by Robert Ryan
Harry puffed out his cheeks. ‘I must have mixed up my stash. Picked up the wrong one. I mean … you seen how good they are. Easy mistake to make.’
‘In which case, you won’t mind going to get the real thing, will you?’ said the Maltese very quietly.
‘What? No. No, of course not.’
‘We’ll swap it back.’ The Maltese lit a cigar and puffed for a couple of seconds. ‘One of yours for one of mine. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?’
‘Right. Yes. OK by me. Take me, what? An hour.’
‘We’ll be here.’
He held out his hand. ‘Come on, Dottie.’
‘No.’ The Maltese shook his head firmly. ‘She stays.’
Harry looked over at Dottie, took in her pinched, terrified expression as the minder reached over and gripped her upper arm. She knew there was no second stash of real fivers.
It was Tony, the cousin, who laid it out for him: ‘We’ll only keep her till you get back with our money, Harry. You don’t show, she works off the debt. I mean, Fred here could always do with an extra girl. Yes?’
Fred the Pimp sniffed loudly as he appraised her, before nodding his assent. Harry backed away, trying not to look at Dottie, mumbling his reassurances to the gamblers.
As he left through the darkened public bar, he heard Dottie call his name, the forlorn sound cut off as the greasy curtain swished back into place behind him and he stepped from the pub into the smudged light of another grey day.
Harry headed south, walking aimlessly, trying to get his mind around the dilemma. Nothing came, nothing that would save Dottie. Too many of them to take her out by force, no way of getting the money back to the gamblers within an hour. No, he’d got his wish, he was out of the East End for good, even if it wasn’t quite the way he wanted. She’d be fine, he told himself over and over again. It was all bluff. They wouldn’t turn her out just for a few fivers. Would they? He blinked back a tear and rubbed his temple in agitation, scratching at the skin until it was almost raw, as if he could erase the thought.
He realised what day of the week it was when he saw the little lads hanging around Fournier Street, hands in pockets, stamping against the chill morning air. Sabbath goys, the kids who earned a few bob by doing household chores for the Jews on Saturday—putting coal on the fire, lighting candles and heaters, boiling water and the like.
Which meant The Lane would be closed, of course. He’d been unconsciously heading for one of the market’s breakfast stalls. A warm drink, a bit of company, someone who didn’t know him, or what he had just done. He had enough change in his pocket for that. Not today, though. Keep walking, he told himself.
Eventually, he found himself on the Strand, footsore and weary, his bitterness replaced by fatigue, and he still hadn’t convinced himself Dottie would come out of this all right. There was nothing he could do about that, he decided. Forget Dottie, he had to think of himself now. Another couple of hours and his name would be blackened all over the East End and he would be shunned in every pub and café where he did business.
As he looked up to check his direction, it appeared as if the world was softening, losing focus: a London Particular was rolling in off the river. Soon the city would be blanketed in its lung-burning filth.
He slowed and turned up the collar of his jacket at the thought of the smog and it was then that he saw the recruiting office. The army had got him out of trouble before, perhaps it might again. He went up to the darkened door with its picture of a comically fierce British Tommy and checked the opening times. Nine o’clock. Around an hour to kill.
Harry sat down on the step, waiting to find out exactly what his country could do for him, as the first tendrils of gritty mist began to curl around his feet.
Seven
France, April 1940
HARRY BUTTONED UP HIS greatcoat and pulled on his gloves, ready for his excursion into town. As he adjusted his cuffs he smiled at the three bright stripes on his arm. Sergeant Harry Cole. It still amazed him—how the bloody hell had he become Sergeant Harold Cole? He had never managed higher than lance-jack before.
Harry stepped out into air that was pin-sharp cold on his cheeks. His billet was a converted garage on the outskirts of Croux, a small town north-west of Lille, almost on the Belgian border. The Royal Engineers had commandeered the industrial complex at the northern edge of the village, converted two warehouses and stables into accommodation blocks, put the brass in the hotels and the non-commissioned officers into the old Citroën concession.
As his boots crunched on the road he was aware of the weighty swirl of his coat. Every British Expeditionary Force solder had a ‘housewife’, a sewing kit, and Harry had put his to good use, creating a warren of pockets in the lining of his thick greatcoat, each one capable of holding a packet or two of five Weights. As he strode towards the perimeter fence, Harry felt like a mobile tobacconist.
On that grim morning in the Strand six months ago, the recruiting sergeant had questioned him closely on his former career. When he heard Harry had been instrumental in building up the defences of Hong Kong against the Japanese, and that he was a talented electrician (well, it was true he could re-wire a car’s ignition), the sergeant had recommended him for the Royal Engineers—plenty of defences going to be needed over the next few months, m’lad, he had said, and always work for good sparks.
And so, welcome back the prodigal lance-corporal, complete with, it appeared, a commendation from Parkhill in Hong Kong attached to his records. In an army being hastily cobbled together from raw, green recruits, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that the authorities at Aldershot had concluded that Harry was a soldier with just the right degree of experience and polish, yet retaining the common touch, someone who could move effortlessly between the disparate worlds of the men and the officers. In short, a perfect NCO.
Harry got his third stripe on 2 September, 1939, the day before war was declared. He still remembered when his new colleagues in the Sergeants’ Mess had burst into loud cheering at the thought of ‘giving old Adolf a taste of his medicine’. Bloody idiots, Harry had thought.
As he strode along towards the main road that led into town he could hear the thump of feet as the two men who had drawn stag—guard duty—stamped up and down against the cold and damp. It was spring, but the waterlogged flatlands on the Belgian border were in no mood to give up winter so easily. As he ducked under the flimsy two-inch striped pole that marked the barracks’ entrance, he heard Evans, one of the sentries, say: ‘Evening, Sarge.’
Harry didn’t reply, just stared out across the darkened marshy flats, sniffing the fumes from the sulphide-heavy sluggish water that lay a few hundred yards hence. Somewhere out there under the crystalline stars, the British sappers were extending the Maginot Line. Whereas the latter was by all accounts a model of modern comfort and efficiency, the so-called Gort Line that the BEF engineers were creating was little more than a series of slit trenches. As they excavated they kept discovering the gruesome reminders that someone had passed this way before—rotted trenchcoats, rusted bayonets, the fragments of skulls. Chipping away day and night, the engineers were building exactly the same charnel pits as their predecessors had constructed twenty-five years previously.
He sniffed the air once more and rounded on Gascoyne, the second sentry. ‘You been smokin’, son?’ Harry liked to keep his charges guessing, so they were never quite sure which version of him they were going to get. He moved between affable Harry Cole, just one of the lads, who liked a pint, a joke and a sing-song as much as the next man and Sergeant Harold Cole, strict enforcer of rules and regulations. He tut-tutted loudly. Gascoyne had got the latter. ‘On stag?’
‘Had one just before I came on, Sarge.’
Harry looked at his watch. ‘You been on two hours, son. I can still smell it. Either you’re lying, or you need to do something about your breath. Let’s see them.’ He clicked his fingers impatiently. The soldier handed over a pack of ten cigarettes that was already half empty and
Harry took one. ‘Du Mauriers? They’re too posh for the likes of you. Where the bloody hell did you get Du Mauriers in tens?’
The last thing Harry wanted was upmarket competition from the likes of Du Maurier, not when he had a shed full of Players to shift. ‘Well?’
Gascoyne hesitated for a moment. ‘Doyle, Sarge. Doyle’s got ’em. Better for me chest than Weights.’
Harry threw the pack back and said with disdain: ‘Tipped ciggies. You think the Wehrmacht’ll worry about the kind of army where the soldiers smoke tipped ciggies. Now you watch yourself, my lad.’
Evans cut in before Gascoyne could answer. ‘I need a piss, Sarge,’ he said.
Harry considered telling him to do it in his pants, but he decided he’d done enough of the hard man. ‘Go on, then, at the double.’
Harry left them to it and strolled round the perimeter fence towards the first of the neat redbrick houses that made up the bulk of the town. This was a friendly posting—there was no anti-British feeling, in this part of the country at least. In the Great War, Croux had been smashed, invaded, liberated, invaded and liberated again—by which time there was precious little left. The current BEF garrison was seen by locals as the next generation of brave Tommies, returned to defend them once more. Brave, maybe, but ignorant. It astonished Harry that very few of his comrades actually knew where they were and what they were meant to be defending.
He supposed this was normal, that soldiers lack any kind of overview of war, leaving it up to the top brass. However, the apathy of even the NCOs in trying to get a sense of place took him aback. ‘Be out of here next week,’ one of them had said by way of explanation. ‘Another town, another country, another set of orders we know nothing about. No point in frettin’ it.’
Well, Harry knew exactly where he was, which direction to Paris, how many miles to the coast, knew they had the majority of the French forces a few miles to the east, a few more divisions to the west. He had also noted how the BEF were busy scrounging guns off the French, notably the one-pounder anti-tank guns that didn’t look as if they could dent a dustbin. It was worrying, that, both the Brits wanting to filch them, and the French willing to give them up.
He came to Julie’s estaminet and entered, the warm fug of beer and hot breath washing over him. There was the usual split between locals and soldiers and at the squaddies’ end of the bar someone at the piano was promising to hang out his washing on the Siegfried Line.
Julie was behind the bar with her mother, both dressed in floor-length white aprons. Julie was twenty, a sparky brunette with a sexy, toothsome smile, and he had got to know the daughter while setting up a little business transaction with the mother, who owned the bar. Her name was Madame Dubarry and she liked Harry, and liked his cheap NAAFI cigarettes and whisky even more, although she didn’t trust him, not, at least, with her daughter.
‘Madame Dubarry, you look lovely tonight.’ His French was only good enough to give the most bald-faced of compliments, but it did the trick, as always. You fix the mother’s electrics, mend their stairs, generally make yourself useful around the house, and they soon get used to the idea of you courting their precious one. He shrugged off his cigarette-laden coat and Madame Dubarry leant across the bar, took it from him and hung it in the backroom. When he picked the coat up, it would be considerably lighter.
As soon as she was out of sight Julie whispered, ‘Eleven-thirty. Canal bridge,’ and slid him a frothy beer. He smiled, gulped half of it in one, winked at Madame Dubarry and sidled off to the piano for a few choruses of ‘Smile For Me, Yolande’.
It was midnight before he heard the clatter of her heels on the steel bridge and looked up. He’d been leaning over watching the grey water swirl lazily in the moonlight, smoking a cigarette cupped in his hands, as had become a habit, and had noticed the wires trailing in loops under the frame of the bridge. He wondered if it had been mined by the engineers. Another part of the big picture mere cannon fodder like him weren’t allowed to know.
She came alongside, slipped an arm through his and let his lips brush her cheek. He pulled her closer. She wriggled to loosen his grip and produced a roll of francs. ‘A present from Maman.’
He took the payment for the NAAFI cigarettes and slid it into his tunic pocket. ‘Good, thanks.’
‘I’ve got ten minutes, Harry.’
‘That’s no time at all, Julie.’ He moved to kiss her again, but she placed two hands on his chest.
‘I have to help finish cleaning up, Harry. No time for any of that.’ She smirked. ‘I know what you soldiers are like.’
‘I bet you do.’
She slapped him playfully on the arm. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say. You know it is not true.’
Unfortunately, she was right: he knew exactly how chaste she was. So far they had had a couple of meals together—with Mother always close by—a few snatched meetings like this one, nothing even close to a moment of passion. He wasn’t sure whether Julie even liked him or if Mother had asked her to keep him sweet—at least, up to a point. So why did he bother? Because, he guessed, he liked a challenge and she was the prettiest, and most coveted, barmaid in town.
‘They’ve invaded Norway. The Germans.’ She said it with a chilling matter-of-factness.
Harry stepped back in shock. So it had begun. ‘Christ. Nobody told us. When?’
‘I don’t know. Yesterday, perhaps. It was on the radio just now. That might mean the Germans will move against us here. And you’ll all have to fight.’ Her lip quivered as if she were about to cry. He knew how she felt.
‘Not likely. Norway’ll keep them busy, Julie. The Germans can’t invade every bloody country in Europe, can they?’ The question sounded hollow even as he asked it.
‘You’ll be shipped out, won’t you?’
‘It’s possible. It is also possible we’ll just sit here and wait for them to come to us. Nobody tells us anything. Shit. I was hoping you could come to Paris with me.’
She shook her head. ‘Maman would never have allowed it anyway.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
She kissed him on the cheek. ‘She likes you, Harry.’
‘She likes my fags.’
‘No, no. She thinks you want to go places. Not an ordinary soldier, she says.’
He laughed. ‘No, I’m not an ordinary soldier.’
She was closer to him now, and his lungs filled with her scent, and he was remembering the easy, lazy way it was with poor Dottie, no guilt and no Maman to worry about. It clearly was never going to be like that with Julie. He shut Dottie out of his mind. It didn’t do to dwell.
‘If we do go away, I’ll come back for you.’
She gave a sigh of disbelief.
‘No, really,’ he insisted.
‘Why would you?’
He stroked her hair, running the dark strands between his fingers. ‘Because I’d want to. How can I convince you?’
It was her turn to touch his face and he enjoyed the sensation of her fingertips across his cheek. ‘There is a ring …’
‘A ring?’ he said, as non-committally as he could.
‘In Van Roy’s. It’d give me something to hold on to when you go into battle. To pray with. To remember you by.’
Go into battle? he nearly shouted. Are you out of your fucking mind? ‘We’re the Royal Engineers. We don’t really do battles,’ he lied, ‘not as such.’
‘It wouldn’t have to mean we were engaged or anything, if you didn’t want. It’s a … token.’
‘I’ll take a look at it.’
She smiled and said quickly, ‘In the window right at the far left, white gold with three diamonds.’ Just for a second he wondered whether the hustler was being hustled, but when he looked at her, there was no sign of it in her innocent face, just a pair of eyebrows raised in a silent question.
‘I’ll see what I can do. Sergeants don’t find the money for white gold and diamonds easy to come by.’
She stuck out her lower lip and pouted. ‘Har
ry, I know you get more than a sergeant’s pay. My Maman gives you …’
‘OK, OK. I said I’ll see what I can do.’
She kissed him. ‘I have to go. Let me know how you get on.’ Harry watched her hurry away into the dark, listening to the echo of her footsteps reflect off the houses, fading until all he could hear was his rapid breathing.
He looked back north and saw a flare rise in the far distance and hang in the air like a low-slung star. Was something afoot out there? Or was it just another nervous sentry, spooking at every movement? He couldn’t worry about the implications of Norway right now—it was a long way away and he had business of his own. Obviously progress with Julie was determined by whether he thought she was worth a ring in Van Roy’s jewellers. Plus he had Doyle and his fags to worry about. He’d have to construct a way to scupper the rival cigarette trade in its tracks; there was, after all, room for only one Harry Cole in any fighting regiment.
After asking around some of the seedier estaminets in town, Harry found his man in Lille, down a backstreet, cobbling shoes and cutting keys in a lock-up shop that smelt of rubber heels and foot odour. He showed him the drawing of the Van Roy ring he had sketched through the window glass and they haggled and then the cobbler said he could make a copy in one week and Harry said five days and they shook hands and that was Julie’s ‘token’ sorted out. Doyle was going to be trickier.
Private Evans was miserable. Not only was he fed up with the cold, with the sloppy food, with the digging of trenches and the guard duty, he was really annoyed by the size of his bladder. It didn’t seem to be able to hold more than a cupful and he’d stupidly had a couple of pints of dark Belgian beer and now he felt fit to burst. He looked across at Dobson, his oppo that night, who was scanning the horizon with an intensity that suggested he expected Germans to appear at any moment.
‘Dobbo, I need a piss.’
‘Again? Well, go on then, boy. Be quick.’
Evans re-slung his rifle, rushed over to the large stack of packing cases, unbuttoned himself and sighed with relief as the high-powered stream splashed against the plywood. He was just doing his flies up when he saw the shadow move a few hundred yards to his left. He slowly slid his rifle off his shoulder. The dark shape stopped and the weak wall light briefly illuminated a face. Sergeant Cole.