The War Before Mine

by Caroline Ross

  ‘They used them for bull-baiting,’ Strang had informed Philip. ‘Used to grab a lump of flesh around the face and hang on. My Dad said you could cut off a Staffie’s leg while it had a hold and it wouldn’t loosen its grip.’

  Spike got up, shook himself, and trotted off towards the stern of the boat. He was profligate in his affections by day, though at night he always bedded down with Strang. Philip had watched the efforts of some of the others to lure the dog away with tidbits, attempts which worked only as long as the scraps of food lasted, for then Spike would return to his place, his warm, silky little body curled around Strang’s feet.

  The affinity between men and Canis familiaris must have its origins in both species’ love of play, Philip thought, the never-failing attraction of puppies for children. But he had read somewhere that it may have all begun with dogs being good hot-water bottles. African Bushmen used the term ‘three-dog night’ to express the idea of a very cold night – presumably a very hot one was called a ‘kick the dog if it comes near you’.

  He frowned at his unwritten letter and remembered the short time he had been allowed a dog at home, another terrier, and how awful it had been to come back for the holidays and find his mother had got rid of it because it kept digging holes in the rose bed. Dear Mother, I will never forgive you for having Tigger put to sleep…

  Philip came out of his thoughts to the sense that something was happening. The boat was moving slowly out of the harbour on the short voyage it made every day to flush out the bilges. But that wasn’t it. Something else was going on. There were excited voices and a high-pitched scream of laughter from the stern, where the soldiers played games. Tucker was already on his feet and Philip, too, got up and moved along the rail.

  Anderson’s big body came into view. He was leaning back and rotating slowly, lifting Spike, whose jaws were clamped to a deck quoit, into the air. A group of men were watching and laughing. Philip started to run as Anderson began to turn faster, lifting the dog higher off the ground until he was swinging Spike around his head like an Olympic hammer thrower. ‘No!’ Philip shouted. ‘Stop!’ there was a rush of feet behind him and Strang shoved past him, racing to save his dog. Anderson let go of the quoit.

  Time slowed for a moment as they watched the small animal projectile, its legs stiffly outstretched, fall through the air in a long arc outwards from the side of the ship. Anderson stared, swaying, his lips stretched over his teeth in a panting grin.

  The boat’s propellers were churning the water around the stern into creamy foam. Spike hit the sea with a small splash and sank. A dark head surfaced for a moment and then disappeared. From shocked slow motion everything speeded up. Strang started to climb over the rail and Murray lunged forward to pull him back; Tucker threw a lifebuoy over the side; a voice shouted ‘Get the engines shut down;’ and in a rush of arms and legs Strang charged Anderson, knocking him to the deck, and leaping on top, pummelling his fists into the big face.

  Philip wanted Strang to kill Anderson, wanted to see Anderson’s face smashed to a pulp, Anderson’s blood running on the deck. His fists clenched. If Strang couldn’t do it, he’d be happy to do it for him. All the tension and fear aboard the ship came together in collective anger against Anderson. Men gathered in a tight circle shouting encouragement to Strang. ‘Get the bastard! Go on Rick, batter him!’ Another voice yelled into Philip’s ear. ‘Help me separate them.’ Jimmy’s voice.

  Two minutes later it was over. Jimmy looked at the two gasping men. ‘Will someone please explain what is going on?’

  Strang was struggling to hold back tears. ‘Bastard. Threw Spike over the side.’

  Anderson looked at Jimmy. ‘Didn’t intend to, sir. Stupid dog wouldn’t let go.’

  ‘And the dog’s dead?’

  There was a pause. Tucker looked at Strang. ‘I think the suction got him,’ he said.

  Jimmy spoke to the crowd. ‘Could the rest of you please disperse? I will deal with this.’ He walked over to the side of the ship, Tucker at his shoulder, speaking urgently.

  ‘Anderson’s a bastard. It was deliberate. I saw it.’

  ‘Drop it, Tucker!’

  Philip had never heard their CO sound so angry. Jimmy collected himself, speaking in a lower voice, ‘I don’t need to tell you, Edmund, or anyone else, that we can’t allow this incident to divide us.’

  ‘But Jimmy—’

  ‘Not now, above all. Is that understood? You two men must shake hands and forget about this.’ He walked over to Strang and patted his shoulder. I’m sorry, Rick. It can’t have been deliberate and you must remember it’s a dog. Only a dog.’ The boat’s engines had stopped and the pumps were going. Anderson put out a hand to Strang. Apart from blood trickling down from a split bottom lip, he looked completely relaxed. Strang touched the hand briefly with his own and turned his back.

  The scene of high drama was over, but the sick feeling in Philip’s stomach remained. He watched as Wilf Murray went over to comfort Strang, only to have the younger man jerk his body away. Philip felt Anderson had done something unforgivable, and it would bring bad luck.

  Jimmy Burns walked slowly back to his cabin, shut the door on his anxious men and opened one of several envelopes lying on his desk.

  Dear Jimmy,

  I am not much of a letter writer but orders are orders. I never thought of doing much else than following in Father’s line as a farmer. We have a hundred acres of middling land near Camelford and milk 60 head of Ayrshire cows, who are quarrelsome beasts but the milk is top quality. We also run a herd of Dorset horns up on the moor.

  I’ve always expected to carry on. The tradition round our way is for the oldest son to marry a local girl and move into a house nearby. I’d help Father and Mother and then, when they retire, take over the running of the place.

  I think I might find that a bit boring now. I’d never left Cornwall until the war, proper Cornwall, I mean, not this southern bit. I’ve enjoyed it a lot travelling around in training and seeing a bit of the country. I won’t forget those mountains in Scotland in a hurry.

  The truth is, Jimmy, I don’t know what I really want to do when this is over. I can’t picture past the next few days. I know farming, I have a way with animals, and I really enjoy blowing things up. Any suggestions?

  Yours truly,

  Richard (Strang)

  PS. Thanks for letting me have Spike aboard ship. Would you ask them to look after him till I get back? He gets meat and biscuit at around 5pm and a bit of milk in the mornings. I have said something already, but they will take more notice if it comes from you.

  When Philip woke at three a.m., Strang was not in his bunk. Philip found him on deck under a skyfull of stars, and in confiding mood. ‘I found Spike and looked after him, and that meant – I know it sounds stupid – Spike was going to look after me, you know, make sure I get back.’

  ‘Like a charm? A talisman?’

  ‘Trust you to know what to call it,’ said Strang with a smile.

  ‘I’ve got one of those, over there,’ Philip waved his arm towards the shore. Name of Rosie.’

  ‘The girl at the harbour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucky you. She’s gorgeous. I haven’t got a girl, leastways no one serious, so I’ve been out here saying goodbye to my family…in case…’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Anyroad, that one’s my dad.’ Strang pointed at a bright star low in the sky. ‘And that’s mother, right up there, see her? Ruling the roost like usual.’

  Isle of Wight, 1933

  At last, Philip’s mother tires of supervising his solitary game of croquet and he escapes, scrambling through the hole in the hedge on to the village green, where he finds Will Harvey sitting on the war memorial. They walk down to the stream together as awkward strangers. Two hours later, transformed into muddy, excited friends, they arrive at Will’s house with the dinosaur bones.

  ‘Mum?’ Will’s mother comes out of the back to greet them, her face shining with sw
eat. ‘This is Philip.’

  ‘I know who he is.’ She smiles and shakes her head when Philip holds out his hand. ‘I’m all sticky with jam.’ Philip follows Will through the main room to the dark scullery, where a copper pan full of red fruit steams on the stove. It all seems very small. The whole downstairs would fit into the rectory kitchen.

  Bert Harvey, watched intently by a brown-and-white spaniel, scratches up weeds in the vegetable patch, wielding the hoe with one large sunburnt hand, and shuffling the broken weeds away with his feet. The empty left sleeve of his shirt is pinned across his chest. Will tips the sack of bones on the ground and the dog sniffs excitedly at the largest one and starts to drag it away.

  ‘Stop him, Dad,’ says Will. ‘They’re dinosaur bones.’

  ‘Drop it Tressell!’ says Bert, and the dog releases the bone into his hand.

  ‘Ox,’ he says, running his thumb down the length. ‘Leg bone, this ’un. Old Barnes chucks his dead beasts in the stream. Saves himself the trouble of burying them.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ asks Philip.

  Bert explains the difference between bones and fossils and shows them where the bone fitted into the shoulder and the knee of the animal. Philip’s sorry when he stops speaking. ‘What did you do in the war, Mr Harvey?’

  ‘I blew things up.’ He looks steadily at Philip. ‘Then I got blown up myself. Served me right, you could say. Here Tressell.’ The dog bears off the bone in triumph to the bottom of the garden.

  Mrs Harvey comes out with a basket. Outside, and without a plate or napkin, Philip eats fresh bread smeared with skimmings of raspberry jam. Will’s big brothers return from fishing with a gigantic pike. After he’s seen and even felt the huge teeth, Will takes Philip upstairs to show him the box of treasures he keeps under his bed.

  The sun is going down by the time they part at the rectory gate. Philip looks back to see the sunset’s last blaze transform Will’s hovering form into an angel, fringed with gold.

  ‘You should never have gone into that house,’ Philip’s mother scolds. It seems she’s angry with him not for having disappeared for three hours, but for accepting hospitality from an unsuitable source. ‘Now we will have to invite the child here.’ Mrs Seymour writes a letter to Mrs Harvey, inviting William to visit between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. the following Wednesday.

  Will arrives looking completely different, his blond hair darkened with water and plastered to his scalp. Philip’s mother serves tea from the trolley in the drawing room, which she usually does only when the bishop comes. She slices the cake, iced on the top but not in the middle, and asks Will questions that echo around the room. How many are there living in that little house? Is his mother still cleaning for Mrs Erith? Will mumbles, nods, shakes his head, drops a piece of cake on the carpet. He seems lost in the huge flowery armchair. To Philip, it is as though his mother has put shrinking potion in the lemonade.

  Later, when his father comes home and asks cheerfully how it has gone, Philip can only say, ‘all right’, and this starts an argument between his parents that seems to be both about the Harveys and about something else. His mother murmurs about it being wrong to encourage further intimacy with a boy with such parents. The woman cleans and he is a gamekeeper, and worse, a Communist. His father says Bert Harvey is an intelligent man and a hero who lost his arm trying to save others at the Somme.

  She snaps, ‘Well. He was a godless hero then.’

  ‘But the war caused many to question their faith,’ dad says, and then mother shouts, ‘Yes, you could say for Bert Harvey, at least he is honest about losing his faith,’ after which everything goes quiet.

  Philip hates it when his mother and father argue because it makes him see the gap between them, a hole he alone, without any brothers and sisters, cannot bridge. That night, after he has asked Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to bless the bed that he lies on, his mother says, ‘It’s sad, isn’t it, when we find we don’t have so much in common with people as we thought?’ She kisses him goodnight on the forehead.

  Philip lies in the stiff cotton sheets listening to her feet going down the attic stairs and the tap of her wedding ring on the banister as she turns left at the bottom. He feels he belongs nowhere: not at school with all its stupid rules; and not in the village, for reasons that seem to be to do with his house being too big, of going away to school, his father being the rector.

  He pads across the room and kneels to gaze out of the bedroom window into the luminous summer evening. From this high up in the house it’s possible to see beyond the rectory’s garden to some of the cottages around the green. The corners where people are – eating, laughing, talking – glow softly, lamplit.

  13

  Aboard ML12: 26, 27, 28 March 1942

  Boarding the bloody thing only confirmed Philip’s loathing for the launch and his conviction that it was not up to the job. It was too small; it was made of wood; the huge tanks of extra fuel looked lethal. And just to improve his temper, orders from the Royal Navy meant they were to be treated like transported convicts and kept shut below for 36 hours, allowed up only for brief periods to receive instruction on firing the Lewis guns and Oerlikons. Well, that news comforted marvellous much, Philip felt like saying, because before he had been bustled below he had had time to see the firing positions were almost completely unprotected.

  Nothing was as it should be. The sun failed to shine, the sea lost its blueness, no hankies waved farewell from the harbour walls. Even the traditional yearning gaze ashore from the ship’s rail was denied them. Instead of the last of England as it blurred, faded and disappeared, the portholes below deck offered a sullen circle of grey sea.

  The twelve commandos – six from Jimmy’s demolition squad and another six from the assault party under Dixon – offloaded packs, settled themselves around tables and filled the cabin with cigarette smoke. The air was one of resentful gloom.

  ‘Cocky little bastard, wasn’t he?’ said Tucker.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That rating. The one who ordered us down here. What’s going on in your dreamy bonce now?’

  ‘I was thinking. Not much of a send-off, was it? But supposing we do pull it off and get in the papers, how would they write about it in The Times? Be a bit different I bet.’

  Murray chipped in. ‘Something like… “The brave little fleet finally weighed anchor at 1p.m. on 27th March…”’

  ‘“…adopting a course due south to confuse the enemy as to its intentions”,’ Philip added.

  Murray grinned. Unlike the rest of them he seemed in great good humour, and looked younger today, his face less lined, his hair less grey, almost as if he’d taken a draught of the elixir of youth so as to blend in with the rest of them.

  ‘Go on,’ Tucker said. ‘Listen to this, Rick.’

  Strang turned his blond head, but said nothing. He sat apart, which Philip interpreted as a sign of his determination to put as much distance as possible between himself and his dog’s killer. Strang’s face was pale beneath the freckles. The murderer Anderson was cleaning his nails with a penknife.

  ‘They always miss out the waiting bit, don’t they?’ Tucker said. ‘They got up, waited. Waited a bit more. Sat until their backsides were numb. I reckon I must of spent months waiting since I joined up. Go on Phil…’

  ‘“The audacious company comprised the cunningly disguised Campbeltown, 17 launches…”’

  ‘“…of dubious seaworthiness…”’

  ‘No, Murray, “…of solid British construction. Moulded from the finest mahogany by honest shipwrights of Clyde and Tyne. The plucky little fleet was accompanied by an escort of two destroyers…”’

  The boat rose as they hit rougher water and through the porthole Philip glimpsed the rounded stone of Pendennis Castle. They were at the harbour mouth. Some of the tea he’d drunk earlier found its way back into his mouth. He’d forgotten about seasickness. Another thing that wasn’t as it should be.

  Murray went on, ‘“Among the launches was ML 12, nick
named Unsinkable by her noble crew. Aboard her, Edmund What’s-for-dinner? Tucker; Richard Have-you-seen-my-cow? Strang’… ‘Philip God-bless- you-my-child Seymour—”’

  ‘Yeah, what was that all about, Seymour?’ Anderson interrupted.

  The chaplain had been quite overwhelmed by the demand for Holy Communion that morning and Philip had offered to help serve. He regretted it. All that fervent chewing had convinced him everyone thought they were going to die. He felt again the little dry wafer on his tongue and another little gush of returning tea. They must be well clear of the harbour by now. There was quite a swell.

  ‘Did you not know?’ Murray looked at Anderson. ‘Seymour’s father is a man of the cloth.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A vicar.’

  ‘Is that what you call your dad then, Phil?’ said Strang.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cloth?’

  ‘Need to put my head down for a minute.’

  ‘He’s feeling sick,’ Tucker pronounced. ‘Remember him out past the sandbanks that windy day? Puking his guts up he was.’

  Philip lay on the floor with his head on his pack. The smell of the engine made the nausea worse. He found a place on his rucksack that smelt salty from one of its many immersions in the sea, and buried his nose in it. Shut eyes. Swallow it down. What are you going to do when you meet Jerry? Sick up all over him? Funny how feeling sick took priority over everything, even fear. I don’t want to fight you. I just want to lie down on solid ground. Heil Hitler. That’s what I say.

  Above him, Tucker was keeping the conversation going.

  ‘Bet you all made promises, didn’t you?’

  ‘What was yours, Edmund?’ Murray enquired. ‘Safe passage in return for no more fornication?’

  ‘Not fornicating likely.’