Tuesday's War, page 4
Photoflash.
This image lasted maybe a millisecond, and burned itself on to my memory forever: a pretty girl with a snub nose, not tall, my height, say, which is five two; dark hair rested on her shoulders; small breasts with big, uneven nipples and some freckles. She had freckles on her belly too, and her patch of pubic hair was dark, dense and very small. She even had a scattering of freckles on her thighs. And she smiled a lopsided cheeky girl grin that stopped your breath. It was like standing in front of a magnet. Is that what they mean by beauty? Was it anything to do with the fact that Grace was the first naked woman I’d ever met in daylight?
Her voice was a hoarse stage whisper. ‘What are you like in the mornings?’
Hey; I can come on with the smart phrases too. I mouthed, rather than said, ‘I’m a bit of a morning person,’ and tried to return her crooked smile with one of my own, attempting to sound as nonchalant as Charles Boyer, but it didn’t work. I must have looked like a schoolboy with the twitch.
Grace was fast asleep in the crook of my arm by the time the others began to stir. I was warm and comfortable, and didn’t welcome the morning chorus of farts and curses which signalled waking airmen getting chocks away before levering themselves upright. Someone had put the radio on: Fred Astaire sang that ‘it was a lovely day to get caught in the rain’.
Fergal thrust his face through the partition curtains and said, ‘Christ, Skipper, she’s worn you down, you’re no bigger than the Sparks!’ Then he asked, ‘What’s the met, Charlie?’
‘Fine and clear outside, and bloody freezing. It’ll be a good weekend.’
‘Where’s the Skip?’
‘On finals. Bloody running. Don’t wake Grace.’
He nodded at her, and asked, ‘Will Grease be all right about this?’
‘Yes he will,’ replied Grace, without opening her eyes.
‘What about me then?’ from Fergal again, whose grin was wasted on Grace, because she wasn’t looking.
‘Wait your bloody turn,’ she said, and pulled the blankets over her head.
Grease’s Red Indian motorbike had had a sidecar for the last fortnight. Piotr had found it; we didn’t ask him where. After Pete had washed, shaved and carefully combed his hair, he set off on it to the kitchens, with a carton of American cigarettes tucked into the open top of his battledress jacket. He returned with the makings of eight breakfasts which we cooked on two shallow baking tins balanced on the stove, and a squadron-sized urn of tea which we waxed with Polish vodka. In fact the sidecar was so full of food that we had to store some. Grease returned, stripped off outside, and emptied the ice-cold contents of the fire bucket over himself. He steamed in the cold sun momentarily, before rubbing himself down.
Grace glanced at his cold shrivelled prick and snorted, ‘If I had known that’s what it looked like last night, I wouldn’t have bothered!’
Grease replied, ‘Maybe it needs warming up.’
‘Then stick it on the stove with the other sausages.’
Between Bawne and St Neots, there’s a fair-sized village named Crifton. Grace told us that her father and stepmother owned most of it, and Crifton Park, the estate around it, and most of the farms between Crifton and the next airfield at Gransden. She asked us to stay for the weekend. Seven unplanned-for semi-domesticated guests wouldn’t be a problem, apparently. Somehow it was decided that only Grease, Marty and the Toff would go with her: Fergal, Conroy, me and the Pink Pole would head for the Smoke. Fergal volunteered to fiddle travel warrants for us, and Piotr surprised us by tossing a set of keys to Grease and saying, ‘You take the car.’
Grease asked, ‘What car?’ Not an unreasonable question.
‘Ours. It was Abbot’s. He missed the bus yesterday. I will take the money to his widow.’
‘I didn’t know that he was married,’ Conroy said.
‘No. Neither did the RAF. No permission. It is better I give the money to his widow. Less embarrassment.’
It was a small, four-seat open Singer: at a push you could get a full crew of seven into it. I know that because that was what Abbot and his people used to do. They would drive up to their aircraft dispersal, and leave it there until they got back from the trip. I recalled, then, that I had noticed it standing forlorn in an empty revetment as Tuesday’s Child had taxied in. I suppose that no one had since wanted to move it, just in case. That was just the sort of thing that wouldn’t worry the Pole.
Before we split, Grace found she had something to say. She had her smart little uniform on again – without the jacket yet – and had her smart little bum facing the stove, one high altar of our little hut warming another. She cleared her throat as if she was embarrassed, which embarrassed us, so we stopped stuffing bags with shirts, shaving kit and condoms and listened.
‘We have seven or eight Lancs to deliver here, all from Ringway. That’s usually about one a week. I can probably get them all. They offer you most of the flights anywhere near your home. It’s the way we do things in the ATA – there aren’t many other perks. That way you get to see your family, if you want to. I wondered if I could count on your spare berth now and again for the duration . . . although I’ll always go on to Crifton if I’m in the way, and you can come on with me if you like.’ She sounded oddly uncertain; as if she was unused to asking for favours. That was disconcerting.
The Toff jumped in before the rest of us, and killed the gentle smile on her face stone dead. ‘We don’t have a spare berth,’ he said.
Grace said, ‘Oh,’ and her mouth went round, then turned down at the edges. Put down. Her cheeks coloured.
Then Toff said, ‘We just have a spare bed called Grace’s Place. You can have that if you want.’
Grace blushed: the one and only time. Grace kissed everyone in turn, starting with the Toff. I thought that the kisses she gave to Grease and me were not as sexy as those she stuck on the others. Always you learn. Looking back forty years it’s hard to tell if we ever fell in love with her: if we did it must have started about then.
By late afternoon on Saturday we were at the bar of the Trocadero, and halfway to drunk. On the tiny dance floor I had a couple of dances with some American Red Cross girls, who were pretty and able, but definitely not willing. It made you understand why the Yanks went mad for British women; their own are born with their knees tied together. So we stayed in the bar after that. We had taken a taxi from the station to Green’s, where we always tried to stay: it was a bomber hotel. Then we dumped our kit and made straight for the Troc, because we’d scored there before. We couldn’t get tickets for a show, and didn’t fancy queuing in the cold for returns, so it was supper somewhere, and then clubs or pubs. Maybe a dance; if they’d let us in.
Somewhere along the evening we lost our tail gunner, and merged with an American crew from the 306th at Thurleigh. That was near Bawne. Neighbours. They were taking a bit of a beating, but you didn’t talk shop to strangers when you were on leave. In the bar of the Bag O’Nails club, after we tossed a couple of stroppy fighter types on to the pavement, we ploughed across the furrows of the same American Red Cross girls from the Troc. The Yanks gave them the treatment. We remembered the score, and didn’t come on to them. So they came on to us, and I woke up with a plump little redhead.
After I had washed and shaved and dressed in clean clothes, and breakfasted alone because the others didn’t show, I felt kind of flat. Fergal and Conroy surfaced for beer at lunchtime, and after that it was pretty certain to be pubs and bars all the way to Monday night.
Conroy voiced what I had been thinking. He looked up from the book he was reading – he always read and got drunk at the same time: this time it was Juvenal, I remember – and observed, ‘If there’s an afternoon train we could be back in the pub in Eltisley by tonight, and drop down a surprise visit on the bike to this Crifton place on Monday. What was it they were doing then?’
‘Impromptu shoot,’ said Fergal. ‘Apparently her old man likes shooting things.’
‘Like the Pole,’ I said. ‘Where is he by the way?’
‘Sloped off from the Troc early. Said he was going to pay Abbot’s widow. He’ll find his own way back.’
‘Always does,’ Conroy said.
In the train that afternoon I thought that Grace had stepped out of an aircraft, and changed everything. That’s what I thought. Conners asked me what she was like. I told him, ‘I don’t know. You turn your back, and when you look again she’s become someone else.’
‘I know what you mean, but I’m not going to complain.’
‘Neither am I,’ Fergal said. ‘Gift horse.’ There was something about the way he said it that made me wonder if he was even less experienced with women than I was.
I said, ‘Maybe she’s her own woman.’
Conners winced, and looked at me as if I had gone mad, then turned away and lit up without offering them round.
I know a little about architecture because the art teacher at my grammar school in Surrey found a few lessons spare at the end of my last term, and gave us a quick gallop through the history of architecture. It meant that I could name shapes, and Crifton Park House is Palladian. The drive to it started in the village. As you burst out of the trees and into the light you found the house in front and slightly below you, doglegged about another half mile further on. It was a two-storeyed mansion as big as an aircraft carrier. I could have fitted my parent’s old three-bedroomed semi into the portico alone. Fergal steered for that: Conroy was on the pillion, and I occupied the sidecar. Fergal wasn’t terribly good at motorbikes, but he was better than either of us.
When he pulled up, with a slither that took a stripe a foot deep out of their gravel, he spoke for us all. ‘Strewth. Fuckingham Palace! Are we at the right place?’
A gravel path as wide as a runway, which appeared to surround the house, was dotted with elephant-sized grey urns sitting on plinths. They hosted great trailing falls of geraniums, splashed red. Red is a colour I had come to dislike since joining up.
There was a gardener working at one of them, at the top of a wooden set of steps. I crunched up to him. He looked down and gave me an uncertain smile. He wasn’t badly dressed for a working gardener, partly hidden by a huge leather apron. It was huge, because it fitted him, and he was. He must have had four inches on Grease, which would have made him six five at least, and he was heavy with it. His face was a hunting and shooting brown, and topped with a fringe of white hair, through which his pate climbed. That was brown as well. He carefully wiped his hands against the apron and stepped down. He held one hand out to shake – mine, thinly bandaged fingers and all, disappeared inside it. He bent slightly to meet me. He said, ‘Fuckingham Palace. Very original. I must take that man’s name. He could write some of my speeches for me.’ He scrutinized my battledress trade flash and said, ‘You’re the sparks.’
He didn’t sound like a gardener to me, so I responded with, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m Peter Baker. My people make some of the bullets your people fire at Germans. Have you got time to look at my radio? I salvaged it from a B17 that made a mess of my long ride, and I’m trying to get it going again.’
‘I’ll have a look at it, but won’t make any promises. I don’t build the things, I just twiddle the knobs, talk into them and rattle away with the Morse key. America is another country as far as radios go; a lot of things in their sets work back to front.’
‘Come to see my Grace?’
‘That was the idea, sir.’
‘She’s off shooting with your skipper and your gunner. The one with the limp.’
‘We call him the Toff.’
‘See why. He speaks the language better than most. Anyway – you’ve time to give my wireless the once over before lunch?’
‘Absolutely, sir,’ and I waved the other two over. Safe landing. Good touchdown.
He walked fast. In a bloody great house like that you’d have to or starve to death between meals. He dropped Fergal and Conroy in a library the size of a railway station chapel, with bottles of beer at their elbows, and then led me north, west and up to a small room in a corner of the building.
‘Servant’s room,’ he observed. ‘Used to have dozens in the 1800s I’d say. Room enough for a battalion of them. I get by with six – all too old for the services or war work.’
‘What about the estate? The land?’
‘I unretired the last estate manager, and gave him a dozen land girls. He thinks he’s died and gone to heaven. Treats them like a ruddy harem, and works to the government’s plans, not mine – but we get enough off the top to feed the place without straining the local black market.’
There was a bed with a striped mattress as old as the house, two hard chairs, a shelf with several books – some about radio telegraphy, and one on astronomy – and a table bearing a standard US bomber radio with a battered case. There were WD charts pinned to the walls: the Western Approaches and the whole of Europe.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘Most of the bits are here. Where’s the aerial off to?’ The thick lead climbed up through a skylight window.
‘One of the chimneys. All right?’
‘Should be.’ I went through three induction circuits. On. On. On. Valves lit, and I began to smell that warm, friendly electrical scent of an excited radio. Then static. Well; so what? After Krefeld I spoke static fairly fluently.
‘This might take me some time.’
‘No problem, Sparks.’ Then he said, ‘Look; I can’t keep calling you Sparks. You have a name?’
‘Charlie Bassett.’
‘Charlie then?’
‘That’s fine.’
‘I’m Peter.’
‘That’s fine too. Our tail gunner, the Pink Pole, is a Peter too; only it’s “Piotr” – the Polish way of saying it.’
‘I’ll leave you to it then. Lunch at one, OK? Can you find your own way down?’
‘I’ll follow the smell of food until I get there.’
‘If you get thirsty try the bag at your feet. Bye for now: I appreciate this,’ he said, and moved out. Quiet and quick on his feet for a big man. The bag I hadn’t noticed was an old doctor’s case. It contained a bottle of bourbon, and a thick glass tumbler.
I worked for an hour, but got further down the bottle than the radio. I’d come back in a week, if he still wanted me to. I found Fergal in the library with paper spread around a writing desk, and three empty bottles of Angers beer. He waved me away, and said, ‘He has to give a speech at the Manchester Trades next week, and wants me to liven up what he’s written. Conroy’s helping him in the garden. They were talking poetry.’ As I left him he added, ‘Grease is around somewhere. He stinks of gunpowder and dead things.’
Grease was cleaning a shotgun in a spare kitchen. He was surrounded by heaps of dead birds. You could see the feather dust dancing in the rays of light admitted by high windows. I asked what the birds had been. He said, ‘Those are snipe, and those are woodcock. That heap are grouse, and those are pheasant. The big thing is a swan that the Toff took against. Great isn’t it?’
‘I’m not sure. What happens to them now?’
‘Folk eat them. The Boss will have woodcock or snipe tonight.’
‘The Boss?’
‘Grace’s dad. Met him yet?’ I nodded. Seeing Grease reduced to man-the-mighty-hunter, and surrounded by bird corpses had temporarily robbed me of sensible speech . . . but silence didn’t worry him. Grease asked, ‘You want the good news or the bad news?’
‘Good news.’
‘Grace is one of the best bloody deflection shots you’ve ever seen in your life. She tumbled most of these birds.’ What was good about that?
‘Tumbled. She didn’t tumble these birds, she bloody massacred them. This was Custer’s Last Stand for birds.’
‘You must have pulled a girl in town,’ Grease said quickly, ‘because you’ve come back picky. You’re always picky when you’ve scored.’
‘What’s the bad news?’
‘The Toff’s off sulking somewhere. Won’t talk to anyone. Grace is a bloody sight better shot half pissed than he’ll ever be sober. He can’t stand the competition.’
We ate lunch in a huge kitchen: eight at the table – Marty mooched in from the fields; he’d met a land army girl who was teaching him to plough. He smelled strongly of warm horse, or eau de land girl. It wasn’t always easy to tell the difference. The Toff looked quite low. Grace sat at one end of the table – furthest from me – and her father at the other. Kitchen or no, the lunch was still served to us, although the staff looked so far gone I thought that I should be waiting on them.
The Boss read my mind. He said, ‘Don’t say it, lad. You get shot at most nights, so let them do their bit – there’d be a revolt if I tried to retire them now.’
‘Have they been with you long?’
‘Since ’36. That’s when I arrived. They were already here. They’ve more right to be here than we have.’
Lancashire hotpot. A real one. Huge hunks of fleshy mutton under carrots and onions, and crisp slices of potato over a thin layer of mash. At some point between that, and the bread pudding with custard which chased it, Grease blinked owlishly several times and said, ‘I think our Charlie became an ace last night. I think he dipped his wick in the wicked city. He’s come back early, and very picky.’
‘What makes one an ace?’ the Boss asked.
‘Two shags with two different girls on two consecutive days.’ That’s the Toff, coming out of it at last.
No one asked me who the first of the two had been, but Grace was suddenly looking at me.
‘What was she like?’ she asked.
I think I probably looked at my plate as I said, ‘An American girl, from Bedford. She was . . . an enthusiast, I suppose.’
Grace sniffed and looked away. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘one of those.’
After lunch broke up I took an enormous mug of tea to the front of the house, and sat under one of the windows in the sun on a stone bench made for giants. The sun on my face felt precious. Grace’s father, who everybody else seemed to be calling the Boss now, strolled up. He had a black curved briar pipe dwarfed by his hand. At first he sat without speaking – the tobacco he smoked smelled sweet and rich. Then he asked, ‘What are you doing?’
