The schoolhouse was set, like a small outpost, on top of the next neck of land and Schorner observed a flash of reflected sunlight as one of the windows was closed. He lifted his field glasses and saw that the young schoolteacher, Dorothy Jenkins, was moving some books from the window sill. Unhurriedly he walked down on to the beach and along the fine sand and then the shingle until he had reached the path leading up to the school. She opened the door as he was approaching. Her smile was uncertain.
‘Not breaking curfew, am I?’ she said. ‘Yet?’
‘Not yet,’ he smiled. ‘It’s tomorrow.’
‘I don’t intend to be here tomorrow,’ she replied. He had reached the door now and they walked together into the classroom. Only one of the desks was occupied. Bobby Bewler, the teenage simpleton, was regarding Schorner with wild apprehension.
‘This is Bobby,’ said Dorothy Jenkins. ‘He’s keeping me company.’
The lad leapt to his feet, banging the desk seat back like the explosion of a gun, and saluted Schorner dramatically. The surprised officer returned the salute.
‘Bobby’s a bit different,’ mentioned Dorothy. She turned to the boy. ‘Sit down, Bobby,’ she said. ‘That used to be your desk when you came to the school, didn’t it.’ The youth nodded his head fiercely, an irregular grin severing his vacant, red face. The woman turned to Schorner saying: ‘His mother is trying to get her belongings moved from her house today, so I thought Bobby would be better off here. I had to do some clearing up anyway.’
‘Does his ma need some help?’ asked Schorner seriously. ‘I can get some of my boys there.’
She shook her head. ‘The WVS, the Women’s Voluntary Service, are organizing it,’ she smiled. ‘I don’t think your soldiers would have a hope.’
Schorner looked carefully around the shell of the schoolroom. Everything had been taken away except the desks. ‘It’s sure a great pity,’ he said to her. He watched the boy, whose attention was taken with some insect walking along the wooden floor.
‘What, Bobby?’ she asked. ‘Or the whole business?’
‘Both,’ he shrugged. ‘The whole business, as you call it, and the way it affects kids like him.’
‘Less than most, I’d say,’ she answered practically. ‘Every generation here has had the likes of Bobby. The people are very close, you see.’ As they watched Bobby had captured the creature from the floor. It was a small, polished woodlouse. He placed it on the desk in front of him and proceeded to slice it up with an overgrown thumbnail. Schorner grimaced but Dorothy only reacted with embarrassment. ‘That’s how they are,’ she shrugged. ‘One day he might become a soldier.’
Schorner regarded the young woman thoughtfully. ‘And what will you be doing?’ he asked. ‘Still teaching school?’
‘That’s my lot,’ she replied simply. ‘They’re making room for us in the classrooms at Wilcoombe. Everybody’s got to squeeze up. They don’t like the idea. But we’ll manage. You must come and see us there some time. Tell us about American history.’
He could see she was not being caustic. He was accustomed to that now, so he knew the difference. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’d like to do that if I get the opportunity.’
‘They enjoyed your poem the other day,’ she added. ‘The children.’
‘Good. I’m very glad somebody’s got some good thoughts about us.’
Dorothy went with him to the door. He opened it and the salt air breezed in, catching her dark hair. She laughed and held it down. Peaceful sunlight lay across the sea and the sand. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much about it,’ she said. ‘In the end they’ll realize that you’ve come to fight for us.’
‘Thanks,’ said Schorner sincerely. He half turned back into the room. ‘’Bye, Bobby,’ he called. Only silence came back. He shrugged. ‘See how I lose friends and fail to influence people,’ he said. They shook hands and he ambled down the path between the short dunes to the beach. The first of the landing craft was approaching in-shore. Schorner turned and saw that the simple boy had joined the schoolteacher at the door of the small building. They waved and, suddenly gladly, he waved back. ‘Okay you men,’ he called to a group of GIs standing idly on the beach. ‘Let’s get this thing unloaded. Let’s get our feet wet.’
On the next day, the final day allowed for the evacuation of the civilian population, Howard Evans left his surgery in Wilcoombe and got into his car. It was still fine and there was an upstairs window open in his house. Beatrice looked out as he was about to move off. ‘Be long?’ she called.
‘Lunchtime,’ he answered. Then: ‘I thought I’d just take a last look around.’ He nodded eastwards. It was already a different country. ‘Over there.’
‘Can I come too?’
‘All right, if you like.’
She vanished from the window and appeared a few moments later through the cottage front door, pulling on her coat. She had been patching the sleeves on the previous evening and as she got into the car she examined her workmanship with satisfaction. ‘Not bad, is it?’ she asked her husband. ‘A new season, a new design. This one’s called “rags and tatters”.’
He laughed with her, then said: ‘You’re sure you want to come?’
Seriously she nodded. ‘I think so,’ she replied. ‘For a last look before it’s all altered.’
He accepted the thought. ‘It will never be the same again,’ he told her. ‘Some people will never go back, the look of the land will be all changed. I suppose you could say that today is the end of the century for these parts.’
His words were at once confirmed. They drove out of Wilcoombe and along the coastal road. Within two hundred yards there appeared a military checkpoint, barbed wire and a white-painted barrier. Two American military police stood outside a sentry box. One was black, his face and eyes startling under the domed white helmet. It was the negro who moved forward and stopped the car. He saluted politely. Evans wound down the window.
‘I’m the doctor,’ he explained. ‘Evans. I’m just going to make a final check to see that everything is all right. That nobody’s been left.’ It sounded a strange explanation even to him.
The snowdrop nodded: ‘That’s okay, sir,’ he slurred ‘But tomorrow nobody goes through. That’s the orders.’
Evans thanked him and drove on. Beatrice smiled at her husband. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a black man speak,’ she said quietly. ‘He didn’t sound a bit like Scott and Whaley on the radio.’
He said, ‘Scott and Whaley? That’s just burnt cork.’
She laughed: ‘What, for the radio?’
They were driving along by the sea now. The waves were jumping in the sunshine. Two naval vessels were loitering out in Start Bay. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ said Evans. ‘Black men have always been funny up to now. Acts.’
‘Like G. H. Elliott, the Chocolate-Coloured Coon, or the golliwog on the marmalade,’ she said. ‘Yes. They’ve always been to amuse us. We’re going to have to change our attitudes there.’
‘And in a lot of other places.’ He nodded out to sea. ‘See how the British Navy is mothering the Americans. The ships are ours. That’s why they left it to the poor old admiral to tell everybody.’
‘Those two don’t look very formidable,’ Beatrice said, looking out at the vessels.
‘Judging by the funnels they’re pretty ancient,’ said Evans. ‘But we probably won’t tell the Yanks that.’
They had reached the Telcoombe Beach Hotel. A squad of Americans was digging a trench on the square of lawn that faced the beach. Two other GIs were sitting on the children’s swings at the dilapidated edge of the garden. They creaked with rust as the soldiers swung idly. Evans wished the digging party good morning and they stood up and returned the greeting. In the mild sunshine two had stripped themselves to the waist. Their bodies were white, one thin, the other with rolls of fat coiled around his middle. They all studied Beatrice.
‘Looking for buried treasure?’ joked Evans.
‘No, sir,’ replied t
he thin man adroitly. ‘We figured maybe we could dig our way out of this place. Escape.’
The doctor and his wife both laughed. The neglected rear door of the hotel was open, moving to and fro in the breeze like a beckoning hand in a shabby glove. They walked across the brief lawn and went in. It felt immediately cold. ‘Trying to escape,’ echoed Evans. ‘It doesn’t occur to us that they don’t particularly want to be here.’
They fell into silence the moment they began to walk into the hotel, a silence prompted and heightened by their slow and empty footsteps on the bare boards. They walked first into the kitchen, then the guests’ lounge, then the dining-room. Each room was naked, its walls and floors marked with the geometry of dust and stains left when curtains and carpets had been removed.
‘It’s so cold,’ muttered Beatrice. ‘This place was always so warm.’
Evans nodded sadly. ‘Where did Mrs Katlin go?’ asked his wife.
‘Totnes,’ he said. ‘They found her a room in a guest house. She’ll never come back.’ He stopped as they heard a movement. It was already eerie. He touched his wife’s arm and walked back towards the kitchen. She heard him laugh. A strange haired dog was sitting looking without understanding around the stripped room. They both recognized it for it had wandered the beach for years. Old Daffy, the fisherman, owned it and its journeys in his boat and its living outdoors in the salty air and sun had turned its coat from black to a gingery brown. They spoke to it and it wagged its sunburned tail, but then turned and went out into the air. ‘They’ll have a job keeping him out,’ forecast Evans.
They followed the dog, called good-bye to the soldiers, three of whom were now sitting on the swings and went out to the car. In silence they drove up to Telcoombe Magna. The road through the village was lined with heavy US Army trucks with men unloading them, carrying crates and boxes through the churchyard and into the church itself. There was a heavy machine gun set up in the lychgate. Beatrice had gone pale. ‘That will please Sissons, I don’t think,’ Evans said.
There were twenty heavy trucks strung along the village road. Evans counted them. He stopped the car just beyond the church but was immediately approached by a jeep carrying a quartet of military police. ‘This is a military area, sir,’ called the man beside the driver firmly. ‘No loitering is permitted.’
Evans swallowed fiercely. Beatrice touched his arm. ‘No loitering,’ she repeated. ‘I think we ought to go.’
Evans growled something within himself as he started the car. The Americans watched it with the interest they might give to a foreign insect. Some of those unloading the trucks whistled at Beatrice. Evans snorted angrily but she only laughed and said: ‘The women around here are going to find themselves in demand.’
‘While their husbands are fighting overseas,’ he muttered.
His wife laughed again. ‘Well, you’re not,’ she said soothingly. ‘So I’ll be quite safe.’
‘You’d better be,’ he answered.
Her eyebrows went up, good-humouredly. ‘I’m not sure what you mean by that,’ she said. ‘I hope you always think I’m safe.’
They drove by the gate of the American camp. Evans saw that in two weeks it had expanded from the haphazard settlement of the advance party to a spreading city of tents and huts. Smoke rose into the blue spring day, men and vehicles were on the move, the recorded sound of Glenn Miller’s ‘American Patrol’ sounded over the Devon meadows. ‘My God,’ breathed Beatrice. ‘Look at all that. I would not have believed it possible. Not in a few days.’
Evans had recovered his temper. ‘For them,’ he said, ‘nothing is impossible. They can do anything. Or they believe they can. But it won’t be as easy setting up camp in France.’
They continued to drive along the upward-rising coombe, almost enclosed by the banks and hedgerows on either flank. It could almost have been spring for the air was light, the sun slid through the lattice of branches, the old, long stones set into the banks, the ancient shiners as they were called, glowed warmly. They reached the village of Mortown and Evans, almost involuntarily, stopped the car. He and his wife sat, dumbly, looking down on to what had been a living hamlet.
‘God, look at it,’ she said in a low voice. ‘How terrible.’
Even on that bright day a wind was sneaking up the street. It made the sign above the village shop, the tin sign which said ‘Lyon’s Tea’, creak and rattle. Somewhere a door was banging. The patches of sun looked cold as ice floes. Every window was blank, every door stood like a tombstone. Soon weeds and moss would begin to grow in the crevices of the little street. Soon rats and pillaging pigeons would inhabit the small place which had been the home of humans for a thousand years.
Without saying anything Evans got out of the car. Beatrice, as if shying away from closer contact with the visible loneliness, remained where she was. He walked alone down the slope and along the street. There was a brook which ran under a paving stone bridge at the foot of the hamlet and in the new silence he could clearly hear the clatter of the travelling water, something of which he had never before been aware.
Beatrice watched her husband’s shoulders hunch as he walked. He paused and pulled his coat collar up about his neck, then continued on the solitary journey. He was almost at the bottom of the single street when he heard a noise coming from a terrace cottage in a tight alley by the Horse and Groom Inn. So deserted was the scene that the sound startled him. He turned cautiously towards it.
From the open doorway appeared the familiarly stealthy figure of Horace Smith, the poacher. He carried his professional bag, an army haversack, slung about his neck. From it protruded the yellow legs of two chickens. He smiled when he saw Evans. ‘’Ow be you, doctor?’ he greeted. Evans grinned with the relief of familiarity.
‘Busy, Horace?’ he said.
Horace nodded towards the stark yellow legs. ‘They’n wouldn’t be caught when everybody went,’ he explained. ‘But I seed no sense in leaving they to be shot by they Yankees.’
‘There’s not much else left, is there,’ said Evans looking about at the newly desolate village. He remembered photographs of ruined settlements in France from the First World War. It was like that except that here every house was intact; only the life had gone.
The poacher shrugged his face. ‘Oh, I don’ know about that, doctor,’ he said. He winked with the eye that was always half closed, his shooting eye. ‘I reckon there be a few little hidey-holes with money in them in these cottages. People get old and not trusting anybody you know. They hides away their money and suchlike and then gets even older and forgets all about it. Oh, I bet there’s a few quid under these floorboards.’
His eye gymnastically dropped up and down again. ‘And there’s the bluey … the lead from the pipes, and the roofs like of the churches. And the brass door knockers. Ah, there be all sorts of things, doctor.’
‘But the whole area is being sealed off,’ pointed out Evans. ‘I had a job to get past the guards even today.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Horace quietly. ‘Nor will I ever. There’s plenty of ways in here if you know ’em. And out.’
‘There’ll be landmines and all sorts of trouble,’ warned Evans. ‘And the Americans would probably shoot you on sight.’
Horace smiled wearily. ‘Now I didn’t say it was I comin’ back ’ere, now did I, doctor? I’ll be making a shilling supplying the Yankees with hare or sometimes I might just come across a stray salmon, you never know. But that’s not to say that others won’t come in. You just watch, they spivs from Plymouth will be creepin’ under the wire to see what they can get.’
‘With that sort of risk, they’re welcome to it,’ said Evans. He looked back up the vacuum of the street to where Beatrice sat in the car. ‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘There’s no one left around here as far as you know is there, Horace?’
‘Not a soul,’ said the poacher surely. ‘’Cepting me.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t hang around too long,’ advised Evans. ‘It wouldn’t do for you, of all
people, to be caught in a booby trap.’
Horace laughed gummily. ‘No danger o’ that,’ he assured. ‘I be goin’ anyhow. Just after another call. One o’ Lackley’s litter ran off when they was clearing out. I think I’ll be going to see if I can find any sign of ’im. T’wouldn’t do for a little pig to be left all on his own here, would it?’
Evans left him and walked up the steep, bleak, shining street, inhabited only by the sniffing wind. He reached the car and got in. ‘Horace,’ he said, nodding towards the slow figure at the other end of the hill. ‘He seems to think that there’s buried treasure under half the floorboards in this area. Not that he’s looking for that, not at the moment anyway. He’s just collecting mislaid chickens and pigs – out of the kindness of his heart.’
Beatrice laughed drily. ‘I bet he is,’ she said. ‘He could be right about the buried treasure, though. They never did trust the banks. How many times have you been paid with a mildewed pound note?’
‘Or with a gold half-sovereign,’ he agreed. They had reached the foot of the village hill. Horace had vanished among the yards at the back of the terraced cottages. They began to ascend the opposite side of the valley. Beatrice felt relieved. She looked back at the village and then reached quickly for his shoulder. An American tank was waddling down the opposite hill. Even as she watched, it clumsily slewed in the road and its rump demolished the front wall and windows of the village shop. She told her husband to stop the car and he did so at the apex of the hill. ‘They’ve just knocked down half of Swain’s shop,’ she said angrily. ‘That bloody tank.’
They got out of the car. The tank’s end was still wedged in what had been the little window. The Lyon’s Tea sign had fallen across the gun. As they watched, four soldiers climbed from the tank and rolled about with merriment in the street. Their torn laughter floated up to the man and his wife on the hill. The tank crew were slapping each other on the back in their hilarity. Fifty yards down the street Horace the poacher appeared, a pig wriggling in the bend of his arm. He watched stolidly.
The Magic Army Page 18