Close Quarters

by Thomas Wood

  I prayed that would be enough to get them waved through.

  “What now?” I asked, trying to break the silence that was doing nothing for the state of my mind.

  Mike chewed on his lip as he thought for a moment, “Down here, at the end of the hill. We’ll park up. There’s a café. With any luck they’ll stay on this road in the hope of finding us. We should be able to see them coming.”

  “Think that’ll work?”

  “Well, put it this way, when we hear gunshots then we’ll know what’s happened.”

  I looked at my feet in dejection, my face fallen. I had been quite looking forward to meeting someone else who had been sent by London, and now it seemed I would have to wait.

  I looked up from my bland but comfortable footwear.

  “Oh well, at least we won’t have to find that chap a suitable pair of shoes.”

  Mike chuckled, as he looked across at me and shrugged. It was the only way that we could deal with such bad news. We were still alive, so we had to carry on as normal.

  6

  It felt quite normal to be back in a place that I had known for so long, the quaint shops where everyone had known my name and the benches where I had shared many a conversation with good friends and family.

  Richmond had been my home for as long as I could remember, and it had been the last place that I had been able to be myself. No war, no lies, no death.

  As I walked through the square, that was normally bustling with shuffling feet and chipper voices, I felt quite at peace. Everything seemed normal.

  Not just normal for this war, but normal in every sense of the word. There was nothing that set it apart from its peacetime persona, everything was just as it was in the early spring of 1939.

  Slowly, I picked up my pace, until I was charging along at quite a speed, my legs feeling as though I would soon outpace myself and end up flat on my face. There was nothing for me to be running towards, nor from, but I felt compelled to do so.

  The bombs that had been a signature of my last time in Richmond were non-existent, there was nothing but the sound of my shoes clapping on the pavement as I thundered along. There was not even a sound of repeating steps from behind me as I had come to remember, it was just me. Mike was not alongside me this time and, in a way, I was glad. I had always regretted dragging him along with me.

  I skidded to a halt at the end of a street, its sign now masked by a cloud of dust that had risen up over it. But I knew where I was, I had been there many times before.

  There was nothing of the street, other than the road itself, with a pavement running down either side of it. But there were no houses, no other notable buildings, just an eerie dust. The cloud seemed to enshroud everything and envelop it all in its embrace. That was true of everything, apart from a small mound that I could see about halfway down and to the right of the street, where something had spilt onto the pavement, ruining the peace of the road.

  “You can’t go down there, son,” said a voice, whose face suddenly filled my vision. He was a portly gentleman, with the air of a university professor but the personal hygiene of a vagabond. His face was dark and muddied, made darker still by the clouds that rolled around an unlit midnight sky.

  I stared the Home Guard Captain down for as long as I dared, as if inspecting his uniform and he mine. Both of us were covered in a layer of dust that made our uniforms a grey colour, altogether quite bland and neutral.

  “But I live here. This is my home.”

  “No one lives here, son. You can’t go down there,” he repeated, just as monotone as before.

  I shoved him to one side with fervour and great force, not caring what happened to him as I did so.

  I was precarious as I moved, not wanting to cause any more damage to the street with my clapping footsteps that echoed out, as if I was in some sort of a cavern.

  The streetlights were on, highlighting particles of dust as they flickered through the air, and were breathed into my lungs, making my throat itch.

  The closer I got to the mound, the more that I could make out from the rubble. There were broken bits of furniture; a dressing table, a writing desk and a child’s rocking cot. All were smashed and broken, splintered wood garnishing the mound sombrely.

  Then, as I drew closer, a silent wind puffed out its cheeks to remove a particularly dense cloud of dust. The smell of detonated ordnance finally registered in my nostrils, a twisted stench of burning wood settling underneath and catching at the back of my throat.

  The pale canvas of greying mist intensified, as if to angle a light onto the top of the rubble, drawing all my attention to it.

  I resisted the temptation and turned to see what had happened to the Home Guard man who had tried to stop me. But he had vanished. There was nothing but the dust, getting thicker, closing in.

  I turned back to the mound, knowing full well that I would have to look at it sooner or later. It was not my first time here, and I was certain it would not be my last.

  My hand quivered as I looked at them, as it always did. My lip starting to tremble in unison and the ground beneath me turning to liquid as I struggled to stand upright.

  I crawled up the rubble, kicking bits of my home to the bottom of the pile, not caring an ounce for the things that I had built up in my life.

  There, on the top of the mound were two bodies, lifeless ones. I was sobbing before I could even see their faces, which became obscured by the tears that rushed to fill my eyes.

  Both faces were unblemished, but pale, their lifeless corpses seemingly the only thing untouched by the plethora of dust clouds that had formed all around. They both, had it not been for the icy cold finish to their skin, appeared to be fast asleep, quite at peace with everything and oblivious to the anguish that was billowing in my heart.

  I was happy, in a sense, that that was how it was as, had it been the other way around, I would have been driven to torment at the pain that they had been in. I was grateful too for the merciful way in which they had perished. It had been quick and, if I was to believe the old tale, they would not have heard the bomb that had hit them.

  It did not prevent the inevitable though and, as I let out a ghoulish wail, like that of a wounded animal, I felt quite dethatched from my own body, staring at the three figures, lying next to one another. I was desperate to stay there with them both, so that I would not have to experience the forthcoming anguish at being left alone.

  “No no…Grace…My wife…Don’t be gone. Henry, Henry, no!”

  The whole scene was suddenly swallowed up in a black hole, as I found myself staring into the whites of a man’s eyes, sad and concerned.

  “Johnny. You’re not there. You’re here. With me.” I watched as Mike stepped backwards from me warily, as if I was a grenade that had failed to detonate. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, that was burning dangerously close to his skin, as a sprinkling of ash fell to the floor as he sat down in the chair opposite me.

  My body, still twitching and convulsing from the dream, was seeped in perspiration, as if I had just taken a full-body bath. I was cold and the tips of my fingers had turned a deep purple akin to a bruise.

  “Here,” he said, passing me a glass with a measure of liquid in it. I threw it down my neck in one go, thinking it would alleviate some of my thirst but instead doing nothing but irritate it. “Scotch,” Mike remarked. “Andrew and Christopher brought it with them.”

  I let my mind settle for a moment as I tried to recall the faces of the two names. Then it clicked, Christopher had been the small, pointed man with large spectacles, his bespoke shoes regrettably thrown into the first fire we could find. Andrew, his tall and muscular accomplice, seemed the complete antithesis of his comrade.

  “Those dreams of yours,” Mike announced, lighting himself another cigarette flamboyantly and pointing it towards me in between his two fingers. “They’re becoming more frequent.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” I begged, shuffling around and feeling more areas of m
y body doused in sweat.

  “They’re happening too much, old fruit.”

  “I can’t help them. I wouldn’t have them if I had a choice.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” he conceded graciously, as he realised that his manner had not been that much help to me. “And normally, I wouldn’t mind. I mean it’s only natural to...you know…After what happe—”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just that, everything you say…well, it’s all in English. You need to be careful.”

  I wasn’t sure how I was meant to respond, as I had no control over the content of my dreams nor the language in which they played out. Short of never sleeping ever again during this war, I could not see any other way to avoid such an occurrence.

  My fingers still quivered as they had done in the dream, and the sweats that had made the fibres of my clothes cling to my skin had refused to cease, as a bead dribbled down my spine.

  At that moment, a small child tottered into the room, playfully, while I lit up one of my own cigarettes, to try and calm myself down.

  “Bonjour, Georges,” Mike uttered, as the boy looked at him before making his way over to me. He was only about six years old, but he had such a firm sense of what was going on in the world that he at times came across as someone three times his age.

  He knew that his father was fighting to get the bad people out of his country, and that the four men who had recently come to live with him were helping him to do that.

  His father, Jules Gambetta, followed him into the room.

  “Not now, Georges. They are talking. They are important and they don’t need your little ears taking the information away.”

  “It’s alright,” I said, sticking the cigarette in my mouth before lifting the child onto my knee.

  “We were done anyway,” Mike finished for me, as I looked into the child’s wide eyes and smiled. My body warmed as he sat with me, a great deal of comfort from something so innocent emanating from his core.

  We had spent hours together since we had first got to Besançon, largely in silence, just enjoying each other’s company.

  In a way, the company that I had from Georges filled me with an intense jealousy, particularly as the interactions that I had with him were ones that I never had the opportunity to share with my own son.

  But that was through no fault of his own, and I enjoyed the time that I had with him.

  I silently sucked in a mouthful of smoke, as I realised that my life in France had been characterised by a surrealism that was difficult to comprehend.

  My life had become one of intense, long periods of boredom and inactivity, interrupted by brief moments of insanity and excitement, as close to death as a man could get.

  Strangely enough, it was those moments, the ones where I was so close to death that I enjoyed the most, as it meant that the thoughts that plagued me in my quieter moments were all but forgotten, pushed to the back of my mind by the urgency that engulfed me.

  “You have nightmares, Jean?” the boy suddenly asked, making me jump but also frown.

  “Occasionally,” I murmured, looking across at Mike, whose face was etched with worry. If the boy had heard the English language being called out in the night, it would only be a throwaway comment to a school teacher that would see us arrested.

  “Me too,” he replied, before proceeding to tell us both all about the episode up in some distant mountains, when he had lost his father, before being chased by some kind of demon.

  I listened intently for, if I was to ignore him, I knew full well that all I would be able to focus on would be the memories of my own nightmares.

  I played along with the young boy, comparing notes on our nightmares and pretending that his were just as bad as mine. I could not run away from the fact, however, that the child must have heard something, and even that much was enough to make him complicit in what we were doing in Besançon.

  Cautiously, Mike kept an eye on the two of us.

  7

  I smiled at Georges as he quivered in the bottom of the semi-waterlogged trench, his boots pulled on over the top of his pyjamas and a fraying blanket clamped tightly to his body by his father.

  I knew that this was no kind of childhood, hauled from his bed in the dead of the night, to run to a trench at the bottom of the garden to shelter from falling bombs. But it was a reality that Georges had adapted to remarkably well. He was quite a stoic individual and I couldn’t help but admire him.

  The chill that I experienced as I watched him shivering made me feel closer to him, the smile that I received bringing me an element of warmth that I hoped I had given to him earlier on.

  The trench itself was inadequate, to say the least. There were few shelters in this part of France, and the precious materials needed to manufacture proper shelters had been requisitioned by the Germans some time ago. The few supplies that the Germans allowed to the civilian population of France were swallowed up, by the bigger towns and cities that were more appealing targets to the Allied bombers.

  It was about seven feet deep, deep enough to encompass us all stood upright, but also enough to allow the water to seep up through the ground. It was why each of us was perched on a long wooden bench that Jules had put in to try and make our stay as comfortable as possible.

  Above the parapet was a ragtag mixture of sheeted iron and planks of wood, designed to at least keep some of the blast and debris off us if we were to be attacked, with bags packed with dirt plugging the various holes.

  It was, of course, useless if we were to take a direct hit, but it was better than becoming a fool and being caught out in the middle of the street with nowhere to go.

  Had it not been for us, the boy and his father would not have even entertained the idea of having a shelter in their garden, opting instead to lose their lives in the comfort of their own home. But, at our insistence, they decided one should be built, even if it did mean that they were buried in their own garden.

  I looked around at the others as they all huddled in the trench that was quickly becoming overcrowded. We had assured Jules that he would not need to extend the trench any further, it would not be long before we had found an alternative safehouse for our new comrades, Andrew and Christopher.

  Andrew, his face in a constant blush it seemed, appeared calm and collected, slightly irritated that he was in a cold, damp trench, when he could have been tucked up in bed. The same went for Mike and to an extent I imagined that my own face too reflected this, as I longed to be warm again.

  It was Christopher’s face that concerned me the most, his eyes pointed to the sky as he rubbed at his face in panic at what was about to happen. He seemed frenetic and uncomfortable, as if he had never been caught up in an air raid before and had previously thought of them as a mythical story.

  Something struck me as odd about him, as if he hadn’t even known that a war was going on until about twenty minutes ago. It was a concern that would hamper me for days and greatly worry me every time that he stepped out of the front door.

  The siren that bellowed all around, the one that had crudely awoken us from our slumber, continued to sound for as long as it dared, the whining incessant and grotesque. I prayed for it to cease, as it was causing me great discomfort and a pain was searing in the back of my brain on account of the noise.

  Slowly, the operator of the sirens lost his bottle, and it began to wind down depressingly as the sound of aircraft engines shook the ground, small avalanches of dirt falling and being consumed by the boggy trench below.

  The noise was unforgiving and as relentless as the siren had been, but infinitely more terrifying. I dared not to look at anyone else, out of a fear of giving away my own dread of what could happen.

  The quaking ground intensified, until it felt as though the ground would open up and we would all be consumed by some sort of a black hole, which I began to pray for, as it meant we would be safe from the falling bombs.

  The first wave of bombers though, soon passed overhead and, once t
he first row had rattled over us, we knew that we were not to be the targets tonight. It was a tense few minutes, hearing the bombers approach and then hearing the subsequent howl of their falling ordnance, relieved that it wasn’t on your head, but equally sorrowful for the poor souls who were to be subjected to the onslaught.

  “Not us,” Mike breathed, confirming what we all knew.

  “Not us,” said Jules, giving his son an extra tight squeeze, one that I became immeasurably jealous of.

  “If not Besançon, where?” Andrew queried.

  “My guess would be the factories at Sochaux. They make parts for the Germans now. Big factory too. I reckon they’re pumping stuff out for the Germans at a rate of knots.”

  There was no real reason why Besançon would have been the target of the Allies’ bombs, but there was an apprehension all the same. Besançon was close to many of the industrial complexes in Eastern France, with many of the villagers supplying the factories with labour. It would be a valid target had Bomber Command wanted to cripple the workforce.

  But that would throw up all kinds of questions of morality and kindness, as well as the fact that the Germans could call upon manpower from all across the continent. The real aim would be to knock out the machinery inside the factories. That would be a lot more complicated to replace than human lives.

  “So, we are alright tonight?” Jules asked, wrapping his son in the blanket to try and keep him warm.

  “For now, I would say so, yes,” I murmured, reluctant to give him any certain assurances that could end up coming back to haunt me.

  “Then I will take Georges back inside. He is very cold.”

  He was able to talk at a normal level, as the bombers had receded for the moment and were closing in on their target. The ground had ceased to shake and, had the presence of fear not been apparent, the whole landscape would have appeared almost peaceful, therapeutic.