by Derek Beaven
‘Why, the enemy aliens. Don’t you read the papers? Hadn’t you heard they’re all being rounded up? We know exactly where they are.’
Dr Pike heaved a sigh, and pressed on with the question whose answer would confirm that he didn’t, after all, wish to join the local defence force. ‘Which enemy aliens would they be, exactly, Mr Wellbridge?’
Mr Wellbridge looked genuinely surprised. ‘Ah, but you’re only just back from the East. The Jews, of course. They’re all German-speaking. You see, we’ve bent over backwards for years to let them all in, only to give ourselves the trouble of locking them up now. Some of them are living in luxury, you know; managed to blend completely into the community. The law. It’s official. Other areas are well ahead of us. The local police have asked us to set up contingency plans – a holding centre. Not that we’ve actually got many of them out here.’ He winked confidentially. ‘Too remote. A bit too English, don’t you think?’
It was always so unvarying, the tone of voice, the confidential assumption of agreement, as if some password were being slipped. Dr Pike had heard it so many times, read it, lived with it, here before, at school, at the clubs, on the ships, in the papers. But he’d only noticed it, really noticed it, after he’d taken up with Selama Yakub; and was only just beginning, at this strange last gasp with the Nazis at the gates shouting the very same password, to be profoundly, neck-pricklingly angry about it. ‘Have you any idea why the Jews came over here?’ he said gently. He put his glass down.
‘Who knows,’ said Mr Wellbridge, missing any irony. ‘Maybe they were asking for it. Refujews,’ he snorted. ‘A good number of criminals and prostitutes, so I’m reliably informed.’
‘Would we also be helping round up any former appeasers, and prominent anti-Semites? Or any of the newspaper owners, colonels, captains of industry, peers, MPs and other pillars of the community who I gather only months ago were apologists for Hitler? One or two of them might be cunningly blended in, say, as landowners, even out here. Even if, dare we say it, there were no Jews.’
‘What?’
‘I’m suggesting the likelier traitors.’
‘Sorry, I don’t get you.’
‘Never mind. You’d better leave.’
‘What? Look, d’you want to join, or don’t you?’
‘I think not. Would you mind taking this with you?’ He showed both man and bottle out.
Wellbridge clutched the whisky as he stood on the gravel. His face worked between a gloat and a scowl. ‘Not willing to do your bit, eh?’
‘So sorry.’
‘It’ll get about, you know.’
‘I’d an idea it might. Goodbye to you.’
Stan Pike closed the door. He wasn’t surprised in the least that the appearance of Mr Wellbridge had followed directly upon his own casting aside of the demon drink. The music-hall logic helped stiffen his resolve. But Selama Yakub was lost for ever; and as he cleaned his guns he tried to keep fast to what he believed – that figures as grotesque and self-parodic as Wellbridge, or even Hitler himself, were motivated at the level of some hidden substrate by the quest for love, and the desire to be called out, named and understood. If that weren’t the case then there was almost no point in resistance.
CLARICE PULLED IN her horns, like a snail. She clung to routines. As the invasion hung imminent, more likely by the week, she kept house; she concentrated on the task in hand. Everything else – the future, love, the possibility that her cousin’s deception actually left her free to try to find Vic – must be put on hold.
She nursed her father, or convinced herself that she did. The loss of his drink began to work on him. It made him nervous; he had the jitters. She sat with him in the evenings, sewing, or reading, or turning the dial of the bakelite wireless through the various European stations to find music for him. Continually he’d get up to twitch the curtain, or go out prowling the garden. At last, she tried to stop him. Then he held her by the wrist and explained the situation again. He begged her forgiveness. The Nazis were everything he’d always known they were, England was at their mercy, and all he could do was shake and gibber. He was so ashamed.
The next morning she saw his preparations to fight them single-handed. With the spade in his hand, and accompanied by the ecstatic puppy, Bentley, he strode about the garden probing the earth. Then he began to dig.
‘A slit trench,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s just that – a slit in the ground.’
‘Why don’t you go and join the Volunteers after all,’ she suggested, her hair let loose from the comb, framing her face. ‘They’d know.’
‘They’re the most bloody detestable collection of Fascists.’
‘They can’t all be, Daddy.’
‘Shell-shocked old men,’ he said. ‘Hunting and shooting types. Yokels and village idiots. They don’t know their arse from their elbow, girl. They haven’t a clue what we’re fighting for.’
‘They might know what a slit trench was.’ He exasperated her. A convoy of dull-green army lorries began to jam up in the narrow lane in front of the house. They’d been coming past every few minutes. Now one stopped by their gateway. The driver shouted and whistled. ‘You could ask him,’ she gestured.
‘It’s obviously just what it says it is,’ her father said. ‘A trench. You don’t have to be Chief of the Imperial General Staff to know that, for God’s sake.’ The lorry ground on again.
‘So there’s no difficulty?’
‘The fine detail, Clarice. Siting, drainage, slope of side. That’s all I’m after.’ The puppy fell into the trench, and yelped and scrabbled as he scooped it out. It proceeded to dash back and forth barking manically. ‘Bentley! Here!’ he shouted. ‘Calm down, damn you!’
‘Just join in – for God’s sake. If the good men don’t show up, the Wellbridges stand to win. Isn’t that the whole ground of your case?’
But he wouldn’t be persuaded. He sulked and sweated. She pitied his sweats, whether from going on the wagon, or reawakened malaria, or now from the sheer frustration of military engineering. By eleven o’clock the ditch he’d made under the apple trees was about two feet deep and bedded with impenetrable flint; the lorries in the lane were streaming the other way. She took him tea.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘They don’t give them ordinary spades, did you know? They give them entrenching tools.’ He took off his Tom Mix hat, looked at his dog and fanned himself.
And she plucked a strand of hair back from her face where the warm breeze was catching it. The sun on her bare arms was precious. ‘Who? The Volunteers?’
‘The regular troops, girl. They issue them with entrenching tools. To be carried at all times.’
‘You think one of those would do the trick, then?’
He wiped his brow; his forehead was red. ‘This is real, isn’t it, darling? I can’t believe … You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if the whole … If it were just an attack of the DTs?’
‘As far as I know, it’s real.’
‘Then it’s the end of everything.’
‘I should think it is.’
‘Christ, you’re a cool one,’ he said.
She wasn’t. But it was after Mr Churchill’s speech that she’d made a conscious decision to manage her fear – by joining in the national mood. That was the point at which she’d slammed her imagination shut. What remained was a capricious excitement. The benign epidemic, it seemed to crop up everywhere. People she didn’t know stopped to talk to her in the village, or in Manningtree where she went to collect the meat ration. Everyone was buoyed up, keyed up. When the officer called around the village about the coastal zone evacuation, no one would go. It was true, she did feel such a relief to be alone and herself, not tied to allies – or even lovers – no longer mixed up with the apocalypse across the Channel, but unified with her good neighbours and resolved instead. A stand would be made. Let them come. Let the Luftwaffe wheel overhead in packs of bombers a hundred strong – as indeed they were alleged to be doing on the wireless and in the pa
per. Let them just try landing.
She made friends with a farmer’s daughter called Beatrice Bligh, a strong, brown-haired, good-natured girl who taught her how to ride. And that, to her surprise, marked a turn in her morale. Bea was newly married to a young Ipswich solicitor. She poised her life uncertainly between husband and parents, town and country, apparently taking every opportunity to come up to the farm near Harkstead, much to her husband’s irritation. ‘He wants me to give up the horses and stay at home. You don’t think I should, do you?’
‘Can’t see why,’ Clarice replied. She was wearing borrowed jodhpurs, and one of her father’s white shirts. Her brown brogue shoe swung in the stirrup. Mannish, perspiring in the afternoon’s bask of cloudlessness and gnats, she guided the bay gelding, Martin, away from the gatepost just in time to prevent him crushing her knee. ‘Stop it, you spiteful thing!’ She could have sworn the horse sneered as she pulled his mouth. ‘I do believe he actually means to do it, Bea.’
‘He will. He’s a rogue. Aren’t you, Marty? Just be firm with him. You’ll have to have your wits about you until he knows who’s in charge. And don’t let him stop to eat things as he goes along.’
‘All very well.’ Clarice wrestled with the muscled neck in front of her.
He was a rogue. Behind Bea’s back and all the length of the hedge that ran the crown of Appleby’s land, Martin stopped and started, ate, chewed, drooled, and threatened to bite her shin with his disgraceful brown teeth. The sun was hot; her shirt stuck to her skin. At one point flies from some decomposing kill in the hedge swarmed up around her face. They settled on her arms, her hands, and all along the horse’s neck where the hair glistened with sweat below the mane. Both she and Martin flicked and shuddered, upsetting each other. She didn’t know the rules. Clearly, Martin did, because each time Bea turned round he contrived to look docile and plodding. ‘That’s the spirit. You’re doing very nicely. Just give him a slap if he plays up.’
Behind Bea’s back Martin gave Clarice every impression that he cared not a fig and would do exactly as he liked. Under the elms at the edge of Bligh’s farm, they eyed each other with suspicion. Nevertheless, they’d come this far, she reflected; they must have reached some grudging compromise.
The two women walked their horses down through the woods of Nether Hall and came to the banks of the Stour. The tide was out. They stood beside the mud-flats looking over the middle channel to Copperas Bay and then right along the estuary towards Harwich. Martin tossed his head incessantly, and Clarice grew incensed. ‘If only he’d keep still! What is it I’m doing wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Your horse isn’t trying to pull your arms out.’
Bea laughed. ‘I’m all right with horses. It’s the men I find difficult.’
‘Oh, men.’
‘Geoff expects me just to be there. But I don’t see why I should give up my whole life.’
‘It’s early days yet. I suppose there’s an adjustment.’
‘He wasn’t at all like this when we were engaged. Sitting trot. That means you stay in the saddle. We’ll get you two acquainted, shall we? Shake you out a bit.’ Bea laughed. They set the horses trotting along the path beside the tide line. She shouted over her shoulder, ‘I don’t see that I should give up all this!’
Despite the recalcitrant animal’s jogging spine and bruising sinew, for the first time Clarice felt physically connected to the little peninsula on which she’d come to live. She liked the pace she was going. Men, who needed them?
THEY WENT IN under the trees that bordered the few acres of Hayman’s fruit farm, and rode right past the wooden house in the clearing, just as Boss emerged from behind it driving his miniature tractor, the trailer loaded up with sacks. It startled the horses, and they took off, one after the other, in a dash that lasted several seconds. But Clarice wasn’t frightened; thrilled rather at the sudden power, ducking instinctively under a low branch that swept towards her as the path narrowed once more into the thicket, feeling her feet steadied in the stirrups, and dropping her hands down close to Martin’s neck. When they pulled up, Bea turned round. ‘Sorry about that. Are you all right?’
‘Absolutely fine.’ Breathless, she could feel her heart pounding. She’d known all along she’d come to no harm – she’d felt Martin’s better nature through her hands. And though he was his former self all the walk home, dragging at passing leaves, and stumbling close to any dangerous projections, she was both tired and changed. There was, perhaps, a chance. A formation of Hurricanes went over, going back to Martlesham. They were almost close enough to touch, but the horses were as used to aircraft as the women. When she got in at Pook’s Hill it was just in time for the wireless news. As always her father had his ear strained towards the set. The headlines had come and gone and he nodded the all-clear. No invasion had materialised as yet.
Then, under midsummer skies, Bea and Clarice rode almost every afternoon, defying Geoffrey, Bea’s husband, and savouring the hot scents of woods and animals. When the distant sirens wailed, which they frequently did, Clarice took no notice. She grew used to the dung and rot in the buzzing ferns of the Morton plantation and the warm earthen smell off the meadow behind Harkstead church. She loved the dust from the first paths across the neighbour fields, the peppery banks along the winding lower roads, then the peculiar dappled air beneath the oaks on the long slope that led down to the river. And at the tide’s various moods she snuffed up intriguing salt tangs mixed with the leathery waft of the body beneath her. She looked forward to the canters, as did Martin.
They began to rub along better after all. There was a day he forgot to try breaking her leg on the gatepost at Bligh’s. That same afternoon he picked up his feet over the exposed roots through Appleby’s spinney. From Shop Corner the ground on the rise lay open for a stretch where gorse still flowered. Bea nodded, and the two of them gave the horses their heads. Side by side, they raced briefly up the pasture, trampling docks and dandelions, drumming the thin turf; and Clarice was unnerved, even startled until she felt her odd confidence that Martin could look after her.
She took the moment to heart and made too much of it. If she was at one with nature she could look after everyone. She got it into her head that she and Martin created a strenuous tunnel, floored with grasses, overarched with sky – an endless chaste interim which nothing had power to smash. As long as she continued it meant no hideous development could prevent June leafing safely into July.
Then how slow was each evening, the house a watchtower, tentatively fortified. Alone with her father, the sleeping puppy twitching in his basket, the Belgian clock on the mantelshelf, she waited. Her sense was strained, on guard for the peal of village church bells, alert for the rumble of naval gunfire off the Naze, or the diving scream of incoming bombers. She and her father lived from bulletin to bulletin, eating what Ethel Farmer had left them, or what Clarice herself prepared.
Just before dusk he’d go up to the gabled east room where the shotguns now stood loaded, propped ready beside the window frames, to take his final scan of the horizon; and she’d go up with him, throwing open the casements on the darkening view. She’d look east for flares or signals. Her sentinel thought leapt over the hedgerow pickets to inspect the chain of Martello towers strung out only a few miles away along the shore from Felixstowe, built once for this eventuality. She pictured the scatter of defenders, nursing their guns in hastily installed concrete emplacements, she conjured the mysterious wireless transmitters at Bawdsey or Little Oakley, skeletal minarets beside the fraying river mouths. So she drew a mental thicket of mines and barbed wire about her. It was as much as anyone could do.
Evening by evening, above the silhouetted elms, there was no change except the moon dropping back towards the full. It fattened, perfected, began its wane, and disappeared. In the breathless air, nothing else told the season’s passage, nothing else moved or gave. There was only ever the pair of bats who hunted above the garden, wobbling in the gloam. Sometimes she hear
d the cries of swifts arcing high overhead. Highest of all, but only if she attuned to it, there was always the distant patrol of planes. Another dusk would grow gradually dark, and the two of them, father and daughter, would go down again to draw the blackouts.
Later, in a bedroom still full of the day’s heat, the floorboards settling, the rafters above her clicking under the tiles as they cooled, Clarice slept strangely well, her dreams linked with the dreams of her fellow-countrymen. They really would fight to the last man, woman and child. They had no memory of last month’s dead, no grasp of the million and a half French prisoners of war, no understanding at all of what a panzer division, let alone a concentration camp, might really mean. Resolutely picturing invasion as scrums and skirmishes on the mud-flats, they closed their minds to overwhelming force. With their sharpened kitchen knives and gallant pitchforks they would never surrender.
So Clarice slumbered in this saving narcotic of mental fight, undisturbed by the Blenheim bombers dispatched overhead. She lived for riding out next day with Bea Bligh, because while she was riding there was no war at all.
OF ALL THE London jugs, Pentonville reckoned itself the spickest and most span. Evacuated briefly at the start of the war, it was thoroughly back in business. The governor was ex-Navy, the place as trim as a warship. Floors were swept and scrubbed; sinks were scrubbed and bleached; brightwork, wherever visible, was spat upon and polished, and then polished again with Brasso, issued by a bald and motherly trusty from the stores. ‘Just promise me you won’t try drinking the stuff, Victor, it buggers up your insides no end. The tales I could tell you!’ He leant upon his broom. ‘And anyway, what’s a first-timer doing in a place like this?’
‘Don’t know.’ Vic shrugged.
‘Cock-up, if you ask me, dear.’ He stretched out a hand to Vic’s arm. ‘Know what I’m worried about? I’m worried you won’t last. Tell the truth, you’re not really built for it, are you, Victor?’
