by Anthology
“Wounded?” he inquired, as the soldier still remained silent.
The soldier nodded, touching his bandage with an anguished expression. “Creased by a sniper; don’t remember anything after. Medevac, I suppose. Don’t even remember how I got here. Just need to get back to my unit.”
“You look as if you need convalescent leave, at the very least,” said Harold solicitously.
“No time. They’ll need me back as soon as I’m fit to fly out.”
“That’s the spirit!” Harold replied. He admired the young soldier's courage. It reminded him of other young men he had known; of when he had been a young man.
“I was a pilot myself. Mosquito—night fighter—back in ‘forty-three. You wouldn’t have thought it to see me struggling to find my way in the dark outside just now!”
The image of the Dornier came unbidden to Harold's mind. You were not supposed to enjoy killing. He recalled the triumph that had flooded through him as the machine in his sights caught fire and then exploded.
There, you swine! That’s for Margie!
“I’m hurt, not stupid,” the soldier replied, suddenly less friendly. “That was sixty years ago and you’re not a day over thirty.” He got up and went to the serving hatch for another cup of tea, limping badly.
Harold was astonished; he had always looked young for his age, but nowadays that meant looking seventy despite being nearly ninety.
There was no mirror, but he was able to make out his reflection in the glazing of one of the travel posters. It was his face, but not the face he was used to seeing of late in the shaving mirror. Gone were the wrinkles of old age. His hair was a youthful black and he sported once again the handlebar mustache that had marked him out as a fighter pilot, attracting all the girls back in those dark days.
To be honest, for Harold those days had not been so dark; the prospect of imminent death had projected him into vivid reality; every experience, every sight, every sound imprinted indelibly on his memory.
The smell of aviation spirit as you walked over to dispersal in the twilight, sheepskin lined flying boots padding softly on the newly-mowed grass. Listening to the first calls of the nightingale; trying not to think that the bird would sing again tomorrow night but you might not be around to hear it. The unique woody odor you always got inside a Mosquito; the shuddering of the whole aircraft as the nose cannon blasted shells in the direction of that half-seen Dornier, twisting and weaving as it attempted to escape.
And of course Margie, the auburn haired, freckled barmaid he'd met in the village pub, romanced and married in a whirlwind, always living in the present, never making plans for the future because a fighter pilot never did.
It should have been me. I should have died that night, not her.
Instead he'd been airborne, searching in the darkness for a hit-and-run Messerschmitt fighter-bomber that mistakenly dropped its bomb on her pub.
With a start Harold dragged himself back from the past. What he should be asking was how on earth his appearance had been rejuvenated.
Makes no sense.
He gently pinched the skin of his cheek; he was not asleep.
What had happened before he found himself walking along that dark road? For the life of him he could not recall leaving home. In fact the last few days were a bit of a blur.
He had been up to London the previous week. The final reunion dinner of the old squadron. Obvious to them all it made no sense to arrange another.
Working in the rose garden; very hot in the sun. Felt tired; went to get a lemonade; sat in the conservatory. Emily came round from next door and fussed over him. After that—a few incoherent bits and pieces, people coming and going, light and darkness, soup in someone’s hands, fed to him in bed.
And now? Had he died, was that it? Hardly surprising at his age. Yet Harold was not a believer, not since Margie. He'd never expected any conscious experience to follow death. Was it even remotely credible that Half Way Halt was a gateway to some sort of afterlife?
He needed more evidence. Neither he nor the soldier could remember how they got there; two amnesiacs in one waiting room might be a coincidence, three would be strong circumstantial evidence of the supernatural.
He went over and sat down opposite the man in oilskins, speaking softly so as not to upset the young woman and her child.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he began, “but do you know what you’re doing here?”
“Waitin’ for a train, o’ course.” The fisherman, by his voice Aberdonian, gave him a funny look. “This bein’ a railway waitin’ room, Ah’d no’ be waitin’ for a bus, would I?”
“No, you don’t understand, I mean do you know why you’re waiting for a train?”
“Because it hasnae come yet!” exclaimed the fisherman in irritation. “What’s yer game, Jimmy? Are ye anither ane o’ they pen-pushers wi’ nothin’ better tae dae than ask stupit questions?”
“Not at all,” said Harold hastily. “I was just hoping you might be able to help me sort out what’s happening here.”
“All ah ken is we was in collision somewhere off the Dogger Bank. Doon she went in two minutes. Next thing ah’m washed up on the beach—heard a train whistle—made ma way here.”
The man’s clothes were perfectly dry. There was no beach within eighty miles of Harold's home.
“You were fortunate to survive,” he said. “I didn’t hear of any sinking. I'd have remembered, you see; I was in marine insurance for forty years after the second war.”
“Whit d’ye mean?” demanded the fisherman. “Och, mon, yon’ Hitler’s nobbut eight years deed! You’re oot o’ some loony bin, are ye no’? Awa’ wi’ ye an’ leave a man in peace the noo!”
Harold stood up. Eight years after the war. 1953. The trawler “Katarina” out of Stonehaven. The sinking resulted in multiple claims against his company and as a young loss adjuster trying to impress he worked hard to cut back the size of the awards, establishing contributory negligence on the part of the trawler’s owners. The small firm went out of business with the loss of a good many livelihoods. Harold had made suffering worse than it need have been. And why? Because that was his job.
His theory seemed confirmed. He must be dead. And just when he should at long last have been consigned to welcome oblivion there was something more. Harold was not sure how to bear it.
"Guten Abend, Herr Flugleutnant. I was told to wait here for you."
Harold turned to see the man he had taken for a biker. "You were? That's strange, I didn't know I was coming here myself. I'm sorry, have we met?"
"No."
"And you're German?"
"Yes."
"And they told you to wait for me?"
"Yes."
"You're not helping me, are you Herr…?"
Silently, the man looked Harold straight in the eye with the sort of stubborn defiance that can sometimes mask insecurity. From close up he looked not much more than a boy; maybe nineteen or twenty.
"Well are you going to tell me what this is all about? I assume the people who told you to wait for me also told you why?"
"Yes."
"Do you expect me to guess or are you going to save us both some time and tell me?"
"You flew a pathfinder aircraft to Hamburg in July 1943?"
"Ah. Yes, I did. My squadron marked the target for the big raid."
"You dropped incendiaries along with your flares?"
"Of course. The flares wouldn't have burned for long enough."
"My parents lived in Hamburg. Close to the docks. Your bombs hit their house. They were both killed."
"I see." Harold shook his head sadly. "I'm very sorry to hear that. I know it's no consolation, but we weren't aiming for civilian casualties. Bombing was not accurate in those days. I only got so close to the docks because I came in very low; wouldn't have been doing my job if I'd put the markers into the water, you see. Had to hit something solid. I tried to put them on a big freighter. I was just traveling too fast to
be accurate."
"Too fast?"
"Your flak gunners were shooting at me."
"So an accident? You are trying to say my parents died in an accident?"
"Not exactly. They were casualties of war. But you must know the house would have been destroyed a few minutes later anyway. The heavies behind us were at 10,000 feet. They flattened everything around the markers."
"The firestorm."
"Look," Harold protested, "it was war. A war we didn't start. I'm sorry about your parents. But if you're looking for someone to blame, you need to look closer to home, my friend. We didn't invade Poland."
"You are sorry, but you do not apologize?"
"That's correct."
"And the pilot who killed your wife? You would accept from him the same reasoning?"
Harold's eyes narrowed. He looked intently at the young German. The same defiant look, but this time something else behind the eyes.
Only long after the war had it occurred to Harold that the Dornier he'd shot down had been crewed by men like himself rather than the Nazi caricatures that populated war films; that the people he'd killed with his bombs were not all fighting men. They were people, his anonymous victims in the war, with their own lives, families, hopes and dreams. And the fishermen whose livelihoods he'd destroyed in peacetime were ordinary people too.
I was only obeying orders. I was just doing my job.
He nodded. The same excuse the Nazis themselves had used at Nuremberg. He understood. The down train must go to a place where the guilty would at long last be held to account.
"The 109E was a terrible bomber," he said to the young man. "With all that weight slung under its belly it must have flown like a brick. A sitting duck for any night fighter. And you'd lost so many pilots. I can understand a nervous young fighter pilot with no experience being only too eager to get rid of that bomb."
"And so?"
"Yes," Harold sighed. "I would accept from him the same reasoning."
"Then it is good," the young man said with relief. "We can both forgive."
Harold extended his hand and the young man took it.
"We harmed each other, but without malice," Harold said. "We can forgive each other. Whether others will forgive us remains to be seen."
The defiance had gone from the young man's eyes, but he still held himself ramrod straight as he turned back towards his seat.
Harold thought he now understood why the young German pilot was here; perhaps also the soldier. But why should the fisherman be taking the down train? And even if he too was condemned for sins of which Harold was ignorant, that still left the young mother and her child.
He was filled with righteous indignation. He would accept his own punishment like a man, but he would not accept the punishment of a child. He turned towards the ticket desk, meaning to remonstrate with the clerk. The railwayman had disappeared. The kitchen hatch had also quietly shut; there was no representative of officialdom to whom he could appeal.
Very well. He had fought for a cause before, he could fight again. These innocents would board the down train over his dead body. He smiled grimly; the irony was not lost upon him. But, for the moment at least, he was a dead man walking.
He cast a glance up at the clock. It was one minute to midnight. A subtle clunk from within the mechanism indicated it was about to strike. Even within the confines of the waiting room, he could hear a singing sound resonating along the tracks and the distant huffing of a steam exhaust heralding the approach of a train. He turned urgently towards the young mother.
“You mustn’t get on the down train!” he exclaimed. “There's an innocent child to protect. I’ll help you!”
“Well! And hello yourself, Harold! What sort of a greeting is that after all this time?”
The young woman smiled and stood up, gathering the sleepy child in her arms. Her auburn hair shone even in the weak light from the electric bulbs; there were the freckles he knew so well, sprinkled liberally over her snub nose; her eyes were laughing.
“It’s all right. They wouldn’t let you recognize me until you passed the test, and you've passed it. I knew you would. That's why I insisted on being here when you came."
"Margie?" Harold stammered.
"Yes, Harold, it's me. And say hello to your son. You didn’t know I was pregnant when the bomb fell, did you? We both waited for you. Now we can all board the train together.”
“I can’t believe it…” Then he recollected himself. “But it will be the down train…I…I haven’t…I mean, I didn’t…”
“No one ever does, Harold,” smiled Margie. “That’s the reason for the test.”
The singing of the lines grew to a rumble, then a rushing, hissing roar. The platform lights brightened suddenly, bathing the whole scene in an electric glow as a great black steam locomotive thundered into the station drawing four liveried carriages behind it, seeming to shake the very fabric of the building in which they stood.
The platform door of the waiting room opened and the ticket clerk came in.
“Up train!” he announced. “All aboard, please. Up train!”
Harold's eyes filled with tears.
The Man on the Church Street Omnibus(Short story)
by Philip Brian Hall
Originally published in The Sockdolager, Spring 2015
From Gloucester Road to Kensington Church Street is two stops of the dark-green-liveried public omnibus, operated by the Kensington and Hammersmith Company for the benefit of local inhabitants and the great profit of its shareholders. Tastefully appointed and having a coat of arms proudly displayed on its side, the smart four-horse vehicle daily proceeds about its duty of transporting the bankers and businessmen of our great capital’s richest borough to and from London Bridge, by way of Knightsbridge, Piccadilly, Charing Cross, The Strand and The Bank of England.
The law commands the prominent display beside the omnibus doorway of a statement of its fares. These begin at twopence for a short journey and reach the extraordinary sum of sixpence, one sixth of a workman’s weekly wage, for the whole trip. Long familiarity with this route has however taught us that the conductors are all quite incapable of noticing that any person has boarded their equipage other than at the terminus, so that the unwary are regularly charged the full fare if they are unwilling to argue their case in public and with some vigor.
On a certain day in the late autumn of the year 1863, a man in a military greatcoat, with a uniform cap pulled down to his eyebrows, boarded the omnibus at Gloucester Road as it made its way back from The City towards Hammersmith. Nothing could be seen of the man’s face, beyond a large black mustache and a thin mouth pursed in what some might call a hunted expression. He was tall, but proceeded with a remarkably light step to a vacant seat in the rear of the vehicle. Once there, he sat awkwardly, turning his head from side to side as though keeping furtive lookout for someone or some thing.
During the stop at Gloucester Road and for some minutes thereafter, our conductor of the day had been engaged in a protracted argument with a passenger seated upon the top deck of the vehicle, who was smoking an expensive cigar and inveighing to all and sundry against the enfranchisement of potwallopers. This discussion was still in progress as the omnibus entered Kensington High Street and drew up at the foot of the Church Street hill, where the gentleman of military appearance got up to disembark.
With the innate sixth sense of all his kind for a fare about to escape, the conductor suddenly broke off his vehement discourse and rushed down the stairs, clamping a hand upon the gentleman’s shoulder as he made to step down into the road.
“‘Ere you,” he accosted the man, in high dudgeon. “There’s no gettin’ horf wivart payin’ yer fare. That’ll be sixpence, please!”
“Mistake zere is, I sink,” replied the gentleman. He spoke English slowly and with a pronounced Germanic accent. “At Glowchester Road only, I am boarding.”
“Nar then, none o’ that!” insisted the conductor. “Sixpence, I sez and
sixpence I wants!”
“Wery vell, since I haf little time,” the military gentleman conceded unhappily and reached into the deep pocket of his greatcoat, whence he produced a silver coin and handed it to the conductor before turning back to the door of the omnibus.
Barely had the military gentleman alighted and gone two steps than the conductor leaped off the platform of the omnibus and made after him, again seizing him by the shoulder.
“Oy! Oh no you don’t!” the conductor exclaimed. “This ‘ere ain’t a proper sixpence. It’s some kind o’ foreign rubbish!”
“I regret no sixpences coins I haf,” the man replied. “This a silver penny of King Offa is; more than one thousand years old. Value today perhaps five pounds.” He then made as if to be on his way.
The conductor was not so easily mollified. “So you say, matey; so you say. All I knows is what I sees ‘ere. One penny, eh? So I wants five more of ‘em, don’ I? Sixpence the fare is.”
“So much value for two stops you wish?” exclaimed the man, astounded. “Wery vell, go now I must, but another time another omnibus to take I vill remember.” And reaching again into his pocket the man extracted a further five Offa pennies and handed them to the conductor.
Giving the military gentleman a surly look, the conductor put one of the silver coins between his teeth and bit it, then grunted with satisfaction and returned to his omnibus. “And remember,” he called over his shoulder, “Sixpence, the fare is. Hallways sixpence!”
Despite being very little imbued with education, our conductor was not a stupid man. It was one thing to demand six individual penny pieces of the military gentleman; it was quite another to pass up the profit that he might earn from the transaction. Five pounds each, the man had said. Six times five pounds was thirty pounds; more than the conductor could earn in a year!
By rights his employers were entitled to the correct fare of twopence. In the circumstances he decided to be both scrupulously honest and generous. He took a thruppenny piece from his pocket and added it to the quantity of coins in his cash bag. Then he placed the Offa pennies in the inside pocket of his own coat.