Their Finest Hour and a Half

by Lissa Evans

  ‘Mr Hilliard . . . ?’

  The nurse was looking at her watch. The world dropped back around him: the cold light, the metallic scent of blood. The extra was weeping, not sniffing.

  ‘I apologize. I was somewhere else entirely.’

  ‘You were saying that this isn’t Mr Smith.’

  ‘That’s correct. Sammy Smith is missing three fingers from his left hand, he lost them in an accident in a timber yard when he was a young man. This fellow’s left hand is intact . . . poor soul.’ He looked soberly at the figure on the table. ‘I can perhaps see how the mistake was made; the face isn’t dissimilar.’ It occurred to him that Sammy might be wandering around in a daze, he might be in a hospital bed, or at a rest centre, queueing for the use of a telephone, fretting about whether or not Cerberus was being served his correct daily ration of finest sweetbreads simmered in sherry consommé. ‘Should I call at a police station, do you think, or—’

  There was a tiny noise, a batsqueak of distress, and when he looked at the nurse she was crying.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘We try so hard to make people look the way that their relatives remember. We didn’t . . .’ She plucked at the edge of the sheet, drawing it down so that it covered the exposed fingers. ‘We couldn’t have known, you see.’

  He stared at her, uncomprehending, and she wiped her eyes, quickly, with both hands. ‘You have to understand, Mr Hilliard, that the rescue services don’t always . . . find everything. Sometimes the injuries are just – sometimes we don’t know what belongs to whom and – we do our best. We try to make a whole person, but that hand . . . that arm must be from someone . . . It’s awful. It’s an awful thing to have happened. I’m so sorry.’

  He could think of nothing to say. He looked back at the table, at the smooth contour of the sheet that covered a bloody jumble.

  ‘So do you think that that’s your friend?’ asked the nurse, tentatively.

  ‘My agent,’ he corrected. He looked again at the face. ‘Yes. That’s him.’

  INTERMISSION

  January 1941

  The guards from the gunnery knew Edith by now. Every day except Sunday she arrived at the gap in the barbed wire at half past seven in the morning, and was waved along the path that uncoiled through the dunes. For the first hundred yards there would be near-silence – the hiss of air through the long grass, the muffled footsteps that seemed to come from yards away, rather than from the end of her own legs. The air was icy but still, the sand so cold that she could feel it through the soles of her shoes. Then gradually, a low roar would become discernible, increasing in volume with every turn of the path until the final dune was reached, and then Edith would brace herself and turn the corner and stagger a little as a wind that had skimmed the Urals came screaming at her from the length of Badgeham Beach. Away from the dunes the sand was packed as hard as brick, a single, sugared surface that sloped almost imperceptibly towards the sea, the pale sweep broken only by what looked like a series of giant hairpins stuck in the sand. A quarter of a mile away, a hedge of wire marked both the edge of the minefield that guarded the battery position and the limit of Edith’s morning walk; the journey back, with the wind behind her, made her feel like a gull.

  There was so much time here. After years of waking at six thirty, she was incapable of sleeping for longer, and after she’d washed and dressed, and had breakfast, there was still an hour and a quarter before the shop opened. On most days she had the entire beach to herself. Sometimes she found herself singing, the wind snatching the words away as soon as they left her mouth. She had a thin but true voice, and the songs were ones she’d learned at school, sea shanties that had always reminded her of holidays with her auntie and uncle and cousins on the coast: ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ and ‘Johnny Todd’, ‘Fire Down Below’ and ‘Heart of Oak’:

  They swear they’ll invade us, these terrible foes

  They frighten our women, our children and beaus,

  But should their flat bottoms in darkness get o’er

  Still Britons they’ll find to receive them on shore.

  Heart of oak are our ships,

  Heart of oak are our men;

  We always are ready,

  Steady, boys, steady!

  We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again.

  At school, of course, she’d tittered with the others over the ‘flat bottoms’ line, but now the verse had a dreadfully chilling edge. The new and terrible foes were just beyond the horizon, and the east coast was spiked with guns and encrusted with khaki. There were no trippers allowed here any more, no buckets and spades for sale in the shops by the harbour, no green glass floats.

  Her own visit, of course, could scarcely be classified as a holiday (cousin Verna, for all her lavender cardigans and chapel talk, ran her sewing-room like an East End sweat-shop), but nevertheless there was still an air of respite about it. Edith had arrived at Badgeham-next-the-Sea like a gypsy, London’s dirt in her hair, its smell lingering in her clothes, a rabbity nervousness to her gestures, and Badgeham had scoured and sand-blasted her, and bleached her in its white light. Her Sunday afternoon headaches had gone and she felt altogether more like herself than she had in a very long time, although ‘herself’, of course, was still only Edith Beadmore. She felt, obscurely, that two near misses in as many months should have effected some visible alteration, but there was no change in the pale beaky face that peered out from the mirror, no hint that its owner might have experienced anything more traumatic than a crowded journey on the north-bound District Line.

  On the morning that she saw the men, she had just turned back from the minefield and was singing ‘The Keel Row’. A long way ahead of her, a figure stood at the edge of the surf, while another walked into the sea. He was five yards out before the water reached his knees, ten before he halted; Edith was near enough by now to see that he had left his trousers on the beach, and that the sea was still a half-inch or so below the hem of his short underwear. After a shouted exchange with his companion, he walked back towards the sand and Edith averted her eyes and altered her course slightly, so as not to embarrass him. In fact, he was still buttoning his fly when his companion hailed Edith, and she was apparently the only one of the three to find the situation at all awkward.

  ‘Do you know if the whole beach is like this?’ asked the one who’d called over to her.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘On such a shallow rake?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve certainly never seen a boat come up here, they all go to Badgeham Bay just round the headland.’

  The two men looked at each other. ‘Well, that’s all right,’ said the fly-buttoner. ‘Best we’ve seen, anyway.’ He was in his fifties and dressed, like his companion, in flannel trousers and a shabby tweed jacket, the pockets stretched and sagging.

  ‘You’re not from round here,’ he said to Edith, a statement rather than a question.

  ‘No.’

  ‘D’you know anything about boarding houses in the area? Or hotels?’

  ‘Not much, I’m afraid. There’s the Crown and Anchor behind the green in Badgeham, and I think that quite a few other people take in boarders for the summer. Cromer’s the place where most people stay, though – it’s about twenty miles east of here.’

  He nodded, and took a camera from his canvas haversack, and Edith felt dismissed, her usefulness over. She left the men taking photographs of the beach, and it wasn’t until she was walking back to Badgeham along the twisting path between the dunes that it suddenly occurred to her that she had merrily volunteered information of potential vital military importance to two complete strangers. They had asked her and she had told them, without thought or scruple, and the whole incident was horribly reminiscent of a short film that she’d seen during a recent matinee in Holt, in which a naïve spinster called Miss Moss had handed over a set of local maps to a party of ‘lost’ walkers, one of whom had then given away his origins by complimenting his benefactor on her gar
den full of ‘vallflowers’. Miss Moss Shows the Way had been the title, and at the time Edith had thought it rather silly. Now, she felt the back of her neck turn cold. Miss Beadmore Informs the Invaders. Miss Beadmore and the Beach Landing. She hurried towards the guard post, a wretched little shack on which the words ‘Teas & Ices’ were still visible under a coat of grey paint.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  A boy of about nineteen, with dark red hair and a nose to match, looked out warily.

  ‘I think I’ve been rather stupid,’ said Edith.

  ‘Oh yes.’ He looked unsurprised.

  ‘There were two men on the beach. I’ve never seen them before and they were asking questions about sea levels and local towns, and I’m afraid that I told them about—’

  ‘S’all right,’ said the boy. He blew on his hands and rubbed the knuckles.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘They’re official.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They’ve got passes. It’s ministry business,’ he added.

  ‘Which ministry?’

  ‘That’s er – whatjermacallit – classified,’ he said, vaguely, retreating into the shelter of the doorway.

  Edith saw the men again, later that day. They were standing on the harbour wall watching the fishing boats through binoculars. The younger one was making notes.

  *

  The summons to the Ministry of Information came at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, just as Buckley had started The Times crossword.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, throwing down the newspaper. ‘I thought we’d finished with all that. What do they want now?’

  ‘They didn’t tell me,’ repeated Edwin Baker’s secretary, patiently. ‘They just said that they would like to see you and Mr Baker and Mr Parfitt at Malet Street at midday on an urgent matter. I’m just about to find a taxi for you.’ She closed the door quickly.

  Parfitt put his head down on the desk and groaned.

  ‘Can I do anything while you’re gone?’ asked Catrin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Buckley. ‘Protect the contents of this office from that ginger bitch downstairs. If she gets hold of a single page without my say-so, then you’re sacked.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘You can do a bit of tidying.’

  ‘Title,’ said Parfitt, his lips still squashed against the desk.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Buckley. ‘Draw up a shortlist of titles. That ass Shipton’s on our tail about it, as if it’s anything to do with him. Bloody accountants.’

  ‘Tidying the office’ was a relative term, since apart from the ashtrays and the crusted cups Catrin was not allowed to touch anything on either man’s desk, nor was she allowed to move any pieces of paper that were lying on the floor, since it had been impressed upon her that it was not so much a floor as a two-dimensional filing cabinet. She was not allowed to open the window to release the smoke of a million cigarettes in case a draught disorganized the exquisite arrangement on the floor. She was not even allowed to empty the waste bin, because the waste bin was merely a holding bay for pieces of paper that weren’t needed at the moment but which might, at some future point, be frantically searched for, pounced upon with a cry of triumph, smoothed out and declared to be a far, far better version of Scene 27 than the rewrite that they had been slaving over for three days.

  What ‘tidying’ actually boiled down to was the removal of crumpled cigarette packets and biscuit crumbs, and the revolting ritual of wiping Buckley’s typewriter, key by key, in order to remove the daily build-up of brilliantine accumulated from the running of worried fingers through rarely-washed hair.

  Her final housewifely task was to renew the spirit gum that attached the various notices to the wall. These ranged from the rules of the room (1. No bomb stories, 2. No public transport stories, 3. No ITMA catchphrases) to a selection of articles and cuttings that had caught Buckley’s sarcastic fancy, including a lightly charred government leaflet that detailed how to construct a home-made heater for an Anderson shelter out of two large flower pots and a candle.

  The longest wall, however, was entirely taken up with row upon row of small cards. On each was written a brief scene description, and if read sequentially they built into the entire storyline of what was still known, for administrative purposes, as Dunkirk Film. Three months ago, Catrin had watched its slow construction. ‘Right,’ Buckley had said, standing in front of the blank wall, ‘we know what comes in the middle.’ He wrote ‘Boat arrives at French coast’ on a card and stuck it at the centre of the wall. ‘We know what comes towards the end.’ ‘Engine fails. Uncle mends it while under fire’ took its place a foot or so above the skirting board. ‘And we know what happens about half an hour in.’ ‘Boat sets out from England’ joined the other cards. ‘And if’ said Buckley, nodding towards the bottom of the wall, ‘the engine packs up there, then we need to prefigure it, don’t we?’

  He placed ‘Uncle tells friend in pub that boat has engine problems’ close to the top, and ‘Engine stutters but the twins are too busy to notice’ on a card halfway down.

  ‘What’s the very first scene?’ he asked, turning to Catrin. ‘Come on.’

  ‘The twins listening to the wireless – learning about the evacuation?’

  ‘Hear that noise?’ asked Buckley, cocking his head. ‘It’s your audience muttering that they thought they’d paid to see a war film and instead they’re looking at two tarts in armchairs. Parfitt?’

  ‘France.’

  ‘France. Set the scene. Who’s in France?’ he asked Catrin.

  ‘The fiancé.’

  ‘Give him a name.’

  ‘Eric.’

  ‘Hear that noise? It’s your audience sniggering at a hero called Eric. Try something more manly.’

  ‘John.’

  ‘Dull.’

  ‘Johnnie?’

  ‘Better. Who else do we meet in France?’

  ‘The dog,’ said Parfitt.

  ‘That’s right. Because audiences love dogs more than they love people. So . . .’ He thought for a moment and then wrote something on a card, and stuck it at the very top of the wall.

  ‘British army unit pinned down in France. Stray dog hanging around.’

  ‘What else do we need to do in France?’ he asked, looking at Catrin.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, who else is in this film?’

  ‘Rose and Lily.’

  ‘So we need to set up Rose and Lily, don’t we? How can we do that?’

  ‘Set them up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean find out about them before we see them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a long pause. ‘I’m not sure,’ said Catrin, blushing.

  ‘God help us.’ Buckley rolled his eyes. ‘Bring back Jeannie, all is forgiven. Parfitt?’

  ‘Johnnie talks about them.’

  Buckley leaned forward and added the words ‘Johnnie talks to fellow soldier about fiancée and her sister’ to the first scene.

  ‘Right,’ he said, taking another card, ‘what’s next?’

  Over a week, over two weeks, the scenes had gradually accumulated – had been shuffled, swapped, combined – had acquired detail, and had finally coalesced into a single story. A few more days of tweaks, of meetings with the producer, of transposed cards and scribbled amendments, and then Buckley had sat down, and typed the words

  Treatment for

  DUNKIRK FILM

  and had begun to write, at immense speed and with an intensity that had rendered him deaf to alerts, a thirty-page prose version of the film that read like a racy novelette. ‘That’ll do it,’ he’d said, exuding sweat and satisfaction, as he ripped the final page from the machine.

  From Baker Productions, the treatment had been forwarded to the Ministry of Information for approval. There had been a meeting and Buckley and Parfitt had stamped back into the office in Soho Square and started snatching cards off the wall.

  ‘We’re not entirely convi
nced that the portrayal of the rescue efforts present the national case in a sufficiently uplifting way,’ said Buckley, doing an impression of someone with an effeminate voice and no chin.

  The second draft of the treatment had stalled at the War Office (‘We are concerned that the controlled evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force may be represented as a retreat in disarray’) and just after the third version had been grudgingly given the nod by both parties, with the proviso that a special advisor in military matters would be present at every stage of the filming, the Admiralty had taken a gander, reeled back in horror at what it read and dispatched a hysterical memo to the MoI concerning two minor inaccuracies in maritime terminology.

  By the time that Buckley and Parfitt actually started to write the script, the cards on the wall had been altered, moved, scrapped and reinstated so many times that they were covered in thumbprints and almost illegible. In her spare moments, Catrin touched-up the fainter words with a black crayon.

  Now that the story was locked, the office had acquired a different atmosphere. The vigour of the plotting process had given way to the slow grind of scripting, and Buckley had lost some of his spark and bite and spent the days leaning glumly over the typewriter, pecking out lines of dialogue in a steady rhythm that smacked of the production line. He was not, Catrin was beginning to think, terribly interested in the characters; the dialogue that he wrote was functional, the glue that held the story together and nothing more, and he would invariably pass the first draft of each scene on to Parfitt with a request to ‘add a bit of fizz’.

  Parfitt’s fizz-addition was selective. If the scene was complex – a three- or four-hander involving action or argument – or if it contained potentially jokey banter or a bit of knockabout humour, he would crunch himself up in his chair, grip the edge of the desk with both hands and fix his eyes on the script with the look of a man planning a particularly grisly murder. Time would pass and he’d mumble occasionally, sway a little.