The Hour of The Donkey

by Anthony Price

  He reached down and dragged Wimpy to his feet.

  ‘— and together we’ll stand out like sore thumbs, too—‘ Wimpy had been rabbiting on all the time down below, but the effect of being raised up into the open closed his mouth at last.

  He looked around him jerkily, pivoting on his good leg while leaning against Bastable for support.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ he murmured, and sat down again in the mud.

  Bastable ducked down to join him. ‘What’s the matter? It’s all clear, damn it—?’

  ‘All clear?’ Wimpy grimaced. ‘So—we’re in the middle of bloody no-man’s-land then, old boy, that’s what. So we’ll probably get the chop from whoever arrives here first—“if it moves, shoot it”, that’ll be the order of the day,’ Wimpy’s voice trembled as he spoke.

  Bastable felt disappointed that Wimpy had nothing better to offer than a conclusion he had already reached himself, more or less. ‘So what do we do?’

  Wimpy grimaced again. ‘We get out of here—this bloody ditch is too handy, whoever comes this way’ll be certain to take cover in it. If we can hide somewhere less obvious we can wait and see how things turn out, maybe.’

  This time it was Bastable’s turn to grimace. ‘Hiding somewhere’ sounded like going back into the village, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. Also, waiting to see how things turned out struck an uneasy note of doubt in his mind from which he shied away instinctively.

  ‘There’s a house all by itself on this side, just down the road—‘ Wimpy indicated the direction with a nod. ‘—maybe we can find something to eat there, I’m famished—and something to wear, too—‘ He pushed at Bastable ‘—so get moving, Harry— go on, go on! Crawl, and I’ll follow— go on!’

  Bastable started crawling. Food was something he hadn’t thought about for hours, and even now, although his stomach hurt, he wasn’t noticeably hungry. But he was, he realized, quite desperately thirsty and his tongue filled his mouth like a sausage.

  To wear?

  Wimpy pushed him from behind. ‘Go on, damn you—go on!’

  To wear? What did Wimpy mean—to wear?

  Fifty yards down the ditch, level with the smouldering lorry, a dead German soldier lay waiting for them.

  Sweat had rolled down Bastable’s forehead into his eyes, until the way ahead had become a green-and-brown blur which he had wanted to clear, but which, with his hands slimy with mud and Wimpy pushing and grumbling at him from behind, he was unable to attend to so long as no obstacle barred his way.

  But then there was an obstacle, ard the obstacle was the dead German.

  Bastable knew the German was dead even before he had wiped all the sweat from his face, not so much because the German didn’t move as because nothing could lie there in the mud so uncomfortably—so ridiculously—contorted, regardless of where legs and arms ought to be, and still be alive, so he wasn’t frightened, only momentarily shocked, and the shock was momentary because it was overtaken first by revulsion at the thought of having to navigate across the body and then by irritation with the dead man for being where he was, quite unnecessarily occupying the ditch when he hadn’t any use for it.

  Wimpy had half overtaken him by the time all this had gone through his head.

  ‘Go on—get past him!’ The blighter sounded positively eager. He won’t bite you, poor bastard!’

  Passing the German was much more horrible than he had imagined: the body was unbearably soft and for one sickening instant it seemed to be actually trying to embrace him as he squeezed past it, pushing it sideways against the ditch so that an arm flopped over on to his back.

  Wimpy had no such qualms; no sooner had he clambered over the body than he turned back to it and started fiddling with its equipment.

  ‘Hold on a tick, Harry … we’ll have his water-bottle, he doesn’t need it now … Damn! It’s got a bullet through it!’ He dropped the water-bottle in disgust and began to pat the dead soldier’s pockets. ‘Well, then… we’ll see what else he’s got that’s worth having … ‘

  Bastable closed his eyes on the scene. He knew that it made sense—he himself had robbed the first dead man he had ever encountered, he remembered. But there was something too unpleasantly businesslike about the way Wimpy was setting about the job, as though it was the most natural action in the world.

  ‘Ah!’ Wimpy let out an exclamation of pleasure. ‘Just the ticket and two of them—and my favourite sort as well! Here, Harry—one for me and one for you, old boy!’

  Bastable opened his eyes, and found he was being offered a large bar of Nestle’s milk chocolate.

  Wimpy was already eating his, positively wolfing it. ‘Here—go on, take it, man—bags of energy and whatnot in it—take it!’

  Bastable took the chocolate bar. It was limp and broken, and distorted by heat—the body-warmth of the man who had carried it—and the very thought of eating it sickened him. Even the sight of Wimpy munching made his throat contract painfully.

  ‘I’ll eat it later,’ he mumbled thickly, stuffing the bar into the breast-pocket of his mud-encrusted battledress as he plunged down the shaded tunnel of the ditch again, unable to decide which of them daunted him more, the live Wimpy cramming chocolate fragments into his mouth with muddy fingers, or the dead German with his bloody hands and face.

  But now, at least, he was able to leave Wimpy behind, first because Wimpy was too busy finishing his revolting meal and then because the ditch became so deep that he didn’t have to crawl, but could squelch along upright, screened by the nettles, while Wimpy still laboured on hands and knees behind him. Indeed, he was just beginning to wonder, as the distance widened, if he hadn’t been perhaps a teeny bit too quick to discount the liability of that damaged ankle against the advantage of the undamaged wit that went with it… when the end of the ditch came in view.

  Or not the end, but here it vanished into a drain-pipe, and the drain-pipe carried the bridge which connected the road with the driveway of the house Wimpy had selected as their destination.

  On the bridge, canted up at a steep angle with its handles sticking in the air and its pathetic bundles mostly tipped out, was a crude hand-cart which looked as though it had been knocked together out of orange boxes and a pair of old bicycle wheels.

  Bastable raised himself cautiously, and saw that one of the bundles wasn’t a bundle at all: beside the hand-cart, stretched out in the dust, lay a little old Frenchwoman in a black coat with an imitation fur collar, black woollen stockings and brown carpet slippers.

  Bastable frowned at the carpet slippers, and the frown released a rivulet of sweat which ran down between his eyebrows into his right eye, the salt stinging it sharply. Carpet slippers really weren’t the sensible thing to wear. He had seen women in the poorer part of Eastbourne wearing carpet slippers just like these, down along Seaside.

  Now the sweat had got into his other eye. He blinked at it in an attempt to dislodge it.

  He wasn’t sure whether the old women down along Seaside wore slippers in the street because slippers were more comfortable, or simply because slippers were cheap: he’d just never thought about it before.

  Blinking didn’t shift the sweat. He raised his arm and wiped his face carefully with the inner part of his sleeve.

  Someone ought to have told the old Frenchwoman not to set out in carpet slippers. It was one thing just walking round the corner to the shops in them, but when it came to walking any distance they’d be worse than useless. She wouldn’t have got far in a silly damn pair of carpet slippers—

  ‘What’s that you said?’ Wimpy’s voice came from behind and below. ‘Carpet slippers, did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ said Bastable.

  ‘Yes, you did. You said …’ Wimpy trailed off doubtfully as he began to pull himself up beside Bastable, ‘ something about carpet slippers, it sounded—‘ He stopped abruptly.

  Bastable shook his head angrily and transferred his attention to the house. It was a typical French house,
ugly and foreign and quite out of proportion. In his observation, detached houses in France, other than the more substantial better-class ones, were either squat cabins, more like dilapidated stables with their shutters and half-doors, or fussy boxes with one storey too many and no taste in design. This was one of the boxes, only it was no longer fussy, but half-ruined by bomb-blast, every tile shaken loose and every window blown in. Even as he stared at it, a small avalanche of displaced tiles slithered and scraped down the roof, to fall with a crash into the garden below.

  ‘It must have been the bombs just now,’ said Wimpy softly. ‘The shock, most likely—she doesn’t look as though she’s got a mark on her, poor old thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Bastable automatically.

  Eat up your brown Windsor soup before it gets cold, now.

  ‘All right, then—let’s get inside, and see what we can find—help me out, old man, there’s a good chap—‘

  The inside of the house was like every other half-bombed house, full of broken things and fallen plaster which crunched underfoot.

  Brown Windsor soup.

  He leaned Wimpy against the nearest bit of open wall, between a barometer and a tall mahogany hat-stand which had a mirror in the centre of it. The mirror was blemished and pock-marked with age, where its silvering had peeled away, and he resisted the temptation to look at himself in it: whatever Wimpy looked like, he, with his blue jowl, must inevitably look worse, and there was no point in confirming that image.

  ‘Find the kitchen,’ commanded Wimpy, pointing down the hallway, ‘Don’t wait for me, man.’

  There were two doors opposite each other at the end of the hall, both ajar, and Bastable took the right hand one, putting his shoulder to it when it grated and stuck on debris beneath it.

  It wasn’t the kitchen, it was a parlour of some kind, and it was almost filled with an immense table covered with a biege moquette cloth on which a bowl of artificial fruit was the centre-piece. Both were covered with fallen plaster.

  In the corner of the room, by the window, an old man with white hair and a bushy white moustache sat staring at him from the depths of an armchair. A gold watch on a chain hung down from the centre button of his waist-coat. Like the moquette table-cloth and the bowl of artificial fruit, he was covered with dust and fallen plaster.

  Bastable pushed back out of the room so hurriedly that he ran into Wimpy in the passage.

  ‘W—!’ Wimpy staggered on one leg, reaching for the support of the wall. ‘I say—steady on, old boy!’ he protested.

  Bastable shouldered the second door open without bothering to try the door-handle.

  This was the kitchen.

  Pots and pans, a sink with a hand-pump for water, a great black range—there was still a fire smouldering in it.

  They had left it too long, they had left it too long and too late, the old couple had! They had been too old to take the road—too old and too foolish and too afraid—and too late…

  Or… this had been all they had, everything they had in the world, and they hadn’t wanted to leave it, couldn’t bring themselves to leave it— the barometer and the hat-stand and the artificial fruit and the pots and pans—

  And the British had gone, anyway.

  And the Germans had come — God! Maybe they could remember another time, the old couple—maybe they had been here that other time, when the British hadn’t gone, and the Germans hadn’t come—but this time the British had gone, and the Germans had come, and they had been safe after all, because not even the Germans would bother about an old couple in their ugly little house on the edge of the village.

  And then the British had come back and it had been too late.

  God damn and blast it all to hell!

  ‘The old boy’s dead too, poor old bugger,’ said Wimpy from the doorway behind him.

  Bastable turned towards him.

  ‘Is that a parcel of food on the table there?’ Wimpy pointed with one hand. In the other hand, with the gold chain dripping down between his fingers, was the old man’s watch. ‘And what’s in that jug?’

  ‘What are you doing with that watch?’

  ‘It’s still going—is that milk, by any chance?’

  ‘What-are-you-doing-with-that-watch?’

  ‘Don’t shout, Harry—the Germans took my wrist-watch—we need a watch … Is that milk?’ Wimpy frowned at him. ‘Don’t be a fool. Harry—he doesn’t need it. And we do.’

  The blood stopped drumming in Bastable’s head. He had been about to make a fool of himself by losing control, like the coward he was, while Wimpy was behaving like a soldier.

  There was an untidy parcel on the green-and-white chequered oil-cloth which covered the kitchen table, and a tall white jug beside it—all in the inevitable litter of plaster.

  He reached forward and picked up the jug. There was plaster also on the thick yellow cream, and a large black fly moving feebly in it, drowning slowly in the midst of plenty.

  He stuck a dirty finger into the cream and flicked the fly out of the jug, and lifted the jug to his lips.

  The milk under the cream and plaster was thin and sour, and marvellously, gloriously cool and refreshing as it ran down his sandpaper throat, and out of the corner of his mouth down his chin. He had never drunk anything so beautiful in his life, it was all the drinks he had ever drunk, on all the occasions when he had been thirsty, rolled into one blissful quenching.

  ‘Hold on, old boy—leave some for me then,’ said Wimpy reproachfully, reaching across the corner of the table.

  Bastable looked down into the jug, and found that he had drained two thirds of it already.

  ‘Thanks—‘ Wimpy hopped round and grabbed the jug from him ‘—thanks a lot—‘ he tipped the jug against his face, the watch-chain swinging from one hand in a spatter of overflowing milk.

  Well, fuck you too, old boy, thought Bastable unrepentantly, aware that he was still thirsty—and there was the pump at the sink, just waiting for him!

  For the first dozen strokes the thing only squeaked and wheezed as he banged the handle up and down with increasing fury. Then he felt the pressure draw and pull against the plunger, and in the next instant a powerful stream of water splashed into the sink beside him.

  He lowered his face into it, still pumping with one hand; this was better than the sour milk even—it went into his mouth and on to his cheeks and into his eyes and down his neck, slaking his thirst and washing away mud and sweat at the same time, making him alive and almost human again.

  He was aware that Wimpy was waiting his turn, but Wimpy could bloody-well wait his turn, and that was that—he managed to get his neck under the jet, and felt the delicious coldness spread across his scalp, soaking in and saturating, and driving everything out of his head with the relief of it, even the awareness—just for a moment, the awareness — that the whole bloody world was full of dead people—dead Fusiliers—dead officers and dead men—and dead Mendips and dead Tynesiders, and dead Germans, and old women dead in the dusty road and old men dead in the chairs—dead fucking everyone, except him and Wimpy, who ought to have been dead ten times over, but weren’t, but were alive—alive—

  In the end, he let Wimpy have his turn under the pump, starting him off and then fastening his hand on the pump-handle as he also spluttered and porpoised with relief under the deluge.

  He was hungry now—dripping wet, and with his uniform still caked with mud—but too hungry to care about that.

  He tore open the parcel on the table. There were the usual long French loaves—yesterday’s bread, or maybe last week’s by the crumbly hardness of it—and a smelly round cheese, and an even smellier sausage, full of garlic, which he hated, but which he bit into nevertheless.

  ‘Harry!’

  Wimpy grabbed him by the arm and swung him round just as the panic in the cry got through to him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Christ—‘ Water was dripping down Wimpy’s face, but words for once had failed him, he could only point throu
gh the broken window, down the length of the kitchen garden at the back of the house, towards the field beyond.

  Tanks—

  German tanks—

  Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!

  Panic again!

  ‘Wait for me—help me!’ cried Wimpy.

  Bastable was already at the door, and he had no intention of coming back, but Wimpy had no intention of being left behind either and he had somehow reached Bastable before Bastable was able to get through the door into the hallway, and he hung on like grim death once he’d made contact.

  They lurched down the passageway, bumping from one side to the other.

  ‘Up the stairs—up the stairs,’ cried Wimpy, pushing him sideways towards the newel-post.

  Bastable looked up the staircase. It was steep and it was narrow, and he was never going to be able to haul Wimpy up there, one step at a time .. . But he was also never going to get Wimpy out through the front door and down to the safety of the ditch in time, either: this was the moment to drop him and run—it had come at last—

  Clear through the open front door came the hideously familiar squeal-and-roar, terrifyingly loud.

  They were trapped. They had waited too long, just as the old couple—the old man and the old woman—had done before them. They had left it too long and too late, and now they were trapped—just as the old couple had been.

  ‘Up the stairs—‘ Wimpy pawed at him ‘—carry me!’

  Bastable bent down automatically at the word of com mand, and Wimpy followed it himself by flopping down across his shoulder in obvious preparation for a fireman’s lift.

  ‘Okay—oof!!’ The next part of the command was cut off as Bastable stood up and Wimpy’s head crashed against the barometer.

  Bastable found himself staggering round in a circle. It wasn’t that Wimpy was too heavy—he was actually much lighter than he looked … but there was a mouthful of sausage stuck in Bastable’s throat which he had forgotten about, but which now refused either to go down or come up while all his muscles were concentrating on holding his burden in position: he gagged and choked, and Wimpy’s head hit something else—either the newel-post or the hat-stand—or maybe it was Wimpy’s feet…