Over Four Winds it saw acres of green wheat and a herd of drowsing cattle but Farmer Eveleigh and two of his Land Army girls were at work down there and nothing presented itself as worth a stop. It flew on over the silent ruin of Periwinkle and across the high plateau of French Wood to Hermitage, where David Pitts was feeding pigs in the large sty behind the farmhouse. David was tolerant of gulls and the bird hovered, hoping he would slop swill from the pail. Occasionally he did, particularly when the wind made him stagger but today he held his course, setting both buckets down very carefully outside the sty door. Unlike his father Davie was a frugal man, who thought of every pint of swill as money in the bank.
Henry, discussing David with his jolly wife Ellie, sometimes dismissed his son as ‘a bliddy ole skinflint’, but secretly he admired him for making such a success of the three hundred acres casually farmed by Henry, and before that, by Henry’s father, Arthur. A curious relationship had grown up between father and son since David had moved lower down the slope into a cottage built for him and his grandmother after Henry had remarried late in life. Henry, semi-retired, was content to take his orders from the boy and was very wary of his mother, old Martha, now entering her nineties. The farm was still in Henry’s name but all the decisions were David’s. Watching him sometimes Henry would shake his head, declaring that youngsters took themselves too seriously nowadays and had forgotten how to enjoy themselves. There had been no hunting in the Valley since the war but even had there been David would never have taken the field in the way that Henry and his father would turn their backs on toil and pound gaily across country with the Sorrel Vale pack.
The gull left Hermitage and beat eastward to circle the Home Farm, concentrating on the strawyard behind the house where David’s sister Prudence, long married to Nelson Honeyman, the young master, dallied with one of the last of the American Rangers left in the area. The gull had profited by the brief American occupation of the coastal strip between Whinmouth and the Bluff, for the Rangers were not only well fed but wasteful. Sometimes they would discard a half-emptied tin of food during a break in their training out on the sandbars, but this morning there was only one of them to be seen and he stood behind the angle of the farm, enjoying a joke with Prudence. The gull knew Prudence as one of the few women in the Valley prodigal with titbits, and its curiosity was aroused now by a small, opened crate of brightly coloured packages and tins resting on a trestle close-by. It wondered if they would leave it unguarded so that it could flop down and investigate but they did not, standing there a long time talking and laughing, so that Prudence’s brassy head, shining in the sun, periodically jerked back and her laughter reached the gull as it continued to circle hopefully. Then, lifting the carton, she took it into the barn and the Ranger followed, so the gull flew on over the Home Farm paddocks and the big stone house that was silent, offering nothing until the ground rose steeply behind it and there was promise in the jam-buttie a little boy was nibbling at the top of the orchard.
The gull recognised the child as it had recognised Prudence, the source of an occasional meal, but today Mary Palfrey was there with her new baby who was tottering between mother and brother. Fearing nothing in this quarter the gull dropped down on a gatepost at the end of the orchard, not because it was interested in watching Sorrel Palfrey learn to walk but because, intent upon his sister’s attempts, Jerry Palfrey had turned his back on his jam-smeared crust and was calling, in his high, piping voice, ‘Come on, Sorrel, I’ll catch you.’ It was an opportunity the listing gull had learned to watch for over the seasons. With a flurry of wings it was down, up and away, the crust in its beak. The boy Jerry did not resent the naked theft but shouted with laughter. The staggering child fell flat on her face with surprise.
The gull skirted the woods and looked down on the family at High Coombe where the farmer’s wife, as usual, was sitting at her easel in an untidy front garden. It ignored the bright colours in the box beside the woman, knowing from past experience that they were inedible. Turning south it drifted down the wind funnel between the timber of Coombe Brake and the Bluff. There was nothing to be found here except an odd pig-nut outside Willoughby’s farm, Deepdene, and soon it was coasting over the three detached houses that crowned the northern edge of Coombe Bay village.
Its ancestors had often found easy pickings here for one of those tall, greystone houses had once sheltered an old German who encouraged gulls to feed from his hand but that was long ago. The people living here now usually ignored visitors flying in from the Coombe. The gull knew two or three of them, however, the man who lived in the end house and walked with a bobbing roll as if his leg was injured like the gull’s own, and the three people who lived next door, a man with a rigid hand, a woman and baby, who seemed to live in a pram on the lawn. The man was there now, leaning on the fence and looking directly up at the gull, as though comparing its clumsy aerobatics with the flight of the bright little machines that sometimes skimmed south over the woods, or inland from the sea.
The gull hovered long enough to study the upturned face that was unlike the face of any other man in the Valley. One side of it was dead like his hand, while the other could register expressions that the gull had learned, over the years, to recognise as like, dislike, interest, indifference or impatience. Today this side of the man’s face was animated and he called softly to his wife who was bending over the baby’s pram. The woman glanced up and presently went to the kitchen window, got something and gave it to the man, who placed it on his rigid hand and slowly extended his arm, a gesture the gull recognised as an invitation. It hovered a moment in order to make quite sure, then dipped to the fence where it alighted, staggered a full two feet, and steadied itself by half-opening its sound wing. The man stood quite still, the piece of bread resting on his gloved hand, and the woman watched too, so that for a moment there was absolute stillness in the garden.
The man said, ‘It’s him all right, Margy. It must be oil. That port wing is U.S. and he’s got a gammy leg as well, poor bastard!’ Then, to the gull, ‘Here, boy! Take it! We bloody cripples ought to stick together,’ and the gull, reassured by the tone, heaved itself from the fence and took the crust, wheeling in an uncertain half circle and heading for the quay.
The man watched it go and the woman watched the man.
‘Well, at least the poor old bugger is still airborne,’ he said, and lounged off into the house to turn on the radio. Sounds of a news-bulletin reached Margaret as she stood by the pram, rocking it gently, but the words carried on the breeze were only intermittently heard and therefore made little sense. ‘ … making good their landing … considerable opposition at scattered points … advancing on two sectors …’ And then, one complete sentence: ‘So far only one vessel reported lost.’ she called, ‘How is it going, Andy? Is there anything fresh?’ and Andy, appearing at the french window with a cigarette in his mouth, said, ‘They’ve all got ashore and seem to be in business.’
He stood there a minute and Margaret wondered uncertainly, if she should try and console him again. She knew the source and depth of his bitterness—an armada of aircraft, ships and men committed to the biggest enterprise of the war, and himself pottering about a garden with a woman, a child and an artificial hand. His depression had increased, she noticed, when the papers had begun to talk of the Second Front and all the American Rangers down on the shore had packed up and gone, taking their landing craft with them. Then Andy came lounging out of the house, calling, ‘I’m going to have a yarn with Ken Shawcrosse. Give me a shout when lunch is up.’ she thought, unhappily, ‘I’ll probably have to give three shouts, and then Ken Shawcrosse will come lumbering back with you and expect me to feed him on our rations. And after that you’ll both swill gin and French, and tonight you’ll be sour-tempered until it’s time for bed and might want to use me, as if I was something from the far end of a Sultan’s harem.’ Then, as the baby gurgled, she drew her finger along the child’s cheek. ‘We’ll stick it out, Vanes
sa,’ she said, ‘we’ll stick it out until it improves. And everyone except me seems to think it will.’
II
The gull, being no fisherman, did not venture across the tidal lagoon to the sandbars where the one landing craft the Americans had left behind lay wrecked and rusting, holed by a 1940 obstruction and now the haunt of gulls who lined its weed-covered sides to watch for fish trapped in the hull. Evie Craddock saw them standing there as she tied up to the barnacled poles, slipped out of her skirt and singlet, and lowered herself into eight feet of slack water. There were no prohibitions about bathing now and in fine weather she came here every day. It brought Simon much closer and today she was in need of some kind of reassurance.
He had said nothing about the part he expected to play in the invasion but his extreme reticence had only increased her uneasiness. Before releasing her hold on the gunwale she looked across the ruffled water towards France, picturing what might be happening there, her guesses based on the scrappy content of the radio bulletins. They did not tell her much. To listen to the genteel voice of the announcer one would imagine the invasion was a kind of cross-Channel excursion, the picnic to end all picnics, with men wading ashore in shallows shouting like boys sent to play on a beach. She was aware, of course, that it was not like that at all, that over there, almost within sight it seemed, men were bleeding to death in the shallows and all was the wildest confusion. Simon, if he was there at all, would have been ashore since first light, and she wondered, distractedly, whether there had been a second mention of glider troops in later bulletins. The thought made her push off and swim rapidly round the dinghy, as though ashamed of enjoying herself when Simon and hundreds of thousands of others were drenched in sweat and numbed by explosions. Then her commonsense caught up with her and she thought, ‘If he could see me he’d laugh—out here making a pilgrimage round the mermaid beat in his honour. I’ll write and tell him what I did on D-Day.’ She lay flat on her back and let herself wash to and fro in the tidal wavelets. ‘He’ll make it somehow,’ she told herself. ‘It’s like Paul told me on the phone—Simon will make it in the long run or he wouldn’t have got this far.’
Simon had, in a manner of speaking, already made it. The Orne bridge was now as secure as the most optimistic of them could have hoped for ten hours previously when they cast off and came gliding in from the north-west to crash within fifty yards of the bridges over the little river and the Caen Canal.
The first twenty minutes had been the liveliest and, in some ways the most rewarding of Simon’s military career and that career went back a long time now—to the day when he emerged from the hold of the Dutch collier to join the raggle-tailed Basques in a war that was already history. It was of this other war that he thought as he sat in the whistling glider awaiting the impact. You were not supposed to think of anything on these occasions but empty your mind so that the body was free to respond to reflexes rehearsed over the months of training for a single leap into the dark towards a specific objective. The leap was from the wreck of a Horsa glider. The objective a couple of bridges over two insignificant waterways near the village of Ranville, in Normandy.
And yet his mind persisted in making comparisons. Both wars, from his point of view, had been fought as an amateur, but this time he was an amateur with professional equipment at his disposal. Even the Bren gun he held was capable, in the hands of a trained man, of killing half-a-dozen men with a couple of bursts whereas, in Spain, he had counted himself lucky to carry a 1914 Lebel rifle with a stiff bolt action. The men beside him were amateurs, now as then. Tonight they were fresh-faced youngsters, keyed-up to a terrific pitch and probably terrified by the hazards of their assignment and yet, like himself, fortified by the certainty of ultimate victory, and this was half-way to survival. In Spain it had not been that way at all. Always they were staring over their shoulder at defeat, a mob of peasants fighting Italian armour and German dive-bombers in a contest from which the Democracies had stood aside, calling their cowardice non-intervention.
Well, here after so long was the beginning of the end, an invasion mounted on a massive scale and surprisingly he was part of it. And that in spite of having passed his fortieth birthday.
He heard the long, final swish of the glider and felt the grinding, bumping slither of its impact. Then training took over and his thoughts went tumbling back to the lumber room as men spilled out of the door and down through the shattered nosecap, shouting and leaping, whooping, prancing and firing haphazardly into the snake-belts of mist that hung above river and canal. Expecting to lead some thirty of them he was, instead, caught up in their tumult, and in the flash of exploding grenades images registered on his brain at the speed of a runaway film. He saw Lance-Corporal Gilson fire from the hip at the embrasure of a pillbox. He saw another man hurl grenades into a gun-pit. He saw a tall German soldier standing on the bridge itself, his mouth wide open but no sound issuing from it as a Bren burst folded him like a sack. And then there were his own tiny triumphs as he shot a man in the act of firing a Verey pistol and seconds later, two more pounding back across the bridge. From the direction of the canal came the continuous wink of flashes and the roar of grenades and after that, from all around, a long, unaccountable silence. It was done, apparently, and so quickly that it was hard to believe. It had been like a noisier edition of one of the briefings, where every object seen here was a scale model glued in a frame. The only real difference was the dead, the man still holding a Verey pistol, the two fugitives at the far end of the bridge, and on the lip of the gun-pit his own sergeant, camouflage smock still smouldering from a phosphorous grenade.
Time passed and they pottered about in the gloom. ‘Consolidating’ it was called but how did one consolidate fixed objects in the dark? Overhead he heard the throb of engines and glanced automatically at his watch. It was 3.20 a.m. and the noise would come from the Dakotas carrying parachutists to hold the heights north-east of Caen against a panzer counter-attack. Later he heard them rallying to the toot of an English hunting-horn. The sound had never stirred him as it seemed to stir other men, for he had forsworn foxhunting as a child. All the same it was odd to hear it away in the mist and he made a mental note to write and tell his father who, despite having been a Master of Foxhounds, had never learned to produce anything better than a despairing wail on the instrument.
Messages, most of them encouraging, came in from one source or another. The canal bridge was secure. The parachutists were assembling in the west. Casualties had been relatively light. Miraculously it was seen that their own glider had landed within fifty yards of the bridge. As it began to grow light, and they had to contend with nothing but a few snipers, abstract thoughts began to creep out again but they took no hold and skirted carefully on the edge of triviality. The hedge tear in his smock. The thick crust of dirt under his thumbnail. The foolishly upturned heels of the two dead men on the bridge. From the shelter of the gun-pit he could count eight German bodies. The British dead had been carried into the pillbox.
When it was quite light he could see the profile of the German with the Verey pistol and it was contemplating him that he came to terms with the curiously final reaction to the night that was gone and already receding into history, like the battles in Spain and the débâcle at Calais. For him, in a sense, it was over. There was no hate for the man spreadeagled on the bridge, or the inert grey forms of the others. All this time he had been sustained by a hatred that had driven him blindly along the years, and although it had moderated after his marriage to Evie there had still been enough to push him as far as this. But now it was altogether spent. Tomorrow or the day after they would roll on, he supposed, over the Seine, over the First War battlefields of Flanders, and ultimately over the Rhine, but it would be a campaign, not a crusade. The transition pleased him. In a way he felt purged and free.
The man at his elbow said, fighting a yawn ‘They haven’t shown up yet, sir. Taking their time.’ He meant Lovat’s Commandos, sch
eduled to relieve them and already an hour-and-a-half overdue. ‘They’ll be along,’ Simon said and as he said it they heard, from down the road, the faint but unmistakable skirl of pipes so that Simon smiled, not from relief but at the juvenile enthusiasms the British injected into the sorry business of war. There had been that story about footballs punted across No-Man’s-Land on the first day of the Somme offensive. There was the early morning toot of the hunting horn heard in the Normandy mists. And always, in every war, there was the moan of bagpipes.
He stood up and watched the men scrambling out of cover and moving across open country. Some of them were waving and cheering but most of them just stared. The green berets marched in with conscious panache, as if they were relieving another Lucknow. Their piper was playing ‘Blue Bonnets over the Border’, a tune Simon had heard often during his long spell in the Highlands. Soon red and green berets intermingled and he overheard Lord Lovat apologise for being late, as though he and the Major had agreed to lunch together. ‘I must remember to tell the Gov’nor that too,’ he thought. ‘Amateurs, the whole bloody lot of us. But we look like beating the hell out of the pros and that’s a damned sight more than we deserve, considering the way we went about it until a couple of years ago.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 27
