‘It’s been nasty,’ he said as he turned down the hill. ‘People don’t seem to realise. They’re walking around Dover as usual.’
‘Nasty,’ she echoed. ‘I’ve never imagined anything like it. That bombing . . . and the sailors from the ships. Christ, Frank, only a couple of weeks ago I was dealing with broken wrists and kids with boiled sweets stuck in their throats. Now . . . well, I’m so . . .’
‘You’ve been there since early,’ he said.
She moved to be near him. ‘Were you all right?’ she asked wearily.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘The most difficult thing was keeping them away from that unexploded bomb. One bloke asked if he could go and give it a tap. It’s still down there, ticking.’
‘Two of the children were dead when they brought them in. The one they pulled from the wreckage was as sprightly as anything. She was happy her golliwog was safe.’ Nancy was silent and thoughtful. ‘I’ve seen dead children before. Diphtheria, measles, fits, all the usual things. You do when you’re nursing. But these tots were . . . well, were so battered. It was terrible, Frank, just bloody terrible.’
Instow trudged up to the destroyer’s deck and marvelled at the late tranquillity. Dover enclosed dozens of ships in the embrace of its harbour, the sky fading blue, gulls crying as if demanding information. At the start of the battle they had prudently flown inland and sat on walls and roofs until it was done.
He felt wrecked. Even sleep would not help now. He had lost his ship, such as she was, and his crew, some dead, some wounded, had been carried ashore. Survivors remained below decks as though unwilling to come out. The casualties from the destroyer had also gone, and the ship was almost clear of debris; one anti-aircraft gun was still manned in case the Germans came back but two of the crew were asleep against its barrel.
He felt he had to tell someone. There was a red telephone box on the pier. He walked to the gangway and went down. There was a sentry who saluted him and a petty officer who appeared as he walked towards the telephone. ‘It’s all right to use it now, sir,’ said the man. ‘They wouldn’t let the crew use it. It would have blocked it up for hours.’
‘Their wives won’t know they’re safe,’ pointed out Instow.
The man smiled seriously. ‘The families wouldn’t have known anyway that they’d been in action,’ he said. ‘Only when you’re a casualty they get to know. Then they tell them.’
Instow walked towards the box. It was dusty but undamaged although one wall of the building next to it had been demolished. He dialled ‘0’ and the operator answered after half a minute.
‘I’d like to make a trunk call, please.’
‘I’ll connect you to the long-distance operator.’
She did it quickly. ‘Operator,’ said Instow. ‘Would you connect me to Otway 437, please. It’s in Cumberland.’
‘I’ll try. The lines are very busy. It must be the war.’
‘I expect it is,’ he said.
‘Ah, it’s ringing. You’re lucky.’
The ringing tone went unanswered. It sounded empty. He could imagine the telephone, sitting black and upright, on their hall stand. She was not there. The operator’s voice returned: ‘I’m afraid there is no reply.’
He left the box disconsolately and turned to walk back to the ship but then changed his mind, paused, and went in the direction of the town. It was getting dark. Outside the dock gates a young girl was sitting on a bench.
‘Would you do me a favour?’ she asked.
‘What is it?’ said Instow.
‘Buy me a drink. A port and lemon will do.’
‘All right,’ he smiled.
The girl smiled too. ‘My name’s Molly,’ she said. ‘We could be friends.’
Chapter Five
DORIS SAW THE police car drop the three boys off at the bottom of the road. She went hurrying to the front gate, muttering: ‘Now what’s he done?’ The trio were jumping with excitement, laughing and telling the tale to each other.
‘Harold,’ she called as they came up the hill. ‘I’ve been worried to death. Where have you been?’
The three stood smugly at the gate. ‘In action,’ boasted Harold. ‘We been in action.’ He produced a cigar stub from the pocket of his short trousers. ‘We captured a Jerry.’
‘All by ourselves,’ said Spots.
‘We got him,’ said Boot lifting his hands in surrender.
‘You just stop this,’ Doris told them. ‘You . . .’ She pointed at her son. ‘You are coming with me to Northampton. We’re evacuating. And throw away that dirty cigar.’
‘But we captured this German. We did.’ He looked at the others. ‘Didn’t we?’
‘Stop making these things up! You’re coming to Northampton, Harold.’
All four turned as a car came slowly along the road. Cars were not frequent in that street. It pulled up a few yards away and a tall fair-haired man with a notebook climbed out.
‘Ah,’ he said, and pointed. ‘You’re the ones. You’re the boys who took the Jerry prisoner. I’m from the Daily Herald. Reg Foster’s my name.’
Doris thought she was going to faint.
Cartwright had a meal of pie and mash and tea with Sergeant Dunphy and the bomb squad, standing around the Women’s Voluntary Service canteen which was parked a careful distance from where the unexploded device was still ticking. Whenever there arose an emergency a refreshment canteen swiftly arrived on the spot, at times before the fire engines. ‘If that thing doesn’t explode tonight we’ll have to think again about what to do,’ said the bomb-squad sergeant. ‘That’ll be up to the brass. My feeling is that it will go off. Everybody will wake up at the same time.’
Cartwright felt drained. ‘Just as well they’re not bombing at night,’ he said.
‘They will soon enough.’
Eventually Cartwright put his cup and plate on the counter. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ he said.
The sergeant saluted and then they all shook hands. Dunphy looked apologetic. ‘You were the only officer available, sir – and a sapper.’
‘Glad to be of use,’ said Cartwright sincerely. ‘I’ve nothing better to do.’
An army van pulled up and he climbed in. ‘There’s a brave man,’ said Dunphy sinking his teeth into another meat pie. ‘And he don’t realise it.’
‘You went in as well, sarge.’
‘I don’t know any better either.’
Cartwright got out of the vehicle and showed his pass to the sergeant at the entrance to the cliff tunnels, then despite his tiredness walked up three levels to where the chalk had fallen from the wall revealing the Roman brickwork. There was an aperture slightly larger than his head. He moved cautiously closer and sniffed the stale air. A gunnery officer came and stood by him. ‘What do you think it is?’ he asked.
‘Won’t know until we get inside,’ said Cartwright. ‘Some sort of bath place, I expect. A latrine maybe.’
‘Anybody in there, d’you think?’ The officer laughed at his own joke.
Cartwright did not want to climb into any more holes. ‘I’m not going to look tonight,’ he said.
‘Bosoms,’ argued the sailor. ‘That’s all wrong. She only can have one bosom. Two tits equals one bosom. Four tits, two bosoms.’
The soldier insisted: ‘It says it on the ruddy placard. “Chesty Peploe – Britain’s Biggest Bosoms.”’ He drank his beer. ‘All I know is when she’s going around perched on that tub on the stage, she moves, son, she moves. You can see ’em wobbling . . .’
Toby Hendry came through the pub door with Giselle. At the bar were four airmen. They raised their glasses. ‘Long debriefing?’ said one.
‘Longish.’
One of the young officers bought the drinks.
‘Hear you brought back a prisoner.’
Hendry laughed soundlessly. ‘It was a toss-up who captured who. It was our navy that turned up first.’
Giselle turned and looked deeply into his face. ‘You have been . . .? You did not t
ell me any of this.’
Hendry shrugged. ‘I forgot.’
‘You have been flying . . . and fighting.’
‘Swimming as well,’ said one of the airmen.
‘You were in the sea?’
‘In the soup,’ said one of the others. They laughed.
They raised their glasses. ‘To Taffy Lewis,’ they said together.
Giselle looked from one face to another. ‘Lewis?’ she said. ‘What has happened to Lewis?’
There was a pause until one of the young men said: ‘He’s gone for a burton.’
‘He’s dead,’ said Hendry touching her arm. ‘He just died today.’
At that moment the unexploded bomb exploded. It was a mile away. Dust rose and fragments of plaster fell from the old ceiling. The clock slid from the wall behind the bar. Everyone crouched. Hendry put his arm across Giselle’s head. The other men put their hands over their tankards.
Summer skies continued blue and warm along the English Channel coast. There was scarcely a puff of cream cloud from Cape Cornwall to Broadstairs on the nose of Kent. Fields were green, the sea docile, beaches, hung with barbed wire, lay empty. In Dover, when the Germans were not overhead, red-faced people sat outside the open door and boarded windows of the Sunshine Creamery, licked away the dwindling supply of ice cream and drank fizzy lemonade. Elderly men in caps huddled on the promenade watching the dainty sea without comment.
But now halfway around Britain from the Isles of Shetland to the Isles of Scilly waited a ring of enemy armies. From Norway to Spain the German army waited for further orders. In the southern counties of England there was excitement, there was tension, there was even some fear, but there was also an odd exhilaration and enough to talk about. In Dover the town council called an emergency meeting.
As the aldermen and councillors, soberly aware of their responsibilities, approached the town hall at ten to six on a Monday evening they were greeted by Latin American music. The bowler-hatted mayor, Alderman George Bell, was the first to the interior door and without ceremony he pushed it open. Twenty-five couples, some in uniform, danced stiffly on the oak floor. An old gramophone played through a horn extended like an exotic pink flower, and a woman with skinny shins and a feathered hat over a long face sang out instructions: ‘Take your partner now to the left . . . hesitation . . . and then bend her over your arm . . .’
‘What’s this?’ demanded the mayor stoutly from the doorway. The aldermen and councillors crowded behind him, trying to see.
‘The tango,’ responded the tall woman half turning with the rhythm. ‘The Argentinian tango.’ She held out her thin arms. ‘May I?’
‘No, you ruddy mayn’t,’ responded the mayor backing away into an alderman. A soldier, his partner caught in mid-bend, stared at them and let the lady slip slowly to the floor. The dance ended in disarray.
‘Turn it off,’ ordered the mayor removing his bowler.
‘I refuse,’ responded the instructress standing tall. ‘This is not Nazi Germany – not yet – and we book this room every Monday until six.’
A man with smooth hair, coat and trousers appeared, the town clerk. ‘She is Polish, Your Worship,’ he said gravely as if that explained everything. ‘And she pays a month in advance.’
The mayor muttered unhappily: ‘Hitler is on the doorstep, about to strike any minute and we have to wait for a ruddy fandango.’ Stamping his feet he led the councillors into the chamber where they sat grumpily waiting for six o’clock while the alien music drifted from the next room. ‘It’s called “Jealousy”,’ said a woman member. ‘This song.’
Silence came as the town hall clock struck six. The sounds of the dancers making for the exit came through the door. ‘Those army boots will ruin our floor,’ grumbled the mayor. As always his official attendant approached proffering the shining and ornate chain of office used by mayors of Dover since 1606. He arranged it around the mayoral neck and Bell rested its weight on the table in front of him. ‘I call this meeting to order,’ he said. There were forty councillors and aldermen in the chamber. They were worried.
‘At this emergency meeting we have before us a proposal that Dover should be evacuated of all civilians,’ said an alderman. ‘Forthwith. Some people have already left but this council can issue a statement saying that everybody should leave the town at once. We can expect more air raids and goodness knows what else. Invasion, gas attacks. The question is should we evacuate?’ He paused, rattled his aldermanic chain on the table and looked belligerently around the faces. ‘. . . Or should we stay and face up to Hitler? Show the Hun we’re not afraid.’
Evacuation had always been an emotive subject. After the solitary German bomb had landed on Christmas Eve 1914, blowing a householder from a tree, there was an order for the entire town to be evacuated at once. Notices were posted, trains and buses mobilised, but the dumbfounded inhabitants refused to leave. Not at Christmas.
Evacuation plans at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 had been confused. Dover was the recipient of more than four hundred evacuee children from London, many of them howling for their mothers.
Soon afterwards trainloads of elderly residents were evacuated to the West Country where many of them ended in a Somerset lunatic asylum. Men and women were strictly separated, silence was imposed and the old people were issued with institutional uniforms. It was only when one who could walk far enough reached a distant telephone box that the error was exposed.
During the bombardments of the town in that summer of 1940 many people fled; the population diminished from forty thousand to twelve thousand. Almost a thousand children remained, however, sheltering in the caves. The schools were closed and their pupils, who became known as the Dead End Kids, ran wild through the town and its tunnels. The cinemas were bedlam every afternoon, crammed with children who rioted when the air-raid siren sounded and they were ordered to leave. Often the manager surrendered and let them stay despite the risk of a direct hit from a bomb.
It was an air-raid warning which halted the council meeting. Councillors strode out into the evening still angry and arguing. Councillor Walker, known in the locality as Darkie, who earned his peacetime living as a boatman, protested: ‘Dover is where I belong so I’m not moving. How can I be a boatman miles inland?’
Darkie Walker did what he often did when he was disturbed; with his small dog he walked down to his boat on the foreshore. They had been telling him it must be moved. He strode over the shingle towards it. At his back a solitary German plane came towards him. The dog began to bark.
Doris walked irresolutely from her house, down the bay-windowed street towards the telephone box. Sandbags had been piled against three of its sides. By habit she scanned the area for any sign of Harold.
She had a shilling’s worth of heavy pennies in the pocket of her pinafore. Her intention was to telephone her sister in Northampton but when she reached the bulwarked telephone box her steps slowed. All around the Dover evening was flat and peaceful as it had ever been, with a cluster of pink sunset clouds. She remained outside the box. A young girl came up the hill. ‘Somebody in there?’ she asked. She raised herself on her toes to peer through the protective tape on the door.
‘Nobody,’ said Doris.
‘You waiting for a call?’
‘No, you carry on.’
The girl looked puzzled but pulled open the door and went in. Doris, her mind made up for her, turned and retraced her steps.
She heard an explosion in the distance while she was sitting, still undecided, in her living room. Again she worried about Harold. She made a cup of tea and sat for another half an hour trying to read a month-old copy of the Daily Mirror which had been pushed beneath the settee cushion. It would come in useful for fish and chips. The headline read: ‘HITLER FEARS RUSSIA’. There was an advertisement for Camp Coffee with a drawing of a Scottish army officer, heavily kilted, being served by a turbaned Indian servant.
She would have to make a decision and she knew what it ought
to be. It was now eight o’clock.
Taking the cup into the kitchen she turned resolutely, went to the front door, and hurried down the hill towards the telephone. They would have to go.
Her sister did not want them. ‘Well, you know we don’t have much room, not for two,’ she said. ‘Somebody’s going to have to sleep on the couch.’
Doris said: ‘Ena, we’ve got to do something to get out of here. It’s getting very dangerous. We’ll just have to manage.’
‘We’ll be getting bombed here soon,’ put in Ena, as if she knew something others did not. ‘Army boots are made in Northampton, you know.’
Doris was firm: ‘You had some nice holidays down here, didn’t you. You and Eric. We made room for you. I want to bring Harold up there tomorrow.’
‘Oh, all right,’ sighed her sister. ‘God knows where we’ll put you.’ She laughed sourly. ‘Maybe Eric can clean out his old pigeon loft.’
Doris replaced the phone and moodily walked back towards her front door. From behind she heard a call and turned to see her son running frantically up the slope, his bare and skinny knees going like pistons. ‘Mum! Mum! The Jerries dropped a bomb on the beach and killed that man called Darkie – the one who hires out the boats.’
Between them they hauled a single bulky suitcase, scuffed brown leather with two thick straps. Harold was sulking on the bus and kept his face turned to the lower-deck window. At the station Doris saw his two everyday companions, Boot and Spots, lurking behind the newspaper stand. ‘Go on, Harold,’ she said. ‘Say goodbye to your pals while I get the tickets.’
‘I don’t want to go to rotten Northampton,’ he glowered. ‘It pongs. What’s wrong with Dover?’
‘Dover is being bombed and Northampton isn’t,’ she replied. ‘Go on, say cheerio.’
‘Grammar school cissies say that,’ he said scornfully. ‘Cheerio.’
Doris bit her lip and turned towards the ticket office. She asked for one single and one half-single to Northampton.
‘Clearing out, are you?’ said the man behind the aperture. ‘Don’t blame you myself. I would if I could but then there wouldn’t be anybody here to give the tickets to those that is clearing out.’ He laughed, a single ‘hah’, at his little joke and nodded towards the platform. It was thick with people waiting for the next London train. ‘You’ll be safe up in Northampton. One pound ten shillings please, missus.’
Dover Beach Page 9
