“Christ,” he said to his impassive audience, “what a carry-on it is, eh?—What a laugh me and Berni’ll have about this lark when we get back to barracks!”
The doctor motioned him to lift Bernard from the packing cases and as he did so Boxer noticed that the two tourniquets had been expertly retied and a fresh bandage added to the dressing on the shattered elbow. Bernard was now breathing steadily and a little colour had returned into his cheeks.
“I gave him an injection,” the doctor said, “he will not give you any trouble. If you are stopped do not pretend, my friend. These clothes are simply a ruse to get you as far as the road block and to stop casual shooting! Stick the flag in your brother’s belt, so that it can be seen. If they ask you about his dressings tell them it was your own people who attended to him but they left him behind on the beach.”
They passed out into the sunshine and for the first time Boxer noticed the strange silence that had descended over the hazy landscape. He did not connect it with the battle, or link the absence of gunfire with the cessation of fighting, and the probable withdrawal of all British troops but he was grateful for it nonetheless and marched firmly down the track indicated by the Frenchmen.
Bernard seemed no heavier to carry than a section of Bangalore torpedo tubing. He strode on into the sun, emerging soon on to a metalled road at a ‘T’ section and then turning left, as the Frenchman had instructed.
Without warning a convoy of lorries bore down on him, driven at furious speed, and Boxer had to suppress an instinct to flatten himself in the ditch beside the road but the lorries rushed by in a whirl of dust and the helmeted troops standing in the back did not so much as glance at him.
Boxer counted the lorries, six, seven, eight, nine of them, each crammed to capacity with armed men. In their wake came two armoured cars and then, from the opposite direction, a huge touring car, containing officers in steel helmets, decorated with colourful insignia.
It was the staff car that stopped. Bernard heard the screech of brakes on the pavé and a hoarse shout from one of the officers. A man jumped out of the car and came pounding back towards him, shouting questions in a language that Boxer assumed to be German. He remained quite still, his tiny beret perched on the crown of his head, his lumbering frame straining at the clips of the overalls.
Suddenly the German threw back his head and laughed, calling back to the car, which reversed, rapidly. A plump, elderly officer climbed out and approached Boxer, looking him up and down with great interest.
“You are an English soldier?” he said, finally.
It is doubtful if, even had he possessed a fluent command of the French tongue, Boxer would have tried to bluff. He was aware of the utter inadequacy of his disguise and the events of the day had exhausted his powers of thought. He felt terribly tired, tired of thinking and discussing things that he did not begin to understand, tired of weighing possibilities that made no kind of sense to him. The German at least did not beat about the bush, but like the Frenchmen, seemed to be asking a simple question that merited an equally simple answer.
Boxer grinned, then nodded, pleasantly.
“That’s right,” he said, “I’m taking my brother to see your M.O.!”
After this bland statement several things happened at once. The elderly officer confronting him whistled slowly through his teeth and the man who had first accosted Boxer began to dance and shout, as though he had suddenly been stung by a wasp. Other men climbed out of the car and began to scream at Boxer and then at one another, until at last the elderly man waved his hand and barked something at a corporal who was the driver of the car.
The corporal leaped into the driving seat as though he had been standing on coiled springs and in the midst of all this bustle Boxer found himself jostled into the car, with the officers crowding him from behind. They all seemed terribly excited and in a crazy hurry to get somewhere. When he found that entry into the rear section of the car was difficult without jarring Bernard’s legs on the folding spare seat, someone prodded the small of his back with a Mauser pistol. Then, as though by magic, they were all tearing along the road towards a group of buildings in the distance and still he was holding Bernard close against his breast.
When the car screamed to a halt beside the buildings the officer with the pistol motioned him to get out, but Boxer had not been infected by their terrible urgency and said:
“Okay, okay, but take it easy chum! I don’t want to knock old Berni, do I?”
For some reason, a reason that Boxer quite failed to grasp, this remark threw the young officer into a frenzy of rage. He waved his pistol right under Bernard’s nose and kept bobbing up and down, gurgling and gasping as though in the throes of an epileptic fit.
Then the corporal jumped out and doubled round the car to Boxer’s side, where he flung open the door and began to pull frantically at Bernard’s webbing belt. This only increased Boxer’s obstinacy and he braced himself against the front seats, remaining immovable until the elderly officer suddenly began to rave at the corporal and at the man with the Mauser. At length both officer and corporal skipped smartly away from the car and began to salute, like characters in a musical comedy.
Boxer was aware of this pantomime but without seeming to play an important part in it. He saw the corporal and the man with the pistol turn and run up a concrete path towards a two-storey building that seethed with uniformed men. Then the elderly officer was addressing him in English, kindly it seemed, for the old fellow spoke quite softly, and kept pointing to a pair of stretcher bearers who had bobbed out of the building and were now standing stiffly to attention beside the offside door of the car.
“They will dress your comrade’s wounds,” said the officer. “Then he will be sent to hospital, before going into honourable captivity, as yourself!” When Boxer still hesitated, he added: “We are not barbarians!”
Boxer found himself liking the plump officer and whenever Boxer took a liking to anyone he was ready to trust them implicitly. He climbed carefully out of the car and laid Bernard on the stretcher. The bearers moved away immediately and he stood watching them as they marched up the path and through the open door into the building.
Bernard’s uninjured arm swung down as they negotiated the entrance and Boxer noticed that the Red Cross flag still trailed from its short stick, wedged under Berni’s belt. The elderly officer stood silently beside Boxer until the stretcher party had disappeared and while they were still watching a huge private, wearing a camouflaged smock, and holding a sub-machine gun at the ready position, placed himself on the other side of Boxer and stared fixedly into the middle distance.
“Kom!” said the officer at length, “you will now tell me about yourself and why your comrades left you and your comrade behind when they ran away!”
He pointed casually to a shed built under the right-hand wall of the main building and the escort suddenly prodded Boxer with the barrel of his weapon.
They moved off in procession, the officer first, then Boxer, then the soldier with the sub-machine gun. A group of men, paraded at ease under the loggia of the building, watched them with curious eyes.
As he passed them Boxer yawned, prodigiously. “I’d like a kip,” he told himself. “Suffering cats, how I’d like a good, long kip!”
CHAPTER XX
Change Of Plan
ODD AND UNPREDICTABLE events kept getting between Esme and Judith all that spring, and late summer found them widely separated and unmarried.
Once they had rediscovered one another it had seemed to them a very simple thing to get married. There existed, of course, the oft-quoted ‘exigencies of service’ but these could usually be overcome by a little discreet planning or wangling. All that had seemed necessary was to coincide a week’s leave, or even a ‘forty-eight’ and rendezvous within walking distance of a register office. Then they could be married easily enough and speedily enough, even if they had to enlist a couple of strangers as witnesses and forgo the honeymoon until Esme’s operation
al tour had been completed, and he was grounded for the customary six months.
They had no luck, however, no luck at all and were still frantically exchanging telegrams and long, pip-studded ’phone calls, months after Esme’s decree had been made absolute.
First Esme’s operational tour was cut short less than halfway through and he was packed off on a conversion course to Lancasters, in the far West of Scotland. He was detained here until late spring, thoroughly exasperated with the delay, and unable to get a pass allowing him sufficient time to meet Judy in Northampton and return to camp in time for Monday’s training schedule.
Then, when he had at last been posted to a Lancaster squadron, he went suddenly sick with shingles in the head, and was detained in sick quarters for a fortnight. He was given a week’s leave on recovery and they could have married then, but by this time Judy had been posted down to St. Eval, and was on a plotter’s course that prohibited leave for a further six weeks.
Esme went down to Cornwall and spent an afternoon and an evening with her, but it was impossible, in that short time, to arrange anything very definite, so they agreed to leave it over until September, when he expected to be re-crewed and complete his interrupted tour.
Apart from the frustrating circumstances of their extended separation Esme was at peace with himself these days, having discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that an operational flight was not quite the ordeal he had imagined, and possessed, indeed, certain unlooked for compensations.
Isolated in his turret, as the huge machine lumbered across the empty skies, he found that he was able to divide his powers of concentration into two equal halves. One half was devoted exclusively to keeping a sharp lookout for night-fighters, and the other was free to range, contemplating the various aspects of the journey, the huge and exhilarating emptiness of the sky, the fantastic cloud formations floodlit by slivers of moonshine, the soaring passage of distant tracer, reminding him of Thursday night Crystal Palace fireworks displays that he had witnessed from the bunkers of the links at the end of The Lane. Then there were the occasional jocular exchanges over the intercom and above all the sense of ‘belonging’ that they brought with them, the sense of adventuring, in matchless company, into infinite space.
Bomber Command losses were high, and were still mounting, but they had not yet attained the terrifying peaks of the winter offensive. In the main Esme’s squadron was lucky and the targets assigned to it so far had not been excessively hazardous.
Once they flew all the way down to Turin, and twice to French industrial centres in the Rhône area. The only time that anything really frightening occurred was during their sole trip to the Ruhr, when their starboard outer engine was hit by coastal flak, and they had turned for home after dutifully ditching their bombs in the North Sea.
Mac’, the skipper, said that this ‘slice of cake’ was far too good to last, and that soon they would be assigned targets that invited ‘the chop’. Esme thought that he was right, but nonetheless he continued to experience a comforting tranquillity in the long flights and ultimately made the discovery that an actual ‘op’ was a good deal less nerve-wracking than the constant, last-minute scrubbings, due to sudden changes of weather.
A tour of operations at this time consisted of thirty flights, and Esme chalked up eight without even seeing an enemy fighter, or encountering more than a spattering of flak. He thus acquired the ability to live from day to day, sealing off the future as unknown and unpredictable. He spent most of his free time reading or talking to Snowball, the West Indian wireless-operator. Occasionally he went out on a routine pub-crawl with the crew, but he was never much of a toper and it usually fell to him and the coloured boy to convey the remainder of the crew home to billets.
He wrote Judy long and affectionate letters, the kind of letters that he had always wanted to write to Elaine, but had left unwritten because of the depressing inadequacy of her letters to him. Judy’s letters were far more rewarding than the best of Elaine’s had been but they were not, somehow, the letters of an engaged girl, but more like those of a woman who had been happily and tranquilly married for years.
Far from disappointing him this strain of hers exactly matched his prevailing mood. He was able to think of her far more objectively than he had ever been able to think of Elaine, and there grew within him, throughout this period of anxiety and suspension, a warm and cosy acceptance of their association, and a conviction that their coming together, after all these years, had been fated. It was as if all their games of make-believe as children had been a planned prelude for a shared existence as adults, and that now nothing was strong enough to deny them one another’s company in the years ahead.
He sometimes told himself that it was quite absurd to think of their love in these terms, for he was barely thirty, and she was a year younger, but he would not willingly have exchanged the repose she brought him for the emotional switchback of his life with Elaine. It was good, these days, to have someone like Judy to think about, and it was satisfying to reflect that, when the world eventually sorted itself out, as he believed it must if it was to endure, then he would at least have someone left who shared his memories of sunlit days in the plough-land beyond the Manor Wood, where the scent of wood-smoke drifted across from builders’ fires, and thrushes sang in the thickets of the border spinney.
For Esme, as the war entered its fourth year, had become sharply aware of the great contrast between the world of his childhood and boyhood, and the world of today, with its curious mixture of the trivial and the far from trivial, its brutal slang, its blackout, its careless-talk posters, and its books of clothing coupons, all clouding the emotional demands of war and the infinite pathos of eager young men gathering together night after night for the lunatic purpose of flying hundreds of miles in order to drop high explosive on people they had neither seen nor expected to see.
He was aware of this contrast but without being over-involved in it. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was watching it without playing any part in it, and without it stirring in him more than the casual interest of a spectator.
He remembered how, when a child, he had conjured with the ridiculous notion that he was the only person alive, and that everyone about him was imagined, and this thought returned to him sometimes when he sat hunched in his turret, remote from everything but the moon, the stars, and the comforting, crowding, unrelated memories of growing up in the Avenue.
Half-way through September Judy wired saying that they could be married almost at once from Miss Somerton’s home, in Devon.
It seemed that her plotting course had petered out, and Judy had now been attached to a Transport Unit, and was sent, as sergeant i/c convoy, to various parts of the country. She had a convoy, she told him, going to Southampton mid-week, and she could scramble in a long week-end on her way back to base in Cornwall.
Miss Somerton, her former employer, who still maintained a small riding-school on the moors, south of Exeter, had therefore come forward with an offer of hospitality from Friday to Monday, and Judy hoped that he could take advantage of this unique opportunity.
He wired back immediately, promising to do his utmost to wangle a week-end, even if it meant travelling to and from Lincolnshire by overnight trains.
Jubilantly Judy shepherded her lorries into Southampton, and then caught the first train back to Exeter.
She was glad to be back on familiar, pre-war ground and the hook-nosed Miss Somerton was equally delighted to greet her, and drive her back to the decrepit Georgian manor-farm that she had used as headquarters ever since she had moved her riding-school into the west.
The relation between Judy and Miss Somerton was openly cordial, and covertly sentimental. Maud Somerton had taken her in as a shy and depressed little shop-assistant of sixteen, and had then proceeded to teach her everything that she herself knew of horses, and horsemastership.
Judy had proved a patient and rewarding pupil, and all through the ‘thirties’ Maud Somerton had regarded her as a main
stay, particularly in respect of the coaching of children. Judy had that essential combination of firmness and gentleness so necessary to the professional equestrienne, and she could control (Maud never discovered just how) a long cavalcade of bowler-hatted little extroverts, all at varying stages of proficiency, and all trying to make themselves heard above the rattle of hooves, as the bored ponies jogged along high-banked, Devon lanes.
Not once in the years that Judy had worked for her, had there been an accident, or even a spill that led to tears and temper. Maud studied her pupil’s technique closely but was never able to imitate it. She would follow her out of the courtyard, and watch Judy marshall her little charges and shoo them down the gravelled drive. Sometimes she smiled grimly to herself as she listened to Judy’s string of commands and admonitions, recalling, perhaps, the tear-stained little girl she had met by the Roman Well on Shirley Hills so long ago. She would often stand listening until the voices and clatter were lost in the trees. “Keep your hands down, Angela dear…Sarah darling, toes up and out! Monica, love, you look like a small sack of barley…! Don’t bunch your reins, Barbara…here, let me show you, now…relax darling! Hi there, don’t let him nibble! He’ll try it on, just as he does with all of you…!” and so on, until the cavalcade was out of hearing.
Maud would then lounge back to the loose boxes and begin mucking out, reflecting that ‘The Gel’, as she invariably thought of her, must be a born teacher, with the additional advantages of a natural seat and the softest pair of hands in the business! Sometimes, as she pondered this, she would smile with satisfaction and remember how it was she who had spotted these talents at a glance, before ‘The Gel’ had so much as sat upon a horse!
She was by no means as sanguine about ‘The Gel’s’ love life. She had liked Tim Ascham, the boy whom Judy had married when war broke out and who had been drowned a few weeks later, but she was not nearly so sure that she would like Esme, the boy, she understood, who had caused the tears visible on Judy’s face the first day they had met by the Roman Well.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 30