Dover Beach

by Leslie Thomas

  ‘It’s Beano week,’ he said. ‘Dandy’s next week.’

  He brightened and scanned the outside street through the window. ‘I could swap,’ he shouted to her. ‘I’ve got some comics I could swap. I’ll go along the street to Spots’s home.’ He rolled from the chair.

  ‘Don’t you stay out,’ she warned. ‘Come back right away. There’s a big alert on.’

  ‘I know. And I’m stuck in here.’

  ‘Come back as soon as you’ve swapped the comics.’

  ‘All right.’

  Slyly he moved towards the passage, picked up his catapult from its hiding place below the stairs, and went to the front door. He knew where the boys would be waiting.

  They were. ‘Where you been?’ demanded Spots. ‘We been ’anging around hours.’

  Harold screwed up his face. ‘She wouldn’t let me out.’

  ‘Mine had to go and take her dancing class,’ said Boot. ‘That got rid of her.’

  Spots said: ‘I just went out the back door. My mum was having her fortune told in the tea leaves. She ’ad her ’ead in a cup.’

  ‘Those Home Guard twerps are around,’ said Harold. ‘Looking for Germans.’

  ‘We ought to defend something,’ said Boot with unusual conviction. ‘They reckon Hitler will be here tonight.’

  Harold said: ‘Tell us news, not ’istory, mush.’

  ‘What will we defend? All the best places have been nicked by the army and the Home Guard,’ said Spots. He glanced along the street. ‘What about the phone box?’

  Harold did not like others having good ideas. ‘Yes, I thought about that,’ he said. ‘It’s got sandbags, so it’s supposed to be defended.’

  ‘And it’s . . . comm . . . communications,’ said Boot.

  Reluctantly Harold said: ‘You’re dead right, Booty, mush. If a Jerry parachutist landed in this street he’d be in there like a shot. Ringing up.’

  Spots said: ‘They’ve probably got a special bag of pennies.’

  ‘Come on then,’ said Harold. ‘Into action, men!’

  Crouching, they ran to the telephone box. Boot flung open the door and they jammed into the tight space inside. ‘Somebody’s been havin’ a piss in ’ere,’ said Spots. ‘A big one.’

  ‘You probably,’ sniffed Harold. ‘Right. We can just see over these sandbags. Keep your eyes skinned. Take one side each. I’ll do the door as well.’ There was criss-crossed adhesive tape on the door.

  They could just see through the late dusk. Spots whispered: ‘There’s the enemy. They’re coming from the gardens at the back.’

  The three boys crowded to see. ‘Armed,’ said Harold. ‘To the fucking teeth.’

  ‘Let’s go ’ome,’ said Boot.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ ordered Harold. ‘It’s only those Home Guard nuts.’ The group of ten men emerged into the street from the alley. They had rifles and crept along the privet hedges.

  ‘Somebody’s in that phone box,’ said one of the men. Captain Price held out his hand and the men who were able to crouch did so. Others flattened themselves against the hedge.

  ‘I’ve got a rope,’ said another of the volunteers. ‘I found it in somebody’s garden.’ He beamed as if he expected instant promotion. ‘Why don’t I creep up and tie it around the phone box there. They won’t be able to get out then.’

  The captain looked towards him disdainfully. ‘What will we do – starve them out?’

  Doris Barker strutted belligerently from her front door. ‘You!’ she said pointing a finger.

  ‘She means you,’ said the captain to the man with the rope.

  ‘Yes, missus?’

  ‘That’s my spare clothes line. You’ve stolen it.’

  Harold heard his mother’s voice and he pushed open the door of the telephone box calling: ‘Mum . . . Mum . . .’

  The Home Guards looked in the direction of the voice. Doris marched towards it leaning over to recover her spare clothes line as she went. ‘Harold?’ she called outside the box. ‘Harold, are you in there?’ She opened the door forcefully and the three boys almost fell out.

  ‘We was defending it,’ said Harold miserably. ‘Then this lot turned up.’

  ‘Get home!’ ordered Doris. ‘And you two . . . get home.’

  Harold slouched towards his garden gate and the others walked, then ran down the hill. ‘Playing soldiers!’ shouted Doris at the Home Guards. She turned on their commander. ‘You should stay in that crummy rug shop of yours.’ She lashed at him with the rope and turned hitting out at the nearest men, missing both. ‘You’re like a load of kids.’

  At Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, British warships lay rocking gently, prepared to put to sea. It was a grey, lean, formidable fleet, composed of cruisers, destroyers, submarines and others, patiently waiting. Somewhere in the Continental ports were enemy ships, their numbers and spirits diminished by losses off Norway in the battles of the previous autumn. The German army had occupied whole landscapes but the navy had suffered heavily at sea. Fast E-boats were hiding in French ports but they were the only support that an invading German army, with its slow, rolling barges, could expect for the adventure of invading Britain. It was not much.

  The old destroyer Carnforth had left Dover before dusk. At seven o’clock the German battery near Calais had opened fire, the shells sending up fountains of sea half a mile beyond her stern.

  ‘That’s as near as they’ll get,’ forecast Captain Bertram Elphinstone to Instow. ‘Unless we’re really unlucky. They’ve transported those guns miles, put them on railway tracks. But they’ve got no gunnery radar, so they haven’t a clue where they’re aiming.’

  Instow, now second in command, felt happier than he had been for months. ‘She’s a bit of an old bag this,’ said Elphinstone.

  ‘I remember her well,’ said Instow. ‘First time out.’

  ‘Ah, of course. You were in Dover then.’

  Instow said: ‘I served in her for six months, sir. It was the days of the Dover Patrol.’

  Elphinstone slapped the rail. ‘It’s terrific you’ve come back,’ he said. ‘The Dover Patrol, the Zeebrugge raid.’

  ‘Zeebrugge,’ acknowledged Instow. ‘All a bit of a shambles but we came out all right in the end.’

  ‘And here we are years later, still fighting the Hun,’ said Elphinstone. ‘When will he ever learn.’ He sniffed over the side of the bridge. The air was light, the sea moderate. ‘Nice night for an invasion.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll come?’ asked Instow. ‘It all looks a bit empty.’

  ‘Never saw the sea more unoccupied. Not even in the Indian Ocean,’ agreed Elphinstone. He swung his binoculars along the horizon. ‘You married?’

  ‘Yes. As far as you can be married in a war,’ said Instow.

  ‘Absolutely. That’s one of the good things about it. It keeps marriages together by keeping the participants, the marriage participants that is, apart. Personally, I know by instinct when it’s time to go back to sea. It’s when she starts hinting that the lawn needs cutting.’

  Instow laughed quietly. ‘Well, I’ve been a civilian since the Great War. I’ve hardly seen the sea in twenty years.’

  ‘Get on all right with the wife?’

  ‘It’s gone a bit quiet lately. She’s doing war work up in Cumberland.’

  ‘It’s like that. Just take a look at the faces of this crew when the ship’s paid off, see the expressions. A lot of them don’t look happy about going on leave. We had one stoker who got himself taken into hospital rather than face his missus and kids.’

  He revolved through ninety degrees with the binoculars again. ‘Miles of bugger all,’ he muttered.

  ‘Those barges in Boulogne and Calais,’ said Instow. ‘Most of them will have to be towed across. Even those with their own power won’t raise much more than four knots. It will take them all night. It’s not a river crossing.’

  ‘I think the whole thing is propaganda, bollocks on both sides,’ replied Elphinstone. ‘If they’
d managed to get across right away after Dunkirk, with paratroops as well, they might have had a decent chance. But not now. Hitler’s quite literally missed the boat.’

  A call came from the lookout: ‘Vessel ahead, sir.’ He gave the bearing. The captain and Instow went to the side of the bridge. They both searched with their glasses. ‘Christ,’ said Elphinstone. ‘That’s a small invasion fleet. A fishing boat.’

  He ordered the ship to slow and manoeuvred her so that the darkened fishing smack came under the hull of the destroyer, rolling in the swell. ‘Ahoy! What the hell d’you think you’re up to?’ he called through the loud hailer. There were three men in the boat.

  ‘Evening,’ came the gentle response. ‘We just came out ’cause there’s a nice bit of dab and pollock about. Would you like some for your supper, captain?’

  ‘With chips, sir,’ called another of the men. ‘Lovely.’

  Which peal of bells sounded first will for ever be a mystery; but peal they did, and the ringers of Kent and Sussex, and then of Hampshire and Surrey, were swift to grasp the ropes that for months had remained hanging as if dead. Bells echoed across the wide night-time of southern England, one melody beginning another. People waited under their roofs, anxious more than afraid, for German parachutists to fall into their fields and their streets and to trample their gardens; they took up defensive bread knives, kept pots of scalding water on their stoves, de-chained bicycles, removed the rotor arm from any car, and hid horses. They also listened close to the wireless. There were barricades on every road. But the night sky remained the calmest place for miles; there was a theatrical wedge of moon, small unhurried clouds and no sounds of aeroplanes nor any sight of parachutes.

  Cotton and two constables reached the sandbagged coastguard station overlooking St Margaret’s at Cliffe and its undisturbed sea. Below the post they could see coils of barbed wire snaking into the distance. ‘Any news, Fred?’ asked Cotton.

  ‘Only rumours,’ sniffed the coastguard. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

  Cotton left the constables with the assistant coastguard staring out at the anonymous view and went through the low adjoining door into the cottage.

  ‘Margaret’s took herself off to bed,’ said Fred Wansey. ‘She says if the Huns come, to wake her up in time to take her curlers out.’ He looked straight at Cotton. ‘You heard anything?’

  ‘Nothing. Except the church bells,’ said Cotton. He accepted a mug of tea.

  Almost as an afterthought Fred poured in a splash of whisky. Then he sat down, his expression serious. ‘There’s a rumour that Pegwell Bay is floating with Jerry corpses,’ he said. ‘I heard it down the line. Thousands. And they’ve landed at Deal and been fried in our petrol trap.’

  ‘It’s all been done very quietly then,’ shrugged Cotton. ‘You would think there might have been the odd bang.’

  ‘You would that,’ agreed Fred. ‘Some excitement or other.’

  There was a brisk knock on the door that made them both sit upright. With trenches full of soldiers only a hundred yards away it was unlikely to be an enemy. Fred got up and called: ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Woolly,’ came the shout from outside. ‘Woolly Woolford from Pegwell Bay.’

  Fred pulled the two heavy bolts. ‘I know you’re from Pegwell. I know’d you thirty years, Woolly.’

  A big man wearing a jersey around him like a coil of rope, and with a badged cap halfway over the back of his head, came through the door with heavy caution. He went straight to the blacked-out window and inched the curtains apart. ‘All quiet then.’ He sounded disappointed.

  ‘Hear a pin drop,’ said Fred. He handed Woolford a mug of tea and without asking added the whisky.

  ‘We got a report . . . well, just a rumour really, not a report . . . that there was hundreds of Jerries floating in the sea down here,’ he said. ‘Don’t seem to be true.’

  ‘Is that the same lot of bodies who were floating around in Pegwell Bay?’ asked Cotton.

  Fred said: ‘That’s the rumour we got.’

  ‘Nothing happening there,’ said Woolford. ‘We’re all ready for ’em but they ’aven’t turned up.’

  The latch on the black inside door of the cottage clicked heavily and the three men looked up to see Margaret Wansey coming down in a sagging red dressing gown and with paper curlers in her hair. ‘Hello, Frank,’ she said. ‘Hello, Woolly. We’ve got all the top commanders here then.’

  They laughed. ‘Any sign of Hitler?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s not shown hisself yet,’ said her husband with some regret. ‘Here, nor anywhere else by the look of it. Even the bells have stopped now.’

  ‘Bretton church was the last to stop,’ said Woolford.

  ‘County champions just before the war,’ said Margaret. ‘They would be last. It was nice to hear them ring again, weren’t it. Anybody like a sandwich?’

  Each man said he would. She rolled up the sleeves of her dressing gown, set about frying in the pan and laid out three plates on the table. She gave them fried bread and bacon sandwiches and made another three mugs of tea.

  ‘Pity they didn’t come,’ said Fred. ‘They sank the lightship. Been a chance to get even.’ They had settled around the table, the oil lamp light dwelling on their faces. It was now one o’clock. ‘Well,’ said Cotton, ‘they haven’t turned up. I’ll be getting back.’

  ‘Spoilsports,’ sniffed Margaret.

  Air attacks on the town became sporadic and, to the inhabitants, almost incidental. The howling of the air-raid warning attracted little more attention than a change in the wind and few people went into shelters or caves until there were aircraft overhead. Enemy planes flew over on their way to inland targets – airfields and RAF control centres now – and eventually to London. For much of the time Dover passed beneath their wings.

  Shelling from the French coast persisted, haphazard bombardments, fired blindly and in brief spells. Housewives were able to do their shopping while the enemy was reloading. Dover’s shops still closed for lunch.

  British guns fired back just as blindly. There were no targets unless enemy ships conveniently appeared against the distant shore.

  This aimless bombardment from both sides prompted a question in Parliament: if British guns promised to stop firing would the enemy agree to do the same? Winston Churchill growled a dismissal but went to Dover to see the guns for himself. There he ordered bigger guns. The aimless battle continued. Enemy high-explosive shells demolished buildings and killed people in the Dover streets; one fell in the middle of a football match between the army and the navy, killing two players and a man tending his nearby vegetable plot.

  Cartwright was driving to Dover Priory station. Sarah was due on the London train. When he was a mile away two shells exploded, and columns of smoke rose from the station. He reached the yard at the front; air-raid wardens and policemen were erecting barriers. The clanging bell of the fire engine announced that it was on its way. One shell had hit carriage sheds and there was a fire burning. He hurried through the barrier saying to the air-raid wardens the first thing that came to his mind: ‘Headquarters.’

  ‘Ah, right, sir. Right you are. Watch out for some more. Jerry’s got the range now.’

  Smoke was whirling around the platforms. The waiting room and the refreshment room were on fire. Three elderly porters were tugging fire buckets towards the fires, spilling much of the contents and shouting to each other, and another two were trying to pay out the hose of a flimsy stirrup pump.

  Another man was struggling to right a milk churn which was rolling around the platform. Cartwright helped him. ‘Where’s the London train gone?’ he asked.

  The sweating man looked up but with no surprise. Between them they steadied the churn. The man said: ‘She’s gone back in the tunnel, sir. It’s safer in there.’

  Cartwright followed his nod. He almost laughed when he saw the nose of the engine half-projecting from the hole of the tunnel. ‘Thanks,’ he called back.

  ‘Don’t mention it,
’ said the station man touching his forehead and allowing the churn to tip over again. Cartwright heard him curse. Somewhere dogs were barking. The first fire engine had reached the station yard.

  An incongruous sheet of smoky sunlight, like stage lighting, was illuminating the opening of the tunnel and the round nub of the railway engine. Cartwright ran towards it, jumping down on to the line and stumbling across the wooden sleepers. He reached the tunnel. The locomotive almost filled it but along its sides, against the sooty walls, were ranks of crouching people. One woman from the refreshment buffet had a tea towel draped over her, another held a tin tray above her head. There was a small but clear explosion from the direction of the platform. The woman with the towel said: ‘There goes our tea urn.’

  ‘Make room,’ some man shouted. ‘Make way for an officer!’

  ‘Thanks, thank you,’ mumbled Cartwright as he pushed along the crowd. ‘Headquarters . . . headquarters.’

  They fell back to make way for him. The driver was still in his cab with the fireman. ‘We’re going to be late,’ he called cheerfully.

  With difficulty Cartwright climbed into the first green carriage. He slammed the door behind him and hurried along the corridor. Passengers stared out of the compartments. A woman politely asked if the invasion had started.

  He found Sarah sitting calmly alone in a first-class compartment. She jumped up to greet him and they held each other. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘We came out of the tunnel and then straight away came back in.’

  ‘A shell’s hit the station,’ he said. ‘We may be stuck for a while. I’m so glad to see you.’

  They kissed each other. ‘I brought your package,’ she said holding out a brown paper parcel. ‘My excuse for coming.’

  ‘Good.’ He took it. ‘Now I won’t be courtmartialled because you’re here. Somebody had to bring it.’

  ‘It was no trouble,’ she grinned. ‘I went to the military police office at Waterloo station and they couldn’t have been sweeter. A guy with a red armband even saw me to the train.’