The Crew

by Margaret Mayhew

  There was no champagne in the cellar, of course. Cedric looked at Honor as though she’d asked for the moon. If there had once been any such thing left, she knew he would have polished it off long ago. She went back to the reception desk. There were more people in the Oak Bar now and a lot of male laughter reaching the hall. Fortunately, Mrs Mountjoy had gone into the dining-room and would be out of earshot. The colonel’s ears wouldn’t hear much anyway and besides it was nearly time for him to go in for dinner. On the dot of seven-forty, after slowly spinning out his customary three gin and tonics, he would come out of the Oak Bar and head towards the dining-room. And, sure enough, as the grandfather clock hands edged towards that time he appeared. Passing the desk, he paused and shook his head sadly.

  ‘Officers and NCOs drinking together . . . never happened in my day. Not the thing at all. Don’t know what the country’s coming to.’

  The crew didn’t leave the bar until half an hour later and she could tell that, except for the sergeant on lemonade, they were all the worse for drink. The Australian who had bought the matches gave her a look that made her turn away hurriedly.

  Peggy saw them come in and watched Mr Cedric conducting them to their table. They made quite a commotion about sitting down, and one of them knocked a chair over. She knew she was going to have a spot of bother with them. It looked as though they’d spent a long time in the bar before and as they were already ordering more beer, things were likely to get worse, not better. Mrs Mountjoy was looking daggers from her corner. If looks could kill, Peggy thought, the seven of them would have dropped down dead.

  She went across to their table with the menus and her pad and pencil. Not that there was much of a choice: just the cock-a-leekie, then either something the chef called Chicken à la King (though she couldn’t see what it had to do with His Majesty), or steamed halibut with a sprig of old parsley stuck on top. There was trifle for pudding, unless they fancied the mousetrap.

  She stood waiting behind the fair-haired one sitting at the end of the table. He only had one ring round his sleeve so she knew he wasn’t very high up. Last night she’d waited on an old man with four rings and she’d been so nervous she’d gone and dropped a bread roll off the tongs right into his lap. She waited hopefully for a few minutes but they were all talking and laughing among themselves, not paying much attention to the menus and none at all to her, so in the end she thought she’d better say something to the one at the head of the table.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, would you like to order now?’

  He peered up at her, surprised to find someone standing there, and she could see he was more than a bit woozy. His hair was flopping over his forehead and his face was flushed, but he gave her a lovely smile.

  ‘Gosh, I’m most frightfully sorry . . . don’t actually think we’re ready yet. I say, chaps . . . I say, chaps . . . do listen. What do you all want?’

  It took a long time to sort it all out. She had to go round the table and ask each one in turn and of course a couple of them were a bit cheeky. Still, she was getting used to that sort of thing and it didn’t fluster her quite so much. As she went off to the kitchen, Mr Cedric was bringing them the beer.

  Later, they started singing Happy Birthday. Honor could hear it loud and clear from reception and it was followed immediately by Twenty-one today . . . When that had finished there was a lot of clapping and shouts of speech, speech!

  Mrs Mountjoy came storming out into the hall and rapped her stick furiously on the edge of the desk.

  ‘Miss Frost, I demand that you put a stop to this appalling noise at once! I’ve never seen or heard such disgraceful behaviour in my life. This is supposed to be a hotel, not a zoo.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Mountjoy—’

  ‘Sorry is not enough, Miss Frost. Go and do something this minute. As for allowing sergeants in the dining-room . . . whatever next? I don’t expect to have to eat with that class of person. I am seriously considering moving elsewhere.’

  If only she would!

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no hotel rule about that, Mrs Mountjoy.’

  ‘Then there should be. I shall speak to Miss Hargreaves in no uncertain terms.’

  There was another burst of clapping from the dining-room and more loud laughter. Mrs Mountjoy brandished her stick.

  ‘Listen to that! Well, aren’t you going to put a stop to it?’

  ‘If you insist, Mrs Mountjoy.’

  ‘I most certainly do.’

  Honor went into the dining-room. Pilot Officer Wentworth-Young was on his feet, evidently making some kind of speech. Peggy hovered behind him, waiting to serve the trifle. The Australian sergeant was walking round the table, upside-down, on his hands. The youngest-looking of them had actually fallen asleep with his head on his plate. She saw scandalized faces all round the dining-room.

  The rambling address petered out.

  ‘Well, thanks most awfully all of you . . . jolly glad you all came. Jolly, jolly glad . . .’

  The speech-maker collapsed suddenly backwards into his chair and when Peggy darted forward to set the plate of trifle in front of him he caught hold of her and dragged her down onto his lap. Sponge cake and jam and custard and mock cream flew about as she struggled to free herself.

  Honor limped forward hurriedly. ‘Would you please let go of the waitress, sir . . . and could I ask you all to be much quieter. You’re disturbing the other guests. People are complaining. Please. Please. Please—’

  They took no notice of her but started to sing again, one of them conducting vigorously, and this time it wasn’t Happy Birthday but something far worse. She knew the tune but the words were quite different.

  The Australian sergeant had reached her on his upside-down tour of the table. He righted himself clumsily. ‘Come to join the party, sweetheart?’

  The hotel wasn’t on fire and nobody had died but she could see that the only thing to be done was to fetch Miss Hargreaves, who would probably go and call the police.

  The Australian stumbled after her and caught her up as she reached the dining-room doors. He grabbed hold of her arm. ‘Be a sport, miss. Don’t make trouble.’

  ‘You’re the ones who’ve made the trouble.’

  ‘It’s his bloody birthday.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘He might not have another.’ His fingers tightened their grip and he jerked her round to face him. He was looking furiously angry now, glaring at her as though she was at fault. ‘None of us bloody might. Think about that, you stupid bloody sheila, if you can bloody think at all.’

  She wrenched herself free. Mrs Mountjoy was waiting for her in the hall, leaning on her stick.

  ‘Well? I hope you’re going to have them thrown out this instant.’

  ‘They’ll be leaving soon, Mrs Mountjoy.’ She went into the inner office, rubbing at her bruised arm. She was close to tears.

  Five

  CATHERINE SAW THE subtle change in them when they walked into the de-briefing room, back from a raid on Bremen. The strange alchemy that transformed a collection of very individual men into a crew was working its magic. They had to forget their differences, their dislikes, even their distrust. Their survival depended on it. She watched them collect their mugs of hot cocoa and tots of rum from the padre at the hatchway and light their cigarettes and talk together, waiting for their turn to sit down at one of the de-briefing tables. For the first time, they ended up at her table, dragging out their chairs and slumping into them – unshaven, red-eyed, dishevelled and dirty. She unscrewed the cap of her fountain pen and began her questions about the raid. The Aussie bomb aimer had black rubber mask marks on his cheekbones, like war paint. He looked positively aggrieved when she asked if they had bombed on target.

  ‘Too right we did. I reckon we walloped those U-boat yards good and proper.’

  She smiled at him placatingly. ‘I only asked.’

  He took a cigarette from the open tin on the table and scraped a match alight. ‘Yeah, well . . . w
e did, didn’t we, skip?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She turned to the skipper. ‘How about flak?’

  ‘Pretty much where they told us.’

  ‘Was it heavy?’

  ‘Guess you’d say moderate. Plenty of pitches but none of them in the strike zone.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘They kept missing us.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘Any enemy defence tactics you hadn’t come across before – decoys, weapons, anything different that you encountered?’

  ‘I guess not. Nothing we noticed.’ His expression was deadpan:

  Maybe she was imagining it, but she suspected that he was mocking her and her questions. She said crisply, ‘Any enemy night fighters in the target area? Or elsewhere?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not on this one.’

  ‘Did you see any kites go down?’

  He indicated his mid-upper gunner with one thumb. ‘Bert saw one in trouble.’

  The gunner nodded. He was the small, dark one with the cheeky grin, only he wasn’t grinning now. He looked bone tired. She noticed, amused, that he had an extra free cigarette from the tin parked behind one ear.

  ‘A Stirling. Over the drink on the way home – ’bout ’alfway across. Must’ve taken ’its in a couple of engines ’cos I could see two stopped an’ they was losing ’eight. Went into cloud, then, so I didn’t see what ’appened to ’em after that. Charlie spotted ’em, too, didn’t you, Charlie?’

  The little rear gunner agreed. He looked ridiculously young to be doing this ghastly job. No early-morning stubble on his boy’s cheeks – only adolescent pimples very red against his pallor. He stifled a yawn.

  She went through the rest briskly in her interrogation voice, knowing that at times she must sound like a bossy schoolmistress with a rather slack class. When they got wearily to their feet she caught the skipper’s ironic glance before he moved away.

  ‘You seem a bit crook.’ Stew, hands in pockets, fell into step beside Piers as they left the ops block. The nav looked like death warmed up. ‘Still got that hangover?’

  ‘I think I must have. I feel absolutely awful—’

  ‘The oxygen ought to’ve cured you. Still, a good kip and you’ll be right as jolly old rain.’

  Stew put on a fake Oxford accent for the last bit. Couldn’t resist taking the piss out of Piers sometimes. The joke was, he was supposed to call him ‘sir’, being an officer, but they’d none of them ever bothered with that bullshit. It’d been first names all round, right from the start.

  Poor old Piers couldn’t take the grog, Stew reckoned, giving him another sideways look. Not like himself. Christ, he’d been drinking since he was about twelve – pinching beer out of the fridge when nobody was looking. Smoking, too. Nicking the fags from his parents whenever he got the chance. Even so, he had to admit he’d felt a bit rough after the night out in Lincoln. It’d been a pretty good party – what he could remember of it.

  ‘I’m afraid I must have behaved most frightfully badly,’ Piers said. ‘Terribly bad form.’

  He was like a cartoon Pom! ‘Do us a favour, sport. Spit the bloody plum out.’

  Piers, of course, didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘The trouble is, Stew, I can only remember bits of the evening . . .’

  ‘Yeah, same as the rest of us, ’cept Jock. Ask him. He’ll tell you what a bad boy you were. You had that waitress on your lap. Wouldn’t let her go. Tut, tut, old chap. Dashed poor behaviour.’

  ‘Gosh, did I really? What on earth did the hotel people think?’

  ‘Well, they weren’t too thrilled, as I recall. Some bossy sheila came and told us people were complaining. Asked us to pipe down.’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘God, how dreadful.’

  ‘Well, so what? We risk our bloody necks for them. The least they can do is let us enjoy ourselves while we’re still alive and kicking.’

  ‘Just the same, Stew, I think I ought to go and apologize. I say, you wouldn’t like to come with me?’

  ‘Me? No, thanks. Not bloody likely.’

  ‘I’d be most awfully grateful. I’ll buy you a beer. Several beers.’

  What a mug he was. ‘OK. You’re on.’

  They drove the twelve miles to Lincoln in Piers’ Wolseley. He was the only one of the crew to possess a car and that went a long way, in Stew’s book, to making up for the Pommy toff-talk that got on his wick. Buses cost money, taxis even more. A bike was OK for getting around to the local boozers, but not if you wanted to go much further afield. He wondered, and tried to remember as they spun along, how the hell they’d got back to the station after the birthday bash. Piers couldn’t remember anything about the journey either but between them they came to the conclusion that it was Jock who must have driven since he’d been the only one sober. And Jock couldn’t drive.

  Piers parked the car outside The Angel. Privately, Stew couldn’t understand why Piers wanted to go and stick his head in the noose. What was the bloody point? He supposed it had something to do with the way he’d been brought up. His nanny had probably spanked him if he didn’t go and say sorry when he’d been naughty.

  The revolving entrance door had a bad case of the squeaks – he remembered that from before – and there was no-one at the reception desk. A grandfather clock tick-tocked away slowly in the silence like a knell of doom, and a stuffed stag’s head stared down with sightless glass eyes. Cripes, what a bloody morgue! He poked his head into the Oak Bar which was deserted too. ‘OK, nobody about, let’s go,’ he said, keen to be out of there. They could go off down the hill to The Saracen’s Head, better known as the Snake Pit, and sink a few beers. It was a bloody sight more lively than this place.

  But Piers had gone over to the desk, picked up a small brass handbell and rung it firmly. At the sound, a girl came out of the office at the back. Stew remembered her too. It was all coming back to him. She was the one with the limp. The one who’d served behind the bar and sold him some matches and then come into the dining-room later and kicked up a fuss. He’d gone after her and said something – he couldn’t remember what exactly, but from the icy look she sent his way, it probably hadn’t been too polite.

  Piers was saying his bit, stumbling through some bullshit about how frightfully sorry he was if they’d made a nuisance of themselves and that he hoped most awfully that they hadn’t done any damage. The girl was thawing out by degrees and by the time Piers had got to the end of his party piece, stone the bloody crows, she was smiling at him.

  ‘Well, you did make rather a disturbance, sir, but don’t worry about it. And no damage was done. It was nice of you to come by.’

  That was that, then, Stew thought in relief, and headed for the door. Now they could go and have a grog. But Piers was still carrying on, asking something about the waitress . . . wanting to say sorry to her as well, for Christ’s sake. The girl told him she was in the dining-room, laying tables.

  ‘Shan’t be a moment, Stew,’ Piers said and, before he could stop him doing anything so bloody stupid and unnecessary, he’d gone shooting off down the hall.

  He hesitated, not sure whether to stand his ground or wait outside in the car. The girl’s smile had switched off like a light bulb when she glanced again in his direction and she turned her back deliberately and started rearranging some papers behind the desk. That pissed him off. There was no call for her to be so unfriendly when she’d been so nice to Piers.

  He stepped forward. ‘Stew Brenner’s the name.’

  He might not have uttered anything because she went on ignoring him completely. Her face was averted so he could only see the back of her head and the tight sausage of hair above a prim white collar.

  He said, peeved, ‘What’s the matter? Do you want me to apologize, too, or something?’

  No response. Not a flaming glimmer. He must have been ruder to her than he’d thought – maybe even said something obscene, though he usually tried to watch his l
anguage with sheilas, even when he’d had a skinful. ‘All right . . . I’m sorry. For whatever it was. I can’t remember what I did or said . . . I’d had too much to drink, see. I’m sorry. OK?’

  At last she turned round, slowly, to look at him. ‘Gentlemen usually remove their caps in the hotel.’ She went off into the office behind the desk and banged the glass door shut behind her. He could see her sit down at a typewriter and hear the staccato clatter of the keys. Stew swore furiously under his breath. Some women were never bloody satisfied.

  There was only one waitress in the dining-room – a girl laying a table at the far end. Piers stood by the swing doors for a moment, watching her setting out knives and forks and spoons. She was too absorbed in her task to notice him, and he watched her breathe on a knife blade and rub it carefully on the corner of her apron. He gave a small cough and she started and dropped the knife onto the carpet.

  ‘Excuse me . . .’ He hesitated, not knowing for the life of him what he was going to say, but determined that he owed her some kind of apology.

  ‘Did you want something, sir?’ She was staring at him apprehensively. ‘Dinner isn’t served until seven o’clock.’

  ‘I know . . . I mean, I didn’t come for dinner.’ He made his way between the tables towards her. ‘Actually, I came to apologize. To say how frightfully sorry I am to have behaved so badly the other evening. I’m afraid I’d had rather a lot to drink and I can’t remember much about it . . . but . . . but I gather I . . . well, somebody told me I behaved specially badly – to you. At least, I think it must have been you.’ He swallowed. ‘I wanted to apologize.’