For King and Country

by David Monnery

  ‘Probably because you think I’m too stupid to make the connection. Well, I’ve got news for you, Ian Tobin. I did!’ And with that she slammed the door so hard that it rattled on its hinges.

  He looked at it blankly, anger welling inside him. He wanted to crash his fist against it, kick it down. He wanted to hit something. Or someone.

  Instead he turned away, striding faster and faster down the still-wet street. A small voice inside him told him he was getting it all out of proportion, that she was upset and had reasons for making such a mistake, but it was drowned in the roar of his anger. She had found him guilty without any evidence, refused to believe his denial. There had been no trust, none at all, and no love. She was in the wrong, and that was all there was to it. He walked down to the bay and watched the sun go down behind the Gower, the same angry thoughts churning through his mind.

  In the public bar of the Leaning Bishop in Stoke Newington High Street Mickie McCaigh was half listening to Jimmy Cullen and Tel Rosenberg reminisce about the Test Match they’d seen at Lord’s just before D-Day. These days, whenever anyone talked about cricket it reminded him of the story a bomber pilot had told him in Italy about a game which had taken place in Essex a few years back. The man’s squadron had arranged to play the village near their airfield, but on the morning of the game four of the team had been shot down and killed. The game had gone on regardless, and the teller of the story had stood there at slip, one minute remembering a joke he had shared that morning with a man whose body was now floating in the North Sea, the next sharing in the jubilation of a brilliant catch at mid-off.

  ‘Another pint?’ his brother was asking him.

  ‘You need to ask?’ McCaigh said, handing him the empty and looking round at his fellow-customers. The pub was crowded, but there weren’t many others in uniform.

  ‘Lot of women in here tonight,’ Jimmy said, managing to sound both lustful and disapproving at the same time. He had been wounded at Dunkirk, and still walked with a pronounced limp.

  ‘Women should do their drinking at home, then?’ McCaigh encouraged him.

  ‘Decent women, anyway.’

  McCaigh smiled. ‘I get it – then we’d know that any woman in a pub was just asking for it?’

  ‘Most of them are,’ Tel said happily.

  ‘No more than you are.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re actually getting it,’ Jimmy said triumphantly, just as Patrick returned with their pints.

  ‘Getting what?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re too young to know,’ Tel told him, and turned to McCaigh. ‘Did I tell you that Arsenal are going to be sharing White Hart Lane again this season?’ he asked.

  ‘About six times. Look on the bright side – their fans’ll have further to travel.’

  ‘Hey, look at this pair that just came in,’ Jimmy said, and McCaigh had to admit he had a point. The two Wrens looked almost like twins with their bobbed blonde hair, amply filled tunics and gorgeous legs.

  ‘I think I’m seeing double,’ Tel murmured.

  ‘I wish I was fucking double,’ Jimmy said, and they all laughed. The scrum at the bar seemed to open up and engulf the two young women.

  ‘How’s Dad these days?’ McCaigh asked his brother.

  ‘Same as ever. When he’s not at work he’s down at the allotment. Except when that Middleton bloke is on the radio with his gardening tips.’ Patrick’s face broke into a grin. ‘Did you know Mum listens to the Brains Trust these days. Last Sunday lunchtime she started going on about life on Mars! Dad just looked at her like she was someone he’d never seen before.’

  McCaigh smiled, and was still wondering how to move the conversation in the direction he wanted when Patrick came to his rescue.

  ‘Dad still doesn’t get it about the war,’ he said. ‘That this one’s different to his, I mean.’

  A month ago McCaigh would probably have agreed with his father, and even after what Farnham had told them about the concentration camp he was far from certain, but this wasn’t the moment for a moral debate. ‘Yeah, well, the old man went through a lot,’ he said.

  Patrick had apparently been expecting an argument. ‘So you agree this one is different, that’s it’s worth fighting?’

  ‘Probably. But it’ll all be over before you get a chance to cover yourself in blood and shit.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Patrick said, sounding more like fourteen than sixteen.

  ‘Meaning?’

  Patrick leant over conspiratorially. ‘Billy Sangster’s getting me another birth certificate.’

  McCaigh kept his voice calm. ‘What’s he want in return?’

  ‘Nothing. Not now anyway. He just wants me to sign an IOU for when the war’s over, see?’

  ‘For how much?’

  ‘Only fifty quid.’

  ‘Fifty quid! And what happens if you get blown to pieces? Does he collect from Mum and Dad?’

  Patrick gave his brother a reproachful look. ‘I wouldn’t sign anything like that. If I get killed he tears up the IOU.’

  ‘Nice of him. And I suppose he also sells phoney birth certificates to men who’d like to be younger than they really are, so that they don’t get called up.’

  ‘So where’s the harm?’ Patrick said triumphantly. ‘All he’s doing is seeing that the people who really want to go are the ones who get there.’ He grinned happily at McCaigh. ‘We might end up on the same battlefield.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ McCaigh said sharply.

  ‘Why not?’ Patrick asked, looking crestfallen.

  ‘Because his lot don’t get their uniforms mucky on real battlefields,’ Jimmy interrupted maliciously. ‘They’re too busy swanning around the rear areas, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Oh right,’ Patrick agreed, his smile back again. ‘You remember that story Dad used to tell about us and the Jerries playing football in no man’s land at Christmas?’ he asked his brother. ‘Well, I reckon on getting a hat trick in this year’s game.’

  Farnham had been allowed only a few hours in London on his return from France at the end of May, and most of those had been spent in a bitter argument with his father. Refused permission to suspend her schooling, Eileen had apparently disappeared, and Randolph Farnham was convinced that his son had encouraged her to do so. Since she had never discussed her work with her parents – helping others was not one of their interests – they had no idea where to look for her, and Farnham’s refusal to reveal what he knew had turned his father’s face a dangerous shade of purple. Back at Fairford he had found a letter waiting for him, begging him not to give her away, and he had written back with the assurance that he wouldn’t.

  In London once more, he had no desire to advertise his presence to his parents, and had accordingly sacrificed the dubious comforts of home in favour of a cheap Bayswater hotel room. He slept well enough on the first night, and on the Saturday morning set out to visit Eileen at the Shelter. It was a bright summer day, and the sharpness of the light seemed to magnify the changes which had come over the capital. Shabbiness and decay seemed everywhere – like the mud-coloured buses the whole city needed a new coat of paint – but it was more than that. With the passage of the troops overseas the life seemed to have drained out of London, and the spirit of adventure which had marked the war’s early years seemed extinguished. ‘Just get it over with,’ the faces seemed to say.

  As the bus threaded its way through the City towards the East End Farnham could see increasing evidence of Hitler’s latest brainchild. V-1s, the Germans called them, the ‘V’ standing for Vergeltungswaffe, which Lord Haw-Haw had obligingly translated during one of his broadcasts from Berlin as ‘retaliation weapon’. Londoners called them buzz-bombs, robot bombs or doodlebugs, and Eileen’s last letter to her brother had been full of them. Seventy-three had apparently got through to London in the first mid-June attack, and over the next couple of weeks some parts of the capital had suffered as badly as they had during the Blitz. ‘We had twelve alerts yesterday,’ Eileen had written, ‘and e
ach time I either crouched on all fours under a table or sat in a convenient cupboard with my chin on my knees. You can hear the wretched thing coming, and if the engine’s still going as it passes overhead you know it’s missed you. The trouble is, that usually means it’s hit some other poor blighter. The people round here are getting really depressed by it all. I think they’ve just about had enough. It’s funny, they’ve moved all the AA guns to the south coast, presumably so they can shoot them down over open country, which makes a lot of sense, but some people are really angry about it. If they can’t actually hear the AA guns firing, they think the government’s stopped trying to protect them.’

  Farnham couldn’t help smiling at the thought of Eileen hiding under a table, but it wasn’t really funny. A fellow SAS officer had arrived on the scene soon after a V-1 landed outside Bush House in the Aldwych. The leaves on the trees had all been blown away, the bare branches adorned with pieces of human flesh.

  He changed buses at Mile End and soon the cranes of the India and Millwall Docks were looming above the lines of terraced houses. At the local police station he got precise directions, and after walking for about ten minutes found himself standing in front of an old Victorian building with a newly painted sign. The front doors were open, so he just walked into the empty hall, and through an open doorway he caught sight of Eileen kneeling on the floor with her back to him, talking to an old lady in a wheelchair.

  He just stood there watching for a moment, but the old lady looked up at him, and Eileen turned her head. ‘Robbie!’ she cried out happily, leaping to her feet. They hugged, and then she dragged him over to meet not only the old lady, whose name was Martha, but all the other elderly people in the room. ‘I’m glad you’re her brother,’ Martha said, ‘because she’s too young for a boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh no I’m not,’ Eileen told her. ‘But who needs one?’

  Martha liked that, and told Eileen to take her brother for a cup of tea. She was going to practise her chat-up lines on some of the old men.

  Instead of the kitchen, Eileen took Farnham up to see her room. It was about a tenth the size of the one she had at home in Knightsbridge, but he couldn’t remember that one ever looking as neat or cared for. And she looked so grown-up, he thought. It had only been a few months, but they’d been months that mattered. ‘So how it’s going?’ he asked, sitting down on the bed.

  She sat down beside him and filled him in on the latest developments. He recognized some of the names from her letters, but it didn’t seem important one way or the other – the details were all swept aside by the fire of her enthusiasm. She was convinced that after the war Shelters like this one would be just as useful; only then they would be helping all those people who got ‘wounded in the struggle to survive’. They couldn’t let the world return to the way it had been before the war. What would be the point of it all if people like their father inherited the peace?

  ‘So you’re planning to stay on here, and not finish at school?’ he asked.

  She grimaced. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I want to go to university and learn more about the world. And I want to travel everywhere when the war’s over – not just Europe but Asia and Africa and everywhere. And I want to keep working here.’

  He laughed.

  ‘And what about you?’ she said. ‘Come on, tell me the good news.’

  ‘What good news?’

  ‘Oh come on, Robbie. It was positively bubbling up between the lines in your letters, and I can see it in your face now. You’ve met someone, haven’t you?’

  He smiled sheepishly. ‘I think so. In France.’

  ‘What do you mean, you think so?’

  ‘All right. I’ve met someone.’

  ‘This is like dragging blood out of a stone. What’s she like?’

  ‘She’s…wonderful. She’s beautiful. Her name’s Madeleine, or at least I think it is.’

  ‘You think it is?’

  ‘That’s how she was introduced to me. It was only after I got back here that I realized it might not be her real name. Lots of people in the Resistance keep their real names to themselves, and with good reason.’

  ‘All right,’ Eileen conceded, ‘but what’s she like?’

  ‘She’s…this is hard. We only really spent two days together. She was my local escort on one trip, and she was nearly captured by the Germans, and we had to get away together. We had to walk about thirty miles through the mountains.’

  Eileen was enthralled. ‘And she just fell into your arms?’

  He grinned. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘A lot must have happened in those two days.’

  ‘I think it did.’

  She looked at him. ‘I bet you thought it would never happen,’ she said.

  ‘You’re right there, but…’ He sighed. ‘It only happened six weeks ago but already it’s beginning to feel like it happened in another life.’

  ‘The war can’t go on for ever.’

  ‘No, but she lives in a town with a railway junction which we’ll be bombing at regular intervals.’

  ‘But she doesn’t live in a signal box, does she?’

  ‘No, but I watched the RAF bomb that junction and half the bombs fell on the town.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll pray for her each night when I pray for you. I don’t suppose God will care if we’ve got her name wrong.’

  Neil Rafferty repositioned his sore backside in the cinema seat and tried to concentrate on the film. It was the latest Hitchcock, something he’d been looking forward to seeing since he’d read about it in an American magazine, but his heart just wasn’t in it.

  In the seat next to his Mary Slater was sitting transfixed by the story, and looking not a little like the on-screen heroine. Her brother Tommy – Rafferty’s oldest friend – was sitting on her other side, obviously torn between the film and Daphne, the rather stunning-looking brunette he had brought along for the evening. Tommy had known that Rafferty was seeing Beth that afternoon, and had obviously hoped to cheer him up with this evening out, or at least make sure he wasn’t drowning his sorrows in private.

  It wasn’t working, Rafferty thought. And he could always throw himself in the river after everyone else had gone home.

  He had dreaded seeing Beth again, but he couldn’t just abandon his son, so he had arrived at the specified time, and for nearly an hour had managed to keep up the pretence that he no longer loved or hated her. Beth had kept up a relentless flow of small talk, little David had looked at him as if he was an interesting stranger, and Brad had not been there, at least in body. Going upstairs to use the toilet, Rafferty had impulsively put his head round the corner of their old bedroom door, and though it had all looked so familiar there was a different smell in the air. He had just stood there for a moment, weighed down by the sadness of it all.

  Back downstairs he had tried to make contact with his son, but after a while he began to feel that all he was doing was sitting there asserting ownership. It would be different when the child began to talk, he told himself, but he didn’t really believe it, and Beth delivered the killing blow just as he was about to leave. ‘I think it’s only fair to tell you now,’ she had begun, ‘before you get attached to him, I mean…but after the war’s over, well, we’ll probably be moving to America.’

  He had just looked at her, astonished by the fact that such a possibility had never occurred to him.

  ‘It’s not as if you really know him,’ she said defensively.

  ‘He’s my son,’ Rafferty had said, feeling his eyes begin to water.

  There had been nothing else to say, and he had walked away feeling as lost as ever. Could he stop her taking their son to America? Did he want to? She was right in a way – he did hardly know the boy. But…

  In the adjoining seat Mary Slater jumped, and a little squeal escaped her lips. On the screen Uncle Charlie’s face was looking anything but avuncular, and Teresa Wright was wearing the expression of someone who�
��d just made a potentially fatal discovery. Ten minutes later she was living happily ever after, the houselights were on and they were threading their way back to the lobby.

  ‘I’m going to take Deirdre home,’ Tommy told Rafferty, once the girls had gone off to the Ladies.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘Well, we may pull off the road somewhere. You’ll look after Mary, yeah?’

  ‘Tommy!’

  ‘If I let her walk home alone in the blackout Mum and Dad’ll kill me.’

  Rafferty rolled his eyes at the ceiling. ‘OK.’

  ‘Thanks, mate. Just think of her as your little sister. Though she did have a crush on you years ago.’ He grinned. ‘And she’s a nice kid,’ he added.

  ‘I know she is.’ Rafferty had always liked her, but had certainly never thought of her as anything other than his friend’s little sister. Now, watching her walk back across the lobby with the more flamboyant Deirdre, he realized she had grown up. How old was she – seventeen? No, eighteen more like.

  ‘Do you want to go straight home?’ he asked after the others had disappeared, hoping she’d say yes. ‘Or would you like a drink or something?’ he added dutifully.

  ‘I don’t really want a drink,’ she said. ‘Could we just take a walk? Along the river perhaps?’

  ‘OK,’ he said noncommittally, and they started off down the blacked-out streets in the direction of the Cam. After walking for about a minute in silence she suddenly said how sorry she was to hear about what had happened between him and his wife. She made it sound like he had been bereaved, and that was so exactly the way he felt that he felt a huge surge of gratitude. But the only thing he could think of to say in return was ‘thank you’, and another minute of silence ensued.

  ‘Tommy says you and he may set up a car business after the war,’ she said, trying again.

  ‘Yeah, we’ve talked about it. There’ll be no new cars for a couple of years, so everyone will want their old ones fixed up, and a lot of them have just been gathering rust for the last five years. It won’t be hard to find work.’

  They crossed the bridge over the Cam, and as they turned to walk down the path she slipped an arm through one of his. ‘Tommy still looks up to you, you know,’ she said.