There was a postscript: ‘I do hope and pray you haven’t been on any more of those dreadful ships that get sunk. You must stay alive. You must, you must. For my sake.’
It was some months since this letter had been written, and he wondered whether she had started filming yet. Although he was always pleased to hear from her and the very handwriting gave him a lift because it was something of hers that he could see and touch, nevertheless the final effect of the letter was depressing. He felt that she was drifting further and further away from him, and not just in the physical sense, though California was on the west coast where he was unlikely ever to set foot. She was obviously still on the way up and would soon be far beyond his reach.
There was another thing in the letter that made him uneasy: it was the word ‘sweet’ which she had used to describe the man who had so fortunately turned up at the moment when she was out of a job. ‘This sweet man’ she had called him. Of course it might mean nothing; it might have been a word she had used simply because the fellow had stepped in with this ‘truly stupendous’ offer, and he had to believe that that was all there was to it; for his peace of mind he had to. But it bothered him all the same.
*
The War was moving against the Axis now. The Russians were advancing on all fronts, having first held and then defeated the German besiegers at Stalingrad; Sicily had been taken by the Allies and Mussolini had been overthrown; Japanese sea power had been crushed by the American Pacific Fleet, and the 14th Army under General Slim was driving the invaders southward down the Malay Peninsula. The tide had really turned at last, but there was still much to be done.
On June the Sixth 1944 Sterne was on board a little coaster which had carried a cargo of ammunition across the Channel to the invasion beaches on the Normandy coast. He had been promoted to the rank of lance-sergeant some time before and was in charge of four gunners and two naval ratings manning four Oerlikon guns. The ship was there for a week discharging its cargo and was to make half a dozen more trips to Mulberry Harbour from the London docks while flying bombs were dropping all over the capital. But he led a charmed life.
One evening he went to the Windmill theatre, which boasted that it had never closed. A man in uniform could get in for five shillings, but only in the gallery. It seemed much the same in many ways as it had been years before. The big difference was that there was no Angela Street on the stage, and without her the show had lost its charm for him.
*
His last voyage was in a tanker, the M.V. San Antonio, on the Russia run. The tanker was carrying a cargo of raw alcohol picked up in Philadelphia, and it struck him as curious that after all these years of seagoing he should have been spared until these last few months of the conflict the necessity of sailing in one of the vessels that the old gunlayer named Gregg on board the S.S. Dagon had described as hell-ships.
But the Russia run was less hazardous now. The convoy reached the Barents Sea without seeing the least sign of a German plane. Sterne was sharing a cabin with a bearded D.E.M.S. petty officer named Dougal, a Scot from Inverness who could not have been more different from the three of his countrymen who had sailed with him in the ill-fated Dagon. Dougal was a large soft-spoken man who had been employed in a dye-works before the War, and the two of them got on very well together.
Dougal was of the opinion that there would be no trouble on this voyage. ‘They must know they’re finished. They’ve got nothing to gain by trying to sink our ships now. They can’t win now.’
Sterne had to agree that there seemed to be logic in this, but as things turned out it did not prevent a pack of U-boats ganging up on them in the Kola Inlet and sinking two merchant ships and one of the escort vessels. There were snow squalls hitting them at the time, making visibility poor, and it was not pleasant. Everybody was nervous, and with good reason.
Sterne encountered Dougal on the catwalk. ‘So much for your assessment of the situation, Jock. Maybe the bastards in the tin cans haven’t heard they’ve lost.’
He was very conscious of the fact that just below the catwalk were many thousands of gallons of alcohol which might behave in a highly volatile and undesirable manner if a torpedo went into it. But there were to be no more sinkings and the rest of the ships reached their destination safely. He felt a great sense of relief. There were no continual air-raids on Murmansk as there had been on his previous visit to that icy port. You could sleep undisturbed at night now.
One day he went ashore with Dougal and watched an American film in a large building which looked as if it might have served as a concert hall. The film was called Edison the Man, and Spencer Tracy was playing Edison. It seemed an odd choice for the Russians to have made. After all, did they not claim to have invented the telephone, the gramophone, the electric light bulb and all the rest of the things that were being credited to the American on the screen? But perhaps the subtitles were correcting the misleading information that the film was giving. Neither Sterne nor Dougal was able to read Russian and therefore could not tell.
*
It was well on into April when they began the homeward voyage and the War was rapidly drawing to a close.
‘It would be the devil if we bought it now,’ Dougal said. ‘Right at the end.’
It was a fear they all had; that the luck would run out at this late stage when they were so close to home. Yet in any war there was always someone who was the last to die. You just hoped it would not be you.
And in the event their luck held. On the very day that World War Two officially ended in Europe the San Antonio crept into Loch Long and sent the gulls wheeling away in fright as her anchor chain rattled from the locker in a cloud of rust. They were home and dry.
*
Yet the war with Japan was not yet finished, and would not be until two bombs of unimaginable destructive power had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And whether that had been strictly necessary or whether it had been essentially a political ploy would be a subject of argument for many years to come.
*
David Sterne came to the end of his army career in November 1945, just a few weeks before his twenty-ninth birthday. He felt that he had lost six years of his life – the best years. And what had he done in all that time that was of any real value? Looked at in a cold dispassionate way, the answer had to be: not much. Not bloody much at all, if you wanted the truth. Without his contribution victory would have come at precisely the same time, no sooner and no later. He had not even been an essential cog in the great machine; a drop of oil maybe, which could easily have been dispensed with, since there were so many other drops of equal worth. But that was true of millions of men and women in the forces. Only the top brass, the generals and admirals and air-marshals made much of an individual impression on the overall course of the conflict – and even they were as likely to make the wrong decisions as the right ones. Only in their memoirs, written years after the events, were they infallible in their judgements, brilliant in their strategy and incapable of being influenced by anything so mean as a desire for personal aggrandisement.
Sterne could make none of these claims for himself, except the last. He knew that the part he had played had been small. He knew that many times he had been afraid, that too often he had taken the easy way rather than the more difficult but better one, and that he had never done anything which might have by any chance put him in line for a medal, apart from the campaign stars and suchlike which you got just for being there.
But at least he could say that no misguided decision on his part had ever sent a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand of his own countrymen to their untimely deaths. Again, it was not much perhaps; but it was something.
Chapter Twenty-Two – OCTOPUS
After his discharge he went back to the farm. There was nowhere else for him to go for the present. His brother Will was married and had a farm cottage. George was still living at home and carrying on a rather lukewarm courtship with the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. It was accepted that
when his father eventually decided to retire he would have the farmhouse, while the old people would maybe have a small bungalow built for them somewhere nearby. But so far Mr Sterne was still hale and hearty and showed no inclination to relinquish the reins.
David Sterne had no plans. He knew that he would have to decide sooner or later what to do, because the money he had would soon run out and he had no wish to beg from his father. He might perhaps go up to London again, find somewhere to live and resume the writing of short stories. But he knew that even if he could scrape a living for himself at that game – which was doubtful – he could never hope to earn enough to give him any realistic chance of making himself acceptable to a girl who was already on the ladder to success in the world of films.
Not that he knew just what level she had reached on that ladder. He had not heard from her for quite some time, and so had no news of her progress. If she had already appeared in any films, the information had not reached him; but surely she would have let him know. He still wrote to her, but only very occasionally; there seemed to be no point in writing if no reply was forthcoming. He was worried about her; he wondered whether the move to Hollywood had turned out badly. It could so easily have done; the ‘sweet man’ might have been a rogue, the ‘stupendous offer’ worthless, a confidence trick. He just did not know.
He had been no more than a couple of weeks at the farm when he had a letter from London which was to give another twist to his career. It was from a man named Osbert Wilkinson.
Wilkinson and he had met when they were both more or less killing time at a camp near Bristol waiting to be demobbed. Though they had been in the same regiment of the Maritime Royal Artillery they had never previously encountered each other. Wilkinson, a gangling studious-looking man with glasses, had been in publishing before the War in a rather minor position, as he himself confessed. He discovered that Sterne was a writer, and this gave them a common interest.
Sterne thought Wilkinson was a bit crazy, but they got on well together and found plenty to talk about. One of these subjects was an idea Wilkinson had of starting up a magazine. He had no desire to go back to his old job; he had had enough of taking orders from other people far less intelligent than himself and wanted to make use of his talents in his own way. At least, that was what he said.
Sterne thought it was not a bad idea, but he could see snags.
‘Won’t it take a lot of capital?’
‘Not as much as you might think.’
‘But it’s bound to take quite a packet. Have you got any?’
‘Frankly, no.’
‘So this is all a daydream?’
‘Not necessarily. I may be able to find a backer.’
He refused to enlarge on this, but went on to describe the kind of publication he had in mind. He had been impressed by Lilliput, a pocket-sized magazine published by the Hulton Press and in fact subsidised by the highly successful Picture Post. Lilliput was breaking new ground with a mixture of witty short stories, satirical articles, cartoons, amusingly juxtaposed photographs and the occasional artistic nude.
Wilkinson thought he could do something along similar lines, but with improvements. He had a fund of ideas and immense enthusiasm.
‘There’s a tremendous market out there. People are reading more than ever; they’ve picked up the habit during the War. Remember all those men on board ship reading anything they could get their hands on – books, magazines, the lot? Men you’d never think of as readers. Well, they aren’t going to give it all up when they get back to civvy street, are they?’
‘They might,’ Sterne said.
‘Oh, I don’t believe it. It’ll go on. We’ll become a literate nation at last.’
Sterne laughed. ‘And everybody will be buying your magazine?’
‘Of course.’
‘What are you going to call it? Have you thought of a title?’
‘Lots of them. What do you think of The Scavenger?’
‘Not much. Sounds like a dustmen’s trade journal.’
‘Maybe you’re right. But I’ll think of something that will really grab people.’
‘How about Octopus?’
‘You may have something there,’ Wilkinson said. ‘You may have just the thing.’
*
Sterne had pretty well forgotten about all this when the letter came. He had never regarded the idea as anything more than a castle in the air, with no real substance to it. The letter proved him wrong.
It was written in Wilkinson’s large flowing hand and read:
‘Dear David, Drop everything and come up to London at once. Octopus is being born and I want you to join the team. All details when you arrive. Don’t hesitate; this is your big chance and I will not take no for an answer. I shall be expecting you at the above address as soon as possible, or even sooner. Osbert.’
So it was happening, and he had decided to use that title that he, Sterne, had come up with. He was surprised that Wilkinson had got things moving so quickly; but he was an older man and had been in an earlier group for demobbing. Even so, he had certainly lost no time in setting the wheels turning. And where had the money come from?
He was to learn in due course that it had come from an uncle in Birmingham who had a factory turning out gardening tools and similar implements. During the War it had done contract work for the government, and the profits had been considerable. Wilkinson had unashamedly played on his uncle’s conscience.
‘I hinted that a nephew who had risked his life for his country deserved a bit of help from the moneybags of the family who had stayed at home and done rather well out of the War. He saw that I had a point and coughed up.’
It came as some surprise when Sterne announced that he would be leaving the farm immediately and setting himself up again in London. His mother seemed particularly disappointed.
‘So soon? Why, you’ve only been here a few days.’
‘I’m sorry, Mother, but I’ve been offered an opportunity and it would be foolish not to grab it.’
‘What kind of opportunity?’ his father asked.
‘Working on a magazine.’
‘How much are they offering you?’
‘The figure has not yet been fixed.’ He decided that it might be wisest not to tell them that the magazine had not yet been launched.
His father looked doubtful. ‘Well, I hope you know what you’re doing.’
He did know what he was doing, but whether it was the right thing was quite another matter. Time alone would tell.
*
The editorial office was in a patched-up building adjoining a bombsite down Hammersmith way where there remained heaps of brick rubble and charred timber. The side of the building was shored up with heavy beams, and Wilkinson said that it was planned eventually to pull it down and rebuild.
‘But that may not be for years yet, so we needn’t be in any hurry to move. And the rent’s reasonable. All in all, it should suit us fine while we’re finding our feet.’
There were a couple of single-bedroom flats in the upper part of the building, one of which Wilkinson was occupying. The other he said Sterne could have if he wished.
Sterne thought it was a good idea. It saved him the bother of finding other accommodation; which might not have been easy.
*
Right from the start it seemed to him a pretty crazy venture, even though Wilkinson had managed to gather quite a bit of talent around him. They would meet in a ground-floor room which had been equipped with the paraphernalia of an office: filing cabinets, typewriters, desks, the lot; all secondhand. A telephone had also been installed and there was a fair-sized oak table round which they would sit, drinking endless cups of coffee, smoking cigarette after cigarette, scribbling notes and talking, talking, talking. There really was a lot of talk, not all of it much to the purpose.
There were four others besides Wilkinson and Sterne. Joe Wade was an artist with a talent for the grotesque and bore rather more than a fleeting resemblance to some of his own
creations: a wild mop of hair, sharply pointed nose and limbs that seemed to have grown too long for his body, as though they had been stretched on a rack. Norman Lait was a photographer; a small compact man who had travelled much with the British army, shooting with his camera and being shot at with guns for his pains. He had been wounded in the right leg and walked with a limp. Philip Townsend was a cartoonist who specialised in the comic strip.
The last member of the team, but certainly not the least important, was a woman. Her name was Celia Dart, and she was apparently related in some way to Wilkinson. She was thirty-five, red-haired, freckled, plain and lean. She was also as sharp as a pin, had an excellent business brain and a talent for organisation. Without her everything would have slipped into a state of chaos. She kept things on the rails, and her acid tongue could bring others to order in a moment. All the men respected her judgement, and indeed were rather in awe of her.
It was she who found a printer for the magazine and struck a hard bargain. Wilkinson had arranged for his former employers to see to the distribution side of the business. They were publishers mainly of gardening and homecare journals, but agreed to handle Octopus at a very reasonable charge. It was planned to give the magazine one hundred and twenty pages measuring approximately eight inches by five and a half, and the cover price was to be one shilling. It was hoped that some advertisers would be attracted to its pages, but that would depend upon sales figures.
A Wind on the Heath Page 14