Dancing in the Moonlight

by Rita Bradshaw

  Ruby’s words were ringing in her ears as she walked faster now, berating herself for doing the very thing she’d made the others promise not to do – walking alone in the blackout. But for once she hadn’t been thinking about the threat of Tom Crawford, not with Jacob and John possibly lying dead or injured so far away on foreign soil. She didn’t dare run – the last thing she wanted was to go sprawling and twist her ankle or something – but the footsteps were right behind her now. Gathering her courage she swung around, her voice shrill as she cried, ‘One step more and I’m going to scream.’

  ‘Lucy? It’s me.’

  The voice wasn’t Tom Crawford’s, but neither did it belong to the scrawny, emaciated stranger she could just make out one or two yards away. Her stomach in knots, she peered through the darkness as she told herself her memory was playing tricks on her. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘It’s me. Your brother, Donald.’

  ‘Donald?’ The voice was his, but the man in front of her looked old, at least double the thirty years of age Donald would be now. And yet the voice . . . She took a step nearer. ‘Donald,’ she whispered, shocked beyond measure as she recognized a trace of the familiar face in the skeletal features of the skull-like head. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m sick, lass.’

  ‘Sick?’ She stood dazed for a moment more and then as full realization dawned, she flung her arms around him. ‘Donald, oh, Donald. It’s you, it’s really you.’

  It was a second before he responded, and then his arms went round her, too, and she was hugged as he’d never hugged her in the past. ‘I’m sorry, lass, I’m so sorry,’ he murmured over and over again, his voice breaking. ‘I shouldn’t have done what I did, I shouldn’t have left you. Can you forgive me?’

  ‘You’re back, that’s all that matters.’ And it was, it really was.

  ‘Oh, lass.’ He was sobbing, crying like a baby, and now she was the one hugging him as he wept out his deprecation of himself, incoherently in the main.

  It was some minutes before they drew apart, Donald rubbing at his face with his coat sleeves and Lucy wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘I can’t believe it’s you.’ She reached out and touched his cheek with her hand and he caught her fingers, pressing them against his skin. ‘You said you’re sick? What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s me stomach, lass, but don’t let’s talk about that now. I’ve got me pills, so I’m all right, but – I wanted to see you. I’ve been back a couple of days, but I couldn’t drum up the courage to come to the house after I found out where you lived. Not after what I did. I – I thought you’d slam the door in my face.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ she said softly. ‘I love you.’ They looked at each other, their smiles shaky. Then Lucy slipped her arm through his. ‘Come on,’ she said, even more softly. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘This is it, matey. This is the end. Would you look at that? We’re done for this time.’

  Jacob didn’t turn to look at the man who had spoken – Willy Armstrong, his friend and the battalion’s comedian. But Willy wasn’t cracking one of his endless jokes now.

  They had been marching more than forty miles a day for three days to the coast, fleeing refugees constantly hampering their movements, and bombs and machine-gun bullets from the air picking them off like ducks at a fairground stall. Jacob had become numb to the roadside human debris of the retreat, bodies and bits of bodies becoming just more obstacles to step over. Their Sergeant had told them evacuation from Dunkirk to England was the only hope they had, and ultimately the only hope the nation had, if Germany invaded its shores. Without the British Expeditionary Force, which contained the majority of Britain’s most experienced troops, who would defend their mothers and wives and sweethearts and children from Hitler’s Nazis?

  ‘Keep that in your minds, along with putting one foot in front of the other,’ Sergeant Fraser had bellowed, reminding them of it at frequent intervals until a German bomb had separated his head from his body.

  And now they were within sight of their objective – or what was left of it. Much of Dunkirk was on fire and the smell of burning machinery and corpses hung oppressively in the choking air. Above the heavy black pall of smoke, German and British planes were engaged in a fight to the death, but the limited resources of the RAF couldn’t compete with the enemy’s low-flying Stukas, which were ripping into the endless columns of British troops on the undefended beaches and blowing them to kingdom come.

  Even as they watched disbelievingly, a bomb blew a mighty crater into the sand, a number of soldiers fell into it, dead and alive, and another bomb covered them over.

  ‘It’s a slaughter!’ Willy’s filthy, dust-caked face was stretched in horror. ‘They’ve brought us here to finish us off. No one’s going to get out of this alive.’

  Privately Jacob agreed with him, but they were standing with a couple of young conscripts who looked as though they should still be in short trousers and who were plainly terrified. ‘We’ll get out,’ he said quietly. ‘The Corporal said it’s not just the Royal Navy that’s coming for us, but fishing boats and the like. We’ll show Hitler what’s what. We look after our own.’ He called to the Corporal, who was a few yards away. ‘Isn’t that right, Corp? We’ll live to fight another day.’

  The Corporal, who had taken over when Sergeant Fraser was decapitated the day before, limped over to them. He’d had a machine-gun bullet lodged deep in his foot for the last five days, but had still led the marching. He was a Newcastle lad, born and bred, and in happier days he and Jacob had had many a friendly, if heated, discussion about their respective town’s football teams. ‘Oh aye, man,’ he said now, grinning. ‘We’ll all live to see Newcastle knock the living daylights out of Sunderland, that’s for sure. Now get lively and dig a trench; it’ll be a while before it’s our turn to depart these fair shores and there’s no need to make the Germans’ job simple for them by providing easy targets, is there? There’s been enough griping that you want a rest, over the last few days. Now’s your chance. An’ once you’ve got a brew on, I’ll have two sugars in mine, all right? An’ a couple of Garibaldis to go with it.’ Jacob grinned back. They had no supplies and no one had eaten for three days. Even their drinking water had come from streams and rivers, and, in the last resort, muddy ditches.

  Over the next forty-eight hours, amidst the bombing and shelling, all they could do was wait their turn and watch what was happening. Hunger was a worse enemy than the Luftwaffe’s attempted annihilation, and Jacob wondered if they were simply going to starve where they sat or stood.

  Dunkirk’s bomb-damaged breakwater was still serviceable, allowing some of the waiting troops to be taken off by larger boats. The rest were picked up directly from a ten-mile stretch of beach by small craft largely manned by amateur sailors. British, French and Belgian ships of all sizes – from destroyers to private motor cruisers – were part of the operation. But it wasn’t easy. Both large and small craft had difficulty getting their human cargo out to the waiting British destroyers, because they were quite a long way out, due to the shallow waters of the harbour. And the German bombs rained down incessantly.

  Before their rescue, the waiting troops were forced to stand out in the water waiting for the boats and small craft to take them on board. When Corporal Potts came limping over to marshal them into position, Jacob had to will himself to move forward. The sea was running red in places, with body parts and dead bodies floating side by side, and the thought of just standing there – so near and yet so far from rescue – was worse than the endless hours of waiting their turn on the beach.

  But if he wanted to get back home, back to Lucy, he had to take the chance. And he wanted to, more than life itself. One thing had crystallized in his mind over the last hellish weeks. He was going to tell her how he felt. Spell it out. No talk of friends or old times’ sake or any of the other rubbish he’d been hiding behind. He was going to tell her he loved her and always would, th
at she was the only woman on Earth for him and he wanted her to wait for him. He didn’t care that she was wealthy and could no doubt buy him ten – twenty – times over. After what he’d seen and had to do, that was so unimportant it was laughable. He had let his hurt that she’d disappeared from his life and married another man and had his baby, and his pride that she had become too wealthy and successful to approach, keep him silent. She might not love him like she’d clearly loved her husband, but she did have some feeling for him. He had seen it in her face and heard it in her voice that last afternoon before he had left. He had let her slip through his fingers once, admittedly through no fault of his own, he qualified, but he had spent nearly half of his life to date without her.

  So much wasted time.

  They had reached the end of their line now and were standing waist-deep in salty water, the soldiers in front of them scrambling into the small boat waiting for them. Willy climbed aboard, and as he did so the skipper of the vessel said to Jacob, ‘Sorry, pal, he’s the last one I can take.’

  Jacob nodded, but the next moment Willy had splashed down into the waves again, saying, ‘No offence, matey, but he’s me lucky mascot.’ He called to one of the youngsters, ‘Here, mate, you go in this one. I’ll wait for the next bus. There’s bound to be one along sooner or later.’

  He joined Jacob, saying somewhat sheepishly, ‘We’ve been shoulder-to-shoulder thus far, that’s the way I see it. All right?’

  Touched, but knowing better than to show it, as Willy was embarrassed enough, Jacob grinned. They’d watched each other’s backs from day one, but he didn’t know if he would have refused the boat. ‘I thought for a minute there I was going to be spared your jokes on the way home.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Willy pulled his helmet more firmly over his forehead. ‘Did you hear the one about—’

  It took them both by surprise. One moment the little boat had been speeding away with its occupants sandwiched in like sardines in a can, and the next it was blown out of the water by a direct hit, fragmenting into a hundred pieces as bodies flew through the air.

  Willy swore softly, but didn’t say another word. There were no words to say, after all. The lad who had taken his place had been a baby-faced, gangly youth, who had thanked him as he’d climbed into the small motor cruiser.

  When their turn came, it was a fishing boat that picked them up and the gnarled fisherman and his son who were manning the craft that was their livelihood were characters. ‘Let’s be having you, boyos,’ the fisherman shouted as, weary unto death, they climbed aboard. ‘You’re an orderly lot and no mistake. There’s more pushing and shoving in the queue outside the pie shop of a Friday night. An’ just so you know, I’ve got no intention of going to meet my Maker courtesy of Jerry, so you’ll be back on British soil afore too long.’

  It was comforting. Bravado, most certainly, but comforting nonetheless.

  ‘We’ve lost two destroyers four or five miles out in the last twenty-four hours, so I’m giving you a ride home meself. That’s if there’s no objections? No, I thought not. All right, we’re chock-full, so the next stop is England, boys.’

  Exhausted, cold and wet through, his teeth chattering from standing in the icy French sea, Jacob shut his eyes for a minute or two as the boat began to chug away, but then he turned his head and looked back towards the beach. They were leaving column upon column of British troops waiting for evacuation, and from a distance it reminded him of stone walls dividing miles of fields; some of the formations were in squares and others were simply long lines. They had been told that British soldiers were sharing with French formations in holding the rearguard, fighting furiously to the south end of the bridgehead to keep the Germans back from pouring into Dunkirk and storming the beach. They were either going to be killed or captured, he thought wearily, and if he got out of this slaughter alive he would owe his life to those men he’d never meet or be able to thank.

  It was a big ‘if, though. German aircraft, torpedo boats and U-boats were operating in the Channel and even if they cleared this mess and got out to sea, it wouldn’t be plain sailing. Not by a long chalk. But anything was better than waiting on that damn beach being bombed and machine-gunned by an enemy in the sky above them, who was faceless and without pity. If anyone had told him a few years back that he would be capable of hating men he had never seen and of wishing every last man, woman and child of a nation to deepest hell, he wouldn’t have believed them.

  ‘Here, mate.’ He came out of the black morass of his thoughts to find Willy snapping a small bar of chocolate in two and handing him half.

  ‘What the . . .?’ Jacob stared at his friend in amazement. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping it for this moment.’ Willy grinned at the expression on Jacob’s dumbfounded face. ‘For a little celebration if we ever got away. I swopped my watch for it, with that French kid we were talking to on the last day of the march before we got to Dunkirk.’

  ‘You’ve had it all that time?’ Jacob thought of the endless days on the beach when he’d been near fainting with hunger. ‘What if we’d been killed before we reached the boat?’

  ‘Then we wouldn’t have needed it any more anyway.’ Willy was delighted with Jacob’s reaction, being forever the showman. ‘And you’d have been none the wiser.’ He watched as Jacob crammed the whole four squares of his share into his mouth, not chewing, but just letting them melt in an ecstasy of taste. ‘Now, aren’t you glad I waited till now?’

  Strangely he was. Not simply because of the taste and smell and wonderful sensation of the smooth warm chocolate filling his mouth, but because a moment ago he’d been in the darkest place he could ever remember, filled with a hatred so strong it had blotted out everything good in the world. A reaction, maybe, to the waiting and fear and the massacre going on around him, but he had wanted to kill and destroy, and take satisfaction from it. And that wasn’t him, that wasn’t Jacob Crawford. He wasn’t an animal.

  He let his tongue savour the sticky sweetness as the boat chugged further out to sea, so tired he could barely register the explosions going on around him. Willy could have kept the whole bar to himself and eaten it without him knowing – it would have been easy. But he hadn’t. And why? Because he was a good man, a fine man. Along with many others. The world wasn’t all bad. It stood to reason that even among the Germans there were good men, although he couldn’t see that right now.

  Willy’s eyes were shut and his head was lolling on his chest, a smear of chocolate at the side of his mouth. Jacob smiled wearily, his last conscious thought before he fell asleep himself being, ‘We’re fighting for right, and with blokes like Willy on our side, we’ll beat ’em yet. They don’t know what they’ve taken on with us British.’

  Twenty-four hours later, on June 4th, the beaches of Dunkirk were littered with decaying bodies and the twisted shapes of hundreds of battered vehicles and weapons of all kinds. But Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the British Army by more than a thousand boats, varying in size from a Royal Navy anti-aircraft cruiser down to dinghies that were sailed across the Channel by their civilian owners, was complete.

  Crowds, waving Union Jacks and yelling ‘Well done, boys’, were waiting on the shores of the south-coast ports as more than 338,000 troops who had been rescued were fed and given shelter before they were put aboard trains for barracks or home or hospitals.

  Lucy had heard no word from Jacob or John as she listened to the speech of Winston Churchill that day and, like thousands of other women nationwide, she didn’t know if her loved ones were coming home. She sat with Donald and the others clustered around the wireless, heart-sore and tired and frightened by the threat of invasion, as the Prime Minister spoke the words she was to remember for the rest of her life:

  ‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight
in France, we shall fight on the sea and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender; and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.’

  There was a deep silence after Lucy turned the wireless off. Daisy, who had flatly refused to be evacuated to the country when war broke out, was sitting between Flora and Bess, both of whom had tears running down their cheeks. But Daisy wasn’t crying, and it was she who broke the quiet when she said, her young clear voice ringing with conviction, ‘I shall fight them in the streets. I’d rather die than become a Nazi slave.’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’ Donald spoke, but his eyes were on Lucy. He knew she was worried to death about John and, as the days had gone on and there’d been no word, they were all fearing the worst. Matthew had just turned seventeen and she was concerned that if they lowered the call-up age to eighteen, as had been suggested once or twice in the newspapers, he would be conscripted the following year, which was an added worry. But there was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on. He knew that Jacob Crawford had come to the house before he’d gone away to fight, Ruby had told him so, but when he’d tried to broach the matter with Lucy, she had gently but firmly refused to discuss Jacob or any of the Crawfords, come to that. In Ruby’s own forthright way she’d let him know they’d had to leave the day after he’d skedaddled – as she put it – and described the subsequent week or so of living rough with all its horrors, before the fishmonger had taken them in. But Lucy hadn’t said a word about that time. Ruby had given him the impression Lucy had married the man to secure them a home, but when he had plucked up the courage and tentatively asked about her husband, Lucy’s face had been soft and her voice warm as she said, ‘He was a grand man, Donald. A wonderful man, and his boys are just like him.’ That was all very well, but it didn’t explain why Lucy had cut Enid Crawford out of her life so completely.