‘Are the camels and the elephants safe here?’ inquired John Colin. ‘The Germans won’t drop bombs on them?’ He looked lugubrious at the thought of a bombed elephant. James smiled.
‘They’re just fine,’ Joanne assured him. ‘They must think it’s just like a vacation.’
‘Will there be a circus again? After the war?’ inquired the boy. ‘Are the clowns here too?’
They arrived at a high fence, thickly knitted with barbed wire, and James raised his eyebrows. As they cleared the trees and the wayside hedges they saw that the compound within the wire was occupied by a strange congregation of men, trudging men, wearing odd but respectable clothes – coats, waistcoats and some hats; men sitting on the steps of long huts, smoking, grimacing at newspapers. Some just stared into space or gazed through the wire. They looked oddly hopeless as if waiting for a train which in their hearts they knew was unlikely ever to arrive.
‘Aliens,’ said James as he realized. ‘God help us, they’ve put the poor blighters with the circus animals.’
‘No, sir,’ came a loud voice through the wire. ‘The elephants are right along the street. They don’t let us mix up with them.’ His voice was accented and his laugh hollow.
Joanne stared at James and then said ‘Thank you’ to the man. She suddenly asked him: ‘Where is your home?’
‘Cricklewood, London,’ replied the man firmly. His face just fitted an aperture in the wire, like a lugubrious picture in a thin frame. With less conviction he added: ‘Before that, Salzburg.’ He stepped two paces back from the wire and performed a token but elegant bow. ‘I am an enemy alien, madam. I am in prison here because Churchill is afraid of me.’ He emitted a nasal laugh, turned and shuffled away. Several other men had stopped to stare at the trio outside the wire. One glared single-eyed through a monocle. As they moved on towards the next gate he shouted: ‘Get us out of here, British officer! Get us out!’
‘This story gets better,’ suggested Joanne slyly. ‘I only came to write about the homeless camels.’
‘Don’t,’ he pleaded seriously. He shook his head. ‘Somebody, somewhere, lacks finesse, I think.’ He stared at the men. They seemed to have forgotten him now and had returned to their private despond.
A trumpeting through the trees stopped John Colin; he hung on to their arms, amazed at first, then with a slow delight drifting over his face. ‘That,’ confirmed Joanne, ‘was the call of the wild.’
The man who came to greet them at the gate was improbably dressed in a ringmaster’s red tailed coat and gaiters, but with a mothy and discoloured jersey below. His large stomach expanded the jersey and pushed the curves of the coat aside. ‘Ah, I got the message,’ he said without formality. ‘Want to have a look around, do you? Well, it’s not very posh. My name’s Nately and I’m in charge here. Most of the time I’m the only one here anyway. All alone with the wild beasts.’ He laughed patronizingly and shook hands before he led them into the compound with its assorted huts and larger buildings below the trees. A girl of about seventeen, wearing a blouse and jodhpurs, came out of a stable with a bale of hay swaying on a pitchfork. ‘Is this for Rajah?’ she asked in a cockney voice.
‘Right,’ said the man. Despite their presence he paused to watch the girl’s rolling buttocks as she went up the yard. ‘Here,’ he said, as if suddenly remembering his role, ‘we have some of the circus animals. Not many, a few camels, the elephants and one old lion, who’s just about had it. Mind, there’s a few horses, as well, and a lot of the old circus props. The animals get fed up because they haven’t got much to do. Most of them won’t see this war out.’ He saw the girl at the top of the yard. ‘Sal,’ he called hoarsely, ‘get that old saddle on Rajah, will you?’
‘Right you are,’ she called back. ‘Where’s the ladder?’
‘In the shed. Give him another half a bale to keep him sweet.’ He lowered his face towards John Colin. ‘How about a ride on a jumbo?’ he suggested. He straightened up. ‘I suppose I’d better ask mum and dad,’ he added.
He caught Joanne’s uncertain glance at James. ‘It’s quite safe, madam,’ he assured. ‘Old Rajah’s a bit ancient now, the stuffing’s coming out of him, but he still remembers carrying the kids around pre-war. While Miss Ashworth is getting him ready perhaps you’d like to see the circus props. They’re all in the barn just here.’
Squeakily he opened one side of a pair of double doors and turned on a wan electric light. They stepped into an eerie place, the walls hung with huge painted heads and costumes, holes for the eyes, the mouths laughing widely but without mirth; a whole clown’s suit was suspended from a beam as if the performer had finally despaired and committed suicide. The little boy looked entranced but apprehensive. He touched tentatively the frame of a one-wheeled cycle with its saddle ten feet from the ground. Amazingly, the man called Nately quickly picked it away from the wall and without preliminaries mounted it and began to ride it furiously around the centre of the barn. It creaked and squeaked as he pedalled, shouting madly: ‘Roll along now! Roll up, ladies and gentlemen. Last performance this year! All the thrills of the big top!’
He ceased just as abruptly as he had begun, jumping lightly to the ground and steadying the cycle with one hand. He whirled it on its wheel and set it against the wall. ‘Don’t do any harm to keep in trim,’ he announced. Joanne and James were laughing but John Colin’s eyes were filled with surprised admiration. The man picked up a trumpet and blew down it hideously. Then he balanced a red ball on his head and two others on his fingertips. ‘Happy days,’ he said.
The girl Sal appeared in the doorway. ‘Rajah’s ready,’ she sniffed. Nately let the balancing balls fall. ‘I managed to get it on.’
Apprehensively they went out to the yard again. A dusty-looking elephant was standing apathetically, its trunk swinging like a rope. On its back was a threadbare saddle of what had once been red and gold leather. A ladder had been placed against its flank. ‘Well . . .’ began Joanne apprehensively.
Nately said hurriedly: ‘Perfectly safe, lady. Sal will go with you.’
Joanne looked at James who grimaced. ‘You want to ride on the elephant, don’t you?’ he said to John Colin.
‘Of course he does,’ broke in Nately. ‘What lad wouldn’t? Not many of them get a chance nowadays, do they. Right, up we go. You too, sir.’
Feeling foolish James began to climb the ladder to the elephant’s high back. He wished fervently that he was not in uniform. He reached the saddle and sat on one of the side-facing seats. He could feel the elephant wobbling beneath him. Breathless with anticipation John Colin followed and then the sheepishly smiling Joanne. The girl Sal came last. Nately removed the ladder. He went to the front of the elephant and taking a ringmaster’s whip from inside the door of the barn touched the animal on the mouth. It began to ponder forward.
They went, yard after slow yard, around the compound and between the buildings. Two other elephants in an enclosure trumpeted as they trundled by but the aged Rajah took no heed.
‘You’ll be able to smell the camels soon,’ announced Nately confidently from below. He was walking with them. ‘They niff like billy-o. And kick! One of them kicked my good wife, just a glancing blow, but she’s been laid up for five weeks. Hasn’t she, Sal?’
‘I’ll say,’ grunted Sal. ‘Look out for the trees just here. You’ve got to duck.’
The camels gathered in a disconsolate group in another enclosure, bunched like a pile of threadbare rugs. ‘What are they eating?’ asked John Colin.
‘Nothing,’ answered the girl. ‘They do that all the time, just move their jaws around and around. I expect they’re just practising.’
Joanne, trying to hide her reaction to this wisdom, looked away and James followed her glance. They were nearing the area of the gate and, after clearing some trees, they came to a high honeycomb fence, against which the hapless aliens were now congregated, clutching on to the wire as prisoners and caged birds always do. The men, mostly middle-aged or elderly, with s
tomachs, fallen shoulders, domed heads, began to cheer, not derisively but as if they were pleased to see that someone, at least, was enjoying life. One produced a flute and began to play a cheerful jig. The elephant looked around with slow interest, found it was unexciting and plodded on. ‘German spies,’ announced the girl as if it were another section of the circus quarters. ‘They ought to be shot.’
The aliens summoned a last cheer as the huge trousers of the elephant’s backside went around the corner of a building and from view. James climbed down the ladder and helped Joanne and the boy. ‘How do you get on with the neighbours?’ he asked Nately.
The circus man leaned closer. ‘Bastards, aren’t they, sir?’ he whispered man to man. ‘Always moaning. Ought to have them digging trenches, I say. And they’ve got the nerve to complain about the smell of the camels.’
When they left, John Colin holding a coloured flag which had been the man’s parting gesture, Nately locked the rusting gate behind them with an air of finality which suggested that he would not open it again for some years. The girl Sal stood next to him and watched them go. Then they turned and went back towards the buildings round the compound. James glanced at Joanne. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that?’ he said.
‘Not very often,’ she agreed. ‘War certainly has some unusual aspects.’
‘I didn’t like that man,’ put in John Colin. ‘But he was clever on that bike, wasn’t he.’
They had no choice but to walk along by the perimeter of the aliens’ camp again. A group of men, including the one with the flute, followed them on the other side of the wire, observing them, but in silence. The flute player had ceased his tune and now carried his instrument under his arm like a cane.
‘Sir . . . sir . . . Major Lovatt!’
Surprised, they stopped. The perambulating prisoners on the reverse side of the wire halted also. Their heads moved around on their worn necks. A younger man was advancing to the wire. James realized he had seen him somewhere before. The man reached the wire, clutching it. ‘Major . . . oh I beg your pardon for this interruption, but I thought you would remember me . . .’
‘I do,’ said James. ‘Yes, Mr . . . Mr Burton, wasn’t it? From the estate agents.’
‘Wasn’t it,’ emphasized the man. ‘Now it is Bormann again. Look where they have put me. In here. Why do they do this to me, major? Can you get me out?’
James looked at Joanne. ‘Would you . . . I wondered . . . would you walk back to the station with John Colin? Perhaps I’d better . . .’
Joanne smiled and nodded: ‘Sure, we’ll wait for you.’
‘I won’t be very long.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s half an hour for the train anyway. I think I ought to try and see this chap.’ He said through the wire, ‘How do I get in?’
‘Easy, easy,’ called a toothless alien. ‘It’s getting out is the trouble!’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Bormann anxiously, ignoring his fellow-internee. ‘Go to the gate, sir. I will ask the commandant. He will allow it, I am sure. For an officer.’
Joanne took the boy’s hand and they continued towards the station. John Colin hung back several times to see what James was doing. James, making his way towards the wired gate, waved and Joanne and the boy waved back.
‘Your wife and little son are very nice,’ said Bormann. They sat at a wooden table under a canvas awning so faded that its stripes were only just discernible. Two collapsible canvas chairs, the unchecked growth of weeds and some rampant poppies around them gave the place a tropical air.
‘It looks nice,’ said Bormann, ‘but it is a bad place. I want to be away from here.’ He looked starkly at James. ‘First the Nazis,’ he complained. ‘Now the fucking elephants. They drive me crazy, those fucking elephants, if you will excuse me. Hooting like a mad band. And they smell. Those and those ridiculous camels. Never will I forget the smell.’ He regarded the Englishman sorrowfully. ‘You hear that I have learned to swear in English. All the time it is fucking this and fucking that. I learn it from the guards here. They say it all the time.’
‘What do you do to keep yourself occupied?’ asked James.
‘Do? Sir, there is nothing to do. I cannot be an estate agent in this place. First they set me writing letters to German people. With another man. We had to write letters to be dropped from aeroplanes.’
‘Leaflets,’ nodded James. He had always wondered who wrote the leaflets.
‘Another British madness. Here you are trapped . . . yes, trapped, that is the word, on these few fields with all the sea and the Germans around and it is the British who write to the Germans telling them to surrender. What madness is that?’ He stared at the sunshine making geometric patterns on the warped plywood under his feet. ‘There was another man to write these leaflets, as you say, also with me. But they took him away because he was no good. I think he really liked Hitler. He spelled Adolf A-D-O-L-P-H-E. Adolphe. He made it sound like some philosopher.’
‘What would you like to do if you were away from here?’ asked James.
‘Anything.’ His enthusiasm shone but then he paused with the patent thought that he had overcommitted himself. ‘Anything, but not dangerous, you understand, sir. Not spying in Germany or in my own country. I could never be a spy in Vienna anyway because everybody knows me there.’
‘What happened to your mother? I remember you telling me about your mother.’
‘She is working in the Harrods store. Doing very well, thank you. They did not arrest her because they say she is harmless. But I also am harmless. I am a refugee, not a spy. I would like to work in Harrods.’
James rose to go. He shook Bormann’s hand. ‘I will see if there’s anything that can be done to get you released,’ he promised. ‘It seems that the whole system is a little odd.’ At the gate the man was playing the flute as he went out. ‘God Save the King’, he played. Bormann called after him hopefully. ‘Some of us, the aliens, they sent to the Island of Man. There I hear it is like a holiday. It is very nice. Maybe they could send me there, sir.’
On the evening of 20 August, Winston Churchill was to broadcast one of his stirring speeches on the wireless. That it would be stirring there was no doubt; they always were. Even the dullest mind could not fail to respond to the resonance of voice, the gallant words and phrases of that summer, phrases that were already written deeply into the pages of history.
At RAF Moyles Court, however, on that mellow late daylight hour, the wireless set in the mess and the second set in the stand-by room issued their sound to little but tables and chairs. In the mess the stewards were clearing tables and there was only one man in the stand-by room when Millie entered, a pilot who said little and read deeply all through the periods when he was not flying. He was twenty-five years old and tended to treat the others as the boys they were.
Outside on the grass alongside the airfield young men lounged, like wasps in their yellow Mae West life jackets. They made up the last stand-by flight of the day, for the light was fading. They lay scattered in the warm and settled air, joking, reading, lying and intently studying the now vacant battlefield over their heads, or kicking a saggy football around. Sometimes the ball, punted off course, fell among a group of reclining pilots who shouted protests as people disturbed on a beach might do. They were waiting for the previous operational flight to come back. It had taken off twenty minutes before but the Germans they had been dispatched to intercept had turned back before crossing the coast. It had been a good day for the squadron, for no one, so far, had been lost.
Not for the first time Millie thought how strange the battles were; like performances, kept to certain times with set rules, ceasing with the oncoming of night. The sky would fall quite suddenly quiet then. There were a few times in the hours of darkness when bombers drummed blindly overhead but they were passing enemies and they had not yet begun their bombing of London by night. The British fighter pilots knew they would not be called out in darkness, for there was nothing they could do; the time of the night-fighter
was yet to come. So they turned over in the safe luxury of sleep.
She had thought about it on the train, in her house, or riding her bicycle, or when, with the many watchers below, she had traced their conflicts in the sky (she sometimes felt certain that she could recognize individual Hurricanes five thousand feet above her head). On the ground there was often a curious picnic atmosphere. People sat in the open air with their war-time bread sandwiches to squint at the lofty curls of vapour trails; pointing out a slow parachute or a spilling plane. The fliers themselves jovially crowded village inns or lined the bar of their station mess, when they were not sunbathing beside the runway, or facing death among clouds.
The combatants had as little idea as the everyday civilian of the widespread gravity of the battle; of how the shortage of replacements for lost aircraft and lost pilots threatened to defeat them despite their successes and their courage. Nor did it appear to concern them. Only the personal moments did; the German coming to attack and their going to meet him, to turn him back or destroy him, the laughter and the beer afterwards.
They believed, as did the civilians, that these fights in the sky were only the preliminary skirmishes to the real battle, the invasion by ground forces. They were not dismayed by the prospect, for tomorrows did not figure greatly in their thoughts. The evil of each day was quite sufficient.
Churchill was due to broadcast at nine o’clock. Charlie Fox’s mother in the Old Crown at Binford had said that it was not Churchill at all who made the speeches but an impersonator. Churchill was too busy. She also said that Lord Haw-Haw, broadcasting that day from Germany, had said that the Lymington clock was fast – and it was. There must be spies everywhere. People grouped around their wireless sets throughout the country awaited Churchill’s speech, the large veneered box set altar-like at the centre of many a living-room.
At Moyles Court, however, the young airmen continued to enjoy the evening warmth out of doors as though the speech were nothing to do with them. The returning flight was now circling the airfield before descending. Through the open windows of the stand-by room came the symbolic notes of Big Ben. They took a minute to strike nine o’clock and there were many who devoted that special minute for saying their daily wartime prayer. As the sounds drifted out into the open some of the airmen stood casually and began to wander towards the windows. Millie heard them laughing and smiled at their banter. Three of them began to sing, inconsequentially and softly:
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