by Leo Kessler
‘Aye? And how do we come into it?’
‘Very simple, A&D. We want bodies.’
‘Alive or dead?’
‘Alive, preferably,’ Keyes answered, ‘so that we can squeeze them. Then we can make a start at finding out what the Boche has planned in the way of an invasion of these here islands. We think that the Germans intend to invade across the shortest route – the Dunkirk, Calais area, heading for Kent. So we need some German prisoners from that area. You and a group of volunteers from your Commando are going to get those prisoners for us.’
The little Laird accepted the news calmly. After all it was the kind of assignment he had created his private army for in the first place. ‘And how are we gonna get there, Admiral?’
Keyes, hard-bitten VC that he was, hesitated a moment. He knew how much some people were affected by the mere mention of the word; he had seen six-foot four marines go green when they were told the means of transportation for the job ahead.
‘Sub!’ he said. And then, quickly, ‘Old Winnie thinks that a submarine is the safest means of getting across the Channel at the moment.’
‘Submarine?’ the Laird of Abernockie and Dearth croaked. ‘And Old Winnie thinks that's safe. Now I know I should never have voted conservative.’
CHAPTER 2
The September sun blazed down. The sea sparkled a glassy afternoon grey. On the beach the shingle swayed back gently, creaking under the weight of the surf and Berlin Lola, who was prancing around in the water, her underskirt tucked into the elastic of her art silk pink knickers. The others watched her in lazy admiration, nibbling at their chicken legs and sipping lukewarm champagne, thinking that she looked every bit like a white hippo.
Over the white smudge which was England, the planes twisted and turned silently, their flight marked solely by white vapour trails. It was a perfect day for a Sunday picnic.
Otto took his eyes off a group of stiff-legged black and white birds hurrying back and forth along the beach like men on crutches. Leaning back, he yawned lazily.
‘Could be a peacetime Sunday back on the Havel in Berlin, Count,’ he announced.
The Count looked up from his breviary which he was reading, occasionally mouthing the Latin phrases, almost as if he were tasting the sonorous syllables.
‘Oh… yes,’ he commented with surprising acidity for him, ‘just like a peacetime Sunday back home. Drinking champagne with four – er – grandes horizontales – and young men killing each other at two thousand metres in the sky over there. Very typical indeed.’
Next to him the consumptive whore Trina, who was slightly tipsy, lolled against the Count and breathed, ‘Oh, Herr Graf, you do speak so lovely. I could just sit here all day and watch your mouth… drinking in your words.’
Otto took the half-bottle of champagne from her skinny fingers and said severely, ‘Yeah, and that’s all you're gonna be drinking in for the rest of this afternoon. Remember you’ve got the evening shift at Calais, and you know what this sea air does to the field-greys.’
The Count sighed again and Otto said, ‘Now don’t come crying stinking fish again, Count. That was what this picnic was about. To take your mind off things for a while.’
‘But how can I, Otto?’ The Count clapped his pudgy, well-manicured hand to his temple dramatically, his bright white eyes bulging out of his head like hard-boiled eggs. ‘Tell me how!’
‘Look, just tell me exactly what the problem is.’
‘The absolute ennui of everything, Otto. Something must happen soon, or I shall go stark raving mad, I promise you.’ As if in answer to his threat, it was at that moment that Berlin Lola fell into a rock pool and emerged laughing happily, pulling off her pink knickers to wring them out, and revealing a tremendous area of white flesh.
‘See, Count,’ Otto seized the opportunity offered him while the others laughed. ‘That’s something, ain’t it? You don’t see an arse like that every day of the week, even on Sundays, do you?’
‘No,’ the Count was forced to agree, ‘young Lola is amply endowed.’ Once again he gave one of his tragic sighs. ‘But it is not the flesh, I seek, Otto.’
‘Well, the only other thing on offer is this sodding war!’ Otto said in exasperation. ‘I’m going to hit the pit for half an hour.’ He lay back in the sand and closed his eyes. Within a few minutes he was snoring softly. The Count stared down at his handsome face which had never seen defeat, only victory for a few moments. Then, being the kindly man he was, he took off his shovel hat and tilted the brim against the sleeping man’s head to keep the sun off his face.
He sat there surrounded by the sleeping, snoring company, watching the silent planes looping and curling over England, as their pilots attempted to kill each other, and wished sadly that he was young again.
Lieutenant Brice-Jones, captain of His Majesty’s Submarine Redwater, known throughout the Royal Navy as ‘HMS Red Piss’, thrust back his cap and commanded, ‘Up periscope.’
The electric motor whirred and effortlessly the long tube steered for the surface, while the Laird watched the procedure, hollow-eyed and green-faced, quietly vomiting into the standard issue sick bag. The sea had been perfectly calm all the way from Portsmouth, but as the little Laird had moaned to his Second-in-Command, the Hon Freddie Rory-Brick (or ‘Red Prick’ as the men of the Laird’s Command called him behind his back), ‘Me, I’d get bloody sick going across Hackney Bridge, I would!’
The others waited in tense expectation, the sound of the submarine’s electric motors dimmed almost to nothing.
Brice-Jones, his cap thrust back to front so that he looked like an early flier, swung the periscope round the clock, a puzzled look on his face until finally he said satisfied, ‘Found it!’
‘That’s a relief,’ the Laird said thickly.
The captain stepped back and ordered Down Periscope and then, ‘Take her up,’ before turning to the waiting commandos to say, ‘You see I’ve never been abroad before, chaps. The war started the year we should have done our cruise at Dartmouth. But this looks like the place to me.’ He stared around the heavily armed commandos, their faces blackened with boot polish so that they looked like a group of pre-war black minstrels.
‘So this is the drill. We launch you now, dive, and rendezvous at twenty hundred hours.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘Shall we – ’
‘Circumcise our watches,’ the Laird cut in angrily. ‘Come off it, laddie, let’s get this show on the road!’
Five minutes later the commandos started to scale the ladder into the conning tower. When it came to the Laird’s turn, he held up his overlong kilt and began to ascend with difficulty, still giddy from seasickness.
At the base of the ladder, one of the ratings breathed in awe as the wind caught the Laird’s kilt and blew it upwards, ‘Airy, ain’t it?’
‘What did yer expect,’ the Laird snarled, ‘feathers?’
‘It’s a bit light up here, Colonel, I’m afraid,’ the fresh-faced young captain apologized when the Laird clambered up beside him.
‘A bit light!’ the Laird exclaimed, squinting in the late afternoon sunshine that blazed on the perfectly calm sea, ‘Christ, it’s like bloody Wembley Stadium in the middle of a cup-final! Trust old otter-face Keyes to choose daylight for the mission. Now where’s the outskirts of Calais?’ he asked, knowing that they were a sitting duck out here if a German plane spotted them.
‘I think over there – to the left somewhere,’ the captain said, flushing a little. ‘Perhaps I did make a slight miscalculation, after all.’ He bit his bottom lip.
The Laird swept the coastline. It was empty of any kind of habitation. He stopped himself from exploding just in time. He knew now after a year of war that operations of this kind never turned out as planned and besides he was a kind man at heart; he didn’t want to take it out on the embarrassed young naval officer.
Instead he said, ‘All right, Captain, get those jolly tars mobile with the boats,’ and turned to his men, muttering something about a lo
t of soft nellies with double-barrelled names who wore silk pyjamas.
Five minutes later the four canvas boats were on their way with the captain waving them goodbye from the conning tower and the Laird snorting, ‘You’d think we was off on a day trip to Margate!’
Otto dreamed. Perhaps it was due to the wine and the hot sun, but it wasn’t one of his usual dreams, full of compliant big-breasted women, who were only too eager to jump into bed with him. Instead it fringed on a nightmare, a mixture of fact and fantasy.
The location was Stralsund, where he had lived with his grandparents when his mother, ‘the Witch’, had gone on the trot in his native Berlin. She was earning her money as a lady of the night, or any time of day if it made her cash. Back then he had seen himself as a cocky, blond-haired Hitler Youth, complete with sam-browne and dagger.
Perhaps it was because it had been Hitler’s Birthday, 20 April, but after the speeches and the parades and the eating and drinking, his troop of the Hitler Youth had gone on a private rampage in what was left of Stralsund’s Jewish quarter.
They had found poor old Mayer, with his humpback and his carpet slippers, the front of his shabby waistcoat stuck full of pins and needles, and stained from years of dribbling his soup – the only Jew to venture out that fine April day. But then Mayer had always been regarded as slightly touched in the head; didn’t he give credit to sailors?
Rolf, the leader of Otto's Hitler Youth troop, a burly sixteen year old who could flip dry peas off the end of his erection to a distance of twenty metres, much to the admiration of the younger members of the troop who were still trying to achieve the first stage of that particular trick, had been the one that had made the suggestion. ‘Let’s get the old Yid’s pants down and have a look at a Jewish undercarriage, eh!’
The young boys had taken up the suggestion with delight. Surrounding the old tailor before he could shuffle off in his battered, ancient slippers. They had whipped out their ceremonial daggers, slashed through his braces, the buttons of his underpants, and left him standing there sobbing softly, exposed to their ribald comments.
Abruptly Otto had felt ashamed. He had never seen a grown man cry before and it hadn’t seemed right that boys of eleven and twelve could do this sort of thing to an elderly man. Schulz, the fat-bellied local policeman had sauntered by. Otto hoped he would put an end to this torture, but the only comment he had made, at the sight of children taunting the half-naked adult, was: ‘Now let that be a warning to you kids. If yer don’t behave yerself, the old uncle doctor’ll have to cut a bit off your willies too!’ And he had sauntered on his way, laughing at his own humour.
‘Now then, you Yiddish garden-dwarf,’ Rolf had chortled, complete master of the situation, ‘now we’re gonna see you bend over and receive a spanking from the Hitler Youth.’ He waved his dagger, ‘Or else, one dong is gonna to be a little shorter, if that’s possible with that dingle-dangle you’ve got down th – ’
He had never finished the threat, for Otto had slammed into him and started punching at Rolf's face with all his strength. The riot had started, with all Otto's one-time comrades piling onto him, slapping him across the face, crashing their boots viciously into his ribs until he had blacked out. The last thing he remembered was seeing the pale humble Jew’s face with the tears streaming down it helplessly.
One day later he had run away from his grandparents’ home, with its Hitler picture next to the crucifix, and fled back to Berlin to a life of petty crime, motivated by one thing: he would never serve the Hitler system, that vulgar, cruel, booted, brown-shirted terror which transformed boy scouts into sadists and perverts.
And now, years later, Otto mumbled and groaned in his sleep, as in his dreams he was confronted by thousands of old Mayers without their trousers. The beads of sweat gleamed on his handsome, sleeping face, while the Count stroked his head, muttering softly, ‘Take it easy, Otto… take it easy, my boy… It’s only a bad dream.’
They crept, slipping on the seaweed covered rocks, among the burnt-out, rusting fifteen-hundredweight trucks and smashed Bren gun carriers, abandoned by the fleeing British Expeditionary Force three months before, some of them still bearing the proud boasts of 1939 on their sides.
‘We're gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘Berlin or Bust!’
‘I'm coming Adolf,’ the Laird commented sourly. ‘And I know where – not in Berlin!’ He clambered over a stretch of rocks, and paused on the shingle beyond to stare up at the white chalk cliff that now confronted them. A gasping Freddie Rory-Brick halted next to him and stared upwards just in the same instant that a low-flying gull dropped a blob of white on his monocle. ‘I say,’ he said in disgust, ‘doesn’t make a fellow very welcome, does it?’
‘Perhaps it was a Hun seagull,’ the Laird said unfeelingly. ‘All right, lads, I’ve had enough of this lark, tarting around all over the place. I think we’re lost. Let’s get to the top of that cliff and have a shufti where we’re at, cos if I go farting around in the briny much longer, I’m gonna develop web feet.’
Hastily the three sergeants who were in charge of the grapnels broke out their equipment and, when they were ready, flashed a look at the little officer in his wet kilt.
‘Fire!’ he commanded.
The NCOs pressed their triggers. There were three soft belches followed by little puffs of white smoke. The three shining metal grapnels burst upwards, heading for the top of the cliff, followed by a hundred feet of snaking, quivering white rope.
Clang!
The first hook hit the top and bit metallically into the chalk. Then the second. The third hit the top and tumbled down again, clattering from rock to rock.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the NCO, whose grapnel hadn't found its mark, apologized, ‘I don’t think I’ve got my eye in this afternoon.’
‘Yer, and I don’t think you’ve got yer finger out either. But no matter, two will do. All right, laddies, up you go. I’m going up last. I’m not having any of you randy sods looking up my skirt again.’
The men laughed shortly and then they were scrambling up the ropes at a great rate, hardly seeming to touch the cliff with their boots as they scurried to the top like black-faced monkeys.
‘Bash on, Jocks!’ the Laird chortled. Carried away by a sudden enthusiasm, he scrambled after them, his wet kilt riding high up his skinny shanks unnoticed. A few minutes later he and Freddie were lying in the hot, cropped turf at the top of the cliff, panting hard, staring through their binoculars – at nothing but countryside.
‘Where’s Calais, sod it?’ the Laird gasped.
‘Well, it really ought to be here somewhere or other, sir,’ his second-in-command said. ‘I mean that naval chappie promised us it would be, didn’t he?’
‘Oh put the wood in the ‘ole, Freddie,’ the Laird snarled.
‘Just trying to help, sir,’ the former Scots Guards officer said in an offended voice. ‘That’s all.’
‘Dammit, I didn’t mean it, Freddie! Stop making me feel bad,’ the Laird said, raising his glasses once more and sweeping the countryside to his right, covering each inch carefully until finally his binoculars ran along a low cliff leading down to a small secluded beach. He gasped abruptly and then with fingers that trembled slightly, hurriedly adjusted them. There was no mistaking it, that monstrous area of white female flesh which filled the gleaming circles of calibrated glass!
‘What is it, sir?’ Freddie asked urgently at his side, while the commandos tensed, fingers on their triggers at once. ‘Jerries?’
For a moment the little Laird did not answer, then he said in an awed voice, his eyes still glued to the glasses, ‘No, Freddie. Not Jerries, but the biggest piece of female arse I’ve ever seen this side of Whipsnade Zoo!’
CHAPTER 3
Freddie whistled softly.
‘It looks as if they've been having a picnic or something. Hardly patriotic, what?’ He lowered his glasses from the sleeping figures and the huge pair of bloomers drying in the wind, looking
like a small art silk bell-tent. ‘I mean there is a war on, right?’
‘Get off it, Freddie!’ the Laird said. ‘All of England has probably spent this weekend in the boozers, betting on the gee-gees and watching twenty-two strapping lads who claim they’re C-3 unfit for active service, chasing after a soccer ball. You don’t want to believe all that Churchill “we’ll fight them on the beaches” stuff, old cock. If they invaded Arsenal Football Club, our lads might well fight, but not before.’
‘I suppose you’re right, sir,’ Freddie said a little unhappily and sniffed. ‘What now?’
‘You speak the lingo, so don’t stand there like one-of-each waiting for vinegar. Get over there and ask ‘em.’
‘Ask them what, sir?’
‘Where the ruddy Jerries are, you silly sod.’
‘But sir,’ Freddie protested, flushing with embarrassment, ‘we’re commandos. We’re supposed to be storming up the beach! You know, giving the Boche a taste of the cold steel.’
‘Give them a taste of yer French – that’ll be worse,’ the Laird said drily.
‘But one of the ladies is… er… without undergarments too, sir,’ Freddie added unhappily.
‘Get on with it,’ the Laird hissed. ‘Me and the Jocks’ll cover ye. Now blow!’
Miserably, Major the Hon Freddie Rory-Brick ‘blew’.
The Count looked up from his Latin prayer book, while all around him, Otto and the girls continued to snore open-mouthed, their faces red with the heat and the wine. A tall, skinny man in uniform was walking towards him across the sand, his face, for some reason, painted black.
The Count frowned and squinted into the late afternoon sun. Did the strange man belong to some sort of Goebbels’ concert party, he wondered, sent from Berlin to entertain the bored field-greys of the coastal positions on a long Sunday? Then he dismissed the idea. Goebbels wouldn’t have tolerated a German painting his face black. After all, Negroes were equated with apes in Berlin these days.
