‘He won’t mind,’ Betty said easily. ‘Did I tell you he’s got blue eyes? Lie, I mean.’
So that Saturday they put on their dancing shoes and plenty of lipstick, splashed themselves with Evening in Paris and went to the Palais, Betty rather nervously, Barbara determined to enjoy herself come what may.
It was a smashing evening, as they told one another afterwards. To Betty’s delight, Lie and Barbara took to one another at once, even though he turned out to be a very ordinary young man, with mousey hair and grey eyes, and not the handsome creature Betty had described. And Victor was there and in very good form.
He didn’t mention the coats until the lights dimmed for the first waltz. He and Barbara sat it out, as they usually did. He’d accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to waltz with him, comforting himself that she wouldn’t waltz with anyone else either. They’d get around to it eventually, if he played his cards right. Meantime …
‘Thass cold enough tonight,’ he said.
‘Freezing,’ she agreed. ‘I was perished on the trams this morning.’
‘You need a thick coat.’
‘I ain’t got the coupons for a coat,’ she said. ‘That’ll have to wait till next year.’
It was all panning out as he’d planned it. Couldn’t have been better. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I got a surprise for you. I’ll be a couple of minutes.’
It took him less. Betty and Lie were strolling back to their table as he returned with one of his splendid coats draped casually over his arm.
‘Present for you,’ he said to Barbara.
She couldn’t help liking it. Who wouldn’t? It was a gorgeous coat. She could feel her eyes dilating at the sight of it. But she couldn’t accept it. Not even from old Victor. That wouldn’t be right.
‘Where d’you get it?’ she asked.
‘Bought it, didn’t I? Wholesale.’
‘What about the coupons?’
‘Never mind the coupons. Try it on.’ If he could get it round her shoulders, she’d accept it.
She hesitated, was tempted, and finally put it on, sighing into the luxury of it. It looked as glamorous as he’d hoped, the fur collar a perfect foil for that dark hair of hers, a soft frame for her pretty face. ‘It must have cost the earth,’ she said.
‘Thass a present,’ he told her and appealed to Betty for support. ‘What’d you think, Betty? Don’t it suit her?’
Betty’s admiration was unreserved. ‘I think it’s smashing,’ she said and teased. ‘I couldn’t have one an’ all, could I?’
At first he didn’t take her seriously. Then he realised what an opportunity she’d given him. If he gave her a coat too, that might swing it. It would cut into his profits but so what. Spend some to earn some, sort of thing. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘You could. Matter a’ fact, I got another one out in the car. Identical. Hang around.’
There were no complications to hinder Betty’s acceptance. She was thrilled with her coat and put it on at once. ‘Whatcher think?’ she said to Lionel.
‘You look glam,’ he admired but turned a shrewd face to Victor, aware that there could be a catch in it. ‘What’s the damage, though? I mean that’s a good bit a’ schmutter. Like Barbara said, must’a cost.’
‘On the house,’ Victor said grandly. ‘Any friend of Spitfire’s is a friend of mine.’
He was rewarded by a rapturous smile from both girls. And Betty flung her arms round him and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek to thank him. For a second he thought Spitfire was going to kiss him too. She didn’t but she could have done. And she’d accepted the coat. Oh yes, he thought, preening with satisfaction as the mirror ball dappled his two expensive gifts with shifting patterns of white light. I’ve done really well. Started my own firm and given my Barbara a gift she’ll never forget. Put a foot in both doors, so to speak.
Chapter Nineteen
Snow was falling on the river Maas, drifting before Steve’s eyes in huge irregular flakes that settled on his eyelashes and drifted gently down onto tanks, TCV’s and every uniformed figure in sight until everything he could see was blotched and patched in a wintry piebald. It was November and bitterly cold, the flat Dutch polders needled with frost and the roads that traversed them treacherous with ice.
For the past ten days the battalion had been at rest, billeted with the Dutch and usually inside in the warm, unless they were on outpost duty or servicing their vehicles or taking in supplies. Steve had spent most of his leisure time writing letters, for Barbara had written to him every day, long rather muddled epistles telling him about her working day, and how she couldn’t believe she would never see Norman again, and that she was still living with Aunt Sis, and what a waste war was, and how she’d gone dancing with Betty and then felt guilty about it afterwards ‘so soon after the funeral’. Squashed at the end of her first letter she’d added a postscript that made him ache with pity for her.
I am sorry to go on and on like this but I got to tell someone and if you were here I would tell you. If that upset you just tell me and I won’t do it again. Only I’ve done it this time, so that’s a bit late but you know what I mean.
He wrote back at once to reassure her, saying that she must tell him everything and that it didn’t upset him. ‘Far from it’ But answering her letters was more difficult. In that first long letter he’d said all he could bear to say about death, and now he was stuck for words.
In the long slog across France he’d found all sorts of ways to offer comfort to his mates – a fag lit and handed across, a sympathetic thump on the back, sometimes just a companionable silence – but they were all actions. If he could have seen her, it would have been easier. He could have put his arms round her and stroked her face and kissed her and that would have told her everything. Now he felt he was repeating himself, no matter how hard he tried to comfort her, using the same worn phrases over and over again.
He told her he was glad she was back at work, approved when she said she was staying with Aunt Sis for a bit longer. ‘I know she’s untidy but she’s a marvellous politician and a doughty fighter in a good cause. I wish there were more like her.’ And when she wrote to say that she’d been dancing with Betty again, he sensed that she was worried about it and applauded that too. ‘She’s a good kid, our Betty, even if she’s as bad as I am on the dance floor. Don’t tell her I said so or she’ll give me what-for. Have fun anyway, when you can.’
Not that there was much fun in his own life. On the ninth rest day they were issued with winter uniforms – leather jackets for the infantry and multi-zippered snow suits for the tankies – so, like it or not, it was obvious they would soon be on the move again. They were war-weary and winter-weary and seriously below strength, and to make matters worse an order called ‘Python’ had come through to inform them that troops who had served overseas for more than five years were to be allowed home.
Dusty was disgruntled to hear it. ‘I could ha’ done with another ten days’ rest,’ he complained. ‘Never mind goin’ home. Some bleeders have all the luck.’
‘Stop bellyaching, you miserable old bugger,’ Steve said. ‘They’ve earned it, all they’ve been through. All across Africa an’ all the way up Italy and now this. You’d cut off PDQ if it was you.’
Dusty had to agree with that but he was still discontented. ‘What are they gonna do with the rest of us?’ he grumbled. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’ The battalion had taken so many casualties that it was down to a third of its original number – a fact that neither of them cared to think about too often.
‘Here’s Sergeant Morris,’ Steve said, squinting at the bulky figure trudging towards them through the curtain of snowflakes. ‘Ask him.’
‘Reorganisation,’ the sergeant told them. ‘The three Queen’s regiments are being amalgamated. We’re all being informed tonight.’
‘An’ what’s happening to us?’ Dusty wanted to know.
‘We’re being joined up with the 9th Durham Light Infantry and the 2nd Battalion, t
he Devonshire Regiment. Good lads.’
That was better news. But Dusty accepted it grudgingly. ‘Not before time.’
‘Wasn’t what I come over for though,’ the sergeant went on. ‘You’ve waylaid me. No, what it is, I got a notification for Private Wilkins. Official.’ And when Steve took the envelope looking puzzled, ‘It’s your promotion come through, old son. You’re being made corporal. Changes all round, you see.’
‘Corp, eh?’ Dusty said when the sergeant was out of earshot. ‘Jammy bugger!’
‘It’s my hard-earned reward’, Steve said, ‘for putting up with you all these months.’ But although he joked about it, he was proud to be promoted. It was something to write home about. Unfortunately the 9th Durham Light Infantry were driving into camp even as he spoke, so there was no more time for letters. It was all action.
They took to the road at daybreak the next day, back to the familiar pattern of fear and tension, action and reaction. It was a dark, damp, depressing morning. The rising sun was watery yellow and tentative. It flushed the horizon with the faintest pink which faded in five minutes, and once risen it diminished in size and colour until it was simply a dull white disc in a sky the colour of dirty bandages. To the north, where woods rustled and brooded, snow still covered the tops of the pine trees with a white fringe, but it had melted everywhere else, and the roads they travelled were awash with slush and mud from one embankment to the other. To the south there was so much surface water on the polders that they looked like sheets of lead and the dykes that divided them were sullen grey and swollen. It was going to be a hard slog. But at least this time they were up to strength and had two formidable new weapons to support them, a tank adapted to clear mines with long whirling flails and another that was reputed to be capable of throwing out a tongue of flame a hundred yards long.
As Dusty said, ‘Can’t wait to see that.’
The first went into action almost at once. They hadn’t made more than half a mile before the leading tanks ran into soggy ground. Two were so badly bogged down, that the remainder were ordered to find firmer ground. And that turned out to be a minefield. Two tanks were knocked out instantly, a third was hit by a 75-millimetre, and at that point, the flails were ordered in to clear the mines. They did it in sensational fashion, blazing along the edge of the field, long flails whirling and touching off mines as they progressed, the noise and colour of the explosions highly dramatic in the grey of the day.
Steve and Dusty and their mates watched it with great satisfaction, but then the first skirmish began and the attack was too immediate for them to watch out for anything except their backs. There was a sudden purple flash, then a call to halt and take cover, and then shells came screaming towards them out of the woods.
A hundred yards ahead, the surviving tanks had halted too and one was blazing away with Besa tracer, left and right, up and down, blasting the whole of the front of the wood. Beads of fire sprayed at the trees, struck them and whirled off again. Steve and his mates lay where they’d landed behind the embankment with their weapons ready and pointing at the trees, as bursts of enemy tracer sailed, a hundred feet up, over their heads.
There was an officer crawling along the embankment towards them, yelling to them to keep their heads down, and as he approached, a sniper’s bullet sliced off the metal pip on his left shoulder. Seconds later one of Steve’s troop was hit in the hand. Glancing back he could see blood jetting over the stock of the man’s rifle and heard him groan as he slipped into the mud.
‘Too bloody close!’ he muttered as he began to wriggle back to his casualty. Bullets were thumping into the earth all round them and he checked their trajectory automatically, realised that they were coming from a nearby tree and looked up to see a familiar grey-green shape among the bare branches with its rifle cocked towards them. The casualty would have to wait. ‘Sniper!’ he yelled. ‘Two o’clock!’ Then things happened at speed and in confusion, as he and the troop let off a volley of fire. The sniper was wounded but struggled to stay aloft, was hit again and fell. And then there was an outburst of machine-gun fire from the distant woods that had them all scrambling back behind the embankment.
Steve was pleased to note that he was still calm. He took out the wounded man’s field dressing and bound up his hand. ‘It’s a clean wound,’ he told him. ‘You’ll be out of it now. Back to Blighty.’
‘Thanks, corp. D’you get him?’
‘Yep. Won’t shoot anyone else.’
But the fire from the woods had them pinned down and that was getting worse. It was coming from a concrete pill-box they could just see at the edge of the wood.
‘Now what, corp?’ Dusty said.
Steve was trying to work it out. The machine gunners had a good range and there was no cover apart from the embankment, so it would be suicidal to run out into the field, and although they could lob a few grenades, they wouldn’t do enough damage unless they could get them through the door. But before he could answer, the flame thrower had arrived and was in spectacular action.
The flame it threw was a hundred yards long and spurted from the gun like a dragon’s tongue, bright yellow and scorching everything in its path. They could feel the heat of it from where they crouched, smell the wood burning, hear the roar as it engulfed the pill-box. Dark figures tumbled out into the wood, some on fire and screaming. And the guns were silenced. It was the most dramatic thing Steve and Dusty had ever seen. As they told one another much later that evening, standing by the leaguered tanks, smoking and chatting like the old comrades they were.
‘S’been a fair old day, all in all,’ Dusty observed. ‘Snow’s stopped. Jerries retreated. Them flame throwers worked a treat. We shan’t have so much nonsense with the buggers now. They was giving up in droves. How many prisoners did we take, d’you reckon?’
‘’Bout forty.’
Dusty gloated. ‘That’s the style. Lock ’em all up, rotten bleeders.’
They smoked in silence for a minute or two, looking out over the flat dark countryside. I’ve not done too badly, Steve thought, for my first day as corporal.
‘’Nother day gone,’ Dusty said.
‘Marked off?’
‘Yep.’
‘How many’s that?’
‘Five months, two weeks and three days,’ Dusty said with great satisfaction, and began to sing. ‘Oh eleven more months an’ eight more days I’ll be out of the calaboose. Eleven more months and eight more days they’re going to turn me loose.’
Home, Steve thought, and remembered it suddenly, with a yearning that cramped his guts. Warm chairs by a warm fire, the smell of bacon frying, the wireless playing. The High Street full of crowds, the row of shops, Dad’s tobacconist’s, Mum’s butcher’s. The Town Hall. Barbara running down the steps holding his hand. Barbara in bed with those white arms round his neck pulling him closer …
There was a muffled roar from somewhere in the distance, immediately followed by three more in quick succession.
‘What the hell’s that?’ Dusty said, as they both turned to look.
Across the river, in German-held territory, four white vapour trails were climbing the sky, two to the left, two to the right.
‘Ack-ack?’ Steve wondered. But there were no explosions. The trails simply went on climbing, higher and higher, forming four white parabolas in the ink-black sky. They couldn’t be buzzbombs because they flew straight, once they’d been launched. They weren’t planes either because they were climbing too fast. But if they weren’t bombs or planes, what the hell were they? There was something sinister about that long trajectory heading out to sea.
‘Some sort of gun,’ Steve decided, being practical. ‘Long range. They’re testing it.’
‘Good job they ain’t firing at us,’ Dusty observed. ‘That’s all I got to say.’
But London was on the other side of the Channel. Oh Christ! They couldn’t be firing at London, could they?
They watched until the vapour trails faded and disappeared.
‘Ah well!’ Dusty said, stubbing out his cigarette under the toe of his boot. ‘We shall know soon enough. I’m for a spot of shut-eye.’
Sis and Barbara sat up late that evening too, although they hadn’t intended to. Sis had a lot of Union letters to catch up with and took down her writing box as soon as the cloth was cleared. Barbara made up the fire, and sat in the armchair beside it, to darn her stockings and sew a button on her blouse. Then she was at a loss to know what to do next.
‘I s’pose I really ought to tidy up some of your papers,’ she said, gazing into the fire. ‘I keep tellin’ Steve thass what I’m here for.’
‘You could try that lot on the sideboard,’ Sis suggested, without looking up. ‘The file labelled Beveridge Report. The dog-eared one. It’s mostly newspaper cuttings. I’ve been meaning to get it sorted for ages.’
‘How d’you want it done?’
‘Chronological,’ Sis said. ‘There’s dates on most of ’em, somewhere or other.’
So the file was discovered and the sorting out began, with the date rewritten in red ink in the top right-hand corner of each cutting, ‘so’s you can see it’.
At first Barbara simply restored order without looking at any of the documents. But then she discovered that one of them was a letter.
‘You don’t want this in with the articles, do you?’ she asked.
Sis didn’t look up. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a letter to The Times.’’
‘Who from?’
Barbara looked at the signatories. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York and the Archbishop of Westminster, and the Moderator of the Free Church Council.’
This time Sis looked at her. ‘Five agreed standards for social organisation after the war,’ she quoted and grinned. ‘I should just say I do. Your Steve gave me that. Read it.’
So, as it was Steve’s gift, Barbara sat on her heels and read the list. It was a considerable surprise, for although two of the items on it were what she would have expected from a group of churchmen, that a ‘sense of a divine vocation must be restored to man’s daily work’ and that ‘the resources of the earth should be used as God’s gift to the whole human race, and used with due consideration for the needs of the present and future generations’, the other three were not.
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