The men in the dell came to attention but not all at once and he made them do it again. Then he strode straight-backed and mounted a platform of ammunition cases. The two other men, sergeants with dread faces, stamped across the open ground and snapped to attention alongside.
‘Parade, a–t ease! Stand easy!’
The infantrymen relaxed, spreading their feet, each one linking his hands behind his back. Their steel helmets seemed too big, and they gazed at the bullshit figure on the ammunition boxes from below the rims.
Every word from him was a shout, some louder than others. ‘Any of you know Mrs Rumbleton?’ he blared. ‘Anybody?’ There was a wide silence. ‘No? Well, I am her only son – Sergeant-Major Cecil Rumbleton. I am a Warrant-officer Class One and you will call me SIR! Understood?’
There was a hesitant and mumbled: ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Again! Understood?’
Everyone shouted: ‘YES, SIR.’
‘And I repeat, it is Rumbleton. If I hear any soldier calling me Rumblebum he will be on a charge, a fizzer. That man’s feet will not touch the ground. For, believe me, although I am a nice man – I like animals and women, and I have both at home – I can be NASTY. What can I be?’
‘NASTY!’ they all shouted.
‘Right. You are going to be in battle soon …’ He paused and screwed his eyes at a list on a clipboard in his hand. ‘Where are the artillery men, the gunners, who’ve been transferred?’
‘Here, sir,’ called Harris.
Rumbleton surveyed them icily. ‘Well, now you’ll be proper soldiers. Not sitting all comfy behind a gun sending high explosives on to some poor Jerry three miles away who you can’t even see. Now you’ll be eyeball to ruddy eyeball with him!’
His stony face turned the width of the parade. ‘The two sergeants present on parade,’ he nodded each side at the men standing with him, ‘Sergeant Burkitt and Sergeant Hare, have been thrown out of the commandos for being too rough. Sergeant Burkitt will now tell you what’s what.’
Harris thought he had never seen an uglier human being. Although young, Burkitt was short and hard, his eyes like a squinting pig, his jaw like a bucket. ‘Today we are going to do ’ouse-to-’ouse fightin’,’ he barked. ‘Unarmed combat, close-quarter combat, and silent killing.’ His jaw swung in a half circle. ‘Anybody ’ere done silent killing?’
Nobody had. ‘Right. You’ll learn. But first we are goin’ to fight our way through these Kraut ’ouses. You might wonder why they are Kraut ’ouses because we’re on Salisbury Plain and you’ll be fighting in France, but it don’t matter. After they first built these, years ago now, we had some men goin’ off to kill them Japs in Burma where the ’ouses are made of bamboo and paper. But an ’ouse is an ’ouse except some burn quicker than others.’
Suddenly he seemed less assured, like an actor unsure of his lines. He said: ‘Sergeant Hare will carry on from here.’
Hare was a cherubic-looking man with fair curls, but his blue eyes were vindictive. Despite his round face he stood stiff as iron and spoke in a nasal cockney voice. ‘You got to remember that in the real fing these houses might have proper Krauts in them, and Krautesses. You are not allowed to shoot them! It’s against the Geneva Convention, bein’ as they are civilians. You must get them into a cellar or somewhere a bit safe. But don’t lock ’em in.’
He surveyed the expressions in front of him, then said: ‘During today’s bit of fun you will be divided into two armies. Red army will be advancing from the north, like the left, and blue army from the south, the right. You’ve got to clear the ’ouses as you go and then try and clear each other out of ’em. Got it? Section leaders will make sure that their men only have blank ammunition. Real ammo has been known to sneak in by mistake and men get ’urt. Or dead.’
He sniffed around. ‘Sergeant Burkitt and me will be in charge, geeing you up a bit, making a noise. We will chuck the odd thunderflash in the winders. If a thunderflash lands near you do not attempt to pick it up. Cover your ears and scarper, cos it can blow your arse off. Any questions?’
To Harris’s astonishment, Gordon raised his hand. Hare stared at him as if he were mad and said: ‘What?’
‘Sergeant, how will we know who’s the enemy?’ asked Gordon. ‘We all look the same.’
Hare drew in a breath. ‘A Jock,’ he muttered. ‘Trust a Jock.’ Sergeant Burkitt moved forward. ‘We was coming to THAT!’ he bawled. ‘In a minute, wasn’t we, Reggie?’ Hare gave a nodding grunt. Burkitt continued: ‘The red army will wear their tin ’ats, the blue army will not.’
‘Thank you, sergeant,’ said Gordon politely. ‘I just thought I’d ask.’
*
‘I haven’t had so much fun since I was a kid!’ Treadwell was gripped by the excitement. He fired another three random blanks from the window, then rolled over to reload the rifle. He was out of breath, his face was gritty, his eyes raw.
‘Beats lugging those field guns around,’ shouted Gordon busily reloading.
Across the dust-covered room of the Bavarian house, among tables and chairs, Blackie was enjoying a single-handed battle with soldiers in the next house and hoping they were the enemy. Warren was sitting in an armchair tugging the bolt from his jammed rifle. All day they had advanced and retreated. Chaffey, the mildest of men, had a black eye from a stand-up fist fight, and Gannick had bitten through his pipe. Noise and smoke erupted around them. Breathing hard, Harris charged up the stairs. ‘They’re coming from the right flank,’ he panted. They could see he was enjoying himself too. ‘Cover those windows. Come on, move!’
Almost playfully, an object came through the glassless window and bounced like a toy on the bare boards. They all knew what it was but nobody reacted until Harris shouted: ‘Thunderflash! Move! Take cover!’
In a single rush they made for the head of the stairs, falling on top of each other. Harris was physically pushing them down the steps when the thunderflash went off with a shattering explosion and a streak of light. As Harris tried to cover his ears he tipped forward, over the top of Warren, and tumbled to the foot of the stairs. As he fell he heard and felt his ankle crack.
They were in a heap, legs, arms and rifles entangled. Harris was in pain. They realised he was not pretending. ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ shouted Gordon, putting his head out of the door. ‘Stretcher-bearers here!’
Sergeant-Major Rumbleton was pacing through the smoke and the din of the street outside. He strode to the door. ‘Who’s hurt?’ he demanded.
‘Ankle, sir,’ said Harris, propping himself against the banister. ‘Feels like it’s broken.’
Rumbleton turned to the door and over the noise in the street his huge voice bellowed: ‘Stretcher party here!’
Four panting soldiers ran between the littered houses bearing a stretcher, one flying a Red Gross flag above his head. ‘Christ,’ muttered Rumbleton. ‘It’s the Swiss Army.’
The stretcher party were pleased and eager. With excited shouts they almost pushed Rumbleton aside and then burrowed through the other soldiers until they had space to lift Harris on to the stretcher. They did so clumsily, dropped him once, and finally rolled him on to it.
‘Move! Come on!’ shouted Rumbleton. ‘He’ll be dead before you know it.’
A man at each corner, the stretcher was charged like a battering-ram through the smoke and the bedlam. The mock battle was at its pitch. ‘Sod ’im,’ snorted one of the stretcher-bearers. ‘That sodding sergeant-major.’
‘He’s got a poker up his bum,’ panted the other.
They reached the edge of the imitation village. Two ambulances were parked, cigarette smoke rising from behind them. One orderly doused his Woodbine when he saw the stretcher party. ‘Casualty!’ shouted one of the advancing bearers. Both drivers opened the doors of one ambulance and Harris was heaved in.
A medical corps officer appeared. ‘Oh good, a real casualty,’ he enthused. ‘Not dead, is he?’
They cut the boot from the injured ankle and the officer gave a disapp
ointed sniff. ‘Broken,’ he diagnosed loftily. ‘Or badly sprained. Get him to hospital.’
One of the orderlies stayed in the back of the ambulance with Harris as it bumped across the plain towards the main Salisbury road.
‘You’re lucky, sarge. That ought to keep you out of the invasion,’ he told Harris. He had youthful spots all over his face.
Harris said: ‘So they’ve told you the date, have they?’
He arrived outside his Southampton door at eleven in the morning, placed one of his crutches against the jamb and rang the bell. Enid answered, wearing an alluring and short pink silk nightdress and negligée. She said: ‘Harris! What a lovely surprise!’
‘What a lovely outfit.’
‘It’s American,’ she said. ‘I got it from … Oh, Harris, you’ve got a poorly leg! Let me get you a chair.’
‘I’m standing on the doorstep.’
‘Silly, stupid me,’ she said, opening the door further to allow him into the narrow hall. He stumped forward into the kitchen, put his crutches, his back-pack, his belt and his forage cap in one corner and opened his battledress tunic. ‘Now I’ll have a chair,’ he said.
She made a performance of getting one from the other side of the kitchen table and then found a cushion which she punched into shape before putting it on the chair and gently sitting him down.
‘Whatever have you done?’ She surveyed the foot in its lump of plaster of Paris. ‘It looks enormous.’
‘Broken ankle,’ he said. ‘In training.’
Suddenly she realised. ‘Oh, Harris – does it mean you won’t have to go …?’
‘Where?’ he said bluntly.
‘Oh, you know. To the thingy … Dunkirk.’
‘Dunkirk was four years ago,’ he said. ‘The invasion, you mean.’
‘Yes. The invasion. I get all mixed up with these war things. But you won’t need to go?’
Harris put his arms out to her and pulled her towards him, wallowing in the luxury of her body and the soft silk.
‘Watch it,’ she warned. ‘We’ll have this chair arse over tit.’
He kissed her common, pretty face. ‘Well, tell me,’ she said. ‘Will you be excused duty or whatever it is? Excused the invasion.’
‘I hope the ankle will be mended,’ he said simply. ‘Depends when the invasion day is. They say this will take about six weeks.’
Enid eased herself away from him and stood with her hands accusingly on her hips. ‘You sound like you actually want to go,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘I’ve got to do it, love. That’s why I joined. That’s why I’m a soldier. Besides which, the rest of them would be lost without me. They’d probably run away.’ He regarded her carefully. ‘Is there a cup of tea?’
She almost jumped. ‘Of course there is, darling. I should have asked, but what with your poorly foot and everything …’ She made for the kettle. He thought how sexual she looked, even when she was so unkempt. There was a voluptuous slovenliness about her, her eyes still smudged with make-up, her hair falling about.
‘Tell me about the nightdress,’ he said.
‘American, like I said. You know Maggie Phillips. It was a present from a Yank. But she couldn’t tell Brian that, could she? And he’s home from the air force almost every weekend. She wanted to keep it and she was going to spin some story about winning it in a competition in War Weapons Week, you know, that War Savings thing they have. But Brian has a suspicious mind, a touch on the sharp side, and he would have smelt a rat.’
‘A Yank,’ corrected Harris. ‘It wouldn’t have fitted her anyway, would it? She’s twice your size. A lot taller for a start.’ He took in the short nightdress. ‘That thing would have ended up around her waist.’
Enid seemed to blush, then she giggled. ‘Perhaps that was the idea. Anyway, I got it for two pounds ten.’
She brought him the tea. The saucer was cracked. ‘Just like your ankle,’ she said. ‘Is it ever so painful?’
‘Not now. Can’t feel anything.’
His wife prodded the solid plaster of Paris. ‘It’s ever so hard.’
He took a sip of the tea but he had no time for another. As if she had suddenly spotted something she liked, Enid took the cup and saucer from him and placed them on the table, then knelt in front of him and, with a single warm glance at the swift expectancy of his face, began to open the metal buttons at the front of his army trousers.
‘I’ll never get these off now,’ she whispered, opening them. ‘Not with that lump on your foot. And you’re still wearing those horrible underpants.
Harris said nothing while she unloaded his penis and tenderly put it between her lips and then into her mouth. He did not care whatever she got up to when he was away. As long as she did this when he was here.
She turned her lascivious sleepy eyes up to him and then levered herself up and spread her bare thighs across him. With a practised movement she reached down and guided his penis into her, squatting astride him until his climax and, he was pleased to know, hers. ‘There’s knickers that go with this outfit,’ she mentioned. ‘I’m glad I didn’t wear them.’
Her slight arms embraced his waist and then lightly pounded his body. ‘You’re hard, Harris,’ she said. ‘Every part of you. Hard as iron.’
‘It’s the infantry training,’ he told her, stroking her tangled hair. ‘They’ve transferred us to the Hampshires.’
It meant little to her. She punched his ribs more firmly and then his stomach. ‘Hard,’ she repeated. ‘Even a German bullet wouldn’t get through that.’
‘Kippers,’ he muttered as he woke up. It was three in the afternoon. The window was full of a windy sky.
‘Kippers!’ Enid called up the stairs. ‘Can you smell them?’
She appeared at the bedroom door. She was wearing a housewifely pinafore, her young face bright above it; her hair was carefully done and she was carrying a cup of tea.
‘You could smell ’em in Portsmouth,’ he said.
‘That’s the trouble.’ She put the tea on the bedside table, kissed him on the forehead, leaning her breasts on his chest, went to his plastered ankle and patted it as if it were a pet. ‘They came from the pub; from the docks. You know what I mean. But I had to have a whole ruddy box of them, twelve pairs, so I had to sell some of them, didn’t I? They’d have gone off. I kept two pairs and got shot of the rest. Half the houses in this street will be wiffing of kippers today. I hope the coppers don’t sniff ’em.’
Harris sipped the strong tea. ‘What’s happened to your betting round?’ he asked.
‘Don’t do it any more,’ she told him a little sulkily. ‘That Charlie Parker, that bookie, he started to get personal, and he’s not my type, all whisky and whiskery. So I’m out of a job.’ As if suddenly remembering, she took an opened brown envelope from her pinafore pocket. ‘The taxman is after you again,’ she said. ‘He wants twenty-one quid. You’d think the bugger would leave you alone since you’re fighting for your country and he’s safe behind a comfy bloody desk.’
Harris took the envelope with disdain. ‘It’s not even me. I’ve written to them. The army’s been paying me for four years almost, and the army deducts the tax. Anyway, this bloke Harris has got the same name but a different middle initial than me. See.’ He showed her the front of the buff envelope. ‘His middle name begins with W.’
A touch shamefacedly she asked: ‘What’s yours?’
He had ceased to be astonished by her. ‘Adrian,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘I forgot,’ she said, sitting on the side of the bed. She began to smooth the bedclothes over him. ‘It’s never been mentioned since the wedding and it’s not much better than Neville, so I think I’ll still call you Harris.’ Absent-mindedly she was caressing his groin through the counterpane. ‘Do you want a kipper or a nice time?’ she asked.
‘Don’t burn the kipper,’ he said, kissing her cheek.
‘The kipper’s not quite ready but I am,’ she said and with a sort of decorum, sh
e lifted her pinafore and her skirt. She was naked underneath. ‘Watch the ankle,’ he warned, strongly but gently easing her on top of him. He felt her soft underneath and her thighs willingly opened. Her face moved next to his and her hair tumbled over his neck.
‘I’m worried about those kippers,’ she said when she next raised her head and looked at him. ‘I’ll have to go.’
She tugged her skirt down and trotted from the room, returning with a warm flannel and a towel. She gently worked first one, then the other, over him. He lay against the pillow, savouring the feel of what she was doing, then he kissed her warmly.
Primly she replaced the bedclothes over him. ‘Do you want your kipper up here?’ she asked.
Harris laughed. ‘A bit niffy, won’t it be?’
‘Bedrooms do get niffy, what with one thing or another. We’ll open the window a bit. It’s not a bad day. I’ll bring them up.’
He sat, satisfied as he would ever be, drained and yet complete. He was away from the army and the war, if only for a time, in bed in the middle of a weekday afternoon, and waiting for a beautiful woman to bring him a kipper. She came up the stairs with two on a single plate on a tray with bread and margarine and two bottles of Watney’s ale. ‘It’s what they called room service,’ she said, pulling up a chair and balancing the tray between them. She began to dismember the smoked fish. ‘There’s a dance tonight. Will you be able to come? How long will you be home, by the way? I did mean to ask.’
‘Seven days,’ he told her. ‘I have to report to the hospital again next Friday. They may send me back for another seven days’ sick leave.’
‘That will be nice,’ she said, not altogether convincingly. ‘What about the dance?’
‘Enid, I’ve got a broken ankle.’
‘You could still come.’
‘You’ll be going anyway?’ He knew she would.
‘It’s only at Eastleigh.’ She hesitated. ‘I was getting a lift.’ She looked at the swelling of the plaster of Paris on his ankle beneath the bedclothes. ‘On a motor bike.’ She regarded the mound again and added: ‘He’s got a side-car.’
Waiting For the Day Page 19
