Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘You could definitely say it like that, Pete,’ I told him.

  He continued, ‘It was a hobby. Now I’m supposed to go home, but your police have a big black market blowing up over here. Also they want to keep an eye on me because I am a Pole with interesting political connections. They solve both problems by signing up one to solve the other. That was a very English solution: I think that your Mr Clifford may have put in a word for me. I am not stealing your stores, I am finding out who is. I am a military policeman, Polish Division.’

  I said, ‘We call that a poacher turned gamekeeper.’

  ‘I like that phrase, Charlie. I will try to remember it.’

  ‘Get the Guv’nor to write it down for you,’ from Les. ‘He’s good at that.’

  ‘When it’s all over I will return to Poland and join the Resistance. Maybe I told you that already.’

  Les said, ‘Ain’t it a bit late for that?’

  ‘Resistance against the Russians, friend: the Germans have already run away.’

  Les looked perplexed, ‘That don’t make sense. Didn’t we go to war to free Poland in the first place? The Russians may have got there before we did, but you can’t believe we’ll let them keep it?’

  Pete did what he always did if he was being asked to reveal his serious side: he took the piss.

  ‘If Poland is returned to the Poles,’ he told Les, ‘I will personally see that you get a medal from my country after the war.’

  One of us had to bring the conversation back. Me.

  ‘We thought that broken-down lorry had been set up to be hijacked by you and Tommo, and sold into the black market.’

  ‘And you left him? That was kind. You used to be braver than that when I flew with you.’

  He always knew how to put his finger on the button.

  James admitted, not too gracefully, ‘You’re right, of course. That’s why we came back.’

  ‘I know. The British always do the right thing in the end,’ Pete told us.

  He had a tall Redcap sergeant, and a nifty jeep with side screens and all of the gear. This man strolled over banging his stick against his knee. Why do they all do that? He saluted very smartly, which embarrassed us all over again, and asked James, ‘Excuse me, sir. You would be Major England, sir?’ James smiled, and slouched something like a salute back. The MP continued, ‘There are some folk a bit worried about you, sir. No one’s reported your signals for several days, and anyway you’re supposed to be about two days north of here . . .’

  Les’s face flushed suddenly. You never knew in advance what was going to trigger his anger. I held my hand up to James, hoping he would just keep the guy going, and dragged Pete into the lee of the Thornicroft.

  ‘What’s happening to the Major’s signal traffic? He’s radioed it in, getting an acknowledgement, and then bugger-all happens. This is the second time we’ve been told he’s off contact.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Some bent bastard is cutting him out.’

  ‘You want me to fix it?’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just li’ that.’ Both of his hands were held at waist height, and extended parallel to the ground. It was that comedian’s catchphrase again. We’d used it on the squadron. It made us both laugh.

  I said, ‘Thanks, Pete.’

  ‘It’s not a problem.’ Then he paused, and gave me the look. He said, ‘Why don’t you and your people toddle off now, and leave me with my problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You guessed wrong about this lorry being abandoned to the black marketeers. It’s the rest of this focking convoy we’ve lost. Five lorries, a jeep and twelve men, including a Lieutenant Fielden who won an Olympic silver for running something before the war. Everybody’s panicking except Pete. Situation normal.’

  ‘Who’s stealing the stores?’

  ‘Some bad Czech with an unpronounceable name. Pete will fix it.’ I suddenly remembered his characteristic way of speaking of himself in the third person.

  ‘You want us to fuck off, and leave you to get on with it then?’

  ‘It would be best, Charlie. I fix the Major’s radio traffic, OK? See you in Berlin, OK?’

  ‘. . . and now you’re really a policeman?’

  ‘Yes, but only for a little while.’

  Ah hell. Bugger him. I tried to tell James and Les. Les sniffed. James said, ‘I know. We heard you – I’ve a phone call to make, I think.’ James wandered off to Pete’s jeep.

  ‘Where the hell does he think he’s going to find a working telephone in this part of Germany?’ I wondered.

  ‘You found one a few days ago. I guess he’s guessed that the Redcap has a field telephone rigged in his posh jeep. Wanna fag?’

  *

  ‘You believe the coppers, old man?’ James asked when he drifted back.

  ‘Every time I do,’ I said, ‘they lock me up in prison, or handcuff me to a bed. It’s not very encouraging.’

  ‘What your Polish johnny says is more or less right. Seems there’s some Czech airman ripping the arse out of the black market by getting his supplies sent up by the Army for free, and I got caught in the middle of it. He’s upsetting all the proper racketeers, so Charlie’s Pole has been recruited to sort him out. Apparently this guy doesn’t need to steal our stores; we deliver them to him. You ever heard the like? He calls small convoys forward, pretending to be folk like us, and has the stores out of them.’

  ‘I think it’s confusing. I don’t know who’s on our side any more.’

  Les told me, ‘No one is, Charlie.’ He waited a full thirty seconds before he spoke again. ‘No one ever was. Are we going to bleedin’ Bremen, or what, sir?’ he asked me. ‘It seems to me to be getting further away from us every day.’

  Twenty-Five

  It bloody rained, and we got stuck between a column of muddy Brit Sherman tanks and a small convoy of smaller Morris trucks full of troops. There were about ten of them being shepherded by a Dingo scout car, and each contained about ten men. The tanks didn’t stop for nightfall, but outside yet another small German town the infantry did. So did we.

  I helped James whilst Les brewed up. I rigged his aerial for him; looping it over the highest branch I could reach. He held his earphones up to one ear only, which meant that I could listen in to the other earpiece. He had done that before when he was worried about signal strength, and his keying. He needn’t have worried. I told you he had a good hand. His signal was all encrypted, of course; so it meant bugger-all to me. So was the acknowledgement from the other end, and the brief message that followed it.

  Then the operator sent something in clear. He or she sent Tuesday’s Child, which brought me out in goose bumps. The Major signed off and put the ’phones back in their rig in the suitcase lid. He looked tired. Asked me, ‘What did you make of that, Charlie?’

  ‘Different hand, different operator. The way someone uses a Morse key is like a signature. You only have to hear someone once, most of the time, to be able to recognize them again. Ever since we set out the guy you’ve asked me to listen to has been the same person. This guy is someone different.’

  James said, ‘OK . . . and now tell me about Tuesday’s Child; it wasn’t in my briefing anywhere. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘It does to me, James. That was Pete’s way of telling us that he fixed your communication problem. Tuesday’s Child was a Lancaster bomber, one of the best. Pete and I completed our tours in her.’

  ‘OK . . . Where is she now?’

  ‘In hell with all the others. She crashed and burned the day we gave her to another crew. Bad bitch.’

  ‘Tuesday’s Child?’

  ‘That’s right, James. Grace. We named her after Grace.’

  ‘I see.’

  He didn’t, and I hoped that he never would. He asked me, ‘You Tuesdays stick together then? After you finished flying together?’

  ‘Don’t know. Pete’s the only one I’ve met so far, and I thought he was dea
d.’

  ‘Are you pleased that he’s not?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I am. What’s this about, James? What are all the questions for?’

  ‘Just asking,’ he said. ‘Just interested.’

  I didn’t believe him either. Life’s not that tidy.

  That night I retuned the suitcase for them. The noise came out of a neat speaker the Krauts had built into the lid. We sat around Les’s fire, which threw out a surprising heat. It wasn’t far from our small tents. Kate’s back door was open, and from the suitcase we listened to Johnny Mercer doing ‘GI Jive’, and Louis Jordan doing ‘Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t My Baby?’ Later there was a Glenn Miller hour from Paris. Probably from that bloody club the Americans captured me in. Dinah Shore had flown in, and was doing ‘Stardust’ with them. Somewhere a few miles up ahead people were fighting and dying at the arse end of a bad war, and Dinah was singing ‘Stardust’.

  They told you lies when they said that the worst things to be seen on the march across Europe were the concentration camps, and what was left of the people who had lived in them. They weren’t the worst things – and I know because I saw three camps, and there were things even worse than that.

  They never told you about the big German cities. The big German cities laid flat. The big German cities full of dead people . . . or how we invented the microwave oven fifty years before its time, and flung whole bloody communities into it. I’ve told you before: I was never afraid to ask the questions.

  We drove through a small town. Every house, shop, office or tenement I saw was smashed and burned. Two churches had been spread about a bit, but the cinema had managed to remain intact in the town square. Maybe that was a pointer for the future. The town hadn’t only been bombed: I thought an army had fought its way through it. There were no people and no stray animals, except a thin fox I saw rummaging in a shop window with smashed glass. The smell of burning seeped inside Kate, like stale cigarette smoke clinging to your jacket after a night in the pub.

  The Major said, ‘I think that they used to have a car factory here,’ as if that explained everything.

  ‘I’ve been to the briefings,’ I told him. ‘We would have crapped all over it even if it had only made prams.’

  There was a GI standing on our side of the road at a crossroads just the other side of the town. He wore a scarred chamberpot helmet, a weatherproof coat, and had a big twostrapped pack thrown over only one shoulder. His back was to us, and the hand held out with its thumb up was brown. He turned and smiled when we stopped by him, and held out the hand to me. I had to open the car door to speak to him. We did the ritual: touched, grasped and shook. I liked his open smile, and hoped he wasn’t on a runner again. I said, ‘Hello, Cutter.’

  ‘Hi, Charlie, Les. Hello, sir.’ He gave James a cursory salute and the Major attempted a return serve. All James did was succeed in knocking his cap off. He cursed, Damn.

  I asked, ‘Are you running again?’

  ‘No, Charlie. Same as you, travelling. Under orders this time. They liberated Bremen yesterday, and they have a field hospital that’s going under.’

  ‘They ordered you to walk to Bremen?’

  ‘Shit no. There was a motor bicycle, but I wrecked it. I ran into a dog the other side of town. Pity. It looked a good dog. It was certainly the only dog they got left.’

  ‘See any people?’ That was James.

  ‘Nossir. I guess they all evacuated. Someone else’s problem now.’

  ‘Wanna lift? We’re going that way too.’ That was Les.

  ‘Yes please,’ Cutter said. ‘You want me to ride in the back with the General, or up front like the enlisted men?’

  ‘Charlie can sit in the back,’ Les said. ‘I want you up here where I can keep an eye on you.’

  Cutter rode with his pack and helmet clutched possessively into his lap. I asked him, ‘What do you have in the pack? Booze? Silk knickers for the Fräuleins?’

  ‘The tools of my trade, Charlie, and that ain’t them. I’ve as much penicillin as they’d let me have. If we flogged it I’d be worth my weight in gold to you today.’

  ‘Not that you’d ever sell?’

  I’d gone too far. There was a bit of a sulky silence, and then the Negro said, ‘What’s the point of my cutting folk if I can’t keep them alive with the proper drug afterwards?’

  I said, ‘Sorry,’ and meant it.

  A while after that the Cutter asked, ‘You boys mind if we stay in touch while we’re all still in Bremen? I don’t know what it’s gonna be like up there. They may not like me.’

  In a cobbled dairy yard on a hill closer to Bremen we found five British Army trucks. They were all time-expired AEC Matadors, just like Obadiah. They were parked neatly alongside each other, burnt to a crisp, and still smoking. The rubber smoke made my eyes water. We had slowed up, and then stopped to rubberneck, when we saw a jeep on its side in the ditch outside. When we walked over to examine it we could see that the jeep had heavy-calibre bullet holes in its cracked windscreen, and bullet slashes on both of the front seat cushions.

  There was a small, deserted cheese factory – two rooms in a two-hundred-year-old shed – alongside the dairy. Behind it we found fresh graves, with identity discs hanging on the rough wooden crosses. Some of the crosses were surmounted by British helmets; another bore an officer’s soft cap: half of it had been torn away, and it was stained with blood.

  James was with me. The colour left his face. He lifted the cap, and then said, ‘Bollocks,’ softly. Like a whisper. Then he flung it away from him. He prowled the yard with his revolver in his hand; Les with his Sten. There was no one there to shoot at, of course. The Cutter seemed the least moved.

  ‘We in trouble?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. They’re long gone. It takes three hours to burn out a truck as thoroughly as that.’

  I’d forgotten that he’d been a policeman once, and cops know things like that. James and Les searched the sheds and the house. The Cutter told me, ‘Wasting their time. Does your Major still have his radio?’

  ‘Yes,’ said James. I swung on him, scared. So did the Cutter. James had come from nowhere. He said, ‘Sorry,’ and, ‘Yes, I do have it. Why?’

  ‘I wondered if you might think to send a signal to Charlie’s friend Pete. I understand that he’s a policeman again, just like I used to be.’

  ‘Again?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes. He was one before the war, didn’t you know?’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said.

  ‘Precisely,’ James said.

  Why hadn’t we known that?

  McKechnie and Les left us to it. In the house Les got a brew going. James said to me, ‘I’m flying a bit blind here, old son: sending a signal to an operator who appears to have been substituted for my regular, by your flaky pal.’

  ‘. . . because your own operator was playing against you, James. Trust me.’

  ‘Maybe . . . and maybe we’d better go back to sir until this bit’s over with.’

  ‘OK, sir. It’s your call: forgive the pun. We can either report this, and the law can still catch up . . . or not report it, pass by on the other side, and maybe they never will.’

  ‘Pass by on the other side: isn’t that sort of what your pal accused us of before?’

  ‘Yes. We’re good at it, obviously.’

  ‘You want me to call him up, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Fine.’ It wasn’t. He was pissed off. He sounded as if he’d eaten bitter aloes. James sprayed a short burst of Morse. He had encrypted it, and assured me that the essential detail was there. I wasn’t reassured. He had asked the operator to forward it urgently to Tuesday’s Child. That was neat. We only waited ten minutes for a response, which was Morsed back in clear as, Tx. KKK50.

  James showed me, and asked, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘It’s either Pete, or someone who reads old prewar RAF shorthand. It says, Thanks, I will formate on you in 50 minutes. Pete will be here within the ho
ur.’

  ‘. . . and pigs fly.’

  ‘Stop grumbling, James. Sir. Come and have a cuppa. We’d better not tell the Cutter about the KKK. He’d take it very personally.’

  The room in which Les had discovered a working stove was in what had once been a small farm kitchen. On the way there I said, ‘At least they gave them a Christian burial.’

  ‘The Czech is probably a Catholic,’ James told me. ‘They can be strict about these things. Why don’t you go and say a few words over them? Just in case no one else has.’

  ‘You know I’m not a proper parson, sir. So it won’t bloody do.’

  ‘I’m the bloody Major, and you’re the bloody Captain, and that’s all there bloody is to it! So do as you’re bloody well told, and go and get your bloody book.’

  The only good things to happen were that they joined me at the gravesides, didn’t take the mickey, and said Amen in all the proper places. I don’t know why, but at a grave of one of the driver privates I became suddenly convinced that the occupant had a young family. I made a picture of them in my mind. Horsing around, unaware that they no longer had a dad. I suddenly couldn’t go further. My voice went away somewhere, and James stepped in and finished it for me. When we did caps on, and walked back to the office, James grasped my upper left arm, and guided me as if I was a blind man.

  But I was still pissed off with him afterwards – with this public school thing of wanting to give all the orders, and still wanting to be one of the boys. Besides; it was my sore arm that he had grabbed. I took the char Les offered me: it was in a big chipped mug he’d found – it held about three-quarters of a pint. He’d also slapped a generous waxer into it: brandy this time. I think that he had the contents of a small off-sales bar in Kate’s boot. Anyway, I walked outside with it. I’ve told you that it looked as if the cheese factory had once been part of a small dairy farm? Its muddy yard was cobbled. I walked across it to the old farm fence away from the main road: I didn’t intend to go into the field beyond, but I suppose that Les was keeping an eye on me anyway, because he wandered up behind me. Leaning on the fence. The tea in the mugs steamed.