Long and the Short

by Saddler, Allen

  After the quick induction course Jimmy was sent to a platoon for training. The platoon was run by Corporal Gross, a Londoner who spoke out of the side of his mouth as if every piece of information he imparted was special to his platoon and he didn’t want it overheard by anyone outside the charmed group. He soon caught on to the fact that Fossett rhymed with closet, and Closet became Jimmy’s name from then on.

  ‘Come here, Closet,’ he would say. ‘Let’s have a look at you. Blimey! Is that the best you can do? Look like a bundle of washing.’

  Gross, a kind man at heart, had a good idea that many of the new recruits found their new life bewildering. ‘It won’t last for ever,’ he said. ‘We’ve had our backs to the wall, but we’ve got them on the run now.’

  Jimmy could hardly remember the time when there wasn’t a war on. He had worked in a book warehouse in London, and when it was burned down he had worked at a makeshift place in Wandsworth Road. At first Jimmy wasn’t sure. Was this the Miss Tcherny he had known at Green’s warehouse? The one that left to have a baby. It was four years ago now, and the sister looked older and more sensible than Miss Tcherny, who wore tight jumpers and rolled her eyes like she knew everything you were thinking. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure. If the sister was Miss Tcherny she had changed a lot; she seemed much older. But she caught him looking at her thoughtfully, and she stared back at him.

  ‘Jimmy. It’s Jimmy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Miss Tcherny,’ he stammered.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Look at you! Are you going to defend me from these invalids?’

  ‘Please, miss. I haven’t been in long. They told me to come here. The corporal is coming round to tell us what to do. Are you in charge?’

  She shook her head and indicated Miessen who was doing a tour of the beds. ‘No. He’s in charge.’

  She smiled at him. The last time she had seen him he was a cocky teenager who knew his way around the book trade, making an easy life for himself, running rings around the rather soft Maurice. Now he seemed even younger than he was then, dressed up in a uniform that was too large, with clownish boots and the ridiculous bayonet. A boy sent to do a man’s job.

  ‘How was Mr Green when you left?’

  ‘Not much going on there. Old Green’s a miserable sod. And the other one, Bernard, he was hanged, you know.’

  Rosa experienced a shudder down her spine. ‘I read about it. He strangled an actress, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jimmy looked down. ‘You never know, do you? I mean, who you might be working with.’

  ‘No,’ Rosa said, recalling the time when Bernard Green had his hands around her throat. ‘You don’t.’

  Jimmy sat in a chair and fell asleep. Rosa regarded him fondly. The poor little bugger. He might be sent out to France. Would he survive the trip? What was it coming to when Britain was relying on boys who didn’t know egg from bacon?

  He woke up with a start.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Rosa said. ‘They’re all here. I’ve counted them.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Good job the corporal didn’t come round.’

  He was relieved at eight o’clock in the morning and went off to get his breakfast. Rosa wrote up her notes and left soon after. The next time she saw Jimmy he came on at ten o’clock. Corporal Gross had taken him out drinking, and it was clear that Jimmy was not used to it. He looked glassy-eyed. He was used to having a half of bitter, but the corporal drank pints and had insisted that Jimmy do the same, until he felt that he was swimming in the stuff.

  ‘Drink up, Closet,’ said the corporal. ‘I shall be hurt if you leave any.’

  Jimmy didn’t get drunk. The beer wasn’t the strength to induce intoxication, but he was wobbly from the sheer volume of the liquid consumed. He felt bloated. He was flushed and glassy-eyed, and his feet kept getting muddled up with each other.

  When Rosa saw him she was annoyed. ‘Fancy coming on a ward in that state.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ said Jimmy anxiously. ‘I’ll just have to sit quietly until it wears off.’

  And he sat on the edge of a spare bed, much to the amusement of the German soldiers.

  ‘Pissed off, eh, Tommy?’

  Miessen came and looked at him and shook his head. ‘Do you want to lie down? It will be all right. We will not escape. You have my word.’

  Jimmy’s condition provoked some merriment among his charges. A young soldier, recently recruited, put in charge of a ward full of battle-scarred veterans, with just a puny bayonet to fend off attacks, who then turns up drunk. You had to see the funny side of it.

  The Germans were more volatile. They sang, formed a three-part harmony choir, shouted jokes at one another. They had settled in.

  After a few nights on the ward Jimmy got friendly with some of the men. They conversed in signs and winks. He could see that they didn’t like Miessen. It was more than resentment at his position as officer in charge. There was something else in their venomous looks and their gestures behind his back.

  Miessen sat on the locker beside his bed, cold and aloof. Shouted jokes did not amuse him. The other German soldiers were getting bolder now, their fear of the forbidding officer turning into contempt.

  Later in the week the atmosphere seemed convivial, but Jimmy sensed an undercurrent of excitement. There was the suspicion of danger in the air. The singing became boisterous, and the recovering soldiers seemed to be in feverish high spirits. Some were still ill, but the amputees and shrapnel patients were on the mend and had made their peace with their condition. After all, they may have lost an arm or a leg, or an eye, but they were still alive and out of the war. Jimmy had the Londoner’s sensitivity to danger. Something was going on, and he didn’t like the smell of it.

  He told Corporal Gross. ‘It’s that Miessen. They don’t like him.’

  ‘Why should they like him? He’s an officer, ain’t he?’

  He told Rosa, the ward sister. ‘It all feels a bit weird, miss, you know.’

  ‘They’re all away from home. They’re just trying to cheer themselves up.’

  ‘I don’t like the way they sing. As though there’s something more to it.’

  Rosa shrugged her shoulders, and Jimmy changed the subject.

  ‘Miss, what happened to your baby, you know, when you left to have it?’

  ‘It was a boy,’ she replied, as if that was as far as she wanted to comment on the matter. ‘He’s with my parents.’

  The prisoners had launched into what seemed to be their national anthem. ‘Lilli Marlene’ was sung with affection, with venom; sometimes it sounded wistful, sometimes threatening. They banged out the rhythm on their lockers, banged spoons against the bed iron. The trite little song seemed to arouse strong feelings. It suited every mood. It was a lullaby but also a battle cry. It was bitter and sentimental at the same time.

  The Deputy Matron came down to see what the noise was.

  ‘Put the lights out,’ she said.

  There was just a desk light for Rosa to write up her notes, and the patients quietened down.

  One night when Jimmy reported for duty there was another sister in charge. Her name was Bunty; an apple-cheeked country girl with untidy fair hair. She was there while Rosa had a couple of nights off. Bunty was brisk and forthright about the Germans.

  ‘My brother is in France,’ she said, ‘and if anything happens to him I’ll do for one of these.’ The atmosphere on the ward changed, and Jimmy was bored and found himself counting the hours. He amused himself reading the names posted on the charts at the foot of each bed, Schmidt, Wanke, Hermann. The news was filtering through that the expedition force had struck a sticky patch. Days went by while ‘our boys’ stayed in the same place. It was the Russians who were making an advance. Their troops had been hardened in battle.

  Rosa felt that she had to go home when she got days off. Most of the time would be spent in travelling, squashed in crowded carriages while the train groaned along as though it had the brakes on. It too
k nearly six hours to get to Euston, and then there was another hour on the Underground. She felt she had to make some nod in the direction of her son, Benjamin, who treated her as a stranger in the house. She told her parents about the Germans.

  ‘When it comes down to it,’ said her father, ‘they’ve been conscripted like the English soldiers. Nobody volunteers to put themselves at risk.’

  ‘But do they know what has been happening to our people?’ said Rosa’s mother.

  ‘What does it matter? Nobody is going to speak out if it puts them at risk.’

  Rosa tried to play with the child, but Benjamin was clearly just tolerating her presence. The child could not return love that it did not receive. As a child he wasn’t much fun. He never smiled or gurgled with baby glee. He seemed to have made up his mind to be solemn and sad.

  ‘Will it be over soon?’ Rosa asked her father.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And then we shall have to fight the Russians.’

  ‘I thought we were on the same side.’

  ‘A marriage of convenience, which neither side believes in.’

  London had the look of being down on its uppers. The people seemed tired. As soon as they sat down, on a train or a bus, they slumped into a fitful doze. They weren’t living any more; just going through the motions. A town of zombies, moving about in a daze. There was a spark of life in the West End, where the theatres were doing good business, mainly through servicemen on weekend passes or embarkation leave, and yet there was an underlying anxiety with every desperate show of gaiety. The news of the landing had brought hope, but the slow progress was no cause for celebration. For the moment the drabness would continue. Rosa met old friends and neighbours who all seemed to be on the verge of tears. Everybody had somebody involved in the ‘big push’. Many confessed to praying to God for the first time in their lives. She was glad when it was time to return to Manchester.

  She was quite pleased to see Jimmy again. He had been assigned to her ward on a regular basis. He was on good terms with some of the German soldiers. One, a merry-eyed fair-haired private, was teaching Jimmy how to do card tricks. He was fascinated, his eyes shining like a young child. The tension around Oberleutnant Miessen seemed to have evaporated. He was totally isolated now. The wounds were healing. Even the man with a big hole in his back contrived a painful smile. The one-legged people had begun to skip about, lunging from one bed to the next.

  ‘What was it like, miss?’ asked Jimmy. ‘Up in London.’

  ‘All right,’ replied Rosa. ‘A bit quiet.’

  ‘I don’t like it here. Not the same, is it?’

  Rosa smiled. ‘You’re a typical Londoner, aren’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so. The people up here are all right, but – well, it’s a bit dull. Nothing going on.’

  ‘There’s not much going on in London at the moment.’

  ‘Are you going on with this – nursing?’

  ‘It’s what I trained for.’

  ‘These blokes. The Germans. They’re not so bad, are they?’

  ‘They’re just patients to me.’

  They were quietly talking in the pool of light over the desk. The next-door sister came and beckoned Rosa to the door. There was a whispered conversation which Jimmy didn’t hear.

  Rosa came back to the desk. ‘I’m just popping next door for a bit. Maureen is worried about one of her patients.’

  Rosa went out. Jimmy stared at the row of beds. It was quiet. What a situation to find himself in. A ward full of wounded German soldiers. If these were a cross-section of the enemy he couldn’t see why Britain should be fighting them. They were just ordinary blokes; didn’t seem vicious or cunning or anything. Were they still under the spell of Hitler? He supposed that most of them must have been called up, just like himself. They didn’t want to be involved in fighting, losing a leg or an arm, any more than he did. You got told what to do, where to go. Nobody asked you what you thought. He got up and started on the first bed, checking that the occupant was in his place. As his eyes got used to the dim light he went further along the rank of beds.

  ‘Tommy,’ a voice called.

  He went towards the voice, and suddenly the light over the desk was switched off. Now he was standing in a blank darkness. He put his hand out to feel the bed rail. Had the bulb gone? There was a soft swishing movement at the end of the ward. He was now thoroughly alarmed. He was supposed to be guarding this mob, not wandering around playing blind man’s buff. He heard some scuffling and then a deep sigh which seemed to come from the furthest corner of the ward. He decided that he had to get back to the desk, and yet he couldn’t be sure whether he was heading in the right direction. By this time he was sweating with fear. If some of them jumped on him now he wouldn’t have a fighting chance. Most of them were bigger and heavier than he was, and he was on his own against about thirty, of which over half were active and mobile.

  To his relief the ward door opened and he could see Rosa.

  ‘What the … ?’ She marched over to the desk and switched the light back on.

  ‘Jimmy! Did you switch the light off?’

  He moved swiftly towards the lighted desk. ‘No, miss. It just went off.’

  ‘It didn’t go off on its own. Somebody switched it off. Are you all right?’

  ‘I didn’t touch it. I wasn’t anywhere near it.’

  ‘Is everybody all right? Come on. We’d better go round.’

  So Jimmy followed the sister on a tour of the beds. Most of the occupants were either sound asleep or pretending to be. In fact no one stirred as they moved down the ward.

  The shock was waiting for them at the end where Oberleutnant Miessen was sitting up with a Lee Enfield bayonet in his chest.

  Jimmy felt for his bayonet and found just an empty scabbard.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ he said.

  Rosa shone a torch on Miessen’s face, which was a mask of agony. His eyes were still open, but there was no sound of breathing. Rosa felt for Miessen’s pulse.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘They said he was in the SS, you know.’

  3

  COMPARED with the Regency raffishness of Brighton, Blackpool was a let-down.

  Harry Fortune, still relying heavily on inherited prejudice, regarded Blackpool like the East End of London was pretending to be the West End. There was the Tower, which was – well – different, and the people seemed more set on enjoying themselves than they would in any south-coast resort. They laughed, got drunk, linked arms and swung along covering the whole pavement, spilling into the roads in a sort of wild, brazen abandon. Harry wasn’t a snob, but some of the scenes along the front surprised him. The people in Blackpool were not just out to enjoy themselves. They were blatantly and publicly enjoying themselves in such a wholehearted way that it felt churlish not to join in. There was no sense of reticence here. There were gangs of women, screaming drunk like a scene from a Hogarth engraving. And men, quite sodden and angry, shouting vengeance to the skies for some deeply felt grievance that had gnawed away at them for years. There were fights outside pubs, mostly comic, with the combatants falling over before a punch connected with its target, and hair pulling and screaming. Harry had never seen so much raw emotion displayed in public. Londoners quarrelled and sometimes fought, but these occasions were at some level of control, and passers-by would at least try to calm things down.

  And there were so many cheapjack stalls, so many show booths, advertising a headless woman or a two-headed goat or some other sensation which turned out to be a swizz. The whole town seemed to be dedicated to extracting money from the innocents. And now the place was full of Yanks, bulging figures with shirts hanging out of their trousers, slouching along, smoking, often drunk and dishevelled, to be swept up by American military police and crammed into vans and driven away like cattle to the slaughterhouse.

  Harry had wangled a weekend pass to look for Betsy and May, the two women with whom he stayed on a regular basis, who had left without any explanation or warning. On
his way out he heard about the Normandy landings, so he hurried to the station in case all leave was cancelled. He hadn’t thought of Blackpool as being a big place. He thought that he would be able to cover the whole place in a couple of hours, but now that he saw the extent of the promenade, the density of the boarding-houses, the dance halls, theatres and cinemas, he realized that he would bump into the two women only by accident. There were thousands of women here, and a wild and willing bunch they were. They seemed to be hunting in packs, trolling along the front, getting their photos taken, eating fish and chips, singing and shouting inane comments like ‘Frying tonight!’ as though this moment in time might be their last and they were determined to enjoy it. Harry went into the Tower and wandered from one ornate lounge to the next, sampling the beer, looking in at the ballroom, which even in the afternoon was full of dancers, seriously swirling around to the music of an organ, looking like they thought they were on a cloud in paradise. These people were easily pleased, he thought, and somehow the sight of the massed pleasure depressed him. He came out into the street and mooched along, lit a fag, feeling lost and deserted.

  He walked the whole length of the Golden Mile, a stretch dedicated to cheap novelties and sideshow swindles. There may have been desperate fighting going on around three hundred miles away, but the news of it hadn’t reached Blackpool, or, if it had, the people here simply didn’t care.

  There was a place called the Opera House, which looked nothing like that dusty old building in Covent Garden, where the toffs paraded like walking shop-window dummies, paying hundreds to see poof dancers poncing about in tight trousers. Blackpool’s Opera House had Two Ton Tessie O’Shea, who wouldn’t be doing much poncing about for fear of the demolition of the building. He thought about going to the pictures but found that the big feature was This Is the Army, which no doubt would be telling the story of how the Yanks rescued the British while they were at death’s door. After years of hanging back, the Yanks, who had only been in the war for five minutes, seemed to have taken over the whole enterprise. Even Montgomery was only second in command to some Yank general.