Too Many Heroes

by Jan Turk Petrie

  They stare at each other. Opening his mouth at last, he says, ‘Pete – d’you mind if I take a bit of a break to talk to my friend here?’

  The man looks Grace up and down before giving him a yellow-toothed smile. ‘I’ll allow you an early dinner break, Johnny.’ He claps Frank on the shoulder. ‘If this young lady was my friend, I’d certainly want to take me time about it.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ Frank grabs her by the arm. ‘Let’s go over here, shall we?’

  She’s tempted to shrug him off but doesn’t. He leads her on past all the frantic activity to a large grassy area that’s surrounded on three sides by rows of brick-built huts with corrugated iron roofs. Numbers and names are crudely whitewashed on each of the doors.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Grace,’ he says. ‘It means the world to me.’

  She’s thrown off by where they are; it feels like they’re standing inside an arena. ‘Is this where you all sleep? They’re no bigger than lavatories.’

  Frank’s still smiling at her; that same crooked smile she’d so easily fallen for. ‘You get used to it – mine’s that one over there.’

  Grace has no idea which one he’s nodding towards. The doors of one or two of the huts are open and she can see they’ve managed to squeeze single bunks inside them but not much else.

  Does he imagine this is going to be easy – that she’s going to be putty in his hands? She can feel her anger rising. ‘When you sent me that telegram from Melbourne, I thought that was it,’ she says, ‘the end of whatever there’d bin between us. Can’t tell you what a terrible shock it was when Dot gave me your letter last week. I’m living in a little flat of me own now; if you hadn’t sent it to the Westons’, it would never have found me. So you see I’m only here by chance.’

  Grace looks down at her hands; her fingers toy with her wedding ring, twisting it around and around. Though she’s close to tears, she’s determined not to give in. ‘I knew they couldn’t have caught you or I’d have heard – Collingwood would have made sure of that. After that telegram arrived, I assumed you must be thousands of miles away livin’ a new life an’ I’d never see or hear from you again.’

  ‘You must have worked out it wasn’t me who sent that telegram – I paid a sailor to send it once he got over there. I’m really sorry I had to send such a thing to you, Grace but I had to – to make sure we were both in the clear.’ He hangs his head. ‘My plan was always to go through all the checks, so it looked like I’d officially boarded the ship. I disembarked before she sailed using the crew’s gangplank.’

  When she doesn’t say anything, his hand comes under her chin, raising her head so he can look her straight in the eyes. She can smell the sweet stench of hops about him. ‘This time I owe you the whole truth Grace,’ he says.

  ‘Oh – and what would that be?’ She’s tempted to add more but doesn’t.

  ‘Once I was finally standing there on the deck of the ship, for the first five minutes or so I was sorely tempted to change my mind and do a bunk. The port was teeming with police; you’ve no idea how chuffed I felt outwitting the lot of them despite the odds being so stacked against me. For the last ten years it’s felt like I was jinxed but I’d finally beaten it and I’d got this chance to begin again in a new country – one where I didn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder.’

  It’s hard for her to see his true expression behind those glasses. ‘Can’t you take those damned things off,’ she says.

  ‘As it turns out, I need them,’ he tells her. ‘My eyesight’s not what it was.’

  Neither of them speaks. In the silence she hears the distant sound of children playing and the fut-fut of the tractor doing its work.

  ‘You look tired,’ he says. ‘You must have had quite a journey to get here. Why don’t we go and sit down?’

  He’s right – she feels exhausted by all this. They go across to sit side by side on a wooden bench that looks like it might collapse at any minute.

  ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘I want to know exactly what happened on that ship.’

  ‘Well, as I was standing there on the deck amongst all the other passengers, I noticed how they were surrounded by their families and friends. Some were throwing ribbons over the side to their loved ones on the quayside, while I was entirely on my own. It dawned on me this was no escape – not really; I was just running away like I’d been for too ruddy long and I knew this time I had to stay.’ He squeezes her shoulder. ‘Mainly because of you, Grace.’

  ‘I showed that telegram from Melbourne to Inspector Collingwood,’ she says, ‘pushed it right in front of his eyes. You should have seen the expression on his face when he read it! He’d bin so cocksure all along they were goin’ to catch you.’

  Her smile soon fades. ‘Did you know somebody was tipping the Old Bill off? They knew all about you. Collingwood took great pains to tell me you were a deserter and your real name is Francis John Whitby. He called you a coward.’

  She sees him flinch at the word. ‘He told me how you’d left your baby son behind though his poor mother had only just been killed. Is that true, Frank?’ He looks away, off to his right where wood smoke is rising from an outdoor oven. The smell begins to turn her stomach. A big black pot is suspended there over glowing logs like some witch’s cauldron.

  ‘I could tell you it’s a lie,’ he says at last, ‘but I’m ashamed to say that part of it is true.’

  She stands up full of fury; half wishing she had something hard to hand. ‘How could you go an’ do that to your own flesh and blood?’

  He stays seated, seems to be studying his feet. Finally, he looks up at her. ‘I’ve got no excuses. I can only tell you that, at the time, I thought it was the best thing for him – that the poor little bugger would be better off without me. I left him with Clara’s sister Annie; she already had two boys and I knew he’d be raised in a good family, that she and her husband would treat him like one of their own.’

  ‘But to abandon your own flesh and blood and then just run away from your responsibilities –’

  He stands up. ‘Aye, I’m not proud of it but I couldn’t take him with me, could I? Couldn’t condemn the lad to a life on the run like me. It might not count for much, but I’ve always sent them money when I’ve got it. I even managed to see the lad from time to time.’ Frank hangs his head like a penitent asking for forgiveness. ‘He calls me Uncle Frank – thinks I’m a friend of his parents – a sort of godfather.’

  She gasps. ‘But don’t you see how awful it is that the poor boy doesn’t know his own father. And what about you having to keep pretending he’s not yours?’

  Frank takes off his glasses and throws them down on the bench so hard she wonders if they’ll have broken. ‘Don’t for one minute go feeling sorry for me or owt like that – it’s the price I should and ought to pay. The lad’s happy in his ignorance – he’s a credit to Annie and her husband. Clara would be so proud of how he’s turned out.’ He covers his eyes with his hands. ‘It was me that decided to go AWOL and it’s me that’s forced to take the consequences.’

  ‘You haven’t explained why you went and deserted in the first place.’

  ‘It’s a hard thing to put it into words.’ He starts pacing, rubbing at that scar of his like he’s trying to rub the thing out. ‘Before Clara was killed, I was a rear gunner in a Wellington. One night we got shot up badly over the Dutch coast; I was stuck inside the rear turret. The rest had the chance to bale out but the silly buggers wouldn’t leave me. She broke her back as we came into land and then burst into flames.’ He turns to her. ‘How can it be right that I walked away with hardly a scratch and they all died? The whole thing was back to front.’

  ‘None of that’s your fault.’ She reaches out to squeeze his hand.

  ‘Once I was declared officially fit for active service, I got ordered back to my old squadron.’ He gives a grim smile. ‘Trouble was, I couldn’t find it in me to go back to doing what I’d been doing. My Clara was killed by a stray German bomb. Made me
think about all the women and little kiddies and all the old grannies and that we must have been killing down below us each and every time we went on an op. In bed of a night, I started to picture it – could see them all lying there dead in the rubble.’

  Staring at the sky, he says, ‘It’s fair enough if you get in a tussle with enemy planes but if you’re bombing a target it’s not like fighting an enemy you can see – kill or be killed – or owt like that. We tried to hit the aiming point, but I know for a fact a lot of the time we weren’t that accurate. You had to try not to think about it. Before, I didn’t really picture the consequences of what we were doing. But once you’ve seen with your own eyes what a stray bomb does to your loved ones, it really brings it home. I just couldn’t keep on wi’ it.’

  ‘So why not give yourself up and take the punishment?’

  Frank grabs her arm. ‘I should have done, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking straight. Head was all messed up and I couldn’t face the thought of being caged up like a ruddy animal.’ She can feel how much his hand is shaking.

  ‘Once I started down that road, there was no turning back. I’ve done a good many things I’m not proud of to get false papers, to earn money, some sort of living any way I could.’ Tears are running down his cheeks, but he brushes them off with the back of his hand. ‘I’d think about my Clara. Couldn’t block it out – the sight of our house with nowt left standing but the back wall; a pile of ruddy bricks where once there’d been our home. A place I thought our baby would be safe.’ He wipes at his face again. ‘Just because they were Germans, it couldn’t make it right that we were doing the same to them.’

  Grace thinks of her father – how he’d left Germany because he hated the Nazis, but the British government had interned him anyway. Somewhere she must have German relatives who might have survived the war – unknown uncles, aunties; even cousins of her own age. Her grandmother – her namesake Gretchen – could still be alive.

  Where Frank’s been wiping his eyes with the heel of his dirty hand, he’s left dark streaks under his eyes like war paint.

  She’d spent the beginning of the war down in Brighton. In ’43 a squadron of bombers had targeted the town and set the gasworks on fire. She remembers looking up at the viaduct and seeing the railway line hanging there in mid-air. Thankfully, no one she knew was killed. She can picture that huge pile of rubble he came back to. What must it have been like to stand and stare at the ruins of his home – the very spot where his wife died?

  Someone strikes a gong. Any minute she expects them all to rush over to eat the soup or whatever it is that’s bubbling away over in that blackened pot.

  Chasing a man as usual, her mother had taken them back to London and then finally deposited her with her aunty. She remembers playing around in the bombies, looking up and seeing flowered wallpaper or sometimes a picture or a mirror unbroken and hanging up in its place but unsupported in mid-air; somebody’s living room half blown away; what was left exposed to other people’s stares along with the wind and the rain.

  Overcome by pity, she threads her arms under his and hugs him to her. ‘Oh, Frank,’ she says, ‘what a sorry mess. What on earth are we going to do?’ The sound of voices is growing louder – laughing and squealing and singing like a carnival is approaching. Frank looks down at her. Without those glasses, he’s more like the man she fell in love with.

  ‘This has been a new start for me – after all the law thinks I’m on the other side of the world. I’ve been thinking about going back up Yorkshire and settling down, seeing a bit more of my lad.’ His red-rimmed eyes appeal to her. ‘You could come with me.’

  He reaches to untie her headscarf and it feels good to shake her hair free. When he brushes a few stray hairs back from her face she’s tempted to kiss him for the tenderness of the gesture.

  ‘Could I now?’ She rolls her head at the thought. ‘Thing is, I’ve got a job and me own flat. It’s not much but it’s mine. Then there’s me friends. Not sure I’m prepared to give all that up.’ Her mother is an ample illustration of what happens when you blindly follow a man.

  ‘At least consider it,’ he says. ‘Will you do that, Grace?’

  The hot sun on her back persuades her to take off her raincoat. ‘I will,’ she says.

  Although his face is still strained, he tries a smile. ‘Eh – some of the women here have got themselves a hop husband – for the picking season at least. You could say it’s a hopping tradition.’ He nudges her. ‘They even give ’em a wedding ceremony where they both jump over a hop bine holding hands. Course, if you’re stopping for a bit, you’ll have to learn to call me Johnny. What d’you say, Grace – couldn’t we give it a go, just for starters?’

  Did he think she could just leap up into his arms as if all the time in between had never occurred? ‘This is happening too fast,’ she tells him. ‘I’m really not sure what I feel right at this minute.’

  The crowd is nearly upon them and she can see one or two peering at them with curious eyes. Frank looks so crestfallen; this time it stirs more than her pity. And then there’s the growing child in her belly to think of.

  ‘I might just consider this hopper’s wedding malarkey,’ she says, ‘after all, there’d be nothin’ that’s bindin’ in it.’

  He goes to kiss her but she stops him with a raised hand. ‘There’s one thing you have to promise me first though, Johnny who-ever-you-flamin’-well-are-now.’

  ‘Anything – just you name it.’

  ‘I want you to shave that ruddy moustache off. Over the last few months I’ve grown to detest any man sportin’ one of them.’ She waves a finger in his face. ‘Ahh – no you don’t, mister. You’re not coming anywhere near me, and I’m certainly not goin’ to let you kiss me, until that ruddy thing under your nose has disappeared for good.’

  Appendix

  It is currently estimated that, in the British armed forces as a whole, the number of deserters during WW2 was between 100,000 and 150,000.

  Various estimates of the total number of wartime desertions from the R.A.F. suggest a figure between 5,850 and 10,000.

  Extract from Hansard

  House of Commons sitting – 15 July 1952

  Mr Hector Hughes asked the Secretary of State for War how many of Her Majesty's Forces were, on 31st December 1945, and on each succeeding 31st December, absent from their units; how many of these, though not proved to be dead, were then and are now unaccounted for; and how many have, and how many have not, been traced to civil life.

  The Secretary of State for War, Mr Antony Head: ‘On 31st December 1945, there were 17,317 men still unaccounted for who had deserted from the Army during the late war and 1,043 who had deserted since 31st August 1945. On 31st December 1951, the corresponding figures were 10,432 and 3,556. I will, with permission, circulate the figures for the remaining years in the OFFICIAL REPORT.’

  Mr Hughes: ‘Does the Minister agree that the fact that so many men for so many years have remained unaccounted for is contrary to good order, and cannot he devise some means whereby these men can return as good citizens?’

  Mr Head: ‘I have given this matter a good deal of consideration. The vast majority of the numbers referred to as deserters in the last war are either in Ireland or elsewhere overseas. The remainder have now settled down in civilian life, possibly under assumed names, and the fact that crime may be attributable to them is not borne out by the evidence available to me.’

  Extract from Hansard

  House of Commons – 23rd February 1953

  Mr Winston Churchill – Woodford: ‘Her Majesty's Government have decided that, in the circumstances referred to by the Hon. and gallant Member for Ayr and as a special measure which will not be regarded as a precedent for the future, there will be no further prosecutions of members of the Armed Forces who deserted from the Services between 3rd September 1939, and 15th August 1945.

  ‘Men who wish to take advantage of the amnesty will be required to report themselves in writing to a Service a
uthority. They will then receive a protection certificate and will be transferred to the appropriate Reserve to which men were transferred on demobilisation.

  ‘Men who claim the benefit of the amnesty will not be prosecuted for certain offences consequential upon desertion, such as subsequent fraudulent enlistment, or the possession of identity documents in a false name, but the amnesty will not cover other offences against the criminal law.

  ‘Full details will be announced in due course of the steps which men will be required to take and of the consequential measures which will be applied to men who have been convicted of desertion and are still serving, but any men who are awaiting trial or serving sentences for desertion during the 1939–45 war will be released from custody.’

  Lieut-Colonel Sir Thomas Moore, Ayr: ‘Does my right Hon. friend appreciate that though this generous decision will, I suppose, be welcomed with mixed feelings throughout the country, it will, at the same time, restore thousands of men once again to family and community life and thereby, perhaps, give them an opportunity to justify this clemency?’

  It is estimated that by the time of the amnesty in 1953, the number of deserters still at large was between 5,000 – 13,000.

  By March 25th 1953 only some 1,900 official applications for amnesty had been received.

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