Chapter Twelve
Booby Trap
I
He was by no means infallible. Even after forty-two years he was still capable of grievous misjudgements of character but he would admit to these with a kind of wry humour when he had got over the shock. Such an error was the one he made in respect of Noah Williams, Coombe Bay longshoreman—in the winter of 1944–45.
For a long time now the authorities outside the Valley had accepted his leadership and had never hesitated to delegate responsibility to him, sometimes with a readiness that made protest. For all that he would have resented them going elsewhere for help and advice, for he thought of himself as the God-appointed custodian of far more acres than he owned.
Coombe Bay jetty came within one of these areas for, although he had scattered properties in the village, the bay at the mouth of the Sorrel was not under his jurisdiction, particularly since the military had moved in to set up a gun position there in the early autumn of 1940.
The gun was no longer there but the mock café that had housed it at the end of the jetty was still used as a Home Guard Command post. On this side of the estate and beyond it, where the sandbanks almost closed the channel at low tide, the military still had a network of weed-trailing beach obstacles that were sown in the summer of panic following Dunkirk.
Paul went down there two or three times a week, partly for the ride and partly to consort with one or other of his old cronies, Smut Potter, whose bakery was just along the quay, or Alf Willis, the wheelwright who had lost his sight at St Julien in 1917, but had refused to surrender the post of telephonist he had taken when the local L.D.V. unit was formed in the first spring of the war.
Paul was on the point of setting out for the village one gusty February afternoon when Claire called him back into the house to answer a call from the R. M. Camp on the Moor. It was Trubshaw, the adjutant, who gave him the gist of a message just received from the naval sub-depot at Whinmouth regarding a possible danger east of the landslip from floating mines. Neither the Navy nor the marines seemed much concerned.
‘They’re ours,’ Trubshaw said offhandedly, ‘and they’re about as useful as fishermen’s floats as far as coastal defence is concerned. Two of a dozen or so, laid outside the estuary early in the war. Judged on some of the stuff pressed into use about then they might even date from World War I. The Navy had orders to take them in months ago but you know Jack Ashore when it comes to paper work. They’ve probably been writing letters to one another about them since Dunkirk. Now they’ve recovered all but two that slipped their cables in last night’s gale.’
‘Old or not they can still do a hell of a lot of damage. Has their position been plotted since daylight?’
‘About an hour ago. They were drifting east towards the sandbanks at midday. Pretty well nudging one another I hear and moving out of our patch, thank God.’
‘Well, what the devil am I supposed to do about it?’ Paul demanded and Trubshaw said, soothingly, ‘Oh, nothing, old boy, nothing at all. Just warn the civvies down near the quay. The Navy are coping. They’re sending a cutter along. It’s probably there now.’
‘Well, thanks for telling me,’ Paul said, unable to keep the irony out of his voice. ‘If the village has gone up in smoke by the time I’ve driven over I’ll fill in a form and post it to the Admiralty.’
‘You do that, old man!’ Trubshaw said genially, ‘and I’ll back you up in triplicate.’
Paul was not over-concerned by the news for his knowledge of the strong currents off the Bluff told him the scour would probably catch the mines west of the harbour mouth and push them on to the Conger Rocks two miles out to sea. There, at low tide, they would either explode harmlessly, or half-submerge themselves on the eastern tip of the sandbars, and he assumed that a disposal unit was on board the cutter and equipped to defuse them on the spot.
His irritation stemmed from another source. He had not ridden for a week owing to an accumulation of work and had been looking forward to a trot down the river road and a canter home across the dunes before dusk. Now, he supposed, he would have to go by car, and turn the unclipped grey loose in the paddock. He unsaddled, gave the halter-end to Thirza, and climbed in the old station waggon that had replaced Claire’s Morris as the estate runabout. He not only begrudged the loss of exercise but the petrol. Notwithstanding his Home Guard and agricultural allowances, the authorities were very miserly with their coupons.
He was just passing Mill Cottage, about half-way to the coast, when the explosion echoed up the Valley and its blast rattled his windscreen so vigorously that he was amazed it withstood the shock. The Valley was well accustomed to sudden bangs by now but this was a particularly heavy one. Feeling certain it must be one of the mines he pushed the accelerator as far as it would go. Then, as he rounded the last curve in the road, he saw the pall of brickdust rise over the village and shouted, involuntarily, ‘Good God, it’s washed ashore!’ and swept into the steep High Street, aware of scurrying figures moving towards the harbour at the double.
Down outside The Raven, where the dust-cloud was thickest, all was confusion and outcry. He scrambled out of the car and ran across to the quay where he almost collided with Smut Potter, hatless and coatless in the thin rain that had begun to fall as Paul set out.
‘Tiz a bliddy gurt bomb o’ some sort!’ he shouted. ‘Us didden zee nothin’ go over, did you, Squire?’
‘It’s a mine,’ Paul said, ‘one of two loose from Whinmouth. I just got word from the camp,’ and before Smut could comment he pulled him out of the mainstream of village women and children and into the porch of The Raven. ‘We’ve got to get all these people inshore before the other one drifts in and we’ve got to do it before we check for casualties. Who have you got to help?’
Smut’s instincts as ex-poacher and ex-trench veteran showed at once. His blue eyes narrowed and his stocky body seemed to contract so that Paul saw him as he had first seen him, balanced on his toes ready to run.
‘Be the other one handy then?’ Smut demanded, and Paul said they had been close together when last sighted off the landslip.
‘Then you take a good look while I put the fear o’ God into these yer gawpers, Maister,’ he said and moved off, thrusting his way among the knots of sightseers and shouting, at the top of his voice. ‘Everyone inshore! Tiz a mine an’ there’s more of ’em out there!’ Reaching in the glove box for his binoculars, Paul saw him shoving his way along the quay and almost at once there was a general movement away from the water that began as a drift and ended as a mild stampede. At the same time the cob-dust began to settle and Paul, moving to the quay wall, was able to make some kind of assessment of the damage.
Fortunately, almost miraculously it seemed to him, it was negligible. The mine, reaching the harbour mouth on the turn of the tide, had drifted in on the swell and exploded against the wall of the jetty, blowing a gap ten yards wide. The mock café, at the end of the gimcrack structure, was now an island, and although its concrete walls seemed to have withstood the blast, its roof was stripped and its foundations had tilted so that it now looked like a grey box resting on a criss-cross of half-submerged piles. Apart from this, and a great many broken windows, there appeared to be no quayside damage and no casualties. People addressed him as he scanned the harbour but all he replied was, ‘Get off the beach. Get up behind the town,’ and trained his glasses on the grey waste of water between the shattered jetty and the nearest of the beach obstructions half a mile out to sea.
At first he could see very little. Rain continued to fall and visibility was bad owing to the mist that almost invariably accompanied damp weather at this time of year. Then, making a sweep of the sandbar, he saw the Whinmouth cutter and improbably it seemed to be anchored just outside the bar. He was trying to improve the focus when Noah Williams touched his elbow.
‘They’m stuck,’ he said, with an element of glee in his voice. ‘They gone aground in s
hallow water and they’ll have to bide until the tide’s run an hour.’
Paul lowered his glasses and stared into Noah’s broad, gap-tooth face. ‘This is no time to be funny, Noah,’ he said sharply, for Noah had a reputation as a practical joker, but the longshoreman replied plaintively, ‘I baint ’avin’ ’ee on, Squire. They’m stuck I tell ’ee. You got to be right smart to catch that harbour at turn o’ tide and they should ha’ waited on for a spell. It happened bevore and I told ’em but they bliddy vorriners alwus knows best.’
‘Take a closer look yourself,’ Paul said, passing his binoculars but confirmation came at once, a rocket soaring from the cutter and arching its way over the western slope of the Bluff. The bomb-disposal team, it would appear, were themselves appealing for help.
‘Well, for God’s sake …’ Paul began, but Noah, taking the glasses said, ‘’Tiz blowin’ up rough too. They’d better not hang around out there, the gurt vools!’ He might have been talking about a Nazi landing party.
Noah Williams, almost the last of the seafaring Williamses of Coombe Bay, was not a fisherman in the sense that his forbears had been. He still followed the trade of the sea but his status was that of a semi-amateur. He sold fish from his quayside cottage and in the summer he made some kind of a living conducting trips in the bay, but his intense dislike of salt-water was a local joke and had been ever since, as a boy, he had been almost drowned when caught in a summer squall off the landslip. His Uncle Tom and his brother Dan, who had been with him on that occasion, had been lost at Jutland but long before that Noah, basically a loafer, had all but renounced his ancestral calling. He still had a boat but he would never venture beyond the sandbars, and only then on a windless day. Even his summer traffic was carried by his only son, Jaffsie, who also did a little fishing.
Jaffsie, a young man with a slack mouth and a furtive manner, joined them now. For three centuries the Williamses had given their children biblical names and Jaffsie had been christened Japhet. Paul, who knew the personal history of everyone in the Valley, did not have much confidence in father or son.
Smut rejoined them, shoulders hunched against the rain. ‘I been the length o’ the quay and give orders to keep everyone upalong,’ he said. ‘Voysey’s takin’ over in the High Street and they’ll tak’ more heed o’ him than they will o’ me. Be that bliddy cutter at anchor?’
‘No, ’tiz aground,’ Noah crowed, ‘an’ will be until the tide lifts her.’
‘Have ’ee spotted anymore, Squire?’
‘No. You’ve got the keenest sight of any of us. You take a look, Smut.’
Smut took the glasses and began a methodical sweep of the little harbour, beginning at the foot of the Bluff and swinging the binoculars as far west as the landslip. Then he returned over the same field of vision and when he was two-thirds of the way round he stopped and remained rigid for nearly half a minute.
‘’Tiz there all right,’ he said at length, ‘low down, about dree hundred yards out. Take a bearing on what’s left o’ the jetty and you’ll zee it bobbing like a bliddy gurt vootball.’
For a long time Paul searched the area and at last picked up a small, dark object that he had previously assumed to be a piece of driftwood.
‘Are you sure that’s a mine?’
‘Certain sure and ’er’s goin’ to drift in and strike within yards o’ where t’other bugger went off. If you keep ’er in view you can zee the trailin’ end o’ the cable fallin’ away from the bracket.’
Paul tried again and saw that this was so. The mine was nine-tenths submerged but the trailing cable-end, bent in a wide loop, could be seen threshing mildly in the swirl of the tide a few yards to the right. From here the mine looked almost stationary. Paul said:
‘How is the tide, Noah?’
‘It turned less’n half an hour ago. Tiz slack out there now but it’ll speed up any minute, especially if the wind gets up.’
‘Do you agree with Smut about where the other mine is likely to strike?’
‘Arr I do,’ Noah said equably, ‘and a bliddy good job too. The Government’ll ’ave to build us a new jetty, as well as pay for all the windows stove in, so us looks like makin’ a praper old profit out of it, dorn us?’
Paul considered. Contact would have to be made with the stranded cutter and a bomb disposal expert brought ashore. The Naval sub-depot would have to be informed and everybody kept well clear of the beach. That, he supposed, was Constable Voysey’s job and, as Noah said, the tide would take care of the cutter in less than an hour. All that was really necessary then was to keep the mine in view and get ready to bolt for cover when it was close inshore. He and Smut could do that and Noah or Jaffsie could get word to the crew of the cutter. The sea was choppy but presented no danger to a dinghy inside the bar.
‘Go out and tell those chaps what’s happening, Noah,’ he said. ‘If necessary bring one of the experts ashore.’
Then, noting Noah’s crestfallen look, ‘There’s no danger, so long as you keep east of the jetty. Jaffsie will go along with you. You’ve got a skiff handy, haven’t you?’
‘Arr, I got a skiff, but they got one too. Why dorn ’em launch it an’ row ’emselves ashore?’
‘Because they zeen the mine explode and they baint spotted its mate yet,’ said Smut. ‘I daresay they’m zittin’ cosy till the tide lifts ’em but you do like Squire says They’m paid for their time and us idden.’
Still grumbling Noah and Jaffsie slouched off to the boat-house and Smut, watching them go, muttered, ‘Baint no more good than a cold hot-dinner. Dan, his brother, would ha’ been out there be now.’
‘I was just thinking the same,’ said Paul, with a grin and turned up his coat collar, tucking the glasses into his capacious pocket to keep them from misting. ‘Can you see that mine with your naked eye, Smut?’
‘I can now I knows where her’s tu.’
‘Then hang on here while I find Voysey and get him to tell Whinmouth what we’re about,’ and he turned to recross the quay, heading for the rope Voysey had already placed across the High Street as a barrier.
He was only a few yards up the hill when he saw Voysey arguing with a fat woman on the fringe of the crowd and as he advanced the woman broke away, beating aside the constable’s restraining hand and descending the slope at a trot. As she came closer he saw who it was, Pansy Willis, ‘Pansy-Potter-that-was’, wife of the blind Home Guard telephonist who was her third husband. Paul had known all Pansy’s husbands and had, in fact, been present at two of her weddings, the first to Walt Pascoe, killed by a Turkish sniper under the slopes of Achi Baba and later in the war to Dandy Timberlake, who had sired one of her children when she was still married to Walt. Despite promiscuity in and out of wedlock he had always regarded her as the best of the Potter girls. She had been a good wife to the ailing Dandy, a good mother to her children, and a real comfort to the near-helpless Willis in his middle-age. As she came slopping down the hill he noticed, even from a distance, that she was not her usual brash self and was clearly in some kind of distress for as she ran up to him she clawed at him for support, sobbing for breath and unable, for a moment, to utter more than a series of inarticulate sounds. He said, steadying her, ‘What is it, Pansy? What’s the matter?’ and Pansy, half reeling, gasped, ‘My Alf—I just heard—he’s out there in that ole fort. Do something for God’s sake, send someone out for him bevore ’er bleeds to death or drowns!’
For a moment Paul took it for granted that she was hysterical and talking nonsense, but when, writhing in his grasp, she pointed distractedly to the wrecked jetty, he realised that she might have information nobody had yet passed to him.
‘Alf is still in the post? He was on duty when it happened?’
‘They only just told me, the bliddy thickheads!’ she wailed. ‘I took un over there when I come off duty in the bar and when the big bang come, and I see what happened, Nell Tremlett tells me he co
me ashore half an hour zince. But ’er didden, ’er coulden ’ave, because ’er baint home, an’ where else could ’er be? I asked around an’ nobody zeen him, nobody! He’s out there, I know he is, and if he baint hurt he’ll stumble an’ vall among they old piles!’
Paul said, ‘If he’s there we’ll get him. You’re quite sure he was on duty when it happened?’
‘Zertain sure. He was working on his ole switchboard. Fred Olver was going for him when it went off but then that vool of a Nell Tremlett told us he’d come on back on his own. He could do that so long as he had the hand rail but ’er coulden have, or he’d be here, woulden ’er?’
It all seemed logical, the kind of mix-up that might easily occur in a few moments after a violent explosion. It was a case, Paul reflected grimly, of everybody assuming everyone else had done the obvious and as for Nell Tremlett, nobody would trust her identification for she had worn pebble glasses since she was a child. On balance it seemed that Pansy’s fears were justified but was there time to check? In a matter of twenty minutes or so the surviving mine would be alongside the jetty and projecting underwater beams, splintered by the first explosion, would probably touch it off before it reached the main structure. If that happened, given that Willis had survived the first blast, his chances of surviving a second in the weakened structure of the block-house were not impressive.
‘Let me think a minute, Pansy. There’s another mine out there and the Naval boat can’t reach it. Give me a minute to think.’
She stopped talking and gesticulating, forcing herself to wait. She had acknowledged him tribal chief of the Valley for more than forty years and her faith was just about equal to the strain. His mind began to conjure with priorities, balancing the risks and the time element involved, but he realised at once that he could not do such a complicated sum alone. He needed the help and advice of a man of action and it would have to be Smut, for he could not imagine a man of Noah Williams’ calibre undertaking the extremely delicate task of interposing between mine and jetty, and holding the boat steady while somebody searched the blockhouse and brought Willis out if he was alive.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 29