Scoundrels

by Victor Cornwall

  There was the flare of a flashbulb as I was hauled out of the water by a young fireman who clapped me on the back painfully. Strangers approached to offer their congratulations. A local vicar shook my hand. Children looked up at me in awe. I was the man who had fallen out of the sky and survived.

  Soaking wet, and a little unsteady, I was ushered through the crowds to the waiting ambulance. But where was Trevelyan?

  Parked next to the ambulance was a red and black Morris Eight. Its roof had been almost flattened by the impact of Trevelyan’s barrel. He’d missed the water completely. The barrel was still intact and now jutted from the wreckage. Surely he couldn’t have survived such an impact. Then I saw him. His purplish acorn of a head was poking out from underneath a foil blanket. He was on a gurney sporting a neck brace and a full body splint. He looked okay considering, and when he saw me he attempted a thumbs up, but yelped in pain as he did so. We converged at the back of his ambulance. The poor bugger was in a rum old state, but he was alive, and that’s all that mattered.

  “I missed,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Bloody reservoir wasn’t long enough.”

  “They’ll patch you up,” I said reassuringly, then added, “probably. ”

  “What about Hansclapp?” Trevelyan said weakly. Good point. I searched the crowd for Gruber and spotting him being carried towards us on the shoulders of a couple of junior airmen. He was being hailed a hero.

  That made me feel uneasy. Five minutes ago he was a Nazi. There was no way we would ever let a chap like him join Scoundrels, it was unthinkable. He was a strange man and I didn’t trust him. One glance at Trevelyan told me he was thinking the same. “Are you going to tell him or should I?”

  Hansclapp reached the back of the ambulance. “So you made it too, Trevelyan,” he said. He sounded almost disappointed. Trevelyan didn’t reply as he was being fitted with an oxygen mask, but his eyes burned with rage.

  “Listen Gruber,” I said. “What just happened was a bloody close shave, and I know that you helped us get out of it alive. But we shouldn’t forget that you were on the other side this morning. Had we not offered you Scoundrels membership, you’d have seen us killed.”

  Hansclapp was listening silently. His eyes gave nothing away. I continued, “just so we’re clear, neither of us can put you up for membership. It just wouldn’t be right.”

  Trevelyan saw I was treading on eggshells and tore off his oxygen mask, “It’s just not going to happen, you filthy piece of Nazi dog shit. Look at the state of me! I nearly died because of you, so you ought be thankful you’re not being arrested as a P.O.W. My advice is to disappear quietly and get on with rebuilding your life in a decent country.”

  If Hansclapp was taken aback he didn’t show it. He said nothing, standing silently as he processed the information. As ever, his face was utterly devoid of emotion. Then, as the medics, R.A.F. personnel and onlookers pushed forward, they seemed to swallow him up and he was gone.

  __________

  The ambulance crew lifted Trevelyan on to the vehicle and I followed behind. Just as the back doors were about to close, a man approached, stepping out of the crowd. He was in his early forties, smartly dressed, with circular metal-rimmed glasses.

  “That was a spectacular landing gentlemen,” he said. “Very impressive.”

  “Thank you,” I said, closing the ambulance door, and shaking his hand. The man continued, “I’d love to talk to you about how you did it, once you’re both feeling better of course.” I nodded politely but the man was persistent, stepping further forward. “I’m a scientist. Well, an engineer really. I’ve been working with the R.A.F. on a new kind of tactical bomb. I think you may have just given me an idea.” He handed over a piece of paper with his telephone number on it. “My name is Barnes Wallis, and I’d very much like you to call me when you’re both feeling better.”

  I put the paper in my pocket, nodded good day, and climbed into the front of the ambulance. The sirens wailed and the crowd backed off. Within minutes we were speeding through the countryside on our way to hospital. Trevelyan had fallen asleep and I began to drift off as well.

  I woke with a start. The Klung Hammer had dropped to the floor with a loud metallic clang. It was rolling around the footwell of the ambulance. I picked it up and examined it again, feeling the weight of it in my hand.

  It really was a beautifully engineered bit of kit.

  There you are Major. Mission accomplished. A valuable contribution to the War effort. I place the Klung Hammer mission just above the Battle of Britain in terms of tactical importance. And of course if Barnes Wallis hadn’t been there that day there would have been no bouncing bomb, and no Dambusters raid.

  He was an inventive chap with a unique capacity for problem solving. I remember a raucous evening with him and a party of Wrens at H.M.S. Fledgling, and the morning after when he showed me how to rid myself of chlamydia with two tumblers of brandy and a cocktail umbrella.

  As for Hansclapp… perhaps this was the moment we made a lifelong enemy of him. But we did what was necessary in order to survive. That’s what we’re good at. That’s why we’re Scoundrels.

  Yours sincerely,

  Major Victor Montgomery Cornwall

  Nimbu Towers,

  Pullen-under-Lyme,

  Gloucestershire

  1st November 2016

  Dear Major,

  If you think a little harder you’ll remember that you didn’t instantly recognise the Klung Hammer for its propaganda value, but rather you thought it’d make a conversation piece for the chaps at the Club. It was actually Winston who realised the story would spread like wildfire around the Allied fighting men, and he was right. Three months after our raid, there wasn’t a staff sergeant, flight lieutenant or naval gunner who hadn’t heard how Hitler got his kicks. Over the years I’ve had a number of enquiring letters from historians of the war, desperate to find out the details of our raid. Hopefully these memoirs will satisfy them.

  You’ll know that I’ve had to recuperate from quite a few injuries in my time, usually incurred in the line of duty. You’ll remember that Kamchatka oil-pipeline sabotage job of the late 60s? When that went so very, very wrong I became the first man on record to recover from the Golygina death sentence: a pinecone hammered narrow-end first where the sun doesn’t shine. Impossible to remove, the cone stays plugged in position until one’s guts go septic and burst. My torturer took great pride in telling me that several Golygina corpses had been found with healthy pine saplings sprouting from their rear-ends. That was to be my fate, if it weren’t for Bernard-Bernard’s skill with his bread tongs, which was nothing short of surgical.

  Then there was my celebrated bet with young David Attenborough to prove that swordfish do indeed attack in cavalry formation. My buttocks are scarred with a line of puncture wounds worthy of the Bengal Lancers.

  May these examples serve to remind you that I am no lightweight when it comes to bearing injuries with fortitude. When I crashed to earth inside that plastic drum – my fall broken by an Austin Seven rather than the Morris Eight that you remember – I was damn near dead.

  I was bloody glad to see you when you finally bothered to come down to the ward to persuade Matron to discharge me. Here’s my account of what happened next:

  __________

  CHAPTER 14

  Terracotta Warriors

  Scoundrels Club, September 1943

  On afternoons in high summer, a blade of sunlight scythes through the crescent window on the first floor of the Long Room, reaching almost to Wellington’s fireplace. As it edges across the room, it warms the rosewood parquet floor, releasing the faint perfume of cigar smoke and spilt port from the last three hundred years, which mingles with whatever you’re having. It is pleasant to sit there in the old leather chairs and read a while, or doze comfortably with your memories.

  Or un
comfortably. Whenever I closed my eyes, I’d find myself back in the plummeting plastic barrel, tumbling end-over-end toward glittering water. Abruptly the shimmering surface would flash brown – as I glimpsed the riverbank – and then maroon – the roof of an Austin Seven. The last thing I’d see was the whirling, horrified face of a vicar on his bike, staring up at me as I crashed down to earth. At this point in my dream I’d brace for impact and tear my stitches all over again, causing rivulets of blood to seep through my bandages, leak down the chair and mark the floor.

  The Head Butler, Stuffinch, was getting testy about this, and had suggested to General Lunk Snr that I take myself back to hospital. “Have a heart,” I remonstrated. “I’d rather not go back to that dump to be scrubbed with wire wool when I can be here, recuperating properly. Surely this is exactly why chaps join Scoundrels. Protection in dark times.”

  Lunk looked me over. My injuries were famously horrific, and that’s horrific by 1943 standards. I’d broken bones in all four of my limbs. I’d detached my left retina, punctured a lung and fractured my pelvis. Then of course, the pièce de resistance: on impact with the car’s roof, my spine had sliced my liver in two, leaving the resulting halves fighting for supremacy inside my own abdomen. I wouldn’t get rid of the losing piece until 1948 – a night Cacahuete refers to, shudderingly, as Noche de la Carne.

  “And anyway,” I told him, “I’m invoking ego ipse medicum, so you can’t throw me out. It’s a statute.”

  Lunk Snr sighed. He knew I’d won this one. Stuffinch’s staff would just have to keep mopping up after me. Ego ipse medicum, loosely ‘I am my own doctor’, was a member’s right dating back to Charles I. Once invoked, no Scoundrel could be stopped from completing an undertaking by any other member, no matter how ill-advised. The Edwardian explorer Captain Oates had once used E.I.M. to win a wager that he could stay a full week inside the Club’s meat locker wearing only his underpants and a Hermes silk scarf.

  At any rate, Churchill needed me to get well for the sake of the country. A week after our painful touchdown, he’d turned up at my hospital bed, with Cornwall in tow. Winston was in a tremendously good mood and playfully knighted me on each shoulder with the Klung Hammer, which he’d taken to carrying around everywhere as if it were the Olympic torch. He told us that our mission to the Black Forest was now his favourite after dinner anecdote. Respectable statesmen all over London had burst with laughter at the image of Eva Braun plunging the Hammer into Adolf’s jacksie, and as the story spread it provided the entire Allied force with a giggle or two.

  The Prime Minister demobbed us from the R.A.F. into the care of General Lunk Snr for special duties. He also bumped the pair of us up to the rank of Major, which was good of him. At my bedside, he remarked that if he had a thousand of me, “this war would already be won,” and he was right about that.

  Resting in the luxuriously appointed club was just the ticket. Slowly and surely I was getting stronger, and I was beginning to move with the surefootedness and agility that gave me the nickname Big Cat. I could now do three pull-ups on the chandelier, admittedly well below my club record of two hundred and twelve. I’d had Cacahuete bring in my old Muk Yan Jong wooden sparring dummy from Nimbu. I would stare at it and visualise the day I could begin punishing it again.

  The other thing that made me determined to make a speedy recovery was Victor Il Postino Cornwall. This was a ridiculous nickname he’d given himself, because he claimed to be “making several deliveries every day into tight boxes all over the capital,” the dirty beggar.

  He’d come through our entire escapade unscathed aside from a mild bout of e-coli picked up during our foul ascent into Castle Klunghammer, when he’d ingested a bit of Scheisseberg. He’d soon shrugged this off though, and was as fit as a fiddle. He spent most afternoons loafing around the club waiting for his next tryst. He was having an absolutely devilish time in war-torn, sex-mad London. There was nothing for him to do except keep gals’ spirits up, which he approached like an undertaking, subjecting me to very detailed debriefs. Every morning he’d swing by my room, fold his angular frame into a chair and regale me with stories of last night’s conquests.

  London, he said, was a den of iniquity. The constant threat of death had given the whole city a rapacious sexual appetite. Victor had been seducing War Office fillies on their bosses’ desks, having romps with saucy Fire Guard volunteers in blacked-out offices in Somers Town. He also pleasured a vanload of W.V.S. after driving them down to Brighton for a day out at the seaside. He’d been down into the Strand Underground during an air raid, to find a Dantesque orgy occurring on platform three, which starred most of the chorus line from the Palladium, still in their bluebird costumes.

  This morning he’d sauntered over after a night of passion at an Oxford Street department store with two brunettes from the Gallic S.O.E. that was stationed, on the top floor.

  “We were in Selfridges’ bedroom fittings department for much of the night Trev,” he enthused, as he lit an Eisenhower’s Flame, a blend of Kansan Blonde in a North African top-leaf that he’d had the Scoundrels’ tobacconist whip up for coital reminiscences. “There isn’t a hotel room or digs spare anywhere in London, so they’re bedding down in the shops while they complete their training. Bully for me. Marie snuggled down in a giant brass four-poster, while Josette made her home in a Chesterfield sofa. I visited them in turn from midnight until about five, when I finally ran out of juice. Then Marie woke up and found herself a riding crop and saddle from the Country Sports department. I didn’t sleep a wink, and I’ve a terribly whipped arse. They’re going to have to put that sofa in the sale, it’s shop-soiled. Have you had breakfast?”

  I gave him a withering look. No I bloody well had not had breakfast. I hadn’t had breakfast for six weeks. Or lunch. Or supper. I would not be digesting solid food until my uvula had reattached itself to the roof of my mouth.

  Scoundrels Club, January 1944

  Four months later, I sat replete after lunch. I’d just polished off two ribeye steaks with pepper sauce and a creditable cabernet, which wasn’t too shabby considering all the food rationing that was going on. I was feeling decidedly better.

  I could now do one hundred and ten pull-ups, and hold a revolver steady at a target for a full hour. Last week I’d hit my Muk Yan Jong hard enough to re-fracture my ulna, which delighted my nurse, Cacahuete, no end. I’d even taken a little redhead from the Polish Women’s Auxiliary Force for a stroll up the Strand, and let her nosh me off in a sentry box. By my standards I was still as weak as a kitten, but my progress was good. I knew it wouldn’t be too long before I was back in the thick of it.

  In came Cornwall, as usual. I was steeling myself for some more of his sordid banter, but instead he seized my arm, as if I were some pathetic invalid, and ushered me up a flight of narrow stairs and into the quiet atmosphere of the Vostok Vestibule, a velvet enclave to the rear of the third floor, with a view of the Royal Academy. From Marwood the barman he ordered a rather special bottle of Remy Martin Black Pearl Louis XIII, with three glasses. “Thought we’d push the boat out,” he said, “to celebrate your return to the crease.” Nobody could mix metaphors like Victor Cornwall.

  And then, as we clinked glasses, I caught his eye. I was suddenly seized with an awful premonition.

  I am trapped.

  Trapped

  In a tight, hot space.

  I can’t move.

  I can’t move a muscle.

  The walls are moving in.

  I breathe deeply, but my mouth is full of clay.

  I have to get out of here.

  I HAVE TO GET OUT.

  No room to move,

  Or even fill my lungs.

  No room to think. And then the hammering…

  TINK

  TINK

  TINK.

  Bloody hell. What was that about? I came to with a start as
a shadow fell over me and my unsettling reverie faded to nothing. The shadow was Lunk Snr, who dumped a cerise folder onto the table and grabbed the brandy bottle by its neck to take a long swig. Good-oh. He had an undertaking for us. My convalescence was over.

  __________

  Lunk Snr’s cerise folder revealed a photograph of one of the worst tweed suits I’d ever seen, inside of which was Professor Chadwell, a bumbling and ancient curator from the British Museum. With his wild white hair and milk-bottle spectacles, he presented himself to the world as a fusty old Oriental archaeologist with his head stuck in the agricultural mud of the Tan Dynasty.

  Lunk knew otherwise. Chadwell was a traitor to the Crown; and, Lunk explained, years ago one of the names erased from the Visitors’ Book. He’d done well to be asked up to the Club, but he hadn’t made the grade. Instead, he’d settled at the British Museum, which played a surprisingly significant role as sort of sub-office for British intelligence. It was popular because of its numberless corridors, dramatic Doric columns and excellent buttered toast. I suppose spies felt pretty cinematic swapping manila files behind the head of Rameses II. In 1944 you couldn’t throw a Neolithic axe over your shoulder in the museum without hitting a spook offloading a microfilm, or recruiting a Hungarian dissident. Any curator with a light tread and good ears could glean sensational intelligence snippets by simply wandering about. And that is exactly what Chadwell had done. Somehow he had found out about a key naval promotion, the assassination of a Spanish industrialist and the spiking of a peace treaty. We knew he had passed all of this intelligence onto the Japanese. We just didn’t know how.