Hardly a compromise the pacifists I’d known would have settled for. But there was another aspect of the events that didn’t add up. ‘The war had been over ten years by then,’ I put it to them carefully, needing to be sure of the facts. ‘The units disbanded in the mid 1940s. So why keep them a secret all that time? I can see why operations such as Bletchley Park should be kept under cover. Their code-breaking work might still be useful to the enemy, but not the units’. And those involved were real heroes. So what possible harm could there be in letting it be known?’
‘Modesty?’ Giles shrugged. ‘Wanting to put the war behind them. Not wishing those near to them to know how they’d been deceived, or that they’d been living all those years with trained killers? Whatever the reason, the secret held through to 1970. And it was an American that broke it.’
Little of which interested Peter. ‘But no problem in landing the blame on Jimmy,’ he fumed. ‘What possible motives could he have had? A valuable addition to the unit from what you’ve said, trustworthy all that time. Why suddenly turn against it?’
‘I couldn’t believe it myself.’ Giles shrugged. ‘Not at the time. Thought maybe it was just an act of revenge. Lampooning the church to get back at Codpiece and that schoolteacher after the attacks they made on him. When that article appeared and I began to follow-through on the clues. So accurate, and the rumours about Jimmy being a stool-pigeon. At long last, despite all my father told me – how it was pride in his work that attracted the press – the real reason they fell out so badly. Everything fitted perfectly into place.’
‘With Peter blaming himself all these years. Convinced he’d sold out on Jimmy.’ I’d hoped to boost his morale. Realised, too late, that we’d kept this last part of the story to ourselves. Giles was ignorant of Peter’s assignations with Geraldine; his supposed ‘betrayal’. There was nothing for it but to come clean. Back-track once again and tell him the truth. Accurate as far as it went: a rogue reporter from one of the tabloids inveigling a naïve Peter into revealing Jimmy’s whereabouts then sending in the heavy mob to ferret him out. Concluding with a touching operatic finale: penitent Peter laying siege to Third Class Cottage, receives absolution from his childhood hero, who takes his final bow.
‘So you camped out, actually gained admittance; that last day before Jimmy did a runner? No, hear me out!’ Peter had half-risen in protest, taking offence at that stool-pigeon expression. ‘It’s exactly what he did, though. Letting you believe it was his rescue of Howard or the celebrated Shakesphere prints that brought the press to his door? As good a cover as ever. Precisely the one Father fed me. When all along it was a very different game Jimmy was playing.’
Peter stared at Giles in disbelief. ‘You’re not telling us that newspaper got it right, that Jimmy really was…’
‘Guilty as charged? Led us straight to the funk hole, didn’t he? And the rest of the article as near the truth as makes no difference.’
‘An exaggeration, it’s got to be. Gutter-press journalism at its worst.’
But Giles had believed it. The respected local figure whose family went back generations, had a stake in the land. Who’d remained in Bereden long after others had left to find their fortunes. He, if anyone, would know the truth.
‘Well, I did warn you, right from the start, that your faith in the man would be challenged.’ He’d got to his feet, was brushing himself down, hand held out to assist Peter.
To be shaken off: ‘There must be some other explanation. You can’t think that of Jimmy. Headstrong, against authority in all shapes and form. Misguided, even. But betraying the one man he trusted? Together with Danny Earl, Tom Carter and the rest of them? Never!’ And before I realised his intentions, Peter had taken me by the arm and we were making off. Having no idea, he later admitted, which direction to head.
‘Neither of you interested in why he did it?’ Giles called after us.
Peter slackened his pace.
‘The wheres and whens? Just what it was drove him to it?’
Stopping us dead in our tracks.
‘Turns out both of us have been living with guilty consciences all these years.’
Giles caught up with us and paused for breath.
‘Self-justification, I suppose you’d call it, the old man showing how far-sighted he’d been. The guy who saved the day for Britain. Broke every rule in the book the moment he put pen to paper.’
‘You mean there’s first-hand evidence of what really happened?’ Peter broke away and squared up, all five and a half feet of him to Giles’s six foot.
‘And all this time, after all we’ve been through, you’ve been sitting on it?’ I interposed myself between them.
‘Didn’t realise just how much it meant to you, not till a moment ago. Nor how much you already knew, changing your story every couple of minutes. Do you think I’d have held back otherwise?’ Giles seemed genuinely contrite. ‘A miscalculation as well, assuming that if I took you through it, clue by clue, you’d have cottoned onto it by now.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘And Peter a university man. Two out of ten, I’d say, D minus at the most.’
‘Okay, Giles, so we failed. Dismally. What next: fifty lines, detention, or six-of-the-best in true public school tradition?’ The first and only time I’d heard Peter refer to differences in their background other than in jest.
‘And if you’ve no intention of telling us where we’ve gone wrong, there’s plenty of mess here that needs our attention.’ Time to draw a line before they actually came to blows. I began tidying the remnants of our picnic.
‘It’s not something I’m proud of, you know.’ Giles squatted down beside me, collecting up the cutlery. ‘The old man comes badly enough out of this as it is. God knows what would happen if it got out he’d written it up. A rival to Churchill’s war diaries to his way of thinking.’ He gathered up the rug. ‘And, having got this far, you’d better have a second chance; see what you make of the rest of it. As long as you’re sure there’s nothing else you’ve left out.’ He held one end of it out to me to be folded, ‘and what you read remains between the three of us.’
‘Spare of tongue, my Peter,’ I quipped taking the other end of the rug.
‘And certainly slow to quit.’ Giles brought both ends together and folded it into a neat square.
‘Don’t – patronise – me.’ Peter kicked defiantly at a clump of weeds.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ Giles hefted up the hamper and we made our way back. ‘And from now you’re getting no help from me. Who knows, maybe Jimmy will emerge as a shiny hero, could be a died-in-the-wool villain. Or was he something in-between? Like the protagonists in so many of your modern novels, Helen. Which is something you and Peter must make up your own minds about.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Tales Out of School
Giles insisted that Helen and I read the document on the premises under conditions of complete privacy. The contents might no longer be secret, if ever they had been, but it did contain information of a sensitive nature about individuals living in the area, and he had his father’s reputation to consider. A quiet room off the library had been set aside for the purpose. I remembered disturbing the old Squire over his port and cigar in there one evening when we’d been given the run of the house to play hide-and-seek, discovering that the upper classes really did dress for dinner, just as I’d seen them do so often in films of the time.
‘Hard to imagine him down in the funk hole,’ I said, ‘subsisting on war-time rations with only a chemical toilet between them.’
‘Reliving the glory days,’ Giles mused, ‘snuckered down alongside his men, waiting for the signal to emerge, the sabotage and hand-to-hand combat to begin.’ There was more than a touch of admiration in his voice.
‘Whilst Jimmy was kept busy out there tracking down the enemy the way he had Grigorio. Keeping the woodlands free from the pr
ying eyes of children.’ Helen reminded him.
Painting Mappa Mundi as a childish form of revenge? Maybe. But double-dealing and treachery? Whatever Geraldine said or Helen suspected, I could never believe that of him.
The diary had been kept in a foolscap ledger, bound in a hard blue cover, the pages lined, with thin red columns running down the right-hand side for the keeping of accounts. The opening section had been ripped out, the final part left blank, the rest filled with a script I vaguely remembered. My mother treasured even the most perfunctory of Sir Desmond’s notes, and the green ink, seeping through to the sheet beneath, was precisely the shade he’d favoured. Made to order by the barrel, according to Jimmy, and no mistaking it now. Line after line, some of the entries a sentence or two only, others occupying a page or more, with spaces left in between. Each of them had been dated; all heavily underscored. Nor had the Squire been consistent in keeping up with events. Beginning in the late forties, the text ran intermittently over the years, days sometimes recorded in sequence, leaving gaps of a week or more also. The writing became progressively less legible into the fifties, finally petering out in a series of scrawls, incoherent almost and undated, into what must have been following decade. We found ourselves consulting Giles as to the circumstances under which they’d been written. His continued presence had seemed an intrusion to begin with, but we were to be more than grateful for it by the time we’d finished.
Jimmy hardly appears in the early pages. There are glimpses of him casting a protective eye over the woodlands, disarming traps laid by poachers, upsetting some of the newer teachers over his assistance with our homework, and there he was creeping from the school via the back door prior to some gubernatorial visitation. He is mentioned more fully at the time of the ceremonial ‘beating of the bounds’, which took place every ten years. According to custom, the schoolmaster administered the traditional ‘six-of-the-best’ to his scholars’ backsides at strategic points around the village, the time-honoured means of preserving territorial integrity from one generation to the next. Enid Quintock, though, could not be persuaded to participate, no matter how earnestly Sir Desmond assured her no harm would come to the pupils; that it was a colourful spectacle only.
‘Insisted she was no “schoolmaster”,’ Giles was telling us. ‘And that being the case, the ceremony had to be cancelled.’
He was fresh home from public school as I remembered it, scoffing at such antiquated notions, coming to blows with Chunky over the issue.
Giles smiled ruefully. ‘Grounded for six weeks when I arrived back with a black eye and bruises all over my face’. The source of still further derision when it became known.
‘Ended with Jimmy volunteering to be “beater in chief”,’ I remembered.
Feather-like had been the Squire’s verdict on his efforts, the diary recording Jimmy’s own comment: that the sadists among them must now restrain themselves for a decade for the next such performance.
But Helen’s attention had been caught by an entry on the opposite page. A few lines of verse:
Do not despair for Johnny Head in the air
He sleeps as sound as Johnny underground.
Copied out meticulously in the Squire’s best hand.
‘Strange affair that, and the diary’s not much help.’ Giles pushed it to one side. ‘Believe it or not, my mother’s choice for Vernon’s memorial. Remember how keen she was on the movies, Peter? Well, this was a quote from one of the films she’d seen.’
I was about to remind Helen of our previous discussion regarding the topic, accompanied by some ‘I told you so’ comment, when… ‘Of course.’ She cuffed her forehead. ‘The John Pudney poem! Quoted in The Way to the Stars!’
‘Written during an air raid, on the back of an envelope, I believe.’ She quickly recovered her poise. ‘And used to great effect in the film. Celebrating war heroes. She can’t have chosen more appropriate an epitaph.’
‘Not to my father’s way of thinking.’ Giles was shaking his head. ‘He was no great supporter of the church, had to be dragged there almost every Sunday. Didn’t stop him regarding that poem as sacrilegious though. Don’t know which annoyed him most, that or the rector’s suggestion.’
Which had been some Biblical text featuring angels. Eventually it had been Jimmy who came up with the solution: the Brooke some corner of a foreign field inscription.
‘Mother was delighted, sold on Jimmy’s notion that the plaque stood for all the fallen, heroes or otherwise, especially those whose remains were never discovered – the “unknown warriors”. He laid it on thick, even sketched in a St Christopher motif to make his point, along with that Latin tag that goes with it.’
‘Vade Mecum,’ I said, recalling the medallion he wore around his neck.
The Squire, though, had regarded this as even more irreligious, and the rector had agreed, with Dame Alice settling for the plaque in its current form. After which Jimmy vanished once more back into obscurity.
To reappear, some eighteen months later intermingled with the fortunes of Miss Quintock’s successor. As chairman of the management committee, the Squire’s decision had been influential in Eric Stapleton’s appointment, thoroughly approving of the tighter discipline the ex-serviceman brought with him. The diary confirmed most of what Howard had told us of the man; a strict disciplinarian, determined to wrest the establishment from the disorder into which it had fallen since Miss Quintock’s demise. The Squire had high regard for the approach he adopted, various entries noting improvements in the attendance rate and behaviour of the pupils both in and out of school. His suggestion for the formation of a cadet unit, consisting of the older boys together with any other teenager with time on their hands, was taken up immediately, the two men pooling their military experience, and before long they had twenty or so recruits, kitted out, marching back and forth across the recreation ground two evenings each week.
At which point Jimmy makes his next appearance in the diary, arriving at the hall in high dudgeon to complain that these were exercises in mindless obedience, more suited to the Hitler Youth movement. He’d not been taken seriously, ranting like the Fuehrer himself wrote the Squire. All Jimmy had achieved was the bringing of the two men more closely together.
But there were elements of the Stapleton regime even less to Jimmy’s liking. Two entries in particular took my attention:
25th March
A few of the parents worried. Sensitive souls whingeing about Stapleton’s use of his Korean experiences up at school. Asides during lessons, references to current situation – atomic warfare cf. Battle of Hastings, mushroom clouds cf nimbus formations, four-minute warnings cf the beacon in our woods, Eastern religion cf mind-bending techniques, etc, etc, etc. Told them I’ll look into it.
27th March
At school this a.m. Morning assembly first class. Children well behaved & respectful. More highly strung ones a bit nervous. Probably upset by my visitation. S. denies allegations. Occasionally egged on by older boys, it seems. Promises to be more circumspect in future. No sooner home than Jimmy on doorstep. News travels fast! His version: children scared half to death; parents every right to complain. Exaggeration, Stapleton assures me. And children not the most reliable of witnesses. Must say I agree. Told Jimmy so. In any case, teacher only doing his job; being wise before rather than after event. Unlike our leaders back in ’39. Not that he listened – any more than they did! Write letter of assurance to those concerned. Afternoon – cadet inspection. Splendid turn-out; agreed to look into matter of badges & insignia. Final word in S’s ear. ‘Sapientia satis’. Go easy on the reminiscences.
No doubt as to where the Squire’s sympathies lay, nor how seriously BadEgg took the warning.
Little more than a week later the proposed screening of two American documentaries – Atomic Alert and Cities Must Fight – warning of the dangers inherent in a third World War, were veto
ed by the managing body. Then, within the month Jimmy was once more at Amberstone Hall, brandishing a copy of the Home Office Manual of Basic Training that Eric had dispatched to committee members. Pamphlet 6, Atomic Warfare, to be precise, containing details of heat flash, radioactivity and blast, estimates of casualties in a British City (50,000), with explicit photographs appended to make the point. There’d been a covering letter, outlining the steps implemented to cover such eventualities. Jimmy had witnessed one of these first-hand: the ‘duck and cover’ exercise masquerading as a PE lesson with six-year-olds running into the classroom and squatting beneath their desks at the toot of a whistle. Followed by another, four minutes later, at which those not making it were instructed to curl themselves into a ball or hide down behind hedge, wall or building.
I remembered the press and radio reports of hydrogen bomb tests in Bikini and Monte Bello; newsreel footage of the devastation at Hiroshima; doom-laden maps extrapolating how British cities would be targeted, along with photographic evidence of expected injuries, immediate and long-term. The staple fare of rumour and apocalyptic comic strips, banned in most households, yet freely available in backstreet or playground; infants and the unimaginative coping well enough, but the source of nightmares for ‘sensitive souls’ such as Howard. We’d attempted to shield him from the worst excesses of the media, but none of us realised just how close to home they’d come. Not till I read Sir Desmond’s diary.
Helen was appalled. ‘What about the parents?’ she demanded. ‘You mean they accepted what was going on? Just stood by passively and allowed the man to do what he liked?’
‘It was the 50s,’ I reminded her. ‘With teachers acting in loco parentis, actually trusted to know what they were doing. Make problems at school and there was worse for you once you got home. With the Squire’s backing, BadEgg would have been king of the castle.’
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