by Derek Beaven
There were no trains. Coal deliveries had failed owing to the strike. All movements on that line were cancelled until further notice. When would that be? The ticket man pursed his lips and sucked in his breath. ‘Now you’re asking me. Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow. Could be next week, mate, for all they tell me. Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
The swing bridge in the road across the dock entrance was open. In front of him tugs were pulling out a rusty grey-hulled liberty ship through the lock and into the stream. The ship was fat and ugly, close up, easing itself between the concrete piers. One of the tugs manoeuvred near where Vic stood, then took up the strain again, slewing sideways under Tower Bridge as if to get a better grip on the water.
Vic stared, a little enviously, at the men in the wheelhouse. One stoking, one at the helm, they both wore the river get-up of collarless shirt, waistcoat, and moleskin trousers. The tide swung the stern close. Wavelets on the brown river slopped up against the swags of thick filthy rope that hung from the gunnels. The stoker put down his shovel, turned, and came aft. As he lifted his cap, he ran his hand back over his grey hair, tugging at his sweat cloth in a mannerism that struck Vic as familiar. He knew the man. He’d worked at the boatyard with him. It was Alfie Coats.
He called, ‘Hey, Alf!’
The man stared back. ‘It’s not Vic Warren, is it? Christ, it fucking is.’
The tug went into reverse and belched clouds of sable smoke.
‘Just wait till we get this old Yankee bitch out of her kennel and then we’ll have a natter. And what sort of a bloody mess have you been making of yourself?’
Vic and Alfie Coats left the Earl Howard and walked down towards Shadwell. Soon the warehouses loomed above them on either side, closing out the light, and the narrow cobbled street was busy with vehicles trying to force a route through. The High Street was crossed with aerial catwalks between the upper floors. Vic’s injuries throbbed. He swigged another dose from the syrup the medical officer had given him, and tried to keep up.
In little engine houses glued high up to the walls, men controlled the ropes from top gibbets. The bulging sacks swung as dead weights lifted off open drop-doors. The loaders hung out after them, cigarettes stuck in their mouths, guiding the fall with serious, smoke-wreathed faces. A lad was rolling barrels where the raids had knocked out a fifty-yard gap. Suddenly exposed, a parade of crane jibs reared up on the far bank. Vic and his mate walked on past Shadwell New Basin.
‘Just a bit further,’ Alfie said.
Vic grimaced.
Alf laughed and tugged his white moustache. ‘You poor bugger. Off of the old Free Trade.’
They turned down an alley off Stepney Broad Street and came out where a small pier jutted from the Free Trade Wharf. About twenty lifeless stack barges were lashed together in an oblong block formation.
‘It’s the one on the end,’ Alf said. ‘All the rest are bloody laid up. Kenny Wright’s the geezer’s name. He takes odds and ends down to Southend. Seems to muddle along.’ He laid his finger to the side of his nose. ‘If you know what I mean.’
Vic nodded and smiled. ‘Thanks a lot, mate.’ He shook Alf’s hand.
‘Think nothing of it. Reckon you’ve done your bit, son.’
THE BROWN SAIL bellied and flapped; the sprit swung wide off the mast. Kenny Wright switched the leeboards on the winch and picked up his cigarette. Rounding the point on Blackwall Reach, the old barge began her sedate heel under Vic’s hand. He knew the vessel. At the yard, they’d refitted her.
‘That’s the tricky bit over,’ Kenny said. ‘From here on it’s plain sailing.’ He laughed. ‘Think you can manage that, soldier boy?’
‘I’ll give it a go,’ Vic said. He smiled again to himself, at the impossible romance of his situation. The wood creaked, the water began to swish away under the Irene’s stern. The cargo was salvaged, sulphur-coloured bricks, but under the tarpaulin, there were dozens of boxes of American luxury goods. The Artillery were flying their flag beneath a barrage balloon on Woolwich Common, and Vic lined up the boat’s head on it. Greenwich gasworks slipped past. Soon the old familiar stink began to come from off the marshes.
Kenny lounged in the bow. An equally lazy breeze drifted the barge down with the tide. They passed Woolwich power station. As the broadening river slid between wetlands, a late sun made bright drifts of the eastern cloud. He must contact her; he must show her that he understood. He would write to her at Oulton, and tell her he was at the cabin. At least he knew where Jack was. He could reassure her about that. Concerning the other matter, Phyllis, well, he’d just have to make a clean breast of it, and hope for the best.
What wind there was dropped off as they passed Everholt’s yard at Creekmouth. They drifted on in midstream towards Grays. A minesweeper came up, and part of a convoy: three great, rusty, beaten-looking ships in line astern. Vic took more of his painkiller and turned round to gaze after them. He saw a sunset baulked by the anvil shapes of thunderclouds.
‘No sweat,’ said Kenny. ‘We’ll find ourselves a nice little mud-flat. Don’t worry, mate. You’ll be there by tomorrow.’
STAN PIKE LAY awake in the four-poster bed at Pook’s Hill. Outside, the July storm clattered on his roof and the air he breathed seemed alive with minute droplets, as though the rain had learnt to bounce through the terracotta tiles and horsehair plaster ceiling above him.
As soon as there was a lull, an odd flurry of wind trembled for a second or two in the chimney, and a dormer casement rattled. The overwhelming conviction struck him that Selama was in the room.
Then the downpour re-established itself, leaving only a faint, unmistakably English smell of wood soot that crept towards him from the fireplace; and when he tried to recreate in his nostrils the human sweat, and coconut, the cloves, pepper and peat, by which he might have remembered Selama and her country, he couldn’t do it.
The woman next to him stirred in her sleep, turned over and sighed. Her flavours were her own: of salt, of the fringing shore, and of the sea that twice a day came flooding up past the sloping lawns of her garden. In the absolute dark, the only other evidence of her presence was her breathing. Each exhalation caught slightly in her throat, like the echo of a snore.
Under the covers he put out a hand to her. Mary Benedick’s haunches were naked where her nightdress had ridden up. Her skin felt soft and full. Her flesh covered membranous walls and liquid systems – a lover’s anatomy. Here on the hip, connective structures anchored them at no very great depth to the prominence of her femur, and deeper within to the engagement of that bone with her pelvis.
He recalled how scrupulously, tremulously, medically, he’d once been accustomed to reading her colours, palpating her discrete minor debilities. Now he stroked her side under her nightdress, running his hand upon the indentations of her ribs and then down across the sternum, just grazing with the back of his fingers the undersides of her breasts. His touch woke her.
Only a little later, while she whispered amorous reproaches into his ear, and he, careful of her slight frame, rolled his panting weight away, did he become aware of the rain again.
THE BOY HELD her hand as they turned into the lane. She felt the quickening in his step as they came in sight of the Flatman’s bus with its comical stove-pipe sticking through the roof. She wished she could ask him straight out, ‘Well, then, what do you think, Jack?’ and then catch, as though she were a camera, all the emotions that were crossing his small face. Water from the storm lay in large puddles here and there across the path, and the loaded gun felt heavy and awkward tucked under her arm. But through the hand that held his she could sense Jack’s quivering excitement.
They unfastened the gate. The child stood stock still amid the wet briars. For a moment she felt disappointed in the cabin – she’d let the boy down. The gabling over the porch was flaked, a window-sill was hanging off. Various weatherboards were riven and twisted, and the roof distinctly sagged at the corner. They were details she’d hardly noticed
when, only a week ago in her furious state, she’d had her battle with his mother; and how small and insignificant the frame of her affair with his father looked now.
Jack twisted his hand out of hers and ran towards the front door. ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Auntie Clarice! The wooden house. The house through the bridge!’
‘Careful!’ she shouted. She hurried after him. Cautiously, together, with the barrel of the gun poking forward, they pushed open the door, and as the inside came into view, she heard Jack give a gasp. He ran to the middle of the room, stared at the mattress, ran to the window with its flowery curtains, touched the wall, touched the table, and the chairs, knelt down and touched the floorboards. He turned back towards her, his eyes wide, his mouth open. ‘It’s really here,’ he said.
‘Your father made it,’ she said. She could have bitten her tongue.
He frowned and shook his head. ‘No. He can’t have done. My father’s name’s Rice. That’s us. I shouldn’t really be here at all. If he finds out … I … I had a letter, you see. At the school. It was … It’s probably just something I made up.’
He smiled in embarrassment, such a sweet smile, but so out of place, far too old for him. And how strangely grown up were his mannerisms. She put the gun down on the table and sloughed off the sack of groceries from her shoulder. A flying bomb was somewhere high overhead.
‘Some of the boys, you know, they do tell stories. It’s living away from home, I expect. This letter … I called it the Comforter.’ He smiled again, nervously. ‘From a Victor Warren. He said he was …’
She was desperate to hug him to herself and explain that everything was fine; everything would be all right.
‘But then I went and killed somebody.’ He said it so matter-of-factly. Now there were drops in his eyes, welling at his lower lids. She had to watch him struggling with his too-formal words. ‘There. Now I’ve told you. You’ve been so kind, Aunt Clarice, but … I’m afraid … I’m afraid I’m actually a bad lot. I shouldn’t like you to get into trouble.’ He lowered his gaze. ‘Actually, you’d jolly well better turn me in, after all. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
It was too much. She simply ran and grabbed him in her arms. He clung to her as though he could never let go and she let him sob against her breast. ‘You poor boy.’ She smoothed his hair. ‘You poor, poor boy. It’s all over, Jack. Nobody got killed, nobody has to get turned in. You and me, here. We’ll be safe, Jack. We will. We’ll be safe.’
THE WIND HAD gone round southerly and was coming fresh off the North Downs and the Kentish Weald. Irene leant into the morning tide and picked up speed. Waves splashed under the stubby boat’s black chines, and the heavy length of beech wood that made up the tiller kicked slightly under Vic’s good hand. Then Kenny Wright slackened the port sheets, and she was running northward up the Tilbury bend between the twin forts of Coalhouse and Shornmead.
When he looked across at each of them, now this side, now that, Vic could see the heavy cannon sticking out from their concrete emplacements. Just for a moment all his injuries gave a collective twinge as he imagined the little contraband-carrying barge caught in some whistling crossfire.
They drove close to the marshlands and quarries at Cliffe, sailing straight for a full half hour. As the reach under Pitsea and then the oil refinery came in sight, he fancied he could pinpoint the handmade house up on the opposite hill, even when the whole rise was still no more than a green blur in the distance. Nearer and nearer they came. The brown sail tugged and the timbers creaked with all the little noises of an old boat. He was at home with wood, and how it could be shaped and jointed to keep out the water, or the wind.
Kenny took the helm to go about and bring the nose up to the jetty. Then he drifted Irene’s side just close enough in, still moving, with the heavy sail flapping its block and tackle back and forth, and the tiny mizzen shivering. Vic grabbed his kit and jumped ashore. ‘Thanks a lot. I owe you one, mate.’
‘All right.’
Vic watched the barge catch the wind again and circle about. Then he waved and turned, and set off from the flood defences along the road up towards the hill.
IF THE THING Jack hardly dared imagine turned out to be true, then what of the war, and his mother? And most of all what of Tony Rice? When he caught up with him, Tony Rice would kill him. Tony Rice would have his guts out of him. He could not stay.
Clarice was in the tiny kitchen, making him sandwiches. He could see her fair hair, her arms, the line of her skirt. He waited until her back was turned, and then ran out of the door.
At the end of the lane, he paused. He looked one way.
A dispatch rider was coaxing his motor bike along the concrete strip between the hedgerows. Jack turned and looked the other way down the hill. He was too late. A man in uniform was coming towards him.
He ran back. He shouted in terror, ‘Auntie Clarice! Auntie Clarice! Get the gun! They’re coming!’ Then he slammed the door shut.
She came out of the kitchen holding a breadknife.
‘They’re coming this way!’
His aunt took hold of the double-barrelled shotgun. She told him to open the door. Trembling, he opened it the merest crack. He watched her kneel and point the gun out through the gap. And then all at once he saw her face change. She gave a cry, let the gun drop down, and pulled Jack out from behind the door. ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘Jack. Look!’
When he looked out he saw a soldier with his arm in a sling coming towards them. And as he stared at the man’s face it was as though he walked exactly into the memory he always had at the back of his mind. There was a spray of light behind the man’s shoulder. His arm crooked and punched, crooked and punched. He remembered him sawing. On either side of the cut in the wood, dust the same shade as his mother’s face powder jumped itself into heaps. There were summer birds singing. On his cheeks were buds of water, which rolled into the hairs of his moustache. One large drop rolled down the side of his chin. The man straightened, and wiped his face with a rolled-up sleeve. The saw glittered in his hand. He was out of breath, and when he bent down again to pick Jack up the smell was his father’s waistcoat, and brilliantine, and the inside of wood.
Acknowledgements
My particular thanks are due to Sam Boyce, Bill Hamilton and Nicholas Pearson for help, more help, tolerance, brilliant judgement and terrific support. In addition I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Patricia Browning, Mary Chamberlain, Joan and Philip Cooley, Michael Emmett, Leo Hollis, Jack and Pearl Holloway, Jonathan Kaplan, Peter Lamb, Sylvia Legge, Caroline Saville and Susan Utting.
Special thanks are also due to the London Corporation for records of bomb damage, and to the staff of Barking Reference Library, the local studies staff of Chelmsford Library, the staff of the Essex Regiment Museum, and the Met. Office.
In describing the military actions in this novel, I have had to tread the line between reconstruction and invention. On the one hand it is the duty of the novelist not to seek to alter the details of history; on the other, I had no intention of writing ‘faction’. Above all a novel should not seek to trespass on the experience and suffering of real soldiers – and those of their families – while the events in question remain in living memory. For these reasons Vic’s regiment is never specified; it remains an imaginary one.
Vic’s military career is based on true events, however, for the sake of authenticity. His movements shadow those of the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment, as recorded in T. A. Martin’s book, The Essex Regiment 1929–1950. The battle of Verrières Wood (‘Essex Wood’) took place on 11 June 1944. Whether my evocation of such an engagement rings true or not, I should like it to stand as a tribute to the astonishing courage of the men involved in the real thing.
The battalion held the wood with ‘severe casualties’ until the morning, and were then pulled back. There were many individual acts of bravery. The battalion chaplain, the Reverend F. Thomas, ‘remained with the forward platoons throughout the night, shielding the bod
ies of the wounded with his own and entirely disregarding his own safety, gallantry for which he was given an immediate award of the Military Cross’. Major M. W. Hulme is also recorded as particularly distinguishing himself. The many unrecorded deeds of bravery by ordinary soldiers can only be imagined.
The battalion continued to fight its way through France, Holland and Germany.
The very severe civilian casualties mentioned as occurring in Barking on Saturday 7 September 1940 are a matter of record. I should like to extend my deepest sympathy to the relatives of all those killed, and to the injured and their families.
Note: the ‘plotland’ settlements at Laindon, Vange and Pitsea are well documented. They were bulldozed under compulsory purchase order after the war, and the new town of Basildon was built over them.
About the Author
Derek Beaven lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire. His first novel, Newton’s Niece (1994), was shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild Best Novel Prize and won a Commonwealth Prize. His second, Acts of Mutiny (1998), was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize.
Also by the Author
Newton’s Niece
Acts of Mutiny
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2001
by Fourth Estate
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