‘It would only be for a day, two at most.’
There is a longer pause while Eric weighs this. ‘I couldn’t get there until at least seven tonight.’
‘Great. I’ll see you there. You won’t regret this, Funf.’
‘I already am.’
By the time Charles steps on to the deck of The Painted Lady, wearing gumboots, an off-white submariner’s rollneck and a duffel coat, Eric is already on board whistling to himself as he repairs a bilge pump. ‘Ah, there you are, Charlie,’ he says. ‘Merry Syphilis!’
Charles gives a wide grin as he remembers their crosstalk routine. ‘And a Happy Gonorrhoea!’
Inside, The Painted Lady seems more ornate than the last time he saw it, with a mahogany drop-leaf table and a scattering of oriental rugs. It smells different too: mildewy, sour. Eric, however, is exactly the same; still a short, barrel-chested man with smooth skin that looks like freshly scrubbed teak. Though he is only a few years older than Charles, his fair hair is already going silvery. And with his blustering, distracted manner, this transforms him momentarily into the hopelessly late but time-obsessed White Rabbit.
‘Good to see you again, Funf.’ Charles extends his hand. ‘I’ve missed you.’
Eric has no volume control, emphasizing words erratically and punctuating his monologues every so often with a friendly, snuffling laugh. ‘No time for all that bollocks,’ he says, wiping his oily hands on a rag before ignoring Charles’s extended hand and putting his arm around his shoulder instead. ‘Let’s get cracking or they’ll be finished before we get there. You can start by checking the lights and the lifebelts.’
As Eric supervises the provision of food and fuel, other volunteers arrive and climb aboard the neighbouring tugs and barges. A dockyard commodore, a big man with a high whispery voice and eyes like bags of cement, comes aboard with a clipboard to take their names. He asks Eric to sign a T124 form that declares his boat is now officially a Merchant Navy vessel serving under Royal Navy command. He then informs them that they are to collect steel helmets and charts from the dockyard office and set sail for Ramsgate. There they will meet the rest of the evacuation flotilla and be told their ultimate destination. They are to watch out for mines.
With the falling caw of gulls overhead and the lusty blow of klaxons, The Painted Lady sets off with three other vessels. Being towed behind her is a six-seater rowing boat, and, as it bobs in the wake, it looks as if it is trying to overtake them.
Having made their way out of the Sheerness basin, they realize they will not be able to reach Ramsgate before dark and so decide to stop for the night. This they soon regret. The sea is choppy and, feeling nauseous, they get little sleep. Eventually they give up and open a bottle of Irish that Charles has brought for the journey.
Eric has a habit of stubbing cigarettes out after a couple of puffs. He lights one up now. ‘How you been keeping?’ he says before inhaling.
‘So-so. Bored mostly.’
‘Anyone said anything about your court martial?’
‘Nope. It would almost be better if they did. I’ve become a non-person.’
‘Well, maybe this …’ Eric takes another drag then flicks the cigarette out of the window. He doesn’t need to finish the thought. Both men know that this trip could be an opportunity for Charles to redeem himself.
‘How is your friend, anyway?’ Eric asks gently. ‘Heard from him?’
‘A letter. From prison in Berlin. Nothing since his trial.’ Charles closes his eyes for a few beats then opens them and slaps the table. ‘So. Where do you find love these days, Funf?’
‘The usual old haunts. Buggers can’t be choosers.’
‘Have you considered joining the Medical Corps?’
‘To be honest, I think my services are going to be needed more on the Home Front in the coming days. They’re already clearing beds in the south-east.’
Charles raises his glass. ‘Here’s to finding love, assuming we both survive the war.’
They clink, drain and refill.
They reach the assembly point at Ramsgate a couple of hours after the sun has risen. Here they find themselves part of a strange flotilla of more than three hundred small boats: trawlers, tugs towing dinghies, motor launches like theirs, drifters, Dutch scoots, Thames barges, paddle steamers and cockleboats. As he contemplates them, Charles feels as if he has wandered into someone else’s dream. The little vessels look like exotic misshapen seabirds gathering behind a trawler. He takes out his sketchbook to record the chaotic scene.
Via the radio they are now told their destination is Dunkirk, and they must take Route Y, which will amount to 175 sea miles. In theory this will mean avoiding mines and coastal guns, but it will also add the best part of another day to their journey time. After studying their charts, they follow the serrated coastline of north Kent for a few more miles before heading out to sea.
They encounter neither mines nor U-boats on the crossing but no sooner has Charles made out the coast of France under a chill, lowering sky than his mouth goes dry. Two Messerschmitts are approaching, flying in low from the east. He ducks for cover as they strafe the convoy but none of the bullets hits The Painted Lady. Instead they send up jets of water along her starboard side, making it look as if a family of whales below the surface is spouting in sequence. Eric and Charles exchange a look, trying to hide their shock behind a mask of British insouciance. None of the other boats seems to have been hit. As the ME 109s circle around for another pass, Charles’s shock turns to gnawing, guttish fear.
Again, the bullets send up water, but none hits the boat.
He smells Dunkirk before he sees it: burning bricks, wood and plaster. The town itself has been veiled in a pall of black smoke, churning from a bombed oil tank. But in patches where the smoke breaks, he can see the glow of a hundred fires, tangled telephone wires, abandoned trucks. It looks like the end of the world.
If the ME 109s had rattled him, their strafing was as nothing compared to the disorientation he feels now. Until this moment the war has been an abstraction, something that was happening in another country, to be discussed soberly over a pot of tea rather than actively engaged with. As they await orders from the Royal Navy via the radio, Eric and Charles do not talk. Cannot. They are speechless.
Charles looks around for the rest of the flotilla but because of the oily smoke all he can see is a minesweeper, dark and silent as it lies at anchor, and the vast hull of a destroyer that has been sunk near the East Mole, the sea wall protecting the harbour entrance.
The tide goes out and a mile of shallow, sloping bay is revealed along a seafront ten miles across. The radio crackles into life. ‘Because of the obstacle in the harbour,’ a disembodied naval officer orders, ‘the embarkation will proceed at Bray-Dunes.’
Bray-Dunes turns out to be an undulating area tufted with long, reedy grass, a couple of miles due east of the harbour. When they reach it, Charles raises his binoculars.
At first he thinks the thousands of men on the beach there are shrubs that have spread down from the dunes. Then they all start moving into long lines. Without waiting to be asked, he begins pulling the rope to which the rowing boat is attached. When it is as tight to The Painted Lady as he can make it, he climbs unsteadily down the stepladder and unties the rope before sitting down and reaching for the oars. He can feel his heart stuttering in his chest. A rush of blood is making a roaring noise in his ears, louder than the boom of the surf. He doesn’t think he has felt more fear-frozen in all his life.
‘Maximum of six,’ Eric shouts. ‘You included.’
Because the tide is still going out, the rowing is harder than Charles imagined it would be, but after twenty minutes he feels the nudge of sand against the hull. The seawater laps his rubber boots as he jumps out with a splash and then drags the boat ashore. A corporal from the Welsh Guards helps him.
‘I can take five this trip,’ Charles says.
The corporal holds up five fingers and the men at the head of the queue t
rudge over, their boots silent in the sand. Two of them, their faces smeared with oil, have half-empty bottles of wine in their hands and are clearly drunk. Another with his arm in a sling has abandoned his rifle and helmet, while a fourth soldier, in disobedience of an order, is refusing to abandon his haversack. He is also clinging on to a large suitcase held together with a belt. When the corporal snatches this from him it spills open, scattering souvenirs looted from the town: bottles of wine, a porcelain chamber pot, a pickelhaube helmet, and a brass dolphin holding on the end of its tail a small, broken clock. When the corporal points his gun at him, the soldier looks at the boat, shrugs and wades into the surf. Charles helps him in and then gets in himself, using the oar to steady the boat. The corporal helps them push off. A private takes the other oar.
It is easier rowing this way, though the weight of the men has lowered the boat so much that water is now splashing in. Once the rescued soldiers have been pushed on board The Painted Lady, Charles returns to the shore and sees there is now an ambulance on the beach where he has just been and that it has sunk up to its axles. The whole town behind it seems to be burning.
This time when he calls the next five men over he says to the corporal, ‘And you.’
‘You not getting in, sir?’
For a moment Charles wonders to whom the man is talking. He hasn’t been called ‘sir’ for nine months. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ll go in a later one.’ He taps the helmets of the two soldiers in the stern. Points. ‘You’re heading for that boat there. The Painted Lady.’
Once he has pushed the boat a few yards into the water, he looks up and sees Eric on the deck of The Painted Lady, holding his shoulders up questioningly. Charles holds up six fingers. He knows there is no going back now and this knowledge makes him excited and fearful at the same time. Guilty too, for not sharing his plan with Eric, or even saying goodbye.
As he turns and strides up the beach past the line of waiting soldiers, he isn’t even sure if he can explain his plan to himself. Some ignore him but most look at him as if he is insane. He continues on up past a group of engineers who are setting up a makeshift jetty: lorries parked side by side on the hard sand exposed by the low tide. Some are stripping off the canvas covers and puncturing the tyres by firing bullets into them, while others are weighing them down with sand and lashing them together with ropes.
As Charles reaches the bandstand at the end of the beach, someone shouts: ‘Dover’s that way, chum.’ The scene here is more chaotic. No one seems to be in charge. The air is acrid with smoke and brick dust and there is broken glass underfoot; he makes a crunching noise as he walks along the esplanade. Soldiers carrying rolled-up blankets under their arms have not formed up in lines but are instead milling, not sure what to do, and thousands more are arriving down every road, swelling their number. From somewhere a goat has appeared, trotting back and forth bleating. Charles looks back and sees Eric is helping the last of the soldiers on to the boat, all the while darting looks across the beach. When he then gets in the boat himself and starts rowing to shore, Charles finds his resolve weakening. What the hell is he doing? Eric is supposed to head back to England without him …
He carries on down an alley that brings him out on to a wide boulevard. More columns of men are arriving, weary from marching. Down the road the hulks of abandoned trucks, Bren-carriers and staff cars can be seen. Some are on their sides and men are trying to keep in step as they negotiate them, like water flowing around a boulder in a stream. Fires mark the treeline. The crackle of sporadic gunfire and mortars can be heard in the distance. And the skirl of bagpipes. Bagpipes? Here? Yes, the sound is unmistakable and dreamlike.
Some of the marching soldiers are too exhausted to notice him walking the opposite way, but others follow him with curious eyes, their heads turning like a wave. Their fatigue is palpable. There are abandoned greatcoats littering the road and a couple of times Charles trips up on them, seeing them too late. As he continues against the flow, he thinks of his reason for being here, for not getting back in the rowing boat, and a cold charge of fear runs through him. He reminds himself again of his purpose: he is here in this foreign land to find his friend. Wearing the clothes of a fisherman he will probably be ignored by the advancing German troops. He will sleep in barns. Steal food. Survive.
Before he sees the Stuka he hears its scream as it goes into a nosedive. The two files of soldiers scatter like a parting of the sea, taking cover where they can: on roadside verges, in shop doorways. A 25-pounder field gun and limber being towed by a Quad takes a direct hit. A soldier who had been standing near it has been almost sliced in half by shrapnel and, as he lies on the ground, he tries to put his own entrails back into his stomach. Charles hears high-pitched screaming and turns to see a child running across the road with half her clothes missing. Her hair is alight. He takes his duffel coat off and, running after the child, wraps it around her to douse the flames. When he looks under the coat he sees the child’s skin has fallen away, and she is dead.
The groans of the wounded can be heard for a moment before another explosion leaves Charles briefly blinded by plaster dust. Someone is shouting for a stretcher-bearer. He turns and sees a French soldier lying on the ground drumming his heels. His jaw is missing. Charles is distracted by the sensation of rock fragments stinging the back of his neck. As he brushes them away with jittery hands, he hears bullets silence a whinnying horse.
A soldier now staggers into his path rubbing his belly and looking confused as his hand comes away wet with blood. He takes his helmet off and doesn’t seem to realize that his ear and a flap of skin from his neck are still attached to it. When a medic arrives dragging a stretcher, he gently persuades the man to lie down on it. Charles gets hold of the other end. Suddenly he has no choice. He has to go back to the beach.
On the promenade, the choking dust and smoke is dispersed by a damp and salty breeze blowing in from the sea. He sees decking panels from bridging trucks are now being laid across the backs of the line of lorries, along with planks that have appeared from somewhere. These serve as a walkway along which soldiers can head to the launches. Charles and the medic break into a jog, their boots squishing in the wet sand. A riderless cavalry horse canters past. The boarding is disordered and noisy now. Nerves are frayed. The jostling soldiers, some holding their rifles above their heads to keep them dry, have grown impatient of waiting. Those who have now realized they won’t be rescued unless they reach the front barge past others who are standing still. German shells are reaching the outskirts of the town. Two ME 109s are strafing the beach. In desperation some soldiers fire their rifles into the air where they have passed over. Charles hears someone shout: ‘Where’s the bastard RAF?’
Eric is running up the beach. ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’
Charles does not answer. He has no answer. Blood is roaring in his ears. The shifting sand at his feet seems nebulous and blurred, like cloud vapours. From somewhere on the beach comes the incongruous sound of a mouth organ.
‘Jesus!’ Eric’s voice brings him back to consciousness. He sees his friend examining the man on the stretcher. It is clear now that a section of his skull has been sheared off. ‘Dead,’ Eric pronounces. ‘Leave him here.’
Charles and the medic lower the stretcher and transfer the body on to the sand. The medic rolls up the stretcher and runs back to the town, knocking over a tripod of rifles as he passes it. Three soldiers are sitting waiting in the rowing boat. When they reach the tide line, Eric signals across to the queue of waiting troops. ‘We can take one more of the wounded.’
A man with a bloody bandage around his head pushes forward and strips off his webbing and bayonet.
German guns are now ranged on the beach, sending up irregular storms of sand and bodies as the barrage creeps from east to west.
As they row, a soldier appears alongside and they drag him on board. He lies down flat across the others, to keep the boat balanced. Charles sees another uniformed figure about seventy yards
away, more boy than man, being held afloat in the inky water by his life jacket. He has had both his arms blown off at the elbow but is still alive. His screams seem to carry along the entire coast.
Before they can change course to attempt a rescue, the man’s life vest slips off and he is silenced as he disappears under the waves. There is another man bobbing nearer to them, coated in thick oil. His brains are hanging out. Mercifully, this one is already dead. Geysers of water rise turbulently in the air as shells fall nearby. Everyone in the rowing boat is drenched as the water showers back down.
There are seventeen rescued soldiers now on The Painted Lady, shivering on the deck and in the cabin. Some of them must have fallen back in as they were scrambling on board: they are barely able to move because of the weight of their saturated uniforms.
While Eric tends to the wounded, Charles hands out blankets. Remembering his bottle of Irish he goes around giving each of them a tot. Their faces, staring out from under their helmets, look gaunt. Their skin is black from the oil and smoke, emphasizing the whiteness of their eyes. There are no smiles of relief, only blank expressions of resignation and exhaustion. Some strip off their wet clothes and wring them out.
A nautical mile out, the noise of battle subsides and they become more aware of the chug-chug of the motor. They look back to Bray-Dunes and see another destroyer has been hit amidships and is listing. As he considers this spectacle, Eric says to Charles: ‘Would you mind telling me what the bloody hell you thought you were doing back there?’
‘Attempting a rescue,’ Charles says, unable to disguise the defeat in his voice. He watches a parachute descending in the distance like a strange blossom. In another quarter of the sky he sees white figures of eight scratched like skate marks on ice, evidence of a recent dogfight. Then he hears a wailing siren and, in a moment of choking horror, turns to see a black, hump-winged Stuka coming towards them in a series of jinking dives.
PART TWO
The Road Between Us Page 5