by Owen Sheers
Matthew was offered a clerk’s position with the Underground Rumour Mill. Now, if the PWE had been a man, the Rumour Mill wouldn’t so much have been his brain as his mind; his imagination, his dark psyche. The Rumour Mill didn’t bother with details of execution, leaflet drop locations, radio broadcasts. No, these people were pure, unadulterated storytellers and myth-makers; paid by the British government to lie for king and country. Working from a basement office in London and a country house in Suffolk, the Mill provided the lifeblood of the PWE – rumour and gossip capable of spreading through Europe faster than any blitzkrieg.
The wounds the Mill inflicted were invisible, but deep. The nightmares of a German infantryman shivering at the front; the grain of doubt taking root as a mother in Berlin listened to one of the Führer’s speeches. Their orders were simple. Cook up damaging ‘sibs’ – from the Latin, sibilare, meaning to whistle or hiss – that SOE agents could whisper in the cinema queue, in the bread shop or over that quiet drink with a friend. A sib wasn’t just a lie. That would have been too simple, and ineffective. No, like all the best stories sibs needed a fabric of truth through which to weave their fiction. So, information had to be gleaned first: from prisoner interrogations, from agent reports, and then fed into the Mill, who’d invent around that information before sending it back across the Channel to do its worst. When a sib turned up in conversation hundreds of miles from that first whisper, or when it was read in a captured piece of correspondence, it was ticked off as a success.
To begin with the Mill’s sibs were military in nature, so they had to be approved before they went active. Stories of British ‘ghost killers’ stalking across Europe; fearful new super and chemical weapons, you know the kind of stuff. But as the war got nastier, so did the sibs. They became less military which meant the Mill had a free hand to get as twisted as it wanted.
The first sib across Matthew’s desk was about how the fat from German army amputations was being reprocessed into soap. The inhabitants of German cities were, according to this sib, washing themselves in the limbs of their wounded soldiers. Sex, Matthew soon realised, featured heavily in the Mill’s arsenal. A necrophiliac group of SS officers, one sib reported, had assembled the ‘perfect’ Aryan woman from dismembered body parts of Berlin air raid victims. Pederasty, another claimed, was rife in the factories where young boys were now employed. ‘Who?’ the sibs asked the average German soldier, ‘is doing what to your wife and your son while you risk your life for the Fatherland on the frontline?’
After two years of fighting on the frontline himself this was now Matthew’s war. Processing ‘sibs’, copying memos and handling the expense claims of journalists who, it seemed to Matthew, often went looking for inspiration at the bottom of a bottle. He was given no part in creating the sibs himself, and no access to the information upon which they were based. He was, after all, Irish. They could only trust him so far, this was the accepted opinion. He didn’t mind too much. The work was interesting enough, he had a simple room in lodgings on the Old Kent Road and a landlady who cooked a good breakfast from meagre rations, didn’t ask too many questions and had her own Anderson shelter in the back garden. Not, he thought, such a bad way to see out the end of the war. Not exciting, not glamorous, not even, he sometimes felt, particularly honourable. But not bad, which, after what he’d seen in Tunisia and Italy, was fine by him. He’d done honourable and exciting with the 38th and he still lived with the consequences, limping to and from his Rumour Mill office, every day.
This, Matthew thought, was how it was going to be. He’d think about what he’d do after the war when they got there, but for now he’d resigned himself to being a pen pusher, to doing his bit for the war effort without too much, well, effort. But then one morning, out of the blue, his supervisor, Mr Seybridge, a pale, moley kind of man, dropped an order sheet onto his desk. ‘There you go O’Connell,’ Seybridge said. ‘Something to get you out of the house.’
Matthew picked up the order sheet and glanced over it. There was a package to be collected from an address he couldn’t understand. He looked up at Mr Seybridge who’d pulled out the front of his shirt to clean his glasses, revealing a slice of plump belly, whorled with dark hair.
‘Came in under “Public Morale”,’ he said, still cleaning his glasses and not bothering to look up at Matthew. ‘Which comes under “Propaganda”. Someone upstairs filed it under “Myth”, which, apparently, comes under “Rumour”.’ He held his glasses up to the bulb hanging over Matthew’s desk, then put them back on and returned Matthew’s confused gaze. ‘You’re a farmer’s lad aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I thought this might be up your street. And anyway, we haven’t got anyone else we can spare right now.’ He spread a sudden smile across his face. ‘So, enjoy!’
With that Seybridge turned and walked away, calling over his shoulder, ‘Sally’s got your tickets. You leave in the morning.’
Matthew looked back down at the order sheet. A single typed line at the top said it had been issued by the office of the Prime Minister. At the bottom of the page, under the address he couldn’t understand, was an inventory of the package contents.
6 x Raven chicks
The pick-up address was Welsh, that’s why he hadn’t been able to understand it. From the length of the names and the number of consonants it looked as if the place was deep into the country. He flipped the page to look at the Photostat stapled behind. It was a piece of standard government copy like many he’d seen before, pulled from a file somewhere within the bureaucratic labyrinth of Whitehall. He read the title.
The Tower Ravens
Six ravens have been kept at the Tower of London by Royal decree since Charles II was asked to remove the birds at the request of the Astronomer Royal (Flamsteed, John) because they were ‘disturbing his examinations of the heavens’. The King - informed of the myth that if the ravens leave the Tower, the Tower of London, the White Tower, the monarchy and the kingdom of Britain would fall - refused Flamsteed’s request and issued a Royal decree for a full complement of six ravens to be kept at the Tower at all times. The Royal observatory was moved to Greenwich.
A single handwritten note at the bottom of the Photostat completed the order sheet. ‘One surviving Raven. Re-stock tower with new chicks from above address. Escorted collection and delivery required. By order of the PM.’ And that was it: one typed line, the address, the inventory, a bit of folklore history and this handwritten note. Matthew saw the logic behind it; Churchill couldn’t allow the Tower to go ravenless, not at such a crucial point in the war. No doubt the Nazis had their own Rumour Mill over there and it was the kind of thing they’d enjoy making a meal of. A mythical portent of Britain’s inevitable defeat. Nothing but superstition, but God knows, hadn’t they made use of such stuff themselves? But he still didn’t understand. Why an escorted collection? Couldn’t they just send for the birds? Picking the order sheet off his desk, he went to find Seybridge.
‘Yes?’ Seybridge already sounded bored, as if he knew exactly who was going to walk through his door. ‘What is it O’Connell?’
‘This order sheet sir,’ Matthew said as he entered. ‘I don’t understand. I mean, seems like a lot of trouble doesn’t it? Just for some birds?’
Seybridge sat back heavily in his chair. ‘Does it now?’
‘Well, yes sir, it does. Couldn’t they just send for them?’
Seybridge sighed. He looked to the side of his office, as if hoping to discover a window to stare out of wisely. There was none, so he looked at the exposed pipes running under the ceiling instead.
‘Have you taken a look in butchers’ windows recently O’Connell?’
‘Sorry sir?’
‘Butchers. Have you looked in their windows recently?’ he said, looking back at Matthew over his glasses. ‘They’re selling crows now. And ravens. Anything with a bit of meat on it. You’re going to escort those birds back to the Tower to stop some bugger eating them. That’s why.’
‘Oh,’ Matthew said, ‘I see
, yes sir.’
‘That order found its way to us,’ Seybridge continued, sitting forward to his desk. ‘So we’ll take care of it. Look, I know it’s an odd one but I thought you wouldn’t mind actually.’ He looked almost hurt, as if he’d given Matthew a gift, not an order, and now here he was ungratefully returning it to him. ‘I thought you might even appreciate a trip out of the city, get back to nature and all that.’
‘Right,’ Matthew said, unsure what to make of Seybridge’s sudden paternal concern.
Then, just as suddenly, it was gone. ‘Is that all?’ Seybridge asked, lowering his eyes to the papers layering his desk.
‘Yes sir,’ Matthew replied. ‘That’s all.’
He turned for the door. As he opened it Seybridge spoke again. ‘Try to enjoy it O’Connell,’ he said. ‘That’s my advice. Some time away from this place. It’ll do you good.’
‘Yes,’ Matthew said, ‘thank you sir.’
Closing the door behind him Matthew walked away from Seybridge’s office down the long subterranean corridor back to his own desk, wondering as he went what exactly one should pack for a trip to collect some ravens from Wales.
The order hadn’t said anything about a horse. If it had he might have packed differently. This is what Matthew thought when he saw the boy holding the mud-spattered grey gelding outside the one-track station. The boy, no more than ten years old, held the horse in one hand and clutched a torn piece of cardboard to his chest with the other. ‘O’Connell’ was scrawled across it in what looked like charcoal. There was another pony, a long-maned little skewbald tethered behind the gelding.
Matthew looked around the station, abandoned on the bare hill. The train he’d arrived on was already backing away down the track, trailing heavy gobs of steam. His fellow passengers were also leaving, walking towards the scrappy town in the valley below. Farmers back from market, a couple of office clerks, a woman with a gaggle of evacuee kids, their cockney accents exotic against the terraced houses backed by miles and miles of moorland and hills. Matthew looked back at the boy. ‘Are you here for me?’ he asked him.
The boy looked down at the piece of cardboard, as if maybe Matthew hadn’t seen it. ‘Yer’im?’ he asked. He had a strong accent which ran the two words into one. ‘Yes,’ Matthew said. ‘That’s me. I was expecting Constable Jones? He was meant to take me to, to...’ he fumbled in his pocket for the name of the farm which he still couldn’t pronounce.
‘’E couldn’ come,’ the boy said, cutting Matthew’s search short. ‘’E said as ’e wouldn’ be wastin’ any petrol on some Londoner. ’E said as not with the rationin’. ’E said as yer can have an ’orse ’stead, ’cos an ’orse is good enough for every one else, so it’s as good enough for yew.’
The boy paused, apparently as surprised as Matthew by his own burst of eloquence. ‘’E said as I was t’ show yer up t’ Llewellyn’s,’ he added, just in case Matthew hadn’t understood. Which he hadn’t. Not every word anyway, although he’d managed to grasp what they meant. He’d be riding to the farm with this boy. Over eight miles at least, from what he remembered from the map he’d studied at the PWE. A lonely square marking the farm, marooned in a stream of tight contours, surrounded by green and brown and not another little square for miles. It was already late in the afternoon. He’d had to take three trains just to get this far already. He saw no other choice but to agree.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I see. Well, we’d best get going then hadn’t we?’ He tried a smile on the boy, hoping to crack his dour seriousness. The boy handed him the gelding’s reins in reply, as serious as ever, took his case from him, then went to the little skewbald behind.
‘I’m Matthew,’ Matthew said over the horse’s back. Surely they should at least be introduced before they rode into the hills together? The boy, still strapping Matthew’s case to the side of the skewbald, turned and nodded again. ‘I know,’ he said hitching himself up onto the pony and, with a yank at its bit, kicking it on up a track leading from the station up into the hills.
The track was steep and soon left the scattered vestiges of the little town behind it; the sheds backing onto the station, a single dark cottage with a garden making a brave attempt on the bare moorland slope. As the track became a path, even narrower and strewn with loose stones, they passed a lonely farm with a couple of cattle slow-chewing on a pile of hay. The blonde crop seemed to glow in the gathering evening, still warm with the summer day it was cut. Matthew looked behind him as they climbed and saw the town he’d arrived in had literally been at the end of the line. The railway tracks, cutting smoothly up from the valley below, stopped abruptly beneath the roof of the station. Beyond that roof the town was already winking with lights, lamps and candles lighting up in its windows, only to go out again behind the thick material of the blackout curtains.
All day Matthew’s journey had been a diminishing one: from the vaulted hall of Paddington station, its crowds knotted with soldiers and gaggles of sailors laden with guns, rucksacks, helmets and all the paraphernalia of war. Then, as his train had shunted through the suburbs out of the city, those crowds had shrunk to the six people of his carriage compartment. A tearful evacuee boy, an American sergeant who already looked too old to be joining a fight anywhere, a harried-looking clerk with his family and a nervous-looking Wren who bit her nails all the way to Swindon. All bore the wearied faces of war. Maybe Seybridge was right, Matthew had thought, perhaps it really would do him some good to get out of the city for a day or two.
As the train rolled west Matthew and the sergeant swapped stories from the Italian campaign. The sergeant had got there more or less as Matthew had left, a few days after the little stretcher bearer had shouldered him down to the field hospital. He’d fought right through the country and now, he said in a thick southern accent, ‘I guess we’ll be going over there again, soon enough.’ He was also on his way to Wales, to join thousands of other GIs training there. He didn’t say what they were training for and Matthew didn’t ask. Everyone knew something big was coming and that men like this sergeant would be in the frontline. For the last few miles into Cardiff he’d sat very still opposite Matthew, looking through his own reflection at the passing countryside and occasionally down at a tattered photograph he’d pull from his pocket. Matthew guessed it held the face of either a girl, or those of a wife and child. Whichever, both were far away from him, thousands of miles across the sea from this train edging towards Wales.
Matthew detrained at Cardiff, caught another, smaller train to a smaller, higher town, and then an even smaller train again to this smallest, highest town yet. And now here he was, at the end of his day, his travels diminished to just him and this silent boy, riding together higher into the darkening mountains.
The grey gelding was broad-backed and rocked comfortably beneath Matthew. According to the boy it had no name, so Matthew privately christened the horse Mullie, after a Scottish corporal he’d met at the hospital in Kent. Mullie’s hair had turned the same colour as this gelding’s coat, shockingly white, after he’d been blown out of his tank somewhere in the Western desert. Corporal Mullie had been left grumpily hobbling round on one leg. His equine namesake, in contrast, was remarkably sure-footed and good natured, given every now and then to shaking his head with sudden comforting snorts through his nostrils. As the evening got darker Matthew felt a growing affection for Mullie, for the blind dutifulness with which he carried him, a complete stranger, upon his back up into the hills. He wished he could have said the same about the boy, but it wouldn’t have been true. Matthew had made several attempts at conversation, but each to no avail. The boy knew what he had to do, just as dutifully as Mullie, and he obviously wasn’t going to do much else. So Matthew was thankful when, a couple of hours after they’d left the station, the boy pulled up his skewbald and pointed a finger into the distance. ‘Tha’s it,’ he said.
Matthew strained his eyes in the direction the boy pointed. There was still just enough light in the spring evening for him to make o
ut a dwelling of some kind on the horizon. And a barn maybe, and perhaps even a walled pen for animals. The sound of stones dislodging from the path behind him made Matthew turn around. The boy was already yanking at the skewbald’s bit and jabbing at it with his heels, pushing it on down the path, handing Matthew his case as he passed.
Matthew watched as the rounded rump of the skewbald faded into the darkness until there was just the sound of its hooves picking its way carefully down the mountain. The boy had brought him within sight of the farm and that, obviously, had been enough for him. His job done he’d left without another word or gesture. ‘Well Mullie,’ Matthew found himself saying aloud, ‘I suppose it’s just us now.’ Clutching his case to his chest he tapped the horse’s sides and Mullie, shifting his weight slowly, began making his way up the path just as carefully as the little skewbald had picked its way down.
As Matthew neared the farmhouse the mountain rose higher behind it, its towering bulk edging into the sky to slip the farm further under the horizon until Matthew could no longer make out its shape against the slope. No light came from the farm. He couldn’t tell if the windows were thoroughly blacked out, or if there were just no lights burning behind them in the first place. Unless someone had pointed the farm out, you could have walked right past at night and never have known it was there.
