Dover Beach

by Leslie Thomas

  Harold announced firmly: ‘My old man’s coming out of prison next week.’

  Boot gave up and began trying to adjust the wheel of the pram. Harold climbed out. Spots got down on his knees and inspected the underneath.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Cotton. ‘Your mother will be glad.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harold. ‘He reckons he wants to help with the war.’

  ‘How’s he going to do that?’

  ‘Join something.’ Harold brightened. ‘I reckon he ought to join the police.’

  Instow brought the vessel gently, almost tenderly, alongside the jetty. It was out of the view of the group of civilians waiting on the quay. A military ambulance was already there, its rear doors open.

  He got his small crew on the deck and the soldiers, the commandos and the unkempt engineers made two ranks on the other side of the lowered gangway. Colonel Stelling was in front and Staff Sergeant Dunphy on the flank of his remaining three men. A stretcher was carried from below with Cartwright’s body covered with a blanket. Another blanket-shrouded stretcher followed. Tears coursed down Ardley’s face, but after one glance he and the others stared directly ahead. Small, white-cheeked, Giselle followed the stretchers.

  The soldiers and sailors were called to attention. The naval commander and the army colonel saluted, and Stelling went down to the dockside. He indicated that Dunphy should follow him. ‘Staff, come and see your soldier off,’ he said. ‘Did you know Captain Cartwright as well? He was Royal Engineers too.’

  ‘A few weeks ago, sir,’ said the Irishman quietly, ‘we were conversing alongside an unexploded bomb.’

  ‘That’s how you get to know people,’ said the colonel. He walked towards Giselle.

  ‘I am going with him,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll go to the hospital,’ said Stelling. ‘First.’

  She regarded him with a calm face. ‘He came to look after me,’ she said. ‘Now I must look after him.’

  Three orderlies slid the stretchers into the back of the ambulance. ‘I believe I must write to his wife,’ Giselle added.

  Stelling reached into a pocket. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is from his personal effects. I took charge of it.’ He handed an envelope with an American stamp to Giselle. ‘If you read it, perhaps you will think that you ought to write to this lady in the USA. They appear to have been close.’

  Glancing at the stamp, Giselle took the letter.

  The ambulance driver said: ‘Will you come up the front with me, miss?’

  ‘I will go in the back.’ She turned briefly to study the grey and grim vessel with its sailors and tattered soldiers, then said: ‘Thank you,’ to Stelling and Dunphy. They each saluted her. She climbed into the ambulance, the doors were closed and it drove quietly away.

  ‘Get your chaps ashore, staff,’ said Stelling. ‘They need some rest, same as mine do.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Along the quay came a sergeant and a corporal. The corporal had a hare lip. ‘Staff,’ said the sergeant, ‘we’ve got transport. Get your blokes aboard and we’ll get them a shit, shave and shampoo. And some grub and some kit, of course.’ He glanced towards the deck. ‘It looks like they need it.’

  It was one of the cliffside entrances to the military caves. Ardley, Sproston and Tugwell climbed from the back of the truck. They had said nothing to each other on the journey, their heads hung with weariness and their grief for Jenkins. They tramped into the cave behind the corporal with the hare lip. ‘’Ave a shower, get some sleep,’ he said. ‘There’s some char coming. Anybody hungry?’ He attempted to sound cheery. They stared at him as if he spoke a foreign language and shook their heads. Each soldier stripped his soggy uniform away and crawled beneath blankets. When a NAAFI girl appeared in the doorway with a tray and mugs of tea she did not rouse them. Sproston was snoring.

  At four in the afternoon Dunphy, freshly uniformed, came into the cave. Ardley eased himself on his elbow, realised where he was, and said: ‘What’s next, staff? Berlin?’

  Sproston and Tugwell stirred and opened their eyes. Sproston groaned and Tugwell said: ‘Sod almighty.’

  ‘There’s some new kit in the next dungeon,’ said Dunphy. ‘Very smart some of it is. There’s mugs of tea on the way. You didn’t drink the last lot. Then there’s showers and some grub, very decent too. I’ve had mine. They treat fighting men very well, if they survive.’

  ‘We ought to write to Welshy’s mother,’ said Ardley.

  ‘That’s the commanding officer’s duty,’ replied Dunphy. ‘We’ll all write to her after that.’ For a moment he looked shaky. His usually robust face was pale.

  ‘Where now, sarge?’ asked Tugwell. ‘It’s not back to bloody Thorncliffe, is it?’

  ‘I hope not,’ agreed the staff sergeant. ‘Back to digging trenches and training schemes, I expect. What else is there to do?’

  Tugwell said: ‘At least we know now what it’s like to blow up a real bridge.’

  ‘Well, you won’t need to do it for a while,’ answered Dunphy. ‘Everybody gets seven days’ leave from eighteen hundred hours.’

  In the truck going to the station, each one holding his rail warrant, Sproston suddenly said: ‘Where are you going on leave, staff?’ Tugwell and Ardley looked up with interest.

  ‘I may travel,’ said Dunphy in his pensive way. They smiled, their first smiles for several days.

  ‘To Ireland?’ suggested Ardley. They were going to drop him at the bus station.

  ‘I’ve no reason, no people to go and see, except some daft old auntie,’ said Dunphy. ‘In any case, I’d never get across, all travel to Southern Ireland being banned, in case you tell them secrets which they then tell the Germans. That’s the reason they give, anyway. Maybe I’ll take myself to London for a few days, stay at the Union Jack Club, five bob a night with all grub, and find myself a nice jolly woman.’

  Tugwell said lugubriously: ‘The bombing’s getting worse in London.’

  ‘I could do with some excitement,’ said Dunphy.

  ‘I bet you’re back in barracks in two days,’ guessed Ardley.

  Dunphy nodded. ‘There’s a lot to be said for taking your leave in barracks. Free board and lodging, and you can stay in bed when everybody else is playing soldiers.’

  The truck dropped Ardley outside the East Kent Bus Company terminus, still a bombed shell with a corrugated-iron building set within it. They all shook hands. He said a quiet goodbye and caught the seven o’clock bus. He was going home to his wife.

  It seemed only hours since he had walked through the cottage gate to say goodbye to Rose; in those few days he had been to war and back, to the sheer fright of it. Looking from the top-deck window he thought again of Welshy and covered his face for a while. None of it seemed possible.

  The evening was cloudy and it moved into dimness as they reached the farm. Although the dusk was deepening he found Spatchcock wedged in his chair outside the garden door. ‘Oh, oh, it’s you,’ the old man said. ‘Still here? I must have dozed off.’

  Ardley patted his shoulder.

  ‘She’s up the village hall,’ said Spatchcock. ‘They’re practising their singing, tryin’ to get into tune.’

  ‘I’ll leave my kit,’ said Ardley. He put his pack inside the door.

  ‘Still no Jerries,’ said Spatchcock squinting at the evening sky. ‘I’m beginning to wonder whether they’re really over there.’

  ‘Keep looking,’ Ardley replied going through the gate and up the lane. He felt weary and low. He shook himself and practised a smile in the dark. From a distance he heard the singing coming from the hall.

  ‘For the merriest fellows are we,

  Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.’

  He pushed the door. There were two oil lamps illuminating the interior of the building. The large woman Polly was astride the stool, thumping the piano keys with her heavy hands. About twenty singers were doing their best to keep up. He tried to see Rose.

  It was Polly
who turned and exclaimed: ‘Here’s a real pianist! Come on, young fellow, sit yourself up here!’

  Ardley felt himself shuffle forward as she rose from the round stool. Barely aware of what he was doing he took her place; his hands went uncertainly to the discoloured keys and he banged them fiercely beginning to sing ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’. He had hardly got beyond the second line before he sensed Rose behind him. He almost fell. He turned his riven face to her and held up his arms. She enfolded him and bent to put her face to his. They were both weeping. She could see in a moment what had happened to him. The other singers stood dumbly.

  Rose drew him up from the stool and held him to her like a mother with a son. ‘How was the Isle of Wight?’ she asked through her tears.

  ‘Bloody noisy,’ he said through his.

  Said the soldier to the sailor: ‘’Ow come you’re in this pub so much? Don’t they ever send you to sea?’

  ‘Don’t like the sea,’ said the sailor. ‘It makes me sick. That’s why I’m in the stores.’

  ‘Dead cushy in the stores.’

  ‘Ammo stores. All right if you don’t drop a match.’

  ‘Action, that’s what I want,’ said the soldier. ‘A bit of fightin’. ’And to ’and. All I do now is weed the fucking colonel’s garden.’

  ‘It’s fresh air,’ said the sailor philosophically.

  ‘I ’spect I’ll go back to the coal yard when the war’s over. Money was good, three quid a week, but it was dusty.’

  They had each finished their beers, timed to perfection. It was the sailor’s turn and he ordered two more halves. He had scarcely finished doing so when a high-explosive shell landed half a mile away, shaking the pub and bringing down yet more of the ceiling. Again the clock fell from the wall behind the bar.

  The landlord did not even turn from placing the beers in front of the men. He shrugged and said: ‘I wonder ’ow long it’s all going to go on?’

  ‘God knows,’ answered the soldier.

  The sailor said: ‘Until that bugger ’Itler surrenders.’

  Afterword

  Dover Beach is a work of fiction. Many of the incidents which go to make up the novel, however, are based on fact, although in some cases the chronology has been altered. Some of the more bizarre occurrences include the German spy with the sausage, the stage contortionist caught in her tangled act by an invasion alarm, and the evacuation of elderly people from Dover to a West Country lunatic asylum. At the height of the bombing and shelling there was also a murder in the town.

  More than 3,000 bombs and high-explosive shells fired from occupied France fell on the town but its wartime civilian casualties, just over 200 deaths and 700 people injured, were remarkably light in the context of civilian casualties throughout Britain of 60,595 deaths and 238,000 wounded. This was due to the evacuation of two thirds of the town’s population, and to the sheltering caves of the vicinity. At the beginning of hostilities the town council bought a thousand funeral shrouds at two shillings and ninepence each but half this number was later sold on to other authorities.

  While emphasising again that Dover Beach is a novel, I would like to acknowledge help from the following sources on researching the stories on which it is based:

  Christopher Dowling and the staff of the Imperial War Museum library; the National Archives, Kew; Jon Iveson and the staff of the Dover Archives, Library and Museum; and Denis Donovan, formerly of BBC Television News. I would also like to thank Susan Sandon and Justine Taylor of William Heinemann; Mary Chamberlain, who once again was my diligent editor; my wife Diana for her editorial contributions and research; and Rebecca Dann, who typed the manuscript (so many times).

  Books which I consulted include: How We Lived Then by Norman Longmate (Hutchinson, 1971), still the best record of civilian life in the Second World War; Dover Front by Reginald Foster (Secker & Warburg, 1941); Dover at War by Roy Humphreys (Alan Sutton, 1993); 1940 – Year of Legend, Year of History by Laurence Thompson (Collins, 1966); 1940 – The World in Flames by Richard Collier (Hamish Hamilton, 1979); The People’s War by Angus Calder (Cape, 1969); and Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957); and Some Were Spies by Earl Jowitt (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954).

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted inwriting by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407096285

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2006

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  Copyright © Leslie Thomas 2005

  Leslie Thomas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by William Heinemann

  Arrow Books

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099478645 (from Jan 2007)