Charlie seldom left the barracks, had no conversation with anybody and carefully immersed himself in his role as the camp village idiot. He wasn’t called upon to do any duties. He never appeared on any rosters or lists. Harry Boy had him under his wing, and as long as he made himself useful he was safe. He was billeted in a room with five other ranks, and he made sure that he made himself useful to them as well – taking on the job of folding the blankets for the whole room, running errands, polishing buttons and badges, cleaning rifles. There was no doubt that Charlie was the most industrious member of the unit. He worked all the time, always with a smile on his face, fear in his eyes and sometimes panic in his heart. He was out of his depth, but, mostly, his feet touched bottom. In the barrack room with Charlie there was Jock, a gritty Scot with wobbly false teeth and a foul temper. If Charlie was ever on his own with Jock he felt threatened.
‘Charlie, yer stupid bugger. You’re barmy, ain’t ye? Come over here and give us a kiss.’ Jock had dark and spiteful eyes, and always seemed at the point of a dreadful explosion of rage. Even his normal manner was surly. Charlie became his most vacuous with Jock.
Then there was Alf Kane, a Jew, who had changed his name from something like Krankovitch. He looked like the illustrations of Fagin from Oliver Twist. He was lean and very hairy. He had a long craggy nose, dark flashing eyes and a leathery complexion, electric crinkly hair, which even an army haircut could not subdue. But he was even-tempered, generous and full of good humour about his appearance. He was quite muscular and fit. He had the habit of laying full length on the top of his bed, completely naked, managing to look lewd as well as nude, inviting comments on his hairiness. Charlie knew that Alf had a warm heart and a set of principles that would protect him from harm. Alf provoked his companions’ prejudices.
‘Ikey Moses, don’t trust him. He’ll slit your throat when you’re not looking.’ Alf seemed to read people’s minds and fears. He knew they had all been conditioned to regard Jews as a threat. That they had the handed-down wisdom that Jews were devious and born crooks. Alf wielded this insight with a kind of proud boastfulness.
There was a blubbery figure called Chalkie, for no other reason than that his surname was White. Chalkie’s one obsession was food. He couldn’t get enough to eat. He would always finish up any leavings on other people’s plates. He had a halo of fair curly hair and the fat cherubic face of a blighted child – but with spiteful eyes. His demeanour was open and friendly, but his eyes showed the inner workings of a mean spirit. Chalkie could bluff his way out of trouble, ride rebuffs and insults, but there was always the sense that he was biding his time for some terrible revenge. It was Chalkie who brought a young girl into the barracks. She held on to him round his neck, hanging down his back, and he had managed, with help, to get his greatcoat over the two of them. She was a smoky-eyed creature who smirked all the time as though she knew that she possessed a prize that men were after. Chalkie installed her in the blanket room, and, on a commission basis, he, as well as other gallants, paid her visits, returning as though they had had a banquet of steak and chips and a sherry trifle. The girl was there for three days until she was smuggled out in a laundry van.
Another character in the room was Taffy Davies, a Welshman who was obsessive about cleanliness. He pulled his bed away from the wall every morning and swept little fluffs of dust into a dustpan. He often washed his socks and underwear by hand, in spite of the laundry service, as if he didn’t trust anyone else with his personal garments. He said he was a communist, but his conversation was often biblical and laced with dark threats about what would happen to everyone in the afterlife. As he saw it, Jesus Christ was the first communist. Taffy nearly caused a riot in a local pub when he had refused to stand up when an accordion player squeezed out the National Anthem.
The last character in the barrack room was Corporal Gross, who was nominally in charge. Gross was a romantic who spent much time on his personal appearance. He would spend hours ironing his battledress until it was stiff with creases. His shirts got the same treatment, and even his socks were ironed wrinkle free. Then he would polish his shoes, shampoo his hair and shave, often three times over, followed by lashings of aftershave and talcum powder and Brylcreem on his hair. When Gross went out he expected to click. Not with the local scrubbers but with a classy-looking bird in some kind of secretarial work. He joined the local amateur dramatic society and recruited from there. He could sing a bit, and soon found himself playing the lead in The Desert Song.
All these men had defects of seeing or hearing, wonky knees, limps or bad chests, conditions that had disqualified them from active service.
While the Allied Army was advancing in Normandy and the V1 buzz bombs started to fall on London the little group in the barrack room each had their own interests and devices. Not knowing what might happen tomorrow they determined to live for the day. Jock spent hours in the snooker hall, bullying people into playing against him for money and collecting, whether he won or not. Alf had found solace with a family in Cheetham Hill, an area in which many Jewish families had settled. Chalkie wormed his way around the working men’s clubs and later in and out of bedrooms. Taffy blossomed in the local chapel, often getting invited out to tea. Corporal Gross lived in a musical-comedy heaven, while Charlie just smiled in his private world, appeasing everyone with his willingness to help in any way he could. In this way the graded soldiers got through the days and the weeks, without facing up to the awkward fact that they were a part of a general conflict in which people were being killed and maimed and driven mad with fear.
*
Major Le Surf started to wonder whether Harry Fortune had landed him in trouble. It had seemed a grand gesture at the time, sweeping the threatened informant out of the hospital and into the barracks. There had been a scene with the Matron who said that the man was under the jurisdiction of the hospital and in the end made him sign a disclaimer clearing her from responsibility in the matter. But when he got the man to the barracks he realized that the slanty-eyed sod was still an invalid. Captain Martin, the permanently dyspeptic Medical Officer, informed him that the man still needed his dressing changed every day and confined the little German to the sick bay. There he had to be guarded, as he was still, after all, a prisoner of war.
Martin said that the man was under treatment in the hospital and made a call to the Matron to get his records sent over. When the Major explained that he thought that the man’s life might be in danger, Martin said that if anything had happened to him it would have been one less to bother about. He said that he didn’t do dressings, and his medical orderlies had no experience at dealing with such deep wounds. And so the Major had to arrange for someone to come from the hospital. On top of all this there was still the complication of Grace Grantley who had turned up at the barracks demanding to see him. You didn’t have to be under mortar fire to feel besieged.
In the morning the Jewish sister from the hospital came to attend to the prisoner, and after she had completed her task she hung about outside his office. She was still concerned about the private who had been on the ward on the night of the stabbing. She cornered him on the way to the mess. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’
‘It’s out of my hands,’ the Major replied.
‘I want to see the Commanding Officer,’ she said.
‘I am the Commanding Officer,’ he said, ‘as far as this place is concerned.’
‘Then I want to see Jimmy.’
‘He isn’t locked in a cell, you know. Just confined to barracks.’
But the damned woman wouldn’t go away. In the end he had to send for Harry.
‘The sister wants to see the guard who was on duty at the time of the – er – accident.’
‘Sir!’ Harry snapped and clattered his boots together, showing off in front of the visitor. He took her to the guard room where Jimmy was being kept under the eyes of guard corporals. He had a bed in there, and his meals were brought to him. His doleful face brightened when he sa
w Rosa, but she remembered him as a confident lad, cocky even. That was on his home ground. Now that he was caught up in this crazy military maze of rules and regulations it seemed that he might be broken before he could struggle free.
‘Jimmy! Are you all right?’
‘Could be better,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I wanted to know what was going to happen to you.’
She offered him a cigarette, and they both lit up.
‘There’s going to be an inquiry,’ he said. ‘They say it won’t amount to anything, but they have to do it.’
‘When’s this going to happen?’
‘Don’t know, miss.’
‘I’ll talk to someone,’ she said wildly.
‘Nobody can do nothing. It’s all got to be dealt with up in London. I’m getting an officer to put my side.’
She noticed that his hands were shaking. He seemed too young to be involved in such a dramatic affair. He blew smoke, looking too young even for this pastime.
‘I wish … I wish I could go home.’
She left him looking a bundle of dejection. Outside she ran into the man who had been detailed to take her to Jimmy. ‘He’s very low,’ she said.
‘He’ll be all right,’ said Harry Boy Fortune. ‘He ain’t done nothing. He was just there at the wrong time. I’ll keep an eye on him. I gave him some comics.’
Rosa warmed towards Harry. He looked a bit shifty, but maybe he had a good heart.
‘If anything happens, will you let me know?’ she said and pressed two half-crowns into his hand. ‘Ring me at the hospital. Tcherny. Sister Tcherny.’
‘Certainly will, miss,’ replied Harry, pocketing the money, thinking how easily good deeds could be rewarded.
*
It soon got around that there was a German in the camp.
‘If I see him I’ll do for him,’ said Chalkie.
‘Not supposed to do that,’ said Alf. ‘If they give themselves up that’s the end of it. It’s only when you’re fighting you can kill them.’
‘I’d kill the bastard’, said Jock viciously, ‘for putting me in this lot.’
‘I don’t think it was entirely his fault,’ said Alf.
‘No,’ said Taffy. ‘It’s Hitler who’s done it, but you can blame the German people for putting a madman in charge. Anyway, that’s just half the story. Fascism is just military capitalism. It’s just more naked and direct. The capitalist just bleeds you to death by degrees. Let ye without sin cast the first stone.’
‘What the bloody hell has that to do with anything?’ Alf asked in amused exasperation.
‘He knows what to do with the bloody Jews,’ said Chalkie.
‘Here. Hold on,’ protested Alf.
‘Not you, mate,’ said Chalkie blithely. ‘Present company excluded.’
‘What about my sister?’
‘I don’t know your bloody sister, do I? She might be a bit of all right.’
Corporal Gross entered the room. ‘Now then, lads. Settle down. Lights out in five minutes.’
Charlie was always glad when the lights went out. He knew that he had survived another day without his disguise being penetrated.
The next day more trouble was piled on the Major. The police came to the barracks, a foxy-looking plain-clothes man with a face that had seen the worst of human nature and a stolid constable. Grace Grantley had taken about fifty Aspros and had been found unconscious.
‘Are you a friend of this lady, sir?’
The Major felt the veins in his neck tightening. The two policemen were watching him as though he was an experiment in a laboratory. Obviously they did not respect his rank.
‘I know her, of course. Hand of bridge sometimes. Just a friend, that’s all. Bit of supper, you know, occasionally.’
‘Only she’s left this letter for you.’
It was ridiculously ornate handwriting, like a scroll from another age. MAJOR IAN LE SURF.
‘We don’t have to see it, unless you care to allow us, but we’d be glad if you’d open it and tell us if there’s a clue as to why she tried to take her own life.’
The Major felt trapped. He tore the envelope open.
Dear Ian
I feel such a fool. I have destroyed what we had by a precipitate action. I cannot blame you if you do not reciprocate my feelings. I see that now, but I feel utterly wretched at my miscalculation …
There was more of this drool. And the police were watching him for a reaction. He stiffened with the resolve that he wasn’t going to let this crazy woman ruin his career. Here he was, in the middle of a battle to the death, and he had to deal with nonsense of this sort.
‘Er – Mrs Grantley rather – er – misread the signs. She’s a bit – highly strung. Is she going to be all right?’
‘She’s been pumped out, sir. She’s in hospital. I’m afraid this will have to be looked into. It’s a serious crime to attempt to take your own life.’
The plain-clothes man quoted the rule book in a dispassionate manner. But why? thought the Major. The woman was clearly unhappy, probably unbalanced. Why shouldn’t she bring it all to an end? The policemen went away, and the Major realized that he hadn’t asked which hospital she was in.
It was Friday, and it was pay day. The troop lined up and approached the table when their names were called, took a little envelope and signed for their pay. For this ritual they had spent the entire day getting ready. Not only for the pay drill: it was the one day in the week when they had some money to spend, and the ritual extended to going into town with high expectations of some kind of excitement in the way of a romantic encounter. At the same time they knew that a night of love was highly unlikely. The competition was too strong. Their small allowance would go nowhere against the blandishments of the Yanks.
Every Friday evening the Market Square would gradually become seething with women. Young girls in their teens, mature women in the bloom of development and older women heavily disguised as half their age. All of them were dressed in the best clothes they could find, hair washed and fashionably arranged in coils or curls, swept back or dramatically parted, framing rouged faces with lips prominently outlined in bright red. It was like every woman in the town – and from further afield – had decided to go out at the same time to show off their best outfits. It was summer, so dresses were appropriate for the season: loose floppy ones in plain colours or flower-patterned, while some favoured skirts and blouses, all copied from some female film star seen recently on screen, such as Ann Sheridan, Betty Grable or Veronica Lake. There were jolly giggly girls, plain-faced serious girls, languid girls who affected not to notice that they were one of a crowd. There were women who looked serious and desperate and some with disdainful expressions who clearly regarded their companions as beneath them. In due course they formed a heaving square around the market area. There was an air of excitement, of expectation, of competition, of daring. The square filled up, and still groups eddied and flowed from the side streets and cobbled alleys like a lazy tide trickling over sand dunes. Occasionally fights broke out as a surge from the back pushed someone forward. There was a babble of shouts and cries and then, suddenly, the whole mêlée became silent, and around the perimeter of the staid and weathered warehouses that formed the square trucks full of American soldiers could be seen drawing up. There seemed to be around two dozen of these trucks, and as soon as they stopped dozens of GIs jumped down to be immediately swamped by the younger women, while the others stayed back, confidently waiting their turn until the frenzy subsided. The GIs good-naturedly absorbed the first wave and stood surveying the scene, picking up looks of serious invitation from women who were standing their ground, confident that the mountain would come to Mahomet.
From a market-street pub window Jock and Chalkie watched with hatred in their eyes.
‘Look at them,’ said Jock. ‘Whores!’
‘I know,’ said Chalkie bitterly. ‘It makes you proud to be British.’
Gradually the scene
dissolved into small groups of two or four. The younger girls seemed dispirited and walked off in twos and threes as though they had suddenly thought better of the whole idea and worse of the women who were walking off with the spoils. The GIs had their arms around girls’ shoulders, pulling them close. They responded with cheeky smiles.
Jock and Chalkie became vicious in their comments.
‘Fat bastards. Not much chance of them fighting anybody.’
‘They’ve all got the pox. Serve ’em fucking right.’
There was something deliberate about the way the two egged each other on. They knew that with enough drink the stream of indignation would eventually cause an explosion. When dusk arrived they were out in the street looking for a fight. They didn’t pick on the first Yank they saw. He was too big. They waited until they found one that they could handle.
He was a short man, almost middle-aged, who had found himself far from home and tried to follow the trend, picking up girls and buying them drinks in the hope that they might turn amorous. It was what all the others did. He wouldn’t do this sort of thing at home, but you couldn’t deny that these girls were willing – and, what the hell, it wasn’t his idea to come to this godforsaken part of the country. He had no idea that there were such old-fashioned places in America. England, they said: where the hell was that? Was it east or south?
He had found two women who seemed friendly. They had a strange way of talking. He couldn’t tell what they were saying most of the time, but they showed him a place called a pub, which was like a cave in a wall, with everybody drinking from large glasses. Back home he liked the occasional bourbon, but he wasn’t that interested. His father ran a gas station and sold a few things. It was a quiet little business in the depths of Kansas which, one day, would be his. A farm stretched at the back of the gas station.
‘Chuck,’ his father had said. ‘Make sure you come back in one piece. We’re gonna need you here sooner or later.’
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