The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  The two men shook hands with real warmth. Fletcher looked older than before – older and without the same dangerous muscularity that he’d once enjoyed. But his face was still young and his grip still powerful.

  ‘Must be a bit of a bloody shock to see my ugly mug, what? Probably thought you’d escaped the sight of it?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Alan smiled. His right hand rose to a loose civilian salute. ‘It’s the very best sort of surprise.’ He almost literally had to bite his tongue to keep himself from adding the once-obligatory ‘sir’. ‘You’re well, I take it? You look …’

  ‘I look like a bloody cripple, Montague. You probably think you ought to fling tuppence in my hat or buy a box of matches off me. But at least I’m not dead, eh? That’s the main thing. You look all right. Limbs all present and correct.’

  ‘Yes. They patched me up.’

  ‘Talking of patching, it’s not your wife, is it, who’s … ?’

  ‘That’s right. The hospital for the war wounded in the East End. She’s just bought the premises. Now it’s all down to the builders to get the place fitted out. There’s a colossal need for such places, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I do know. As a matter of fact …’ Fletcher’s face reddened a little with embarrassment, ‘I heard about the project. Sent along a little donation – very little, of course – nothing compared to what – anyhow – thought it best – probably shouldn’t have said – bloody fool.’

  ‘Not at all. You’re very kind.’

  ‘Yes, quite, quite.’ Fletcher grunted away his embarrassment and abruptly changed the subject. ‘How’s that other fellow? Friend of yours. Creeley. Worst dressed subaltern in the King’s Army. Is he … or was he … ?’ Fletcher petered out, trying to remember if Creeley had fallen in the general slaughter.

  Alan smiled thinly. ‘That’s why I’m here, actually. Creeley was sent to storm some guns. Machine-gun posts. Properly fortified.’

  ‘God, yes! The brig’s idea, wasn’t it? Thought the bloody war was God’s way to win him promotion. He got it too. Promotion one day. Heart attack the next. Fell face first into his plateful of beef. So I heard, anyway. Probably balls. Anyway, you were saying?’

  ‘Missing, presumed dead,’ said Alan softly.

  ‘Presumed dead … I’m sorry. He was a damned good soldier, Creeley. One of the very best. A bloody joke on the parade ground, but in the field … You too. Damned good. I was lucky.’ Fletcher’s hand strayed to the stump of his left shoulder and gripped it hard.

  ‘Thank you. Tom would have been pleased.’

  Fletcher nodded and moved his hand. ‘Yes, I was lucky.’

  ‘The thing is, I’m not sure Creeley was killed.’

  ‘Hmm? Really? I remember those posts. Say what you like about the Boche, they knew how to use a gun.’

  ‘True. Only one of the men that went with Creeley did survive. He was badly wounded, but alive. I think it’s possible that Creeley survived too. Survived but taken prisoner.’

  ‘A prisoner of war, eh? That’s why you’re here? To find out?’ Fletcher waved his single arm round the tiny room and the corridor outside. ‘War Office Records, eh?’

  Alan nodded.

  Fletcher’s expression grew more serious. ‘Prisoners of war. Yes. Well, look, strictly speaking you’ve come to the right place, only …’

  ‘Only?’

  ‘Well, we’ve got two sorts of lists here. There are reports from the front at the time – “Lieutenant Creeley, jolly good sort, missing, presumed dead,” that sort of thing. Trouble is, the reports were pretty bloody stupid then and they haven’t got less stupid with age. Like the rest of us. Plenty of the chaps we presumed dead turned out to be captured. Plenty of those we thought were captured turned out dead. Waste of bloody time.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And then again there are the fellows we took back from Fritz following the Armistice. Our lists were jolly well meant to be complete. I mean, we needed to know who we had and who we’d lost. Bloody desk-soldiers in the War Office wanted to know because of pensions and that kind of thing, not to mention wanting to know which of our chaps had survived.’

  ‘Survived?’

  ‘Yes … I suppose you know what the camps were like, do you? They were no bloody holiday camps, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I’d heard something.’

  ‘Well, not much perhaps. Our lords and masters didn’t want to whip up hatred of the Boche, just as we were supposed to be making peace with him. Can’t say I agreed. The only thing worse than a Hun is a bloody Frenchy. Though come to think of it, the only thing worse than a bloody Frenchy is a …’

  Something in Alan’s expression caused Fletcher to let his analysis of international relations die away. Fletcher shrugged. The shoulder that had lost the arm was completely stiff. His shrug was lop-sided, half easy, half destroyed. The whole of England was’ like that now.

  ‘Any case,’ he continued, ‘whenever we entered a camp, we took names, ranks and numbers. So did the Frogs, naturally. But you see, in some cases, the camps had pretty much fallen apart by the time we got there. Not much point in keeping your camps full of prisoners if you’ve just lost the bloody war. Not much point in worrying about records either, come to that.’

  ‘So some prisoners just walked away?’

  ‘They’d have been damned hungry, you see. Bloody Boche wouldn’t feed ’em properly – couldn’t feed themselves properly by the end, mind you – so if I’d been in prison, I’d probably have buggered off myself. Holland. Switzerland. France. Whichever was closest.’

  ‘When you say hungry … ?’ Alan’s voice wasn’t quite steady. He was thinking of Tom. Tom hungry. Tom ravenous.

  Fletcher knotted his jaw, trying to tone down his language for Alan’s ears. When he spoke, his voice was an odd mixture of gruff and gentle. ‘Not just hungry, starving. Some of our chaps came back weighing seven stone, six stone, bellies sticking out all full of air and wind … We lost maybe one in eight of the men taken prisoner, mostly from lack of food.’

  ‘One in eight!’

  ‘And of course, you see, Creeley would have been “missing, presumed dead”.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘Food parcels. The Red Cross didn’t feed dead men. Not their job. Sorry.’

  ‘I see. I had no idea.’ Alan’s voice was a whisper.

  ‘And …’

  ‘And?’

  Fletcher’s face looked ever grimmer. ‘Our poor bloody boys, you, me, Creeley, everybody, we were shot to pieces on the Somme. Nineteen sixteen. August. That meant Creeley would have needed to survive two years. More. More than two years. More than two years on not enough food to feed a baby. I’m most awfully bloody sorry.’

  And that was that. They continued to sit and talk. They remembered past comrades, past ordeals, past horrors. They smoked their way through Fletcher’s cigarettes and turned the air blue with smoke. They promised to meet up again and perhaps they would.

  But Tom.

  No amount of reminiscing could change the truth about Tom. He had almost certainly died under the guns. If he hadn’t, he’d have been taken prisoner and left to starve. The chances of his having survived seemed a million to one against.

  111

  Harrelson wasn’t kidding when he talked about cowpokes. Big raw-boned men with wide sleepy faces. They worked the drill hard but steadily, never shifting one second from their pace. When they took a bite to eat, they talked about cattle and crops and farm prices and banks and repossessions.

  Tom fished the broken bit first go. The bit had sheared off almost in half, the break clean and sharp at the edges. The cutting edge was so blunt that a baby could sleep on it. Tom looked at the bit and wondered what triumph of cowpokery had managed to stick a drill that bad down a well this dicey.

  He set up the corer, and sent the long, poorly conditioned tubes down into the earth. Half a mile deep, thirty-foot section by thirty-foot section. The lifting tackle on the rig was clo
se to exhaustion and there were many stages in the process where heavy parts had to be lifted entirely by hand. The cowpoke-riggers swung their thirty-foot sections of pipe without complaint, like God had written rules against the use of machinery.

  Harrelson came by the rig three times to invite Tom round to dinner. The first couple of times Tom refused. He didn’t want to watch Harrelson and Mrs Holling pawing each other under the table. He didn’t like the widow’s mock-genteel chatter about whatever rubbish she was reading in the movie magazines when, outside her house, the whole of East Texas lay under a cloud of depression, which had been bad enough through the twenties, when farm prices had fallen through the floor, and had only got worse since the stockmarket had crashed and the economy was junking itself. Most of all, he didn’t want to sit through an evening of Harrelson’s attempts to buck him up and get him back on board with the project, money and labour and everything.

  But the third time Harrelson came by, Tom couldn’t refuse. Harrelson was lonely. The part of him that was an oilman – not a crook, not a snake-oil merchant, not a seducer of older women – the oilman part of him was lonely. His wells had failed. He wanted comfort.

  So Tom said yes.

  The dinner was awful. Mrs Holling had been crying before Tom arrived. The food was badly cooked. Conversation sputtered like a gas flare on a dying well. The next day, Tom would take his core. Harrelson had promised him fifteen hundred bucks, and Tom would head off home. They’d never see each other again.

  This was the end of the end.

  112

  The tune hung on the air, sentimental and melancholic, instantly familiar yet impossible to place. Alan paused, listened, then remembered. It was a melody he’d last heard on an icy February night, ankle-deep in freezing mud, shell-fire on the horizon, and the soft German voices floating over on the breeze.

  He smiled – or rather half-smiled, half-grimaced – before making as if to move on. The deputy ambassador to Germany, Aude Hartwell, looked sharply across at his companion.

  ‘Sounds familiar?’

  Alan nodded. ‘February nineteen sixteen, I last heard the song.’

  ‘Under less pleasant circumstances, I expect.’

  ‘I should say so.’

  It was an understatement. The Berliner Tiergarten in April 1930 was as far as possible from that cold February night. The band in the bandstand were dressed in vivid scarlet jackets, sitting where everyone could see them. There was no more hiding from an unseen enemy. No more waiting to see if you could kill them before they killed you.

  Hartwell continued to read Alan’s face. ‘Your first time here?’

  Alan nodded.

  ‘Odd, isn’t it? Everyone thinks so. We spend four years teaching our people to hate the Boche, then we actually come here and find they’re perfectly agreeable. I’d far rather be here than Paris, to tell you the truth.’

  As they crossed the park they chatted about tennis and cricket and the summer racing season in England; and Hartwell wanted to hear news of Sir Adam, an old friend of his, as well as of Pamela and Guy.

  ‘How is Guy? Ever the gallant soldier, I expect?’

  Alan paused.

  He’d seen Guy shortly before leaving London for Germany. It had been after dinner one night and Guy had been drunk – but even so, the scene had made an unpleasant impression. Guy had wanted to play cards with Alan for money. Alan had refused. Guy had been bitter about it. It appeared that he’d made some ugly losses in the American stockmarket crash and he seemed quite preoccupied with the subject.

  ‘Listen, Guy,’ Alan had said, ‘if you and Dorothy are feeling short, you should ask. You know perfectly well that Lottie and I have money to spare.’

  Guy had refused angrily, as though Alan had been attempting to pity him. When Alan had asked how he and Dorothy were finding married life, Guy had answered, ‘Not too inconvenient, considering.’ It had been a loathsome evening and Alan shuddered at the thought of another.

  He answered Hartwell’s question briefly, then changed the subject. The diplomat could take the hint. He said, ‘Look, Montague, you haven’t come all the way to Berlin to chat. How can I be of service?’

  Alan cleared his throat. ‘You remember Tom Creeley, of course? The boy who was –’

  ‘Lord, yes, I remember Tommy. I was down in Whitcombe House, just after the funeral of Queen Victoria, spring, oh-one, it must have been. Tommy – he couldn’t have been a day over ten – what, seven, you say? – was fascinated by my pipe. Found a ruse to send me off down the hall, and when I came back the little rascal had my pipe in his hand, coughing himself black and blue.’

  Alan smiled. It had been a dare between them which Tom had won – or would have done if he’d been able to puff without choking. ‘Yes, exactly. You know he was lost in the war, I take it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. What a dreadful loss! Especially for you, perhaps, though I know your father and mother were fearfully cut up as well. Couldn’t have been more grief-stricken if it had been you.’

  ‘No … Look, this is going to sound damned stupid and it quite probably is. But Tom’s body was never found. I think it quite possible that he was captured, not killed.’

  ‘I see. Of course, if he never showed up afterwards, then it probably amounted to the same thing, poor devil.’

  ‘Yes. But still I’d like to know.’

  ‘Yes, naturally.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’d say he was like a brother,’ said Alan after a moment, ‘only that doesn’t really say it at all. He was more than a brother. We called ourselves twins because we were born the same day, only it went deeper than that. We were …’ He shrugged. Even now, after so many years, he had no words for the depth of his connection to Tom. ‘I don’t know, all I do know is that I won’t be able to rest easy until I know what became of him.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There was a short pause, as Hartwell allowed Alan to overcome his feelings. Then: ‘You’ve tried the War Office, I take it?’

  ‘Yes. And the Red Cross. I think I’ve done everything I can from England.’

  ‘So you’d like me to see what I can dig out here. Of course, I’d be happy to …’ Hartwell trailed off with an air of concern.

  ‘Will it be difficult?’

  ‘Perhaps, no, I don’t know. I’ll have to look into it. I’ll say this for the Germans, they do love a bureaucracy.’

  ‘It’s just you seemed a little anxious.’

  ‘Yes …’

  They had reached their restaurant and they ordered before returning to the conversation. Here on the Ku’damm, the country’s difficulties were more evident than they had been in the park. There were groups of unemployed men loafing on street corners. Election posters hung on walls and trees, many of them already ripped up or defaced. There was something brittle in the atmosphere, something hostile. Alan felt almost as though Tom was still there, still in Germany, caught up in the dangerous currents that eddied around.

  Hartwell spoke of the elections. The National Socialists were set to make heavy gains, as were the Communists.

  ‘The reds are something of a known quantity, at least, but it’s these movements of the right which are causing us to tear our hair out in the embassy.’

  ‘They’re dangerous?’

  Hartwell sighed. ‘They don’t hold power, not at the moment, and their Herr Hitler is a comical little fellow, really, like a bad cabaret turn … But it’s a nasty situation. You don’t meet a single German out here – not one – who thinks that Germany’s eastern frontier was fairly determined at Versailles. You don’t meet a single German who’s happy about paying reparations, when the country has nearly five million men unemployed. You don’t meet a single German who thinks it’s right that a great nation at the heart of Europe should be forbidden to arm itself. I don’t know that I think it’s fair, as a matter of fact, not that I’m allowed to say so … That’s why I don’t know how far I’ll get find
ing out about Tom Creeley in prison camp. There’s a lot of hatred in this country – some of it focused, some of it just swirling in the air. Questions about British prisoners of war may fall on sympathetic ears or they may not … There, look there.’

  Alan looked. Two young men in brown shirts with red and black armbands were walking along the pavement just outside the café window. They were chatting and smoking. A little further ahead there was a middle-aged lady struggling with some awkwardly packaged shopping. She was dark-haired, dark-skinned, probably Jewish. Hartwell’s face was grave and his attention fixed rigidly on the two young men.

  He was right to worry.

  By the time the two men were level with the woman, she had more or less got her shopping under control. One of the young men deliberately jogged the lady’s arm, spilling her packages. The other man kicked the packages into the gutter with his toe. Alan leaped up with a flash of anger, but Hartwell’s hand restrained him from doing anything further. The two young men jostled the woman off the road and went on their way. Alan thought, but wasn’t sure, that one of the men spat on her as he left.

  113

  The cowpokes hauled on the tackle like they planned to do it all day every day for the rest of their lives. Their rhythm hypnotised Tom. Just as they did, he raised pipes without urgency, stacking them in ninety-foot sections inside the derrick, counting them off as though life was just a question of pipes.

  Harrelson shambled about on the ground below, lonely and unhappy. He’d started the morning, saying, ‘Any smells up there, boys? You getting any smells? I’m pretty sure I got something down here just now.’

  But there had been no smells, no excitement, no suck of oil, just the steady rising of pipes. Harrelson had a suitcase in the back of his Ford. Tom guessed that was the last of his relationship with Mrs Holling, and now it was back to the wife and kids abandoned back in Dallas. Around lunchtime, Harrelson produced a parcel wrapped in a white linen cloth.