‘And the press, when they arrived, made straight for the bell tower?’ It was to Mildred rather than myself that the question had been directed.
‘And then to the forest,’ her companion replied.
‘Squire on the spot in an instant,’ the litany continued.
‘One phone call from him sends them packing…’
‘… the local police not unduly perturbed; not a word of it appearing in the press…’
‘… Jimmy suddenly out of favour. Disappears…’
‘… and his cottage is trashed.’
‘Well, there you have it.’ Geraldine sat back contentedly.
‘Just as we suspected.’ Mildred nodded her agreement.
‘You knew all this already?’ It might be their usual mode of discourse, but my patience was giving way. ‘Having gone back to Bereden again to find Jimmy, or Derek as you call him. Discovered all this for yourselves and not said a word about it?’
‘Oh no, dear. It was guesswork on our part. Conjecture only once you told us about the press visit. But yes, we did go back again.’
‘But not looking for Jimmy,’ added Mildred. ‘He’d made good his escape by then.’
‘And do you intend to tell us about this second visit, or just keep us guessing?’ By now even Helen was becoming tetchy.
‘Sorry, my dear.’ Geraldine patted her knee reassuringly. ‘We’ve only just appreciated the significance of what Peter’s told us. Meeting you both the way we did yesterday, the realisation that I’d known him all those years ago put everything else out of my mind. It was Mildred saw it first; grasped how the different strands fell into place, understands now how guilty Peter must have felt over the years.’ She paused, glanced at her companion, saw that contrition was the last thing on Mildred’s mind, and hurried on. ‘But I’m the one to blame. Unintentionally; I’d never have teased you that way had I known. And I’m afraid you’re not going to be any more pleased with me when you’ve heard the rest of it. Derek might not have come up to the expectations I had of him, Peter, but then neither was Jimmy quite the person you took him to be.’
Chapter Twenty
Small Talk Among the Roses
Neither Peter nor I knew what further surprises Geraldine had in mind. Whatever they were, she was determined to keep us waiting till after lunch. And no discussing the matter over the ham and egg salad; not till she’d had her afternoon nap. In the meantime, Mildred could show us round the garden.
She seemed to share my opinion of Jimmy, did Mildred, but kept it very much to herself. Aggrieved, maybe, at being excluded from Geraldine’s matrimonial secrets, to say nothing of the drubbing she’d received following the Roadshow debacle. Peter was withdrawn, wondering – so he told me later – how badly Jimmy might emerge from any further reminiscences. All attempts at small-talk were, in any case, cut short by the ringing of a hand-bell. Mildred scuttled off to see what was required of her, returning a few minutes later to say she was needed in the house. Her companion would not be ready to see us for at least forty minutes. Which must have been as much of a relief to her as it was to us.
They’d made good use of their time. When we re-entered the house the furniture had been pushed back against the wall, chairs brought to the centre of the room and arranged around a table upon which a number of documents had been laid out. The Field of the Cloth of Gold article caught my eye. Alongside it photographs of Geraldine in her youth, certificates, congratulatory letters, newspapers, preliminary sketches of handiwork she never got round to completing, a scrapbook bulging with press-cuttings. All tracing her career from her earliest days in journalism and forming a back-cloth to the story which she now continued.
Her break with Derek had been complete. Having discovered his deception she needed to be as far from him as possible. Immediately, before her resolve weakened. ‘Escaping from myself as much as from him,’ she mused. ‘If only that had been possible. But, in spite of everything, I loved him still. Addicted to the man. As surely as an alcoholic to the bottle; a junky to heroin.’ And the only known cure, she reminded us, was total abstinence.
This had proved difficult. A well-advertised series she’d planned on the work of this Hampshire genius was cancelled; lucrative offers to write about him turned down. All part of the withdrawal cure, but it was not long before the inevitable happened.
‘Quite sudden it was,’ Geraldine recalled. ‘Without warning, at the end of a lecture I’d been giving. A member of the audience stayed behind, the way they often do, you know how it is, Peter. I’d not uttered a word about Derek or his paintings from beginning to end, but suddenly this woman starts asking me questions about him. How she’d taken my advice, used his technique as a starting point for her embroidery. And suddenly, before I could stop her, she’d produced a picture from a bag she’d been carrying.’
A ‘Saintley’, there’d been no doubt about it. Original design, complementary range of colours, perspective delicately handled; the perfect example of the style she’d championed so strenuously. How complicated would the conversion to embroidery be, the lady had asked. How long would it take? What of the cost? The advice she gave was to prove a turning point for both of them. The embroiderer carried off top prize in a regional competition, went on to achieve national fame and, having no further use for the picture, donated it to Geraldine. And there it was, a rococo blending of text and image; Jimmy’s version of Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters brought down from the wall where we’d first seen it, handed over to Peter.
The gift had redetermined the course of Veronica’s life. If she could not have the man who deserted her, she’d make do with his pictures. Lotos-Eaters was the first in her collection. The next – A Stitch in Time – was knocked down to £15 among miscellaneous items at an auction. Birds of Pray – still hanging on the wall opposite – she’d acquired through business contacts. From that point she’d begun her collection in earnest, searching high and low for the works of this obscure Hampshire backwoodsman. Word of her obsession percolated among the artistic community. A biography, they supposed – that or a retrospective exhibition. Not much of the oeuvre survived; what did was retrieved from outhouses or cowsheds, hauled down from dusty attics to be sold at exorbitant prices – or faked.
‘Thinking they’d taken her in.’ Mildred relieved Peter of the painting. ‘But she was much too sharp for that. Pity she couldn’t recognise the man himself as a phoney.’
The early sixties that had been. Before long, she’d acquired fifteen genuine Saintleys, become an authority in the field. ‘Hardly a field.’ Geraldine pushed Lotos Eaters to one side. ‘More of a lawn. A small and largely untended one at that.’
Which must have been the reason one of the dailies had asked her to contribute an outline of his work for their forthcoming supplement on British art. ‘Not a matter of expertise.’ She shook her head dismissively. ‘Just the fact that no one else was capable of doing it.’
The realisation of what was coming crystallised slowly. Neither of us knew the precise point it became a certainty, but there it was in the scrapbook: the article on Saintley’s art from The Encyclopaedic History of British Art we’d read a few days earlier, fixed at the four corners with stamp-hinges. Concluding with the initials GL: Geraldine Leapman. Neither of us said a word. Partly surprise, partly thinking through the implications. But mostly because we were anxious to hear the rest of her story.
It was in building up the collection that word of Mappa Mundi first reached her. The last of the ‘Saintleys’, it was said. His final protest; content and style unknown but believed to be the most irreverent of them all. Nothing more than hearsay really, but consistent enough for it to become her Holy Grail, and Bereden its most likely hiding place. Return she must, but how? Peter and her husband – the man he called Jimmy – might still be around, to say nothing of the countless people she’d contacted on her first visit, and there must be no hi
nt of her marriage – for Derek’s sake as much as her own. Not even her newly-appointed secretary, later companion, Mildred, might be told. Her resolve wavered. Till finally, some fifteen years after the chance encounter with teenage Peter and her erstwhile husband, much firmer evidence arrived.
‘Makes perfect sense now we’ve heard both sides of the story.’ Mildred could contain herself no longer. ‘Little wonder Derek, Jimmy, Saintley or whatever he chose to call himself, left in such a hurry. Same reason nothing about him appeared in the press. The perfect cover-up, till someone let the cat out of the bag all those years later. I wonder…’
‘Why don’t you just let them read it for themselves?’ Geraldine hauled herself up. ‘Half hour’s pruning will do me a power of good.’ She pushed the final piece of evidence across the table and hobbled off on her stick.
It was a whole page feature in what had been The South Hampshire Observer, dated 11th March, 1971, that Mildred passed across to us:
Now it can be told: Bereden’s ‘Secret Army’
‘What did you do in the War, Daddy?’ – ask this question around Bereden and the answer could surprise you. If the truth is told, that is. Some will tell you of military service, in the army, navy or air force. Show you their medals or demob papers. Others recall duty as special constables or air-raid wardens. Or how they were excused service on medical grounds. A few, though, will give you no answer. You may dismiss their war effort as negligible; believe them to have been malingerers even.
Be careful before you make such accusations, though. And read the recently published story of the part played by ‘Churchill’s underground army’, recruited to harry the enemy at a time when invasion seemed imminent. Think before you pass judgement. You could very well be speaking to an unsung hero of World War II.
One of the best kept secrets of that life-and-death struggle, when this Island – and with it Europe – stood on the verge of defeat, was the existence of the Auxiliary Units. Never heard of them? Nor were you meant to. These men and women, recruited for their bravery, knowledge of the countryside – and the ability to keep their mouths shut – were trained in the arts of guerrilla warfare: to kill without question; wound without compunction; destroy road or rail networks rather than see them fall into enemy hands. As they would have done. Before disappearing into the hinterland. Had the invasion come.
Only in the last few years has their cover been blown. By an American, David Lampe, in a book Last Ditch*. This some thirty years after the last of them had been stood down. And, all over the south of England, the question is being asked: ‘Did we play our part in such operations?’ ‘Was there an “underground army” hidden in our neck of the woods?’
Take Bereden, for example. Is it possible that whilst most of us went about our daily activities, a unit such as this was plotting the disruption and downfall of an invading force? Meeting in secret, at some out-of-the-way farm shed, disused cottage, church belfry even? Under the leadership of a respected figure; someone accustomed to command, with experience in the armed forces. With previous knowledge of espionage, maybe? And, given the nature of the terrain, might it not have been possible for an operation base to be established, far from prying eyes, out there in the woodlands? Carefully hidden, with a secret entry – at the base of an oak-tree, say? In which weapons could be stored; from which they could launch attacks should the homeland be occupied? Observation posts also. The battlements of a castle, a high tree, or some obsolete signal tower. Anywhere that overlooked the surrounding countryside.
All speculation, of course. In other parts of the south, maybe, but here in peaceful Bereden? Surely not! Elsewhere, David Lampe now tells us, such men and women – postmen, gamekeepers, poachers even – each of them knowing the countryside like the back of their hand, were trained in the arts of guerrilla warfare. At the ‘sharp end’ were those expected to inflict direct damage on the enemy, through sabotage or disposing of them as surely and silently as possible. The tools of their trade were plastic explosives, incendiary bombs, pistols and sten guns fitted with silencers and commando knives honed to perfection. Many of them took to creating their own weaponry, ‘swords from ploughshares’ one might almost say.
Targets for such sorties were selected by a second group, the ‘special duty section’, who’d probably lived in the area all their lives, coming to know the people who lived there and those among them they could trust. Having ‘run with the hare’ each day, they ‘hunt with the hounds’ by night. Others – woodsmen, gamekeepers or tramps – eking out an existence in third-class accommodation yet steeped in country lore, could well have used their skills at tracking of wild animals to hunt down the enemy, knowing precisely where explosives might be set to cause the maximum of damage.
Communication between each of these groups or to the War Office in London was essential. A number of dead letter drops would be set up around the locality, younger men acting as runners between them and a radio transmitter operated by trained signals staff or a competent local ‘ham’, the aerial hidden high up in the trees or concealed within the chimney of some large building. Disinformation was just as important. Putting the enemy off the scent and encouraging him to concentrate his efforts where they would prove least effective.
The local citizenry needed to be put off the scent also. It could have proved disastrous had some local busy-bodies found one of the letter drops, stumbled on one of the observation posts, or children out playing discovered the base itself. Secrecy and camouflage were part of the answer, that and stories spun to keep the young and the faint-hearted at a distance.
Yet all this going on beneath their noses. Churchill’s ‘underground army’ waiting in readiness. Across the whole of the south, their world map constricted to that of these islands. Waiting for the invasion that never came. And not a word spoken of it. Till now. What part, one wonders, did Bereden play? Perhaps we shall never know. Unless someone steps forward – as David Lampe has done – to paint a broader picture, chart more detailed a map..
*See, David Lampe, Last Ditch, Cassell, 1968, ISBN: 0304925195
I finished the article several minutes before Peter; watched as his curiosity gave way to amazement, then incredulity. ‘Who wrote this stuff?’ He pushed it angrily aside.
‘Someone with a good deal of inside information, I’d say.’ Geraldine had returned and taken her place beside me on the couch.
‘But it’s all nonsense! Don’t you think that if there’d been some secret outfit masquerading about the village I’d have known about it? Unless it was the gang Andrew and I set up! Or the home guard maybe?’
‘Hardly likely. No disrespect, but this wasn’t your fireside run-of-the-mill operation. These boys meant business. Fully trained in the techniques of underground warfare, having the weaponry to go with it; they’d have made life very unpleasant for the Germans had there really been an invasion.’
‘More like the script for some Errol Flynn movie, if you ask me.’ Peter had taken back the article, was stabbing at the offending passages as if to obliterate them. ‘Shadowy figures flitting round the countryside with sten guns and semtex? Their faces blackened? Tracking one another through the forest? Sending secret messages? Just the kind of thing we acted out as kids. About as credible as well. Circumstantial evidence. Not a fact from beginning to end. If he’s so sure of himself why doesn’t he name names, tell us who these people were?’
‘Why bother when it’s all there in front of you?’ Geraldine was not to be intimidated. ‘Their leader a respected figure who’d served in the army, experienced in espionage. His headquarters crenulated, so probably a titled gentleman. I wonder who that could have been? Communicating with London via “observation posts”, signal towers out there in the forest perhaps, four minutes from Portsmouth to the capital I think you told us. Aided and abetted by someone living in “third class accommodation”, “steeped in country law”…
… ‘who
se job was “disinformation”, keeping the “young or faint-hearted at a distance” with stories of cockatrices and grampuses, spectres roaming underground passages.’ Mildred was determined not to be excluded from Peter’s discomfiture. ‘Circumstantial evidence? When the truth was out there for the asking?’
‘So you did go back!’ It must have been triumphalism in her voice; Peter was onto it in a trice.
Geraldine sighed expansively. ‘Yes, we went back to the village. As I was about to tell you. And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to do it in my own way.’ To my relief, Peter eased himself back into his chair, arms folded, prepared – I could tell – to believe none of it.
‘All of you obsessed with the organisational details, where it happened, who ran what, from whom they took their orders. Missing the most important part of the whole piece. Or giving up before you reached it. Here, see for yourself. The final paragraph: “Their world map constricted to that of these islands”.’ She’d dumped the scrapbook in Peter’s lap. ‘World map – Mappa Mundi. And there again, right at the bottom, almost the last words in the piece: someone coming forward to paint “a broader picture, chart more detailed a map”. All those years building up the collection. On the track of that one picture. No notion as to what it was, where it might be. Then the first and only lead to come my way. You bet we went back to the village.’
Clutching at straws, I’d have said, and I could tell Peter agreed. But back to Bereden she’d gone using a false name and booking into a hotel some five miles away. Whilst Mildred, aware only of her professional interest in Derek – ‘Jimmy’ muttered Peter – was dispatched into the village to seek out anyone who might have known him and ferret any information she could from them.
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