The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

After three or four or maybe more days, so routine were we in our marching by night and camping by day that I struggle to remember how many, we were about due to bed down one morning when Wareing kept going,

  ‘Not long now,’ he advised as we continued into daylight on as conspicuous a ridge as this landscape provided, rising gently between sunken fields. Seen at last in daytime, these were open, unchanging lands, hardly a soul or sign of habitation seen on what must have been a purposely pre-planned route. Vast tracts were hedgeless field, which I only hoped someone with working machines would be harvesting soon – even enthusiastic amateurs like the Council commune would have struggled with these acres. I couldn’t believe that anywhere in Europe arrangements hadn’t been made for the fuel and security required to reap this crop and re-seed. If not our nation was lost.

  ‘There’s a little wood there, which will be our best bet,’ pointed Wareing. ‘We won’t go any further today. No mistakes this time.’

  Amen to that. Together again in a friendly copse, even rabbits coming to meet us (till Wareing speared one in the side), and knowing our long march was over, we were at last able to relax. It was even something like our first days again between us, planning and chatting under cover of trees. The rain continued to hold off and it even warmed up a little; which though it meant I couldn’t sleep as easily, all left me as secure in my mind as I had felt for days. Wareing pored over his maps as normal, saying around noon,

  ‘You know this is the last one?’

  I’d gotten that impression.

  ‘But it’s a biggie. We’ll take as long to plan it as we need.’

  I propped myself up, ‘So what do we know?’

  ‘It’s just another old Observation Corps station, revitalised in the Eighties, no records kept since. Nothing special in itself.’

  ‘But..?’

  ‘But it’s in a coastal town, which as you know from experience is always a risk…’

  ‘There was trouble, like Southampton?’

  ‘Not quite. This isn’t a port of any note, nor had a large inland population to make its way there, and so it seemed they escaped any such similar scenes.’

  Yet Wareing paused before resuming, meaning there was something else,

  ‘However, being on the coast meant it was one of the few places that the Major could send people to reconnoitre for us before we got there; and as of one week before we left, his men had reported that from a dinghy in the bay they’d heard engines, seen lights; and though not close enough to see exactly what they were up to, had witnessed people living an apparently ordered, civilised life. The place was functioning, had vehicles, and must have had some kind of social structure in place to be like that after many weeks, at the very least had petrol or diesel for cars and generators.’

  ‘But that’s good, isn’t it? For the town I mean.’

  ‘In itself, yes; save for the fact that since E-Day no one from there has been in contact with anyone in the outside world.’

  ‘Understandable though?’

  ‘Perhaps, if they had no fuel or power; but if they’ve lights working then why not radios? There’s a looped message playing on what was Radio 1, broadcast on the hour every hour, detailing how to get in touch with the authorities, how to send them a signal, how to request aid, how to let London and Calais know that you or your community are there. It gives times of flypasts, sailpasts, when to flash your torch at the sky or how to make a symbol on the ground with stones and bedsheets; where to sail to if you have a boat…’

  ‘Maybe they’re not the communicating type?’

  ‘Or maybe they’ve good reason for keeping secret?’

  I feared a return of my partner’s recent paranoia, but this suspicion soon passed.

  ‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

  ‘We need to recce the area for ourselves. The map shows a point atop shallow rocks to the south of the town’s seafront. From there we can see the town, while being able to get away if spotted. However…’ another thoughtful pause, ‘though this will show us the seafront it won’t show us our target building, which is further to the north. To recce that we’d need to come from the other direction; which from the map gives us no obvious cover. It might have to be an eve of war job.’

  ‘Creeping through the sleeping soldiers?’

  ‘You know that story?’

  ‘They love telling it in training. So, one night or two?’

  ‘Hope for one, plan for two, and then another for the job. I say we find the cliff tonight and try and see what those scouts saw; then, if we get a chance, backtrack inland and come around to the northern side of town.’

  ‘And what if..?’

  ‘What?’

  I had to ask, ‘What if… this target building’s full of people too?’

  He paused a moment, before saying,

  ‘Those knock-out drops they gave us: they don’t do anything to dull the memory, do they.’ He’d remembered what he’d said as he passed out at the Council House, and was prepared to admit it, ‘You’re worried I’ll want to blow these people sky high too? Do you believe I really wanted that before? Believe me, I hope and trust it never, ever comes to that.’

  As dusk fell, we packed up all we wouldn’t need in Wareing’s bag and buried it, taking only food and knifes and the best map in mine. Not that we would have a chance to use them, for as we emerged from the darkening wood out onto the lane that would take us east, a car flew past. It is easy to forget how loud a car is, the sound dampened by the wood until I nearly stepped out in front of it. It came so close that it caught my bag and pulled it right off my shoulder and across the tarmac, the contents rattling as they came to a halt half-way between us and the braking station wagon.

  I had been winded and stunned by the collision, but in a second Wareing – already suffering far worse injuries himself – had shoved me across the thin strip of aged grey roadway into the even thicker woods on the other side, where before barely finding my feet we were racing through bracken and low-hanging branches. Although the roadside had a thicket on that side, once broken through it became more open beneath a thick canopy. Fifteen yards from the road, Wareing pulled me down behind a skinny bough, he taking one a short way to the side.

  I was panicked. I would have ran and ran till I fell; but Wareing knew that as soon as whoever was in the car had caught their breath, got out, run back to this point and gotten through the thicket after us, that hearing us still trampling over branches would have led them straight to us. No, Wareing knew to get as far away from the road as possible in the short time we had… and then to fall stock still, hidden down amid the forest furniture and under the falling darkness accentuated by the overhanging branches.

  In fact there were three of them that we saw, each an unlikely sight in themselves and let alone in combination! The first was a thin, pale lad in what looked like normal wear for a young man engaged on the land: boots, scuffed jeans, check shirt, bomber jacket. Only this young labourer wielded a machine gun. We heard the voice of the second before we saw him,

  ‘Na boss, there’s not much in here: just a map, a couple of knifes, some meat, smells like pigeon.’

  Smells like our breakfast, I thought to myself. He appeared then, this second man, a thick-set older version of the first, only with his machine gun hanging from his back and an elaborately-holstered pistol conspicuous at his belt. The third man, the one the second had just been talking to, appeared last, and was a sight to behold: seamed slacks fell over cowboy boots, while his upper half was clad in soft brown sheepskin. Yet the best was on his head, where he sported a hat something like a rimless porkpie but made of thick woollen fabric woven into circular patterns.

  They were still a distance from us, but should they come our way across the wooded opening then we had nowhere to run. Peeking around the tree all I could, I feared the worst when the youngest took a step forward, rifle cocked. But these men were lazy, the older two heavy, and the ‘boss’ called them back,

  ‘They’re just
hunters. If they come near town we’ll pick them up.’

  As they left, the middle man turned and pulled his machine gun down from his back to strafe the silent wood with bullets, a couple thudding into the tree I was crouched behind, the vibrations running through me. But it was a futile gesture, and tossing the bag and contents down on the forest floor, he left after the others.

  At first I thought this was a trick to lure us out; but no, with three doors slamming they were off in the car, and the forest was again silent. Still, we stayed quiet a minute before creeping out to grab our stuff.

  ‘So, they have got diesel,’ pondered my partner. I’d been too distracted to note the engine sound before.

  ‘Who the hell were they?’ I whispered; but Wareing was thinking. By now it was nighttime. ‘What do we do?’ I asked?

  ‘Keep going,’ was his verdict. ‘That was a fluke, they won’t find us again – these woods do muffle sound, don’t they.’

  It was woods and then meadow field all the way to the cliffs, the sound of the sea calling us before we got there. A warm wind had gotten up but the sky was still clear, which Wareing hoped would keep whoever lived in the town out in the open a while longer. It was only nine-thirty when we got to our position, the low but jagged cliffs suddenly falling away to offer a view of beach and bay that any postcard photographer would have risked life and limb for.

  ‘This is perfect,’ said Wareing, and I couldn’t disagree, the whole of the seafront and much of what lay behind it out on display for us as if we were in a box at the theatre. The sound of laughter rose up the shallow cliff; and looking down there was indeed a public house at our end of the bay, with drinkers joshing and fooling around outside against the sea wall.

  ‘So, let’s make mental notes,’ my colleague thought aloud (though very quietly). ‘They have drink flowing, and for them to seem so happy with it then they can’t be going too hungry either. The windows of the inn look candlelit; but are those electric lights further along the front?’

  From our eyrie I could see that parallel to the beach ran a road in a gentle semicircle echoing the coastline. With the pub at one end of it, the road was separated from the beach by a wide walkway dotted with huts, kiosks and what might have been racks of tied up deckchairs – had E-Day hardly touched this place?

  The arcades and venues that ran along the other side of the road were darkened or low lit, and figures could be seen around a couple of these latter places. Yet there was one building quite a way along that gave the definite impression, from its gleaming glass foyer and from the windows running below its high roof, of having strong lights burning away inside. Too small for a pier, this building seemed the town’s focal point, a garden and some kind of monument sited just outside it.

  ‘You’re going to tell me that that’s our target,’ I half-groaned.

  ‘No, the target’s inland, somewhere over there.’ He pointed in a direction generally townward, behind the seafront; before turning his attention back to the bright building, ‘That place looks like a dancehall or something.’

  Wareing’s gaze then turned to the pub below us: to the people outside, and to what could be seen through its windows which glowed as if a backdrop in a gaslit scene from a Dickens adaptation,

  ‘There must be twenty people in there that I can see,’ he whispered in summation, ‘and they can’t be too worried about things either, by the sound of them. They must have a secure little situation going on down there.’

  ‘And where nicer to have it?’ I added. It was indeed a picturesque scene, the sort of seaside evening we’ve all enjoyed on holiday, missing only the twinkling of lights strung along the front and music from the late-opening arcades. ‘I wouldn’t mind an hour down there myself…’

  But just then Wareing raised a finger in silence, as following his gaze I saw what he saw: a man with a machine gun strolling over to talk to the drinkers outside the pub. Bar the gun, he seemed no different from those he had come over to chat to; while like the men in the car earlier, he had no badge of authority to justify holding such a weapon. After a few minutes he broke from the group, to cast one cursory glance over the rocks (we involuntarily ducking our heads) before turning back the way he had come along the beach walkway. I guessed there would be others on similar patrols down in the town.

  And then we heard the engines…

  What might at first have been the sound of a truck turned out to be two smaller vehicles, one dark like that we had seen earlier, the other’s paintwork flaring orange/gold as they pulled up outside the large lit building.

  As the building’s doors opened so they betrayed for certain the bright steady glow of electric light. The building was too far along the front to see clearly who went in or out, but Wareing was already muttering again,

  ‘Right, we’ve been here half an hour and have heard no other vehicle, so we’ll assume that two is all that they have running; not that they couldn’t find others if needed. If we assume two gunmen per car and only one man on foot patrol, then even if that dark car is the station wagon that we saw earlier then that’s five machine guns we know for certain that they have down there.’

  We stayed on another half an hour, with nothing more occurring than one of the cars, the gold one, leaving the pool of light outside the bright building and turning back onto the streets behind the seafront.

  ‘Come on,’ nudged Wareing, whispering ‘let’s get clear and plan our next move.’

  Chapter 23 – Further Reconnoitring