“It went fine! Archie and Elaine were there. He gave us the house you know, and Edgar Frith gave Edith away. It was very quiet, of course, but everyone was friendly. They’re a friendly bunch in the Avenue.”
“Yes,” she said, “they always were, weren’t they? Don’t you want to see the baby?”
He clapped his hand to his head. “Good Lord, I’d actually forgotten! I was so worried when I heard you were all alone but I needn’t have been need I? The entire district seems to be on tap!”
“In a way it’s just like the Avenue,” she said. “The people around are all that really count, Dad!”
She leaned over and reached into the cot, pulling the blue blanket on one side. Jim caught a glimpse of a brick-red, puckered face, crowned with a sparse halo of dark, brown hair.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” said Judy. “He weighs eight-and-a-half already!”
“He’s fine, Judy. What are you calling him?”
“I don’t know, I can’t make up my mind. It would have been ‘James’, but you’ve already got one James, Archie’s second. I would have liked ‘Esme’ but Esme doesn’t like the name much. He says it’s a bit girlish. What do you think of ‘Harold’?”
“It would be a wonderful tonic for old Harold, but I can’t honestly say I’m gone on the name, are you?”
“No,” she said, “it’s not an open-airey name is it? It’s too ‘officy’, somehow! I say, I’ve got an idea! Reach me that book, the green one, with gold lettering.”
He gave her the book, a small leather-bound volume of Tennyson’s poems, and she put down her Ovaltine mug and began to flick through the pages.
“I can’t think why I didn’t have this brainwave before! Listen.”
She began to read and it was clear that she was very familiar with the passage, for she read it rapidly and without trace of hesitancy:
‘And that same night
the night of the New Year,
By reason of the bitterness and grief,
That vext his mother,
all before his time,
Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born,
Delivered at the postern-gate
To Merlin, to be holden far apart
Until his hour should come;’
She closed the book and smiled.
“That’ll do,” she said, “We’ll call him ‘Arthur’! That’ll give old Esme no end of a kick, you see if it doesn’t!”
“He wasn’t born before his time, he was a good bit overdue wasn’t he?” said Jim, smiling.
“That’s poetic licence,” said Judy, “Esme’s a glutton for poetic licence—always was!”
He knew little or nothing of her childhood games beside the lake in Manor Wood. In those days all his spare time had been taken up with politics and he had hardly noticed the children, unless they got in his way. He saw now that she too had remembered this, for she was not really conscious of him any longer, but sat propped up, her hands folded, her mind exploring a special preserve that was her own and Esme’s. He did not like to trespass any longer so kissed her, softly.
“Good night, Judy love.”
“Good night, Dad.”
He went out and she glanced at the baby before turning off the bedside light. She felt tired, but relaxed and comfortable. The coals rustled in the grate and shadows danced across the ceiling.
Arthur! After all this time! The Coming of Arthur! How would that strike Esme when he heard about today’s event and came rushing home to see his child? Would it strike him as rather forced and silly? Would he prefer a name that had no bearing on the old Manor that had been ‘many towered Camelot’, and the lake that was the mere into which so many Excaliburs had been flung?
What exactly was ‘samite’ that had clothed the mystic arm? For years now she had been meaning to look it up in a dictionary, but she never had and still thought of it as a kind of fine cotton, like the material of the powder-puff handkerchief that Esme had once bought her at Woolworth’s, in the Old Orchard Road.
The nurse looked in and said something but she was asleep.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
King Boxer The First
THE GERMANS HAD a word for it; they called it ‘Fernheh’, a craving to wander into strange, far-off places.
Boxer had been a victim of ‘Fernheh’ ever since new leaves had began to show on the trees outside the compound, and the smell of spring came to compete with the smell of barrack-room brews.
He had made up his mind to leave camp by one of the tunnels, both of which had been nearing completion, when he began his last spell in the cooler, but when he came out he was told that one tunnel had caved in, and that the other had been discovered by the security patrols, so that he was pondering the possibilities of an independent escape when the Allies crossed the Rhine and the Great Exodus began.
Life became more exciting but infinitely more strenuous for everyone. The prisoners were marched from camp to camp, aimlessly it seemed to Boxer, who had never bothered to study the war situation as a whole, and therefore had scant sympathy with the generally-held opinion that escape, at this stage, was not only a waste of time but a dangerous enterprise.
He argued that, under existing conditions, it was absurdly easy to escape on the march. The reservists who guarded the column hardly bothered to count them at the end of the day’s march. In a sense the captives had become gaolers and the tough Coldstreamer, who had been the Senior N.C.O. at the camp for the past two years, was now principal adviser of the harassed Commandant and his despairing staff.
Boxer had rather liked the guardsman in his former role, but he did not understand the Sergeant Major’s current antipathy towards a general dispersal of prisoners into the surrounding countryside.
The Coldstreamer, not distinguished for his patience, did his best to explain to Boxer.
“Look, you clot,” he announced. “The entire bloody country’s in chaos, so the only smart thing to do now is to stick close to the Krauts who know us, and who look upon us as their insurance! The woods are stiff with deserters, Hitler Youth, Werewolves and all kinds of thugs, most of ’em prepared to cut your throat for the scrapings of a Red Cross parcel! So don’t get the idea that you can survive out there, or make your own way back to our lines! You’ll stay put and you’ll like it, until Jerry packs in, get me?”
Boxer could not see it this way. In the early stages of his captivity he had not concerned himself very much with the business of escape. It had seemed to him, at that time, much more practical to remain in Germany and occupy oneself baiting Germans. Today, with the Jerries running here, there and everywhere like a bunch of scalded cats, there was no longer any point in baiting them. They would not rise to a bait, no matter what one did or said. Nothing would induce them to start one of those delightful flaps that Boxer enjoyed so much. Accordingly, he reasoned, one might just as well pack it in, slide off towards home, and call it a day, taking one’s chance with the wild men in the woods. Surely that was more sensible than to continue to march up and down slushy roads, sleep in crowded barns and insanitary transit camps, and exist on next to nothing?
He consulted Whitey, his friend, on the subject, but it seemed that even Whitey had been won over to the Sergeant Major’s point of view and firmly rejected the idea of dodging the column.
“Aw, lay orf it, Gaffer!” he told Boxer. “Where’s the sense in takin’ any more bloody chances? We’ll all be out of it any’ow inside a week or two.”
Boxer was disappointed but by no means discouraged. If Whitey and all the others preferred to wear out their boot leather in marching here and there sooner than chance it in the woods, then he would go off alone and seek out whatever new adventures Fate had in store for him.
He checked his kit, donned every garment he possessed, risked a post-war court-martial by helping himself to two tins of beans from the shrinking communal store, and strolled over to the improvised latrine behind the cattle sheds where they happened to be billeted for the night.
&n
bsp; The latrine was guarded by a single German, a small defeated man, recently invalided from the Russian Front. Boxer gave him a cigarette and told him to look the other way, while he climbed out behind the latrine and jumped down into the adjoining pasture land.
Ten minutes later he was inside the woods and walking due west by the setting sun.
He had studied a map a day or so before he had made his final decision, and had made a rough copy of it on the back of a carton. This map, a blanket and his two tins of beans, comprised his entire escape kit, but his lack of equipment did not worry him overmuch. For years now he had been an expert picker-up-of-trifles and he had no doubt but that he would come across all he needed.
He was not disappointed. That inscrutable Providence said to watch over drunkards, children and incurable optimists, smiled down on him from the hour of his departure. Before darkness fell he emerged from the woods to cross a small open patch, where a second-class road had been cut through the forest. Lying on its side in the ditch, where it had been flung by the bombs of attacking aircraft, was a lorry, and under the lorry, overlooked by salvage team and passing marauders, was an unopened crate of pilchards.
Boxer prised off the lid and counted the tins, more than a hundred of them. He found a piece of angle iron from the canopy and employed it as an opener, eating two tins of pilchards on the spot and then going to sleep on the leather cushions inside the driving-cabin.
He awoke at first light upon hearing the sound of dragging footsteps in the dead leaves alongside the road. Squinting through the shattered windscreen of the lorry he saw that it was nothing to get alarmed about, for the glade was empty except for a young woman who was poking about among the debris between the lorry and the trees.
She was an odd, bedraggled creature, wrapped in what appeared to be a few yards of coarse sacking and a yellow gas-cape. Her head was bare and her black hair hung about her face like a tattered mat.
Boxer climbed out of the lorry and called across to her. At the sound of his voice she ran crouching into the wood but when she saw that he was alone, and unarmed, she stopped on the edge of the trees and looked back, poised to continue her flight.
Boxer had not been a prisoner in Germany for more than two and a half years without learning that the major preoccupation of a woman attired as this one must be a search for food, and he knew at once that hunger alone prevented her from diving into the woods like a startled hare.
He guessed that she must be one of the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers who had been uprooted in recent weeks by the turmoil inside Germany, and was now scratching about for the means of existence. He reached back into the driving cabin and held up a tin of pilchards.
“Pilchards!” he shouted. “Very good! Very nice!” and he smacked his lips and rubbed his stomach.
The woman’s teeth flashed in a smile but she still hesitated. He turned his back on her and sat down to open the tin. When he glanced over his shoulder three women were regarding him from the bushes. All were dressed in bizarre odds and ends, and one of them, whose grey hair was tied under a long, green scarf, wore German jackboots several sizes too large for her.
He dug the angle-iron into the pilchards and forked a large piece of fish into his mouth.
“Pilchards!” he said again. “Smashing!”
Step by step they advanced out of the woods and Boxer then saw that one of the newcomers was a child, about thirteen. He beckoned to her and she suddenly began to run towards him. He ripped off the remainder of the lid and handed the tin to her, chuckling as she fell upon it and began cramming fragments of the fish into her mouth. He opened the driving-cabin door and pointed to the crate.
“Help yourselves,” he said genially, “they didn’t cost me nothing!”
His gesture must have removed the last vestiges of suspicion from the two women, for they dived into the cabin, dragged the crate into the open and seizing a tin apiece at once commenced to pound them with stones.
“Here, half a tick, half a tick, don’t be so bloody greedy!” he protested, and skilfully opened another tin with his piece of iron. The child smiled up at him between large mouthfuls and her pinched face became smeared with tomato sauce, so that it looked startlingly like blood against the pallor of her cheeks.
“You poor bastards,” said Boxer feelingly, “I bet you haven’t seen nothing like this in weeks!”
Between them they accounted for seven tins and then they began to address him in high-pitched, gobbling voices.
“Me no savvy! Me Soldat English!” he explained.
They appeared to understand the word ‘English’ for the child began to caper. The young woman who had been first on the scene evidently mistook him for the advance guard of the British army, for she beamed and pretended to shoot, pointing towards the west.
“No,” said Boxer, comprehending, “I’m just a kriegie on the run, a prisoner…look!” and he went through an ingenious pantomime intended to establish his status. The two women looked so downcast at this that he decided to cheer them up by switching to a second pantomime, this time aimed at impressing upon them the nearness of British troops.
“Waldkappel!” he said, repeating the name of the town from which his column had been evacuated less than a week ago. “The British at Waldkappel! Bom-bom!” and he made noises suggestive of an attack by tanks.
This seemed to confuse them but they did not press the point and presently the young woman beckoned to him and advanced a few steps towards the wood.
At that moment Boxer heard the whine of approaching aircraft and decided that there were healthier places to stand about than an open clearing. He picked up the crate, which he was just able to carry, and followed the trio into the trees, flattening himself as the aircraft zoomed down on the clearing and then skimmed lightly away again. Boxer noticed that it was an American Thunderbolt and its presence cheered him.
“Yanks,” he told the women and supplemented the information by champing his jaws in the hope of indicating chewing-gum. The women nodded. They had evidently seen a number of American aircraft in the area and the crone in the jackboots began a conversation with the younger woman that ended in her laying hands on the crate at Boxer’s feet.
Boxer was having none of this. He was prepared to share his find but not to give it away.
“No bloody fear,” he said shortly, “where this goes I go, savvy?”
Presumably they did, for the young woman beckoned and went on ahead, pushing along a winding path for the best part of half a mile and then leaving it to break through a thick screen of bushes into a circular clearing about a hundred yards square.
Exerting himself to the utmost Boxer struggled along behind her, gasping and grunting under the weight of the box, and when he had burst through the bushes, and slithered down a slope into the clearing he found himself in an extensive bivouac, consisting of half a dozen roughly-constructed huts, inhabited by at least two dozen refugees, all but one of them women and children.
His first thought was that his pilchards would not survive very long in this kind of company and he was half inclined to retreat but the bank that he had descended was slippery and he was quite exhausted by the walk from the road, so he sat down on his crate as the best means of protecting it and waited for the women to explain his presence to the only man in the group, an aged, yellow-faced derelict, wearing a buttonless tunic and huge, baggy breeches, made from an army blanket.
Boxer took an instant dislike to the old man, who did not seem very welcoming, but he was relieved to discover that the old fellow understood English and could speak it reasonably well between his harsh bouts of coughing.
He was able to explain that the women in the clearing were a party of Russian slave-labourers, recently employed in a factory at Mulhausen, and that when the factory had been destroyed by American aircraft a week or so ago their hutments had been set on fire, and the inmates had scattered in all directions.
Germany, the old man insisted, was kaput! The Russians were a
dvancing rapidly from the south-west and were not meeting with much opposition. He seemed to be far better informed on the situation than was Boxer, for he said that it was not the British who had attacked Waldkappel recently but the Americans, who were using ‘thousands and thousands of tanks!’ It would not be long, he added, before the Americans and Russians joined hands inside Germany, but in the meantime they would have to stay hidden and live as best they could. He was a talkative old man once he got started and went on to say that he was a Belgian, who had been sent to Germany early in the war to work in a glass foundry. He did not explain how he came to be here in the company of the Russian women and Boxer did not ask him, for the Belgian’s explanations had taken a long time and he had tired of the strain of attempting to follow him.
While they were conferring the women gathered in an admiring semi-circle around Boxer and every now and again one of them reached out and touched him. As they did this each kept her eyes fixed on him and whenever he met the gaze of old or young they smiled and made little murmuring noises. He found their attentions soothing and pleasantly distracting, and soon his natural geniality urged him to show some response to their welcome.
He got up and opened the crate and at once the women’s murmurs rose to an excited cooing. Solemnly he placed one tin in each pair of outstretched hands, ignoring the surly protests of the Belgian at his elbow, who was evidently distressed by his generosity.
While the women were resorting to various means of opening the tins the young woman who had guided him to the camp signalled to him to follow her across the clearing and into a hut, that stood a little apart from the others.
He went inside and found nothing but a couch of heaped up dead leaves and an empty mess tin. She pointed to the heap of leaves and then at Boxer, from which he gathered that this hut was to be his quarters, and that she now regarded him and herself as joint custodians of the crate.
He signified that he understood her and placed the crate as far from the entrance as possible. As he did so he remembered his tins of beans and took them from his haversack. The woman hissed and glanced fearfully over her shoulder, before taking up a position that blocked the small entrance. He opened the tin and poured the beans into the mess tin, placing the half empty tin under the leaves. He possessed a spoon and began to use it, for the pilchards had proved an unsatisfactory breakfast. He had never liked pilchards but he had always loved beans. He ate them steadily and the woman did not take her eyes from him.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 63