’ and Dolly said, ‘Yes,’ at the same time. Pause.

  ‘Sort of,’ I said, and, ‘but you’re my girlfriend too. I brought you some things.’

  ‘I didn’t tell Lottie you might bring her something too, in case you forgot.’

  ‘I didn’t forget. There’s a bag in the car. Can I walk you home when we’re finished?’

  ‘OK. I suppose that you, and Dolly who’s not your girlfriend, want to eat?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Omelettes do? Real eggs.’

  ‘Yes please. Spot on.’

  ‘Spot on,’ she echoed laughing at me, and ruffled my hair. People only do that because I’m small. She swung her hips so wide as she sashayed away from us that I was afraid she would smack the guys at the tables either side as she passed. I realized that the women hadn’t actually spoken to each other. I didn’t like that.

  ‘I didn’t follow all that. When did you learn to speak good German?’ Dolly asked me.

  Greg snorted. He said, ‘The only good one’s a dead one; didn’t they tell you that, English girl?’ Then to me, ‘Where you find this li’l girl, Charlie?’ That was good, coming from him. Dolly was probably a foot taller than him.

  ‘She’s my passenger, and an old friend.’ Then I told Dolly, ‘My German’s not all that good: barely adequate. It may sound silly but I actually don’t know how the languages happen. I just seem to be able to pick them up. Greg’s even taught me bits and pieces of Russian.’

  ‘What do you know in Russian?’

  ‘I know how to say I surrender, please don’t hurt me and your breasts remind me of sweet apples. I can say that in a dozen different languages now.’ Then I asked Russian Greg where he got all the eggs.

  ‘From that American, Tommo. You wanna know where he gets them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From England somewhere; an’ now two English people are eating them. What goes around comes around.’ He must have caught that from me.

  ‘International trade,’ I told him. ‘I’m all for it.’

  We didn’t walk home that night as it happened. Dolly gave us a lift. The two women still didn’t address each other directly, which was a bit of a pisser. Lottie was asleep in Marthe’s bed when I peeked in. I laid the doll on the pillow alongside her, and placed Dieter’s letter under one of its arms. I could do that because Marthe stood alongside my sofa bed and announced, ‘I sleep in here tonight,’ and then asked, ‘Why’ve you never had me, Charlie? All you got to do is ask.’

  ‘I know. The subject just never came up.’

  Marthe had a great laugh; a whore’s laugh. Men like women who have a whore’s laugh. And she knew a good pun when she heard one. The subject didn’t come up that night either, but neither of us seemed to mind. I usually slept deeply and without dreaming at Marthe’s place. When we woke up in the morning Lottie was jammed between us. So was the doll. We whispered across her; I reached out and touched Marthe’s hair. It was heavy. She put her hand
over mine and held it there. I asked, ‘If I got used to the idea, do you think the subject might come up on my next trip?’

  She pulled my hand down to her mouth, and kissed it. Lottie stirred but didn’t wake.

  ‘We don’t love each other yet, Charlie, do we?’

  ‘No, but when we’re together we are rather formidable, aren’t we?’

  She repeated, ‘Formidable’ – in German gewaltig – as if she’d just discovered the word, and rather liked it. Lottie opened her eyes, and yawned. She smiled, and wriggled up to plant a kiss on my cheek.

  ‘Thank you for Ilse, Uncle Charlie. I love her already.’

  ‘Good. We saw her in a shop window in England, and she told us she wanted to come to a little girl in Berlin. Why have you called her Ilse?’

  ‘The boy who wrote to me asked me to call her Ilse. He had a sister called Ilse; she died.’

  I’ve said it before. You learn something new every day. All along Dieter and I had more in common than we realized: we each had a dead sister.

  Before I left, I emptied my pack on Marthe’s kitchen table. Four tins of hams, four of ground coffee and that tin of fifty Seniors. She squealed when she saw the coffee, kissed me, put two tins in her kitchen cupboard and pushed the other two to one side: she would sell those. The oddly shaped tins of ham were unlabelled. She asked, ‘What are these?’

  ‘Hams; whole hams. Schinken. Ready to eat.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly.’

  She kissed me again.

  ‘Wonderful. I keep one, and sell three to Greg in the kitchen.’

  ‘You keep two, and sell two. I want meat on your bones when I get back,’ and I kissed her back. It was the first time a woman had treated me as if I was a good provider.

  I had time to walk with them in the local park. Lottie carried Ilse as carefully as she would have done a newborn baby. Most of the women promenading in the weak sunshine had a man on their arm. Most of the men were in uniform, but none of the uniforms were German. A man in khaki and a woman leaned against a blasted tree, and everybody pretended not to notice. She had her eyes closed. I wondered who she was thinking of. A boy and an American captain flew a kite. Immediately after the war ended this would have been called fratting. I wondered when they’d stopped asking the sixty-five-dollar question. What the hell; I was a civilian and their rules didn’t apply to me anyway.

  We split at the park gates, underneath an equestrian statue scarred with bomb shrapnel and decapitated by an artillery round. They walked off in one direction, and I another. Marthe had kissed me goodbye and said, ‘I know that I am the luckiest woman in the city.’

  I hated that. I hate it when people around me start talking about luck. That’s when it usually starts to run out.

  There was a battered small Auto Union at one of the cab ranks that were starting to reappear, and the driver cheered up when I offered to pay him in dollars. He said that he had a boot full of Deutschmarks which wouldn’t even get him a tank of petrol. We stopped talking as we approached the rubble fields closer to Gatow; I don’t think that I would have wanted to make small talk with an Englishman in the ruins of my own bombed city either.

  Whisky was parked way over the far side of the field at Gatow, out close to its western perimeter. The Countess gave us a lift to her in the Hotdog wagon. Scroton rode up front with her, while Crazy Eddie and I were in the back. Eddie looked as if he had been crying, which meant that he would have been on an absolute bender the night before. We would have to watch his work until he straightened up. The big cargo door was open, but Whisky was empty this time. Except for two more bloody passengers. Two thin men in makeshift civilian clothes and peaked, black wool peasant’s caps. They sat in the two seats near the tail. They had the thin European face that looked about a hundred years old. As I climbed up they offered me a scrap of paper each. Two railway tickets on which the word Bahnhof – railway station – had been neatly ruled through, and replaced by the name Fliegerhorst, neatly printed in ink. Fliegerhorst means airfield.

  I told Scroton, ‘I believe that they believe that someone’s sold them a plane ticket.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  ‘No it’s not. This probably isn’t legal.’

  ‘Any sod who wants to get out of Germany is OK with me. Who are they? DPs?’

  Both men gabbled at me in turn in a meaningless babble of sounds . . .

  ‘They’re Hungarian Jews,’ Magda told us. I looked round to find her at my shoulder, which wasn’t a bad thing, because, faced with the noises our passengers were making, my language skills folded their blankets and crept away.

  ‘Thank you, Countess. What are they doing in our aircraft?’

  She spat words at them, and they spat back. Maybe they weren’t all that keen on countesses. She told me, ‘They bought tickets. They are going to Israel.’

  ‘But we’re not. Tell them they’re on the wrong plane. We’re going the other way.’

  Magda didn’t even bother to consult them. She told me, ‘Easier to get to Israel from England. They will fly to England with you.’

  I was interested despite myself, because my best girlfriend had thumbed a lift to Palestine on a tramp ship the year before. ‘What then?’

  ‘They cross the Channel, and walk through France and Spain. Then they get a ship to Israel. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘It’s the old escape route set up for shot-down English airmen. The Jews took it over . . . they even use the same safe houses. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘I told you; I didn’t.’ Then I asked the obvious: my speciality. ‘Who sold them their tickets?’

  ‘I saw your American friend talking to your engineer last night; after you left.’She gave me her come-hither smile. Except for the missing tooth it was a rather good one. When she inhaled on a cigarette the air whistled through the gap where the tooth had been.

  Bloody Tommo and bloody Eddie! I swung on the latter. He still looked ill, but now he was blushing as well. I hadn’t the heart to kick his backside for him. He said, ‘You’d better make your mind up. The Customs are coming over for our papers.’ He nodded towards a small green and white car moving away from the admin buildings, and beetling towards us.

  I told him, ‘Shut the bloody cargo door. We’ll sort this out ourselves.’ Just saying it made my mind up, didn’t it?

  I gave each Customs guy a packet of cigarettes with our outward clearance documents. De Reszkes I think. When they left they had smiling faces, anyway. We made small talk until they were a couple of hundred yards away.

  Scroton was chain-smoking – never a good sign – and Eddie tugged my sleeve to get my attention. He said, ‘It’s going to be cold back there for them.’

  I wrestled the cargo door open, and Magda did the talking. She gave each of them a small aluminium pot of coffee, a hot dog and a doughnut. They wolfed the hotdogs immediately. We hugged Magda. Then we mounted up, and I dogged the hold door behind us. As I pulled the curtain around my seat I leaned out, and held my thumb up to our passengers. I remembered that at Tempsford we called our passengers Joes. Each held a thumb up, and repeated the signal back to me. Not a bloody smile. I reckoned that I had three hours to work out how to get them off the bloody plane at Lympne without Brunton or Old Man Halton getting wind of it.

  Whisky gave me the willies. We had to turn downwind after our landfall, and fly about thirty miles down the Channel. We were descending over the cold wet stuff and racing the twilight when the old girl’s starboard engine gave out a colossal bang and started to stream a thin thread of white smoke. Scroton ignored it. Crazy Eddie didn’t even look up. I was standing behind and between them, holding on to their seat frames for balance. I shouted, ‘Shouldn’t you do something?’

  Dave said, ‘Who? Me?’ as if it was the last thing that would occur to him. I had this feeling that if he didn’t do something it was the last thing that would occur to any of us.

  Eddie asked, ‘Wha
t do you want us to do?’

  I glanced over my shoulder at the Joes. All I could see was two pale faces back in the shadow. The engines were definitely noisier; I had to shout.

  ‘Something about the bloody engine . . .’

  ‘Christ man, no. Either it’ll keep running, or it won’t.’

  ‘What happens if it won’t?’

  Eddie seemed to consider the question for an age. Then he asked me, ‘Can you swim?’

  It came down to a race between us and the sun. Which we won, otherwise I wouldn’t be here telling you the story, would I? Scroton hauled the old bitch over the headland, and into the valley. After that all he had to do was land her uphill, in a crosswind, across the field in the gathering twilight. We weren’t authorized for night operations at Lympne because there wasn’t a proper flare path yet – just a few goose-neck flare pots the RAF had left behind. When Whisky’s wheels started swishing through the grass it was already dark enough for the lights to be on in the Admin block . . . later Dave told me he just aimed for them. Both the Joes began to clap their hands as we touched down: maybe they were brighter than I took them for. We stopped for a couple of seconds on the peritrack on the way down into the Dell, popped open the hold door, and pushed them out into the hedge. As Eddie shut down the engines a minute later a great streak of flame poured out of the starboard exhaust and frightened the life out of me.

  ‘I hate this aircraft,’ I told nobody in particular.

  ‘Aw, don’t say that,’ Eddie responded. ‘She loves you; can’t you tell?’

  Brunton and his secretary, a neither pretty nor plain girl named Elaine, were listening to the radio in his office, sharing a cheese sandwich and having a laugh. Brunton phoned the Customs office at Folkestone, and was told that it was OK for me to leave our papers in their postbox. They had an office in our block that they used, but they weren’t coming out to clear an empty aircraft with no passengers at this time of day. Their loss, wasn’t it? When Brunton left us I pinched one of Elaine’s cheese sandwiches, and told her I’d like to pinch part of her. She told me that that wasn’t the way to a girl’s heart. It wasn’t her heart I was thinking about, and we both knew it. Eddie and Scroton checked the board; they were on for a run to Beauvais the next day. I wasn’t. Scroton ruffled my hair as they left, as if I was his fucking dog: I’ve already told you about that.