For perhaps three seconds the two men faced one another. Then, reading certain death in Bernard’s eyes, the little German changed his mind and turned to flee.
He had moved but three strides when Bernard was upon him, leaping high on to his shoulders and bringing him down with a crash on the exposed joists of the passage floor. Here Bernard’s knife rose and fell a dozen times and with each stab he made a queer, strangled sound, half grunt and half whimper.
The man was dead after the second stab but Bernard continued stabbing for almost half a minute. Then he jumped back and staggered into the space that had been the main room.
His eyes, bloodshot and smarting, narrowed to blue slits that peered here and there among the splintered planks and shreds of floor-covering. Down the street the whistle blew, shrilly and insistently this time, but Bernard did not hear it. He remained quite still beside the table top, his hands hanging down by his sides, the German’s blood soaking his cuff, the knife still held in the stabbing grip.
He tried to call out but his throat was so dry and constricted that no sound emerged from his lips. Then, from close at hand he heard a whistle, not the recall signal but a human whistle, warbling a familiar stave.
He spun around and his eyes searched the disordered area immediately beyond the remains of the timber wall for it was from here, where the rubble was higher than himself, that the whistle seemed to come.
He cocked his ear like a terrier and suddenly he shouted with joy and agonising relief, for he recognised the stave as their tune ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It’, the tune they had whistled so often as they strolled down the Avenue in search of routine entertainment, a game of string-and-parcel, or knocking-down-ginger.
In two bounds he was beside the rubble heap and tearing away at the loose planks and plaster. First Boxer’s boot emerged, then his knee, bare and bleeding, and finally, from under a window-frame, his wide mediaeval clown’s grin, splitting his grimy face from ear to ear.
He said:
“Wotcher, Berni? Did you get that bastard?”
Tears were coursing through the dust and grime coating Bernard’s face but their flow relieved the remorseless thump of his heart. He licked his lips and tasted the salt.
“You…you okay, Boxer?” he managed to croak, at length, “you okay?”
“I dunno! I reckon so,” said Boxer, and he prodded himself here and there as he struggled free and stood beside his brother, “I seem all right…bit of a cut on the knee but that’s bugger all. How about you? You okay, Berni?”
Bernard nodded. “It’s a bloody miracle,” he said, “an absolute bloody miracle?”
Then, surveying the scene with a professional air, “I reckon it was the flimsiness of the place that did it. If it had been a brick house we’d have had it, the pair of us!”
“Ah, we oughter have looked,” said Boxer, “we oughter have given the place a proper going-over, before we started mucking about looking for souvenirs. Just shows you Berni, just shows you! It’s a pity about the helmet tho’! It was a corker that one, and old Pop would have liked it! Just a minute tho’, what about the Jerry who lobbed at us? He’ll have a helmet! Where is he, still inside?”
Bernard nodded but when Boxer made as though to move into the passage he suddenly reached out and grabbed his twin’s arm.
“Oh, sod the souvenirs,” he said, “leave that poor basket be, and find something down near the wharf. And come on, we got to get moving!”
Boxer did not argue for he never argued with Bernard, not once a decision had been made. All their lives it had been that way, Boxer making the proposals, and Bernard making the decisions. They found their weapons and clambered over the wreckage into the street.
The snow was a yellow slush beneath their feet, and the air was full of pungent woodsmoke and the reek of cordite. The firing had ceased altogether now and in the direction of the fiord they could see men moving along slowly in groups of three, each outer pair supporting a man in the middle.
Here and there, sprawled in the snow, lay still figures, about three dozen of them and they stopped at each dead commando to collect paybook and identity disc.
They found their corporal awaiting them impatiently at the end of the town.
“Put a jerk in it, fer Christ’s sake!” he said. “Is anyone else back there?”
“No,” Bernard told him, “only the stiffs.”
“They put up a pretty good show,” said the corporal reluctantly, “but half our casualties were with that bloody smoke bomb we copped coming in! It fell smack into a landing-craft! Can you beat that? The R.A.F. dropping the ruddy smoke-screen on us, instead of in front of us?”
Bernard had noted the incident. He was a fair-minded young man.
“The poor sod was hit by ack-ack,” he said, “and his kite was out of control!”
“Your brother looks as if he’d copped a basinful,” said the corporal cheerfully. “Is he okay?”
“He’s okay,” said Bernard. “We were jammy!”
They formed up and moved off towards the jetty. Bernard was thinking: “That Jerry had his hands up but I fixed him simply because I thought he’d killed Boxer. I’m sorry now because he did have his hands up but what the hell? He threw the grenade first and surrendered after! You can’t get away with a thing like that, not on this sort of lark! Besides, I though he’d killed Boxer. I still can’t understand how he didn’t kill Boxer!”
The roar of the grenade still sang in his ears and he felt wretched and light-headed. His mind continued to revolve around the miracle he had witnessed and he thought: “Perhaps this means that nothing can kill Boxer, not while I’m around anyway! There was that icy pond! He was dead when I fished him up. Then there was that crash, the night of the Harringay match. He was as good as dead then in the pile up. Then there was just now—a ruddy grenade, exploding right beside him, and blowing him clean through a wall! I know what! He’s bloody well indestructible!”
Suddenly his spirits soared, lifted on the conviction that Boxer was immortal, as long as he, Bernard, was still around. He watched Boxer fall out and bend over a body in the slush.
“What you got now, Boxer?” he called.
“Cap badge! It’ll do to go on with,” Boxer shouted, adding regretfully, “I’d have liked that helmet for Pop! It was a real corker, that helmet was!”
Bernard yawned and stumbled. Suddenly he felt tired, terribly tired and listless. He cocked a bloodshot eye at his twin, who was running across the slush to rejoin the column, and he saw that Boxer was as buoyant and cheerful as he had been when they had first piled into the landing-craft. His thoughts became fanciful again!
Funny that Boxer should have whistled that tune, when he was buried under rubble! Funny thing that, and kind of ghostly, as though, even had Boxer been dead, he was still able to attract his twin’s attention and be resurrected, as usual.
CHAPTER XV
Spring Roundabout
THE WINTERS SEEMED to be getting harder and the springs more reluctant ever since the war had commenced, in 1939.
The Avenue people could now look back on three wartime winters, all of them colder, longer and more dismal than any winter of the ‘twenties’ or ‘thirties’.
It was not just the blackout and the general shortages that made winter seem longer and darker than usual. There was snow for evidence, snow that hung about for weeks under the dwarf walls, and piled up on the rubble heap that had been Numbers Thirteen, Fifteen and Seventeen.
To the train-catchers it seemed as though they had now walked through slush for months as they made their way to Woodside and Addiscombe stations and when they returned to the Avenue, after dusk, the east wind whipped them when they turned in from Shirley Rise and seemed to pierce their clothing, whether they wore good quality garments, purchased before 1939, or the utility rubbish that outfitters were selling in all the shops nowadays.
Coal was poor quality too and very strictly rationed, so that it was not only Edith who made expeditions into M
anor Wood in search of dead wood and kindling. Mr. Baskerville and his family went there regularly, pushing an old perambulator and returning loaded down with faggots. Jim and Harold spent odd afternoons in the thickets, cutting away at a fallen pine with Jim’s cross-cut saw and the few children who remained in the crescent were always coming out of the wood with their sacks of twigs and fir cones.
Jim would have left the Avenue that spring had it not been for Harold. There was nothing much happening at the A.R.P. Centre. Air-raids over London seemed to have ceased altogether as the Luftwaffe pursued, what seemed to Jim, an idiotic policy of blitzing Cathedral towns in the provinces. ‘Baedeker Raids’ they called them and, to his mind they were typical instances of Teuton stupidity, the shooting of Nurse Cavell, or the sinking of the Lusitania.
Jim toyed with the idea of getting a transfer into the Auxiliary Fire Service, and moving out to somewhere like Bristol, or Norwich but he held his hand, partly because he did not like to abandon Harold, and partly because, at any moment now, he expected to have to hurry off somewhere and give his daughter Judy away.
Judy was still stationed at Queen’s Norton and Esme, halfway through a tour of operations, was stationed right up in Yorkshire, so that the two saw one another infrequently, and never seemed likely to remain together long enough to get themselves married.
To Jim the war seemed to have entered upon a kind of Western Front stalemate. Nothing very much seemed to be happening on the Allied side, apart from the monotonous bombing of rail yards at Hamm, or the even more monotonous ‘elimination’ of the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneiseneau, at Brest.
He had a bad moment when these oft-destroyed vessels escaped up the Channel, in February, and the R.A.F. and the Royal Navy were rumoured to have missed them on account of a stupid inter-service wrangle.
The Russian position worried him a little too, though not very seriously, for it was clear that his prophecy of the previous summer had been mainly fulfilled, and that the Wehrmacht was now bogged down in the Steppes.
He read the papers very carefully each day, looking for news of the Russian counter-attack that would sweep the Nazis back to the Pripet Marshes, but Joe Stalin did not appear to be in any particular hurry and Jim wondered if he too was awaiting the opening of the Second Front, the campaign that some of Jim’s pre-war political colleagues were now demanding at mass meetings in Trafalgar Square.
He was not in the slightest bit worried about the ultimate outcome of the war, as he had been twelve months ago, before Russia was attacked and the British had met with one reverse after the other. All the same, it did seem to be developing into a leisurely war, and his own share in it bored him. He sat reading newspapers and drinking endless mugs of tea throughout his spells of duty at the A.R.P. post, wishing more than ever that he was twenty years younger and could join his twin boys in a Commando unit and have a real crack at the square-headed baskets!
The twins came home on leave after the St. Nazaire raid, in late March. Boxer brought with him a German gas-mask and a machine-pistol, to add to the cap-badge that he had brought home from Vaagso. Jim accepted these new gifts gravely but he was not really interested in souvenirs. He was much more actively interested in the information, passed on to him by Louise, that Bernard, the smaller twin, had now fallen in love.
It was curious, thought Jim, that Bernard should be able to fall in love without abandoning his chaperonage of Boxer, and even more strange that Boxer should accept the fact of Bernard having a girl without a display of jealousy or resentment. This, however, seemed to be the case, for Boxer now went off alone to the pub, while Bernard took long walks across Shirley Hills in the company of the sallow, solemn-eyed girl, whom Judy had brought home one day, explaining that she was the stepdaughter of Edgar Frith, Esme’s former father-in-law, that her name was ‘Pippa’, and that she had come to London to make camouflage nets, at Beckenham.
Phillipa, or ‘Pippa’ as everyone called her, moved into Number Twenty as a lodger, in February, ’42, and Louise took a fancy to her at once. This, thought Jim, was nothing much to go by, for Louise took a fancy to everyone. She even had a word or two to say in favour of Doctor Goebbels because, she said, the poor man had been born with a club foot!
Louise said that Bernard had fallen in love with Pippa and that Pippa returned his love. At first Jim found this difficult to believe, for Pippa seemed to him to be a mousey little thing, and not at all the kind of girl that he would have imagined Bernard might fall for. After he had watched them both for a day or two, he came to the conclusion that Louise was probably right, for Bernard, usually a phlegmatic young man, now seemed to be talking more than usual, and as he talked the girl listened, with her enormous brown eyes fixed upon him and her lips slightly parted, as though in breathless admiration. Jim did not pursue the subject very far. He had always found it very difficult to survey humanity individually.
In some ways the courtship of Bernard and Pippa was similar to that of Louise and Jack Strawbridge, in pre-war days. It was a very solemn, silent, take-it-for-granted affair, and had begun with a question on Pippa’s part, continuing, from then on, a straight and uncomplicated course. As far as Jim could see it would lead, ultimately, to marriage, with Boxer as a kind of wedding gift to the bride.
Pippa had been living at Number Twenty for several weeks when the twins came home on leave but she had heard all about them from Judy. When they came trooping in from St. Nazaire she had an opportunity to watch them at close quarters and after a brief observation she suddenly buttonholed Bernard in the back-garden and said, without preamble:
“Is it like having a baby who won’t grow up?”
Bernard ought to have been shocked, or at least puzzled by such a question, but he was not, for somehow he recognised it as the remark of someone who had understood his lifework at a glance. It was the first time anyone ever had understood it, for until then everyone, including his family, had taken their relationship for granted. The mere fact that this girl had not done so at once recommended her to him as being an exceptionally intelligent person.
Until recently he had never felt the need to discuss his lifelong chaperonage of Boxer with anyone but after the incident of the grenade, at Vaagso, he did feel such a need. Indeed, it soon became urgent to him to confide in someone, and to get the relationship back into its proper perspective.
The thoughts he had been having just lately alarmed him, as though the roar and the flash of that grenade had loosened something in his head and encouraged the kind of speculation that belonged more properly inside the head of someone like Becky Clegg, the ‘dippy sister’, of Number Four!
Having decided that Boxer was indestructible Bernard now found himself wondering whether, in fact, he was really alive at all! It sometimes seemed to him that the real Boxer must have died at the bottom of the Lane pond all those years ago.
Bernard knew, of course, that this was simply a crazy fancy, that Boxer could be touched and seen, that he answered when addressed, and was in every way his old breezy, lolloping, harebrained self, but rationalisation of this kind did not help him to dismiss the thought that Boxer was really dead, or, at best, still a child, a kind of vivid materialisation of Bernard’s picture of the man Boxer would have become had he been alive when fished from the bottom of the frozen pond.
It was because of these disconcerting fancies that the girl’s question seemed to Bernard to be so logical. After all, he had been looking after a baby for twenty-odd years, and he found it very comforting that a complete stranger, such as this girl Pippa, should have recognised this after such a brief acquaintance.
He said, in reply: “That’s it! That’s what it’s like and that’s what it’s always been like, right from the day he fell through the ice in the Lane!”
The girl nodded, sympathetically, though Bernard reasoned that she could not possibly know about the pond for they had never told anybody of the incident, not even Jim, or Louise, and they very rarely mentioned it to one another. It wa
s something that had been sealed and packed away like a secret shame.
After this brief conversation Bernard wanted to see more of Pippa and the following Saturday he took her down the Lane, (still only half an Avenue, for all local building had ceased in September, 1939) to the spot where the pond had been.
Here he described the incident that had remained so vividly in his mind and the girl listened, without interrupting.
When he had finished all she said was:
“Perhaps he was meant to die then! Perhaps you interfered with something by bringing him back to life.”
Bernard could hardly believe his ears. It was very uncanny and frightening that she should be able to read his mind as easily as that, but nevertheless he was drawn to her as he had never been drawn to any woman in the past. He felt certain that here, if anywhere, was someone who could help him and he was sure now that he needed help most desperately.
They went out into the Upper Road and on up the hill, past the Shirley Mill.
When they had reached the pebble slopes, where the old Bank Holiday fairs used to be held, he had made up his mind to confess.
“I think I’m going barmy,” he told her, simply.
For answer she took his hand and led him along a path between the gorse thickets. At the top of the slope they stopped and sat down on a seat.
“Don’t ever think that,” she said, firmly, “and don’t let anyone talk you into going to one of those psychiatrists they have in the army nowadays! There isn’t anything wrong with you, Bernard. It’s just that you’ve had to go through exactly twice as much as every other Commando! That’s something you’ve got to understand, and make allowances for, right now!”
He discovered then that he did not want to leave go of her hand, for he felt that if he did his brain would burst, just like the grenade at Vaagso. He said shakily:
“All right then, you talk to me about it, Pippa, just go on talking to me about it!”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 21