The Iron Stallions

by Max Hennessy

  When the party broke up, she offered him a bed at her flat. The invitation included the 7th Hussar but, at the last minute, the Hussar vanished and Josh found himself being driven alone to Wimbledon.

  ‘This all seems rather dangerous,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mean because of the bombs.’

  He was aware that it was more than a hint, but he was careful to keep things correct. She eyed him curiously as he said goodnight but made no comment. In the morning, she gave him breakfast and saw him off to the station. ‘Come and see me again, Josh,’ she begged. ‘London’s a dreadful place nowadays.

  He thought little of the invitation, but the next time he had to pass through after a visit to a medical board he telephoned her and she promptly asked him round. She looked tired and strained.

  ‘These bloody bombs,’ she said, pouring him a drink. ‘Even if the things aren’t whistling down round your ears, you find you’ve got one of these mobile ack-ack guns outside and every time it fires, it lifts you out of bed.’ She lit a cigarette and gave him a nervous smile. ‘I’d rather be lifted into bed,’ she said. ‘Much more my line.’

  Once again, she fed him and he took her to a theatre. Because of the bombing, it started early and they were back in the flat by ten o’clock.

  ‘It grows so boring,’ she said. ‘You’re home and twiddling your thumbs before the night’s old. For God’s sake, come and see me again, Josh. Everybody’s so bloody serious about this war. They’ve all forgotten how to laugh.’

  He knew she was making a set at him. The pain of Ailsa’s death was beginning to wear off now, and he knew there was an open invitation to Jocelyn’s bed if he cared to take advantage of it. A feeling of guilt stopped him, but she was so willing to look after him he found his guilt was wearing thin.

  The next time there seemed little point in arguing any longer.

  ‘For God’s sake, Josh,’ she pointed out. ‘We might all be dead tomorrow.’

  When he woke the following morning, Jocelyn was curled up alongside him, her head on his shoulder.

  He lay thinking until she stirred and kissed his cheek. ‘I think we were intended for each other, Josh,’ she said. ‘We even have the same name. You’ll have to marry me now and make me an honest woman.’

  After breakfast, he took her to the nearest jeweller’s and bought her a ring. It was only as they left that he remembered his grandmother’s emerald. Somehow it didn’t seem to go with Jocelyn.

  ‘I think I ought to find somewhere else to live,’ she said as they returned to the flat for lunch. ‘It would hardly do for your new fiancée to be spread all over London by a bomb, would it?’

  ‘You could come to Braxby,’ Josh said. ‘I need someone to run the place.’

  She looked interested and he hurried to explain. ‘It wouldn’t be that hard. There are two old dears who look after the place, and an ex-sergeant of my father’s who looks after the outside. He’s getting a bit old, of course, but there’s an ex-sergeant-major of mine who lost a leg at Dunkirk who might be willing to join him eventually. You wouldn’t be short of help.’

  She thought for a moment then finished her drink. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll try it. When do we start?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Her face fell. ‘You do believe in rushing a girl, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s a rush job.’

  She smiled. ‘There must be time to go to bed again,’ she said.

  The house at Braxby was closed when they arrived, but the two old Ackroyds arrived from the village at once and fires were started. As Jocelyn stood in the library warming her hands, outside the window a Yorkshire mist was filling the valley.

  ‘Is it always as dark and gloomy as this?’ she asked.

  Josh smiled. ‘The sun comes out occasionally, and when it does there’s the most magnificent view. My grandmother used to sit and look at it all day.’

  ‘I hope I won’t be lonely.’

  ‘My mother’s handy and my Aunt Jane lives over the hill. Besides, you’ll probably get a horde of evacuees dumped on you. Perhaps even the army’ll try to grab the place. If they did, at least, you’d be here to make sure they didn’t treat it as if it were a village hall.’

  At Christmas the house came alive again. Dogs were already in residence, filling the house with their affectionate enthusiasm, and for a change the whole country was elated by the news from the Middle East. A raid in force to chase out the Italians, who’d taken advantage of the confusion after Dunkirk to advance into Egypt, had been so successful it had changed into a major offensive and the Italians were being chased not only out of Egypt but almost out of Libya, too.

  With her husband in North Africa, Chloe came down from Scotland with her family. They were all aware there wouldn’t be many more chances before Josh also disappeared, and on Christmas morning they made their parade round the stables as the family had done for generations.

  As the new year came, Josh tried to get down to some organisation. Eddie Orne, just learning to walk with an artificial leg, decided to accept his offer of a job and Josh had one of the cottages attached to the farm decorated for him and his family to occupy as soon as the hospital allowed him to leave.

  Jocelyn seemed to think her job would consist chiefly of riding round the estate and, since there was a farm sale in the next valley the next morning, Josh decided to humour her. There were a dozen horses tethered in a row, one of them a small, well-bred mare, with strong hindquarters and a deep chest, and the following day she was in the stables alongside Josh’s wiry roman-nosed bay, and a sixteen-year-old Ackroyd boy had been engaged to look after them.

  ‘The little one’ll also go in the dog cart,’ Josh pointed out. ‘Petrol’s going to be short and transport of any kind will be helpful. Eddie Orne will be here soon and old Ellis Ackroyd will advise you until then. Between them there isn’t a thing those two don’t know about horses.’

  He spent the next two weeks whitewashing and painting the stable, while Jocelyn moved about the house with a notebook and pencil, making notes.

  ‘Major alterations are out for the time being,’ Josh pointed out. ‘There’s too much needs doing before then. But we could do up the library, the dining room and one other so there’d be somewhere comfortable and colourful for you.’

  A few days later his mother turned up on the doorstep. Jocelyn was shopping in York and it was obvious she’d chosen the moment deliberately. She looked at the horses and admired the plans for the house.

  ‘Jocelyn has good taste,’ she said. She had noticed that her son’s fiancée wasn’t wearing Lady Goff’s emerald and she suspected Josh wasn’t yet sure of her. ‘Are you living together?’ she asked.

  Josh smiled. ‘Of course.’

  She couldn’t find it in her to blame him. With the Germans rampant all over Europe, young men couldn’t look forward to much future and most of them were grabbing what they could while they were still around. ‘I’m not criticising, Josh. It was dreadful Ailsa being killed, and I know how I felt when your father disappeared from my life. She’s very beautiful.’

  The war situation remained fluid. The Italians who had attacked Greece from Albania in the autumn in the hope of a cheap victory to match Hitler’s victory in France had found to their surprise that the Greeks were tougher than they’d expected. Despite their inferior numbers, they had not only thrown the Italians out again but had also started to invade Albania and soon had a quarter of the country in their hands. And when the Navy, after hammering the Italian fleet at Taranto, hammered it again off Cape Matapan, it began to seem almost as if the Italians were finished. There was a great deal of elation in England, but when the Greeks agreed to allow a British army on to their soil there suddenly seemed a new intensity about the war.

  ‘Hitler’ll never allow us to get a foothold on the Continent,’ Josh said, and he wasn’t in the sl
ightest surprised when he was called for a medical check-up earlier than he’d expected. The authorities were combing the rear areas to fill the gaps in the Middle East caused by the transference of troops to Greece, and the doctor worked over him thoroughly.

  ‘You’ll live,’ he said. ‘Where do you expect to go?’

  ‘Back to my regiment. Middle East.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘It should be interesting,’ he observed. ‘Hitler’s sent help to the Italians. It was on the news just now.’

  When Josh returned to Braxby, Jocelyn met him at the door. She looked faintly bewildered.

  ‘While you were away,’ she said, ‘I had a visit from the Billeting Officer. He had a car full of refugees. We’ve got two. From the East End of London.’ She gave a dazed gesture. ‘They were lousy and their clothes stank, and I had to get the doctor to come and look at them. He says we’ve got rid of the lice and your mother got them fresh clothes but–’

  ‘But what?’

  She gave a nervous laugh. ‘Well, you’d better see them for yourself. Their name’s Keyho and they’re called Rosie, short for Rosanna, and Kitty, short for Katherine. They’re pretty horrifying but the poor little devils seem to have been on the move ever since the war started. Rosie’s nuts about horses.’

  Watched by the dogs, the two children were in the kitchen eating bread and jam. Kitty, the smaller girl, was shy to the point of speechlessness, but Rosanna was a typical product of the East End.

  ‘What about their parents?’ Josh whispered.

  ‘Both dead. Father before the war. Accident at work. Mother in the blitz. There was an aunt, I gather, but she doesn’t want them.’

  Rosanna indicated Jocelyn. ‘She’s our lady,’ she said.

  ‘It makes me sound like something out of church mythology,’ Jocelyn murmured.

  Josh tried conversation. ‘Do you like being here?’ he asked.

  ‘Not ’arf,’ Rosanna said. ‘There’s no bombs and we get more to eat.’

  ‘Didn’t you like London?’

  ‘Not bloody likely.’

  Josh kept his expression bland. ‘We don’t use that word here,’ he said.

  ‘Everybody in our street does.’ Rosanna smiled angelically. ‘You’ve got ’orses in the stable. Can I ’ave a ride?’

  ‘We could probably do better than that,’ Josh said. ‘We might even find a pony for you.’

  ‘All me own? Honest?’

  ‘If you can manage to stop using that word.’

  ‘I’ll give it a go.’ She gazed adoringly at him then became brisk, feeling she ought to contribute something to the general satisfaction. ‘I can spit,’ she said. ‘I’m the best spitter in our street.’

  Old habits died hard. The children persisted in calling Jocelyn Our Lady and Josh Our Father, they wiped their noses on the backs of their hands, and unwanted food was thrown on the floor where, Josh supposed, they had always thrown it. But it made the dogs happy and they were robustly healthy and, despite Rosanna’s language, she was surprisingly pretty.

  ‘My farver carried fings on ’is ’ead,’ she said.

  ‘What was he, Rosie? A porter?’

  ‘Fink so. Covent Garden. Is this Buckin’am Palace?’

  ‘No. It’s Braxby Manor.’

  ‘What’s a manor?’

  ‘A sort of house.’

  When Kitty developed a temperature – from what Jocelyn assumed at once was a disease caused by fleas but which Josh more realistically assumed was sheer excitement – it was Josh not Jocelyn who stuck a thermometer in her mouth.

  ‘Can I ’ave a suck when she’s finished?’ Rosanna asked.

  They knew no songs but ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ and ‘Once in Royal David’s City,’ they were terrified of water, particularly in the form of a bath, called caterpillars ‘worms on legs’ and referred to rooks, thrushes, tomtits and everything else as ‘dicky birds.’

  ‘I didn’t know they was all different colours,’ Rosanna said. ‘All the dicky birds I’ve ever seen looked black. Muck, I suppose.’ She indicated the bowl of fruit by her sister’s bed. ‘C’ave apple?’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘You won’t slosh me?’

  ‘Did people slosh you, Rosie?’

  ‘My farver did when ’e’d ’ad one or two. Are there fairies round ’ere, sir?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s kind of magic bein’ ’ere. Where’ll you get my pony?’

  ‘There are plenty around. They belonged to little girls who’ve grown too big for them. I expect we can pick one up cheap.’

  It wasn’t hard. Ellis Ackroyd knew of a Welsh Mountain belonging to a neighbouring farmer who’d bought it originally for his daughter who was now in the Waafs. Rosanna was ecstatic when she saw it, but Kitty immediately went into a decline.

  ‘She wants one now,’ Jocelyn said.

  Because he was due to leave, that night Josh suggested they should fix the date of the wedding, but Jocelyn shook her head.

  ‘Let’s leave it as it is,’ she said.

  He put his arms round her. ‘But, don’t you see, old thing, if anything happened to me, Braxby would be yours.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’ She shook her head as if trying to avoid thinking about it. ‘It won’t happen.’

  He was puzzled by her attitude and wondered if she were getting cold feet because of the children.

  ‘It might not work out, Josh,’ she explained. ‘People need to know each other.’

  Nothing he said could persuade her and two weeks later he disappeared to a tank depot for a refresher course on new weapons and equipment. The colonel in command had been a captain before Dunkirk and couldn’t understand why Josh was in such a hurry to get back to the fray.

  There was a technical period at Bovington where Josh heard a new paraphrasing of the talk he’d been in the habit of giving to new recruits in the days when they’d had horses.

  ‘You’ll probably hear a lot of arguments,’ they were told, ‘about who’s the most important member of a tank crew. The best advice is to forget them. A crew’s only as good as its combined skills. Some will tell you the driver’s most important, some the gunner, some the wireless operator. When you have one, some would even say the co-driver, because without him you’d have nobody to make the tea–’

  He took part in exercises with a troop, then with a squadron, and finally with three squadrons as a regiment. He learned to get at the more inaccessible parts of the engine and adjust jets on carburettors. Sitting on the tea-plate seat of a tank commander, watching the twin horns of the machine and the cascades of muddy water they threw up, when the track caught a tree stump and threw them about inside the tank like shot inside a rattle, he realised that his injured backside had recovered enough to get by.

  He learned to live inside the tanks, to cope with the thunder of engines and the noise of the tracks; and to deal with the bundles of bedding, spare lengths of track, camouflage nets, pressure stoves and the other odds and ends with which the vehicles were festooned. It was easy, he learned, to look smart but be short of tanks because of bad maintenance, or fail through carelessness on the range where an iron trolley carrying a target trundled across their front so they could blaze away at it.

  By the time retraining was over, the situation in the Mediterranean was changing again. The Germans had gone into Greece, and the army that had been landed from North Africa had its hands full. The following week he was given orders to rejoin the Regiment in Egypt and sent home on embarkation leave. Almost the first thing he did was to find Eddie Orne, who said he was now mobile and would be moving into the cottage at Braxby within a few weeks.

  On the last night Rosanna was allowed to stay up as a special treat.

  ‘You going off to the war?’ she asked.
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br />   ‘Afraid so,’ Josh said. ‘Mind?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll be all right, though. We’ll look after Our Lady. I can do the washin’ up.’

  In bed, Jocelyn clung to Josh. ‘I wish I were your wife,’ she whispered.

  ‘You’ve left it a bit late,’ Josh said.

  ‘No. I know what I’m doing. It’s just that I’m lost and I’m not sure where I’m heading.’

  Their love-making was fierce and passionate and she kissed him ardently.

  ‘If it all goes wrong, Josh,’ she asked, ‘you’ll forgive me, won’t you?’

  ‘What could go wrong? You know the house and my family and me.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ she said quietly. ‘I was thinking of me.’

  Six

  By the time Josh disembarked in Egypt, the situation in the Middle East had changed again. Hitler’s reaction to a British foothold on the Continent of Europe had been fierce. As his troops had attacked southwards, the British army in Greece, assembled from the already sparse formations in North Africa was flung back in retreat. Instead of a successful termination to the campaign in Libya, they were not only flung out of Greece, but Crete fell, too, while in the evacuations the Navy lost a battleship, three cruisers, thirteen destroyers and dozens of smaller ships, either sunk or damaged. It had all taken place while Josh and his group had been making their roundabout way in convoy to the Red Sea, and the depleted army in North Africa was now hanging on by the skin of its teeth, no longer facing Italians who created no dread in their hearts, but a new outfit called the Afrika Korps, led by Rommel, who had spearheaded the thrust through France.

  With Josh was a squad of replacements and four new officers – three mere boys called Packer, Neill and Greatorex, and an older man called Flood who’d transferred from the infantry. They travelled out of Cairo past ornate ugly villas, gardens and mango groves and up the long slope leading to the desert. For six hours they drove along a thin strip of tarmacadam, stopping only occasionally to stretch their legs. At Amiriya, they turned west towards Mersa Matruh.