Rose climbed nimbly in front of him. He put his hands about her waist and she patted them. ‘I bet this is the first time you cuddled the bum of a land-girl,’ she said.
She gave a short tug at the reins and Pomerse snorted and began to nod down the hill towards Dover. They could see searchlights out in the Channel. ‘It won’t be long,’ said the girl. Ardley thought she was talking to the horse.
On the outskirts of the town they were halted by two air-raid wardens in a small car. ‘Off to Ascot?’ asked one.
‘Going to Cliff Camp,’ Ardley called down to them.
‘We’ll take you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It might be better,’ said Rose. ‘We’ll be getting stopped all the time.’
Painfully Ardley slipped from the back of the horse. Rose smiled dimly down to him. While the wardens watched she leaned over. He reached up and with difficulty they kissed and said goodnight.
One of the wardens said: ‘Give the ’orse one for me.’
In those late summer days in Dover it seemed that the war almost went by the clock. Early mornings were placid, often rosy, with the sun colouring the sea, the green land and the white cliffs. People got out of bed and made themselves ready for work; those children who had not been evacuated, or who had returned to the town, played in the caves.
Some of the Dover caves had been excavated in previous centuries. There were few cellars in the town because the sea crept in but the chalk was readily worked and they had been used, originally by smugglers, then as warehouses and stores. At the start of 1940 one cave was used for growing mushrooms and when it was taken over to shelter civilians the crop was quickly harvested by the new denizens. On pleasant evenings the aroma of fried mushrooms, eggs and chips pervaded the cave entrances.
There were ten caves, the longest at Priory Hill which could accommodate 1,400 people. Athol Terrace could take 725, Barwick’s Cave 700 and Travaion Street 686. The smallest was Launceston Place where 75 people could shelter. The cave in London Road was outside the Regent Cinema and 200 patrons had been known to scurry from a war drama and out into the open air and the real thing. When the film was riveting they often stayed in their seats.
Inside the caves ran ranks of wooden bunks, chemical lavatories and primitive washrooms. Some families camped there even when there was no emergency, men, women and children sitting outside enjoying the summer air, in the evening, before blackout, cooking on campfires and formed in convivial circles on wooden chairs, deck-chairs and old armchairs and sofas. They drank beer and lemonade and sang songs as the daylight diminished. It was like a gypsy life.
Many of the Dover children ran wild like feral creatures. For more than a year the schools were closed and there was anxiety that an underground generation was evolving. In the town some shops and offices, standing shakily among the debris and gaps where others had been destroyed, carried on an uncertain business. The barber’s door was among the first to open of a morning and his parrot in a coloured cage was placed outside to enjoy the safe early sun and the attentions of passers-by. The bird, which had once cursed the Kaiser of the First World War, now squawked insults about Hitler. Milkmen did their plodding rounds, their horses circumnavigating half-filled bomb craters, and delivering pint and half-pint bottles to the doorsteps. Sometimes there were only doorsteps; the houses were gone and wives came from shelters to collect their milk. Resourceful postmen took trouble trying to locate people. The blast-resistant iron pillar boxes from which they collected letters were sometimes the only objects remaining upright in the street. There remained a calm air about the town, although its inhabitants went about their lives gingerly.
Above Dover floated the soft barrage balloons, silver and smooth. Small children would try to reach for them. German fighter planes shot them down for fun. There were air attacks almost every day; sometimes enemy aircraft came in relays and dropped their bombs seemingly at random. One thousand houses and other buildings were destroyed, more than two hundred civilians lost their lives and seven hundred and fifty were injured. There was a lingering acrid smell about the streets.
The cliff-top caves of Dover were occupied by soldiers and guns, some of the guns so old they could have been in museums. Soldiers emerged into the morning to echoes of bugles from all over the town. Seagulls screeched in chorus. Ardley rolled aching from his blankets. ‘What was she like then?’ asked Sproston sitting on the edge of the next iron bed.
‘Lovely,’ said Ardley. ‘And lovely with it.’
‘Liked the woolly jumper,’ said Sproston. ‘Must have been like cuddling your mum.’
Ardley groaned as he went towards the latrines. Jenkins was trying to read aloud as he laced his boots. ‘What’s this word, Ard?’ he asked.
Ardley said: ‘Spell it, will you. I can’t walk.’
The Welshman spelled it. It was Tugwell who answered: ‘Vagina.’ He sighed. ‘Ugh, first thing in the bloody morning.’
‘What’s it mean? Vagina?’ asked Jenkins.
‘Cunt,’ said Sproston.
‘And you,’ returned Jenkins in a hurt way. ‘I’m only trying to learn.’
They were in the lorry park half an hour later, twenty men drawn up in three ranks. Ardley still could scarcely move. Sergeant Dunphy studied him, first from the front and then sideways. ‘Lance-Corporal Ardley, I said attention. You remember what attention is? Feet and legs together.’
‘I know, sergeant,’ answered Ardley miserably. ‘I came back on a horse last night. I can’t get my legs together.’
Dunphy rarely said anything in a hurry. ‘That goes for a lot of soldiers. If you can’t march you could be on a charge. Self-inflicted wound.’
‘I’ll march, sergeant, I’ll try.’
Dunphy started the squad down the hill. At first every step caused Ardley’s long face to crease with pain, but as they marched he moved more easily. As the tallest man he was in the centre of the squad.
As they tramped up Seaview Crescent three boys in short trousers began capering alongside: ‘Left right, left right, left right.’
‘Piss off,’ said Ardley fiercely.
Harold, Spots and Boot continued. A woman in a flowered apron came from a house and called the boys. ‘I’m going to be out until tea-time,’ she said to Harold. ‘There’s some sandwiches. And some cherry pop. Don’t drink it as soon as I’ve turned my back.’
She returned to the house. The soldiers had marched on up to the main road. ‘Where’s she going all day?’ asked Boot.
‘Maidstone prison. To see my old man.’ Half the town knew by now.
‘I wouldn’t like to be stuck in a cell,’ said Spots. ‘Not in the bombing.’
‘It’s not very safe,’ agreed Harold.
Boot said: ‘They ought to let the crooks out.’
‘They wouldn’t come back,’ said Spots.
Doris Barker appeared from the house again. ‘I’ve got to get the bus,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘We’re goin’ down the caves, Mum,’ said Harold. ‘We’ll take the grub with us.’
She sighed. ‘Don’t get into mischief.’
Harold regarded her steadily. ‘We’ll be patrolling,’ he said.
The sunshine of that summer was almost mocking. Cloudless skies, warm afternoons and dusky evenings formed the backdrop to the battle in the air: fighters fighting, guns firing, smoke and explosions and always, somewhere, death.
But there were interludes when suddenly, and with contrary innocence, summer would spread itself across the southern coast and countryside. Gladly people came from close rooms, sat on kitchen chairs in small gardens, adjacent to air-raid shelters, and congratulated each other on the lovely weather.
Dover children roamed in brown-faced gangs across the stubbled fields, running through the town’s streets, playing hiding games in caves and shelters, and clambering through the new landscape of destroyed buildings.
Harold, Spots and Boot had pledged to stick together and not to join oth
er gangs and alliances. The vow was sealed in blood, each having pricked his thumb with a pin. They had secret codes and passwords and referred to the metal-skinned Anderson air-raid shelter in Harold’s garden as ‘headquarters’. There, sprawled on the bunks, they made plans to blunt the first invasion by the Germans. ‘We are a small but deadly force,’ said Harold. On fine nights, with the permission of their mothers, they often camped out in the shelter and were early on patrol the next day.
Some children helped with the harvest, alongside bronzed soldiers pleased to be released from tedious defensive positions. At first the three boys had volunteered with enthusiasm but they found the work demanding and dusty, and instead spent their time with the farm dogs, chasing rats and rabbits. They drank rough cider with the men who swung scythes or drove steam harvesters. They fell asleep under hedgerows.
Guards kept them away from the positions of the big guns, and the anti-aircraft batteries, but they were tolerated on the barrage-balloon sites where each of them had had a turn sitting beside a winchman in his cage as he paid out the cable and the balloon rose into the sky.
But it seemed to the eager trio, armed with their bows and arrows and their secret catapults and ball-bearing ammunition, that the enemy would never pluck up the courage to face them. Each had acquired a semblance of a uniform. Harold wore a discarded steel helmet with a hole in its bowl which he boasted had been made by a bullet. Spots had a threadbare beret and Boot, with a touch of chagrin, wore a cap last used by a conductor of the East Kent Bus Company. Sprawled on their stomachs one afternoon on a bank of coastal dandelions, they were practising with the catapults, using a Peak Frean biscuit tin as a target. Sometimes they hit it and enjoyed the metallic crack as the ball-bearing struck.
Perhaps a bird or a rabbit, and occasionally a fox, would present itself as a target; the first of the trio who spotted it would shout: ‘Action stations!’ and they would fan out, and open fire at Harold’s order. The drill was necessary: once Boot had fired a ball-bearing which struck Harold’s steel helmet just above the hole.
The afternoon seemed to have become even hotter when the languidly flying pigeon appeared. There were German aircraft out of range in the distance. ‘Action stations!’ shouted Harold. He stood, his skinny knees projecting from his grubby khaki shorts, trying to right his steel helmet. It slipped over his eyes but the pigeon remained hovering. Harold and Spots both fired their catapults but Boot, for once, took steadier aim. The pigeon was invitingly poised and the ball-bearing hit it full in the chest. There was a small explosion of feathers, the bird gave an affronted jump and then fell heavily. It bounced as it hit the stubble. The boys were dumbfounded. Then each shouted: ‘I got him!’
‘I got him,’ insisted Boot firmly. He was not accustomed to triumph. ‘I shot last.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Harold irritably. ‘But it was a unit action.’
They were already running towards the grey tuft, the breeze ruffling it. It lay with its wings spread, eyes tightly closed, the wound clearly outlined by a red stain on the breast. The trio stood around it.
‘What a shot,’ said Boot in a subdued voice.
Then Harold pointed. ‘It’s got a ring on its leg.’ He and Spots looked accusingly at Boot. ‘It’s a carrier pigeon.’
Looking as if he were going to cry, Boot pointed out: ‘It was a unit action.’
Harold picked up the dead pigeon. ‘Let’s get out of sight,’ he said. They ran to the hedge. Harold leaned over the bird and managed to unclip the message ring. He took out a flimsy oblong of paper. ‘It’s in code,’ he said hoarsely. He looked at the others bleakly. ‘Probably Top Secret.’
They waited until dusk. It had begun to rain and the town was subdued. The Germans rarely flew in the rain but Harold knew his mother would become anxious and start looking for him. She did not like him getting wet.
Going down the hill in single file, the way they always moved, they skirted the main streets and eventually established an observation position in the soaked and overgrown garden of a damaged house opposite Dover police station. Boot had the dead pigeon and its message. The street was damp and vacant. The police station windows were blacked out.
Harold looked up and down the road once more, then gave a sharp order to Boot: ‘Now!’
The Polish boy straightened up and, looking both ways also, made a dash across to the police station where he dropped the dead carrier pigeon on the pavement in front of the main door, then scuttled back to the wet and weedy garden. The three boys crouched and watched in the diminishing light. Then Spots whispered: ‘Coppers,’ and they dropped even lower as two policemen, talking like mates, trod down the street. They almost fell over the pigeon. The boys tensed.
‘Look at that, Oswald,’ said one of the constables.
‘A pigeon,’ deduced Oswald. ‘Probably the bugger that’s been eating my beans.’ He gave it a push with his foot and, with its coded message, it slid into the gutter. His colleague patted him on the back as if he had achieved some feat and they tramped into the police station.
‘They’d fall over a pig,’ said Harold sourly.
‘Look,’ said Spots. ‘A cat.’
It was a large, prowling cat and it saw the pigeon at once. Spots drew his catapult but Harold restrained him with his arm. ‘No more bloodshed.’
Helplessly the trio watched. The cat sniffed at the pigeon in the gutter, cuffed it, then picked it up in its teeth and dragged it, with no great difficulty, along the street until it pulled it through a hole in the hedge.
‘We won’t get it back now,’ said Boot.
‘Or the message,’ said Spots.
‘This,’ muttered Harold, ‘could cost us the war.’
The soldiers strode out of town, past the damaged houses, shops and churches: windows and doors were nailed up, roofs yawned, and there were open spaces where walls had once been. It was August.
On the open ground above the cliffs at the western end of the town the squad was digging gun emplacements. ‘Can’t see any sense in digging bloody ’oles,’ grumbled Jenkins, ‘if no bugger knows how big the guns are going to be.’ He had a new confidence now that he could read. He read aloud every word he could see: posters, notices, things in shop windows, only regretting that, because of the war situation, all road signposts had been removed.
Sergeant Dunphy called the sweating men to stop. ‘Now isn’t this a beautiful day to be doing a bit of delving by the sea,’ he said. ‘Like when you were little boys.’
To the east, over the lip of the green rise, Dover curled like a comma around its harbour, its cherubic barrage balloons suspended above. From that distance the destruction in the streets could scarcely be detected for they were still threaded with morning mist. In the port the many ships lay orderly against the jetties and against each other. Even the block-ship – the Sepoy – scuttled to protect one side of the harbour entrance looked a comfortable part of the scenery as the morning sea broke unhurriedly around it.
The soldiers had stripped to their waists and gulls swooped for worms in the newly-turned earth. Sproston unearthed a big worm and tossed it up for a grateful gull to gobble. ‘After the war,’ he said, ‘I might go in for animal training.’
They dug on stoically for an hour. Then they heard a breathless engine climbing the hill and leaned on their spades and cheered as a shuddering canteen van appeared over the crest. ‘Not yet, not yet,’ Dunphy warned his men. ‘Wait till I give the order. I’m first.’
The van stuttered to a halt where the road became grass. It disgorged three jolly women and a fat driver who made the soldiers laugh because he wore a steel helmet sitting like a pimple on his head. The women briskly donned aprons while the man puffed as he pushed up the shutter at the side of the vehicle.
‘Dig! Keep digging!’ ordered the sergeant. ‘Make more holes. Without the holes there’ll be no guns. Hitler will win. Dig!’
After a few minutes reassuring steam began to issue from the open hatch of the canteen v
an. The colours of the women’s aprons stood out in the interior dimness. They had cheese rolls and jam rolls and home-made cakes too. One signalled Dunphy with a pale, podgy hand. He made sure he had his mug filled and a cheese roll in the other hand. Then: ‘Squad,’ he called behind him. ‘Fall out.’
There was a scramble. ‘Nothing,’ said Dunphy leaning back expansively, ‘is superior to the British army char and a wad.’ He bit into his roll, then turned and said to the woman framed by the canteen hatch: ‘You’re a sitting target up here, missus.’
She was unconcerned. ‘Jerry won’t touch us. We’ve got a red cross painted on the van’s roof.’ Her face changed to annoyance as the air-raid warning warbled from the town below. ‘Oh, bugger it,’ she sighed. ‘It gets us so behind. I have to get home for my husband.’
All three women were plump and pink-faced. One said: ‘The noise of those things.’ She tried to imitate: ‘Ah-aaaah, ah-aaaah . . . Why didn’t they choose a nice tune like “The Blue Danube”.’
Dunphy took out his field glasses and, standing in the open, swept the horizon. He abruptly stopped the movement and wheeled back. ‘ME 109s,’ he said. It was almost a whisper. ‘Three of the bastards. Coming in low . . .’ His voice rose. ‘Well, for God’s sake, look at that, they’re shooting up the balloons!’
‘Aw, not our barrage balloons,’ said one of the tea women.
‘They’re so pretty,’ said one of the others.
‘Like little elephants,’ said the third.
The soldiers were standing watching amazed. The German fighter planes, as though enjoying a game, swerved and curled over the town, loosing their machine guns at the benign barrage balloons. ‘Typical,’ sniffed Tugwell. ‘’Armless and ’elpless.’
Dunphy stood astonished. Up there, at the summit of the rising ground, they were almost on a level with the height of the balloons. He pushed his helmet back on his head and said: ‘Now I’ve seen the bloody lot.’ One of the fighters continued on its course until it was thundering above them. Some soldiers flung themselves flat, others jumped down into the trenches they had been digging; the women pulled the hatch of the canteen down with a resounding bang. One of them tumbled from the door at the back and pointed angrily at the roof of the vehicle. ‘Red Cross!’ she bawled shaking her fist at the sky. ‘Ruddy Red Cross!’
Dover Beach Page 13