INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘They live down the far end of the road, in those mock Tudor houses,’ Judith said.

  ‘We have been clearing our loft,’ Louise told Jacov. ‘Have you got much in yours?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been up there.’

  ‘Then you must investigate. Just think – it is probably full of the clutter of past owners since time immemorial.’

  ‘From 1880, at least,’ her father said.

  Louise shrugged – this being time immemorial as far as she was concerned.

  ‘We’ve emptied out the dressing-up trunk,’ Claire said. ‘Do you think the film studios would like some of the clothes?’

  ‘I could ask them.’ He would never remember to do it, but both he and Claire thought the matter settled.

  Alice came and sat beside Jacov. ‘That beautiful scarf you gave me wasn’t in the trunk,’ she assured him. ‘I shall never throw that away.’

  He squeezed her hand, and they sat feeling close in spirit while Jacov tried to remember what scarf she was talking about. After a few moments, he said, ‘How handsome you look in your officer’s uniform.’

  ‘I’m not an officer, Jacov. Just a Wren.’

  ‘But you are most handsome all the same. Will you come out with me?’

  ‘Would you take me to the Berkeley?’

  ‘Of course. I would be proud to accompany you.’

  She looked at him to see whether he was making fun of her or himself. It did not really matter. Nothing mattered when one was with Jacov, and anything seemed possible – even dining at the Berkeley. She turned to the Pilot Officer, meaning to explain to him that Jacov was a very old family friend, but it was not necessary because he was listening to Claire talk about the moral stature of Sir Stafford Cripps. Claire’s idea of attracting a man was to let him know how clever she was.

  Louise said, ‘I’m going to make tea.’ She put a hand on her mother’s shoulder. ‘Don’t come fussing around me. I can manage.’

  After a few minutes, Mr Fairley followed her into the kitchen.

  ‘Are you feeling mis?’ he asked, reverting to the language of her childhood miseries.

  Gratefully, she confessed, ‘Isn’t it stupid? Just seeing Claire and Alice, each with a man by them . . .’

  He handed her the tea caddy. ‘It won’t be like it was in the trenches. They’ll never throw life away on that scale again.’

  He seldom spoke of the bad times; and, herself an optimist, Louise accepted his comfort. Lives would be lost, even if not in their millions, but Guy would survive. Belief in survival was a necessary part of surviving.

  ‘I wish I had more to do,’ she said. ‘Men have all the doing. I bet Mummy missed you more than you missed her – you were too busy trying to keep alive.’

  It was nearly midnight when the Pilot Officer left. Alice went down to the front gate with him. It was quiet now. In the sky, a single searchlight lazily exercised itself. ‘I hope you didn’t find it too dull,’ she said.

  ‘Dull!’ It seemed he was delighted with the eccentricities of her home life.

  ‘We’re really very ordinary,’ she assured him. But he insisted it was all quite bizarre. It amused Alice, who had spent so much of her childhood in search of the bizarre, that someone should think she might have found it at home.

  Ted Peterson died in the Rifle Brigade’s gallant stand at Calais. There was little alternative but to be gallant, since it had been decided there should be no withdrawal – time was needed, and the defenders of Calais must buy it. He felt no bitterness, but an intense surprise when eventually he realized that for him this was the end of the affair: so messy and inconclusive. As life drained away – he took a long time to die – he thought about Alice and coffee at Zeeta’s. He was trying to catch the waitress’s eye; dimly, he could hear Alice saying, ‘It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter, now.’ His mind circled as he struggled intensely with the waitress, and the voice kept repeating ‘it doesn’t matter, now . . .’ Then he was on the rugger pitch, struggling through mud with a leaden ball at his chest, and all around there were people telling him it didn’t matter, now. But he would not relinquish the struggle, so convinced was he that something did matter, if only he could hold on to it.

  Guy Immingham, in the Field Artillery, had also been buying time, engaged in manoeuvres to halt the oncoming German Army. But he was more fortunate than Ted. His division was ordered to withdraw from Lille at a time when it seemed likely that it would be completely cut off. They fell back in what Guy supposed would be described as ‘good order’. The corridor to the sea was still open and they headed for Dunkirk.

  It seemed to Guy that he had been under attack for as long as he could remember. As when one is sick, one has no memory of good health; or the summer seems a mere fantasy in the iron grip of winter; so exhaustion and confusion had become the natural condition of life. Nothing beyond his immediate duties made sense, and it wasn’t always easy to make sense of them, either. Defeat was something for which he was unprepared. He believed in his country in much the same way as he believed in his school and his marriage. He equated all three with the Right Way. His life had been quiet and well-ordered and it had never occurred to him that Right would not triumph. As the transport rolled through the night, he looked at the crowds of refugees, cluttering the roads, only moving out of the way as the wheels of a truck brushed against them, some shaking their fists and crying out abuse which the driver returned with interest. These are the people we are fighting for, he thought in bewilderment. What will happen to them when we are gone?

  In the dawn light he glanced across open fields stretching towards the horizon. He was visited by the delusion, as beguiling as the mirage in the desert, that somewhere out there was a place that would be utterly quiet, where not a blade of grass would stir; a place where one could lie and breathe in the good smell of the earth. In a brief moment of imagination, he understood that a man might desert, not because he was a coward, but because no price was too high to pay for a few moments’ peace and quiet. Of course, he felt no such temptation. This was a foreign countryside haunted by unknown tribes with alien customs; he felt safer with his own kind – quite apart from the fact that he preferred death to dishonour.

  By the time they reached Dunkirk, they were well aware that they were involved in retreat on a large scale. Even so, they were staggered by their first sight of the beaches. ‘They’re never going to get this lot away from here,’ a sergeant said to Guy.

  Guy replied firmly, ‘Something will happen.’

  It will take a miracle!’

  Guy believed in miracles.

  In the Channel, a naval officer looked down from the bridge of his destroyer at a paddle steamer waddling like a pregnant duck with a motley brood of ferries, tugs and small motor cruisers. ‘Strewth! I reckon we’ve got everything that can float down there!’

  There were times when it did not seem enough. Guy was a long time on the beach. ‘It was like waiting for the last bus, afraid that the queue exceeds the passenger capacity,’ he told Louise later. ‘But I was always sure I would get away.’

  The Poles, in whose company he was eventually taken aboard a pleasure steamer, had no such confidence. As they saw it. Englishmen were being saved in preference to foreigners; they forced their way on to the boarding craft at gun point. One of them had eyes staring from his head, as though something in his mind had blown, permanently dislocating his features and distending the eyes outwards. Guy, looking at him, felt he was seeing a man’s sanity peeling off like skin from a burn.

  He watched the line of the sea rising and falling gently, and the pattern of shells and searchlights. It was not Death who seemed now to be the enemy, but the constant bombardment of noise, and too-brilliant light flashes. The sound of the guns began to form into a rhythm, accentuated by the darting light, like a demoniacal patter song. He realized that if he did not break this relentless rhythm of the mind, it would be there always. From the depths of his being he wrenched up the counter-rh
ythm of the psalms – ‘God is our hope and strength, a very present help in time of trouble . . .’ It was a battle as desperate as any he had so far fought.

  The pupils of Winifred Clough Day School for Girls had evacuated to Dorset. Over 300,000 men had been evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches. Temporary arrangements had to be made to rest exhausted troops. Some were sent to Dorset.

  This raised a delicate issue for Miss Blaize. Her pupils had been left in no doubt that their future role was to serve the community; and they saw no reason why this should not immediately be interpreted in terms of ministering to soldiers. Certainly, Miss Blaize would not have wished it to be said of her girls that they had flinched from their duty. The question resolved itself into what, in these circumstances, constituted duty? The soldiers, having passed through an unpleasant experience, might express themselves in a manner unsuited to the ears of schoolgirls; might, in the heightened emotional situation, go so far as to make gestures, even demands . . . Miss Blaize would not have said of Tommy Atkins ‘chuck him out, the brute’, but she was not wholly of the ‘thin red line of heroes’ persuasion. She decided that it would be acceptable for the older girls to help in the canteen, provided they remained in the kitchen, and were not exposed directly to the soldiery.

  Claire’s friend, Heather Mason, went to the canteen in the company of the two Misses Courtenay with whom she was billeted. She had no intention of obeying Miss Blaize’s directive. She could not imagine her working-class mother hiding herself in the kitchen in such a crisis. Heather was not patriotic in Miss Blaize’s terms – ‘sod the Union Jack!’ was her response to flag-waving. She was, however, deeply concerned for ‘our lads’. In her mind’s eye, she peopled the army with the faces of ‘our Jim’ and ‘our Harry’ – hundreds of thousands of dear, familiar faces, all turned towards her. She longed to cheer and comfort them.

  She was a tall, bony girl whose body seemed always to be making gestures of nonconformity towards whatever clothes she wore. She had none of the demure prettiness of many of her schoolmates. Her skin was poor, and she had a big mouth from which words tended to tumble all too recklessly. Her main claim to attention – and a sufficient one – was her violet-blue eyes. No polite indifference masked Heather’s feelings. Whatever her mood, it was expressed immediately in the eyes – teachers who had displeased her were startled by their angry glitter, just as they were alerted to pranks by the eyes’ unholy glee. While the WVS ladies contrived to look unconcerned as they worked in the stinking, steaming room, and turned a gentle, cowlike gaze on the soldiers, Heather gaped her horror and revulsion. It seemed it was just one face that was before her, a face that belonged in a macabre pantomime, caked in white clay with razor-cut lines beneath eyes and mouth. In contrast to the deadness of the skin, the red-rimmed eyes burnt like hot coals.

  ‘Go away, if you don’t like it, dear,’ the elder Miss Courtenay said quietly. ‘But don’t let them see you looking like that. They still have their pride, you know.’

  She did not know. She saw no sign of pride or of any human feeling. She did as Miss Blaize had requested; she went into the kitchen, and helped at the sink. As she was leaving with the Misses Courtenay, more men were arriving. At first, they all looked the same; then, she found a particular face taking shape in her mind. Before anyone could stop her she had rushed up to one of the men.

  ‘I’m Heather Mason,’ she cried urgently, shaking his arm. ‘Claire’s friend.’

  He looked at her, stupefied. She thought he had not taken in what she was saying, that the Misses Courtenay would come and hustle her away before she could make him understand. Then the blistered mouth began to work, and at last words came. ‘Tell Louise I’m safe.’

  ‘Oh, I will! I will!’ She spoke as though she would surely jump on a horse and ride through the night. In fact, she wrote to Louise, assuring her that ‘they all look pretty awful, but he’s no worse than any of the others.’

  For this assurance, Louise was duly grateful.

  When Guy came home-on leave he tried to persuade Louise to take the children to her maternal grandparents in Cornwall for the duration of the war. This she refused to do. In her opinion, air raids were likely to be a less exacting experience than minute-to- minute contact with one’s kith and kin, however well-loved. As hers was the stronger personality, her view prevailed over Guy’s.

  Guy was uneasy on other counts than the safety of his wife and children. He had always been resentful of anything in Louise’s life which he could not share. He did not object to her close family ties, since he himself was now accepted in the family circle. Music was another matter. Music meant a lot to Louise and nothing to him. When she went to a concert, or even when she played the gramophone at home, he was aware that she had drifted into a territory he could not enter. He could tell from her absorbed face that this was where her treasure lay. That she should find joy where he had no place, filled him with dismay and a sense of betrayal. He had no joy other than in her and the children. He loved her so much he would not have entered the Kingdom of Heaven without her beside him, hand in his. He found excuses for turning off the gramophone, and when she wanted to go to a concert he would discover that this happened to be the only evening he could take her to a film they both wanted to see.

  Now he would be away for a long time, perhaps for as long as a year. If she remained in London, he would find it hard to imagine what she was doing at any given moment. The secret places of her life would be extended; not only might she be attending concerts, but engaging in a number of other activities which he, by virtue of his absence, could not share. While he had been at work in London, he had not worried about what she did in his absence; his only thought had been that she would be there with the children when he returned from the office. But now that he would no longer see her each evening, it became very important to feel that in some way he was still in her life. If she was in Falmouth, he could imagine her doing things which he himself enjoyed – accompanying her grandfather to the harbour, taking the children for country walks, perhaps going over on the ferry to St Mawes where he himself had spent so many happy holidays . . . And not much in the way of music.

  ‘You get on with winning the war,’ was all that she would say when he tried to persuade her. ‘I shall manage very well.’ But he did not want her to manage as well as that.

  Jacov Vaseyelin, who was with them on one occasion when Guy was on leave, said, ‘I will look after her.’ They all laughed. They had known one another a long time, and were aware that Jacov, gentle and endearing though he might be, was not very good at looking after people. It was in the Vaseyelins’ house that Guy and Louise had conceived their first child, and brought such shame on themselves and their families. While Guy had no regrets about his marriage, he now felt ashamed of their first sexual encounter. Jacov was undoubtedly a bad influence. He would not, of course, see himself in that light. He was much too unassertive to try to influence anyone; nor did he care sufficiently about people or ideas to wish to manipulate. It was his lack of knowledge of the rules which governed society that made Jacov an undesirable companion. Guy’s perceptions seldom ran to anything as dangerous as danger; but the more he thought about Jacov, the more he came to believe that he was a dangerous person. There was something of the clown in him. And while clowns were all very well in a circus, who would want one let loose in his home – a person in whose hands everything tended to come apart?

  Guy returned to his unit. The country awaited Hitler’s next move with more composure than its circumstances would seem to warrant. Defeat had indeed become a miracle. Ben saw an American documentary film showing goose-stepping soldiers marching across a map of Europe. First Norway was branded with the swastika, then Holland, then Belgium, and France. The marching men assembled at the Channel. But a hand came out in a gesture which said ‘So far, and no further!’ There was a glimpse of the naval sleeve with two rings of gold braid. The people in the cinema cheered. Ben thought, ‘If I don’t get involved in this now, I�
��m going to be left out of something all my generation is experiencing.’ He did not think the Navy would suit his style. He opted for the Army – there was no false nonchalance about the Army.

  Churchill said, ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets . . .’

  Down came the street names, the signposts, the names of railway stations. Up went the street blocks, the anti-tank posts. Weapons of surprising ingenuity were conjured up out of household articles.

  Jacov, who looked foreign, and whose phraseology was sometimes unEnglish, suffered at this time. He was sent down to Sussex with a film unit to do a documentary for the Ministry of Information. He lost his way in the small market town, and went into the post office to ask for directions to the council offices. No one would oblige him. The clerks gazed mutely at a poster which read ‘Careless talk costs lives’. Soon after he left the post office, he was approached by a policeman who had obviously been warned about him. Even after the production of his identity card, he was regarded with suspicion. It was the mention of film work which saved him. Allowances were apparently made for film people, who were notoriously eccentric. Moreover, several foreign actors had ‘chosen’ England. The atmosphere became jovial; and Jacov and the policeman parted company after exchanging the names of Anton Walbrook and Conrad Veidt.

  It was the same story in the house where he was temporarily lodged. ‘Did you see The Mortal Storm – just before war began?’ his landlady asked him. Jacov, willing to please, said he thought he remembered it.

  ‘Oh, that ending, when James Stewart carried Margaret Sullavan across the frontier! Dead, she was, of course. I cried for a week after that.’ She paused, a duster in her hand, and stared out of the window where a cattle truck full of land army recruits was passing slowly by. ‘Freya, wasn’t that her name? Lovely, she was!’