Waiting For the Day

by Leslie Thomas

  She turned to them fully for the first time and they saw she had a sharp pointed face that might once have been pretty. ‘That shrapnel stuff kills people,’ she told them. ‘A lot of poor geezers died because of ovver things apart from the bombs. Beffnal Green tube, nearly four ’undred ’ad their lot when some bloke tripped and they all fell down the bloomin’ stairs. Suvvercated, smovvered. Just panic, not a Jerry bomber in sight.’

  ‘You just … walk around in an air raid?’ said Miller.

  ‘Got to earn a few bob, mate,’ she said airily. ‘If you pick your time careful when it’s not too busy up there,’ she nodded at the sky, ‘you can carry on like usual. Lots of the girls do.’ She looked at them prospectively. ‘I’ll give you a short time in ’ere,’ she suggested. ‘It will pass, ’arf an ’our till the all-clear.’

  ‘Both of us?’ said Gonzales, bemused.

  ‘Both,’ she confirmed. ‘Different times, o’ course. I’m not having any of that clever stuff. One can ’ave a short time, and one can look away. Then the ovver.’

  Miller grinned. The gunfire had passed over like a fading storm. Gonzales was fascinated. ‘How much do you charge?’ he enquired.

  ‘Short time? Five dollars. But I’ve got a room ’round the corner. That’s ten.’

  Gonzales said: ‘Ten dollars. Is that for all night?’

  Her nose went up sarcastically. ‘No, all bleedin’ week,’ she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Miller’s three-year marriage had been one of disappointment but no great surprise. He considered his wife with some sadness now as he read her latest, flimsy letter, his shoulders slightly hunched as he sat on his military bed. Outside the window the London traffic hissed softly in the rain. In Dakota it had been snowing again, normal for February, and one of the dogs, not the favourite Adele who was kept in the house and groomed for special events, had won a best rosette at a show in Helena. There were up to eighteen dogs in the heated kennels outside, too many to fix their names. But he could remember Adele because she was the one snug indoors and, of course, had the same name as his wife.

  His wife wrote to him regularly, he thought automatically, every two weeks. There was never anything new in her letters; she might as well have told him she was still five feet, four inches tall and weighed a trifle over a hundred and ten pounds. Dutifully, he always replied within a couple of days but there was not much he could say within the censor’s allowance and he realised that his news might sound as if he were on some sabbatical in a country where very little ever happened. Stretching on the bed, he wondered what was now expected of him by the US Army; what it had in mind for him. Was the plan for him to go diligently about his inspection duties, and then to bow out, withdraw unneeded like a bit-part player leaving the stage, when D-Day was finally launched? He did not consider himself a brave man but he had no intention of doing that. He did not plan to observe the greatest military operation in history from the wrong side of the Channel.

  The first briefing of the newly reinforced Training Inspectorate had been in a metal hut in the middle of a hundred others, like a pig farm set among the exposed acres of Bushy Park, on the south-west fringe of London. The men, intent as he was, were all military specialists – weapons, logistics, assault techniques, tactics, feeding, care for the wounded and dying, transport, and morale. Some were specialists in a single area but he and nine others were charged with an overall view of the preparation and training for the assault on Continental Europe, whenever, wherever, it might be in the months ahead.

  Following the briefing, the officers, strangers to each other, went out into the chill and downcast day and towards the commissary hut for lunch, conversing about everything but what they had just been told: their home states, their families, their baseball and football teams and when the war might be over. Miller asked the waiting Harcourt to drive him to Hampton Court which was next to Bushy Park. The broad red-brick palace of Henry VIII rose like a serene and sturdy backcloth against the scrubby sky, aloof from the war. The Thames outside its walls flowed with grey sluggishness. It was a landscape containing few figures. It was not a time for tourists. The gatekeeper, his old soldier medals on his tunic, said: ‘Some of the rooms are closed, sir,’ adding: ‘open after the war.’

  Miller walked into the palace while Harcourt stayed with the car. ‘I don’t know nothin’ about history, sir,’ he said. ‘All I know about is now.’ He had found a friendly church. ‘But that Wormwood Scrubs camp ain’t no resort, sir. The prison looks nice.’

  Alone, Miller went between the tall walls of the palace, his head tilted as he attempted to study the lofty decorations, paintings and ornaments. There was an armoury of ancient weapons fixed to the walls, pikes and axes and early firearms, relics of old wars now forgotten except in books, and he wondered if there had been a Training Inspectorate in those days.

  At first he saw no one else. He could have been the only visitor to that echoing, empty, raw place. Walking casually and looking about him, he passed a small brick room, hardly more than a cupboard; it was lit within and looked cosy and enclosed; coming from its sanctuary he heard the faint echo of a radio programme.

  Miller’s footsteps clipped the stone floor. It was like exploring a tomb. He walked into another chamber and he heard his footsteps joined by others, light, slow, meditative.

  He was in a large, dim room with a vaulted ceiling. In one corner of the flagstoned floor was a pile of sandbags and some fire-fighting equipment. Around them came a woman, stepping carefully to avoid a coiled hose. Like the last two people on earth they looked up and smiled towards each other. She was in her early thirties with a slim and tired face, her hair hidden beneath a colourless scarf.

  ‘Not much here that Henry VIII would recognise,’ she said.

  He laughed quietly. ‘He would have wondered about the fire pumps.’

  They were standing only two yards apart. ‘Some incendiary bombs did fall here,’ she said. ‘But they managed to deal with them.’

  As though they were acquainted and had walked into the building together, they continued on the same path. ‘Are you stationed in Bushy Park?’ she said. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘For today only,’ he said. ‘I figured I’d take the chance to come over here. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do it again.’ He sensed there was a special reason she was there and she volunteered it, together with her name. ‘I’m Kathleen Burgess,’ she said. He introduced himself and they walked on through the shadowy passages. ‘I haven’t been here for ages,’ she continued. ‘Not since before the war. But I have a friend who lives nearby and she’s just lost her husband so I came to see her. I feel very sad about it. He was a prisoner in a Japanese camp and he died at Christmas, aged twenty-eight, but they have only just informed her. For weeks she had been writing to him and he was already dead.’

  Miller said: ‘That’s certainly sad. It’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s another war the other side of the world, we get so busy with this one.’

  ‘So I came in here for some solace,’ she went on, as though she had not heard him. ‘It seemed the right thing, the correct sort of place. Better than some church.’ She smiled reflectively. ‘Perhaps there should be a Society for Solace.’

  ‘They’d be busy right now.’

  They were walking in a paved corridor, their footsteps still sounding. An old man, prodding a lawn with a garden fork, looked up at them with brief curiosity. ‘Have you been in the chapel?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I’ve only been here a few minutes.’

  ‘It’s just along here, if it’s open.’ She led him down a few dank steps, tried a heavy handle on an ancient wooden door and smiled as it swung open easily, allowing them into a carved chapel, small and sombre, with dark choir-stalls and a heavy bible on a lectern.

  ‘Henry was married here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how many times.’

  Miller grimaced. ‘He made some habit of it.’

  She laughed quietly. ‘I’m an a
ctress,’ she said. ‘And I was once in a play about the six wives of Henry VIII. It was a very hard-up company and I had to play three of the wives.’ She paused.

  ‘I imagine they weren’t around at the same time.’

  ‘Certainly not on the stage. It helped with the budget of the play.’

  They walked pensively, almost intimately, in step, until they went out to the approach of the palace. The light was fading early. Miller could see Harcourt standing by the car in the distance. ‘I’d like to offer you a lift,’ he said, ‘but Uncle Sam won’t let me.’

  She smiled with a touch of warmth and said: ‘I shouldn’t think he would. Don’t worry. The station is very close.’ They paused and shook hands. ‘I’m in a play at the moment,’ she said. ‘It’s in London but for how long I don’t know. It’s Chekov. The Seagull. If you have a moment, why don’t you come.’

  ‘I’d like that very much. I’m in London most of the time.’

  ‘Come around to the stage door and ask for me, Kathleen Burgess,’ she said. ‘You might tell me if you think the play is as gloomy as I think it is.’

  They shook hands and slowly went their separate paths. He glanced towards her as she walked and she turned and looked back at almost the same moment. She sent him a slightly embarrassed wave and he waved back. It began to rain quietly and she adjusted her headscarf and walked on.

  At ten o’clock in the drab morning they drove through London, on their way to Suffolk. ‘The trouble is, sir,’ said Harcourt, ‘the streets don’t look like the map no more.’

  ‘They’ve been rearranged,’ agreed Miller.

  Both men were reduced to silence by the gutting of London. It was history now but the signs were still there. Solid buildings had become single walls, caverns, deep holes, the outlines of what had been rooms where patterns of wallpaper could still be discerned. ‘All this was three years ago,’ said Miller.

  Harcourt nodded. ‘They cleaned the place since then. Tidied up.’ The bombed acres had long been cleared, buildings buttressed, the skeletal walls that remained now weathered into the landscape. Weeds and even bushes were growing from hollowed chimneys, sky looked through holes. A painted slogan on a brick wall demanded: ‘Second Front Now!’ The words were faded and flaking.

  They went through the City, the business streets, where the damaged buildings showed an affronted dignity. Roofless churches stood with the wind rustling through them; perhaps a single remaining wall with the stone tracery of what had once been a stained-glass window. Some office buildings had been lopped to a single floor but people were still working within. Two men were stoically painting a door red. A street sweeper pushed his brush.

  Before them the dome of St Paul’s rose against the sky like the head of a bald giant. ‘Take a look at that, sir,’ said Harcourt. ‘Still got the roof. I’m going to write home about this.’ He took it in again. ‘If it’s okay with the censor man. That guy cuts out everything except what I get to eat.’

  ‘One day,’ said Miller, ‘they’ll build it all again. Maybe even better. When we beat the Germans.’

  To Americans the enemy were Nazis but Miller called them Germans, as the British did. Hun, a First World War word, was scarcely used now, and Boche even less. Now they were Jerry or the Jerries, it was said because the Wehrmacht soldiers wore a helmet shaped like a jerry – a chamber-pot. Then, at other times, the whole enemy race was labelled by the name of its dictator – Hitler or, familiarly, Adolf.

  ‘Adolf was over last night again,’ said a newspaper seller when they reached London’s East End. ‘That’s every soddin’ night this week he’s been over.’ The grainy-faced man was selling the three London evening newspapers at a penny each. He was sitting on a stool behind an orange box. ‘And last night,’ he jerked his head up the street, ‘the bugger got Clarence Road again. ’E must aim straight for it.’

  Miller left the car and his gaze travelled along the shattered houses. Harcourt watched white-eyed from his driver’s seat. Firemen, with a red engine, were damping down the wreckage. Another fire engine was preparing to leave. Some houses had been entirely demolished, the walls, ceilings and floors left like an open-fronted cupboard. There was a bed hanging as if it were sliding from a shelf, shabby furniture was piled on the pavement. Roofs had caved in, the guts of the people’s homes were hanging out, but a brick chimney stayed staunchly upright. The street was paved with glass, slates and broken bricks, a fountain from a fractured water main spouted almost formally. The air smelt of burning. A postman trudged through the scene, handing a letter and making a comment to an overcoated man sitting round-shouldered on a chair in front of a wrecked house. A woman with a shawl and a shopping basket urged along a toddling child who wanted to splash in the growing puddles; a group of neighbours stood dumbstruck and a frail old man tried to clear the pavement in front of his gate using a dustpan and a hearth brush.

  ‘Six dead,’ sniffed the paper seller. ‘That makes twenty-three in this street altogether in this war. Two brothers, little nippers, five and six, caught it last night, but the old gran, eighty-odd, not a scratch on her when they lugged her out. All she wanted was her teeth.’

  Miller handed him three pennies and the man recited: ‘Star, Mews, Standard,’ as he handed them over. ‘Racing papers,’ he said. ‘All today’s runners.’ He nodded towards the bomb damage. ‘You won’t find no news of this mess,’ he said. ‘They reports that the bombers was over but they won’t let on any more. All the news is about Russia or Italy or some place what you’ve never ’eard of.’ A fire engine backed out of the street, the crew’s faces black, their eyes seeming sightless.

  On a wall was written the same slogan as he’d seen before, in rough, faded paint ‘Second Front Now!’

  Miller asked the newspaper vendor: ‘Who did that?’

  The man half turned. ‘Oh, that,’ he said dismissively. ‘Painted by bleedin’ lefties, wanting to help out their mates in Russia. Wanted us to invade years ago. ’Cept, of course, them buggers didn’t ’ave to do the invading.’

  Miller got back into the car and as they drove he looked at the headlines. ‘Red Army Traps Germans’ … ‘RAF Pounds Berlin’ … ‘Dockers Threaten Strike’.

  They travelled unspeaking, looking at the wide spaces like football pitches in the East End streets, bombed in the Blitz of three years before; ruins that by now had been absorbed into the London landscape, scarcely noticed by the inhabitants.

  ‘My home-town people would never have any idea about this,’ ruminated Miller. He thought of Adele and the Dalmatians.

  ‘No, siree,’ agreed Harcourt. ‘Only pictures in the newspapers or at the movies. It ain’t like being here, seeing it real. In Charleston nobody’s getting killed, getting their houses blown apart.’

  They drove through the bomb-rent suburbs, houses with blanked bay windows, shops with boarded fronts. The inhabitants, wrapped in shabby garments, plodded about their wartime lives. There was a man singing and squeezing an accordion at a corner, only a small dog listening. In a school playground boys with outstretched arms were pretending to be fighter planes.

  They reached the first fields, still solid from winter, wind streaming from the East across frozen mud. It looked like Russia. In the distance rose the masts and funnels of ships in the docks, barrage balloons overlooking them. They passed a convoy of lorries carrying what at first seemed to be tanks. When the vehicles had dropped behind, Harcourt said thoughtfully: ‘We goin’ to fight with wooden tanks, sir?’

  ‘Mock-ups, dummies,’ said Miller. ‘From the air they look the same.’

  ‘Gee, what they goin’ to think of next,’ hummed the driver.

  ‘Don’t you write that to your mom, or the censor will cross it right out.’

  ‘Dummies,’ confirmed Major Al Pitt. He indicated the plywood aircraft shapes spread around the rim of the Suffolk airfield. ‘Just like Pinocchio, all made of wood.’

  He and Miller sat in his Quonset hut office. There was a rusty electric fire glowering o
n the floor and a photograph of his wife on the green metal desk. ‘Gliders,’ he added, ‘… that will never fly. Take a look at the harbours around here – they’re full of boats, landing-craft, cardboard and wood. They’d sink before they floated.’

  ‘And German reconnaissance?’ asked Miller.

  ‘We let ’em come. We’re happy to pose for their pictures. We show them all we’ve got – trick tanks, vehicles, boats. One of the English carpenters even made a nice kennel for his dog. Maybe Goering’s air force will think it’s hiding some kind of secret weapon. It’s a big kennel.’

  ‘And you think they’re fooled?’

  ‘Who can tell? We can only hope to get them in two minds, or more if we can. If they look at this show and think it’s a build-up for a landing in the obvious part of the French coast, in the region of Calais, then that’s okay with us. But maybe it’s a double bluff. Maybe Calais is where the landing will really be. I don’t know. Nobody tells me.’

  He poured Miller a second cup of coffee from a chipped enamel jug. He was ten years older than Miller and weary with the war. ‘But tomorrow it’s for real,’ he said. ‘A real parachute drop.’

  Miller said: ‘The training’s been frustrating?’

  ‘Frustrating? That’s putting it nicely. We’ve got the men and we’ve got the ’chutes but we can’t get them working together. The airspace and the ground space available just ain’t enough, captain. Then we’ve got what the English call weather. If it’s lousy then the bombers from the bases about here can’t fly, but neither can we. When the sun comes out we can’t operate either because they want the airspace.’

  ‘I heard that your men had to drop out of trees.’

  ‘Don’t kill me. Out of fucking trees, out of windows, anything for a jump, or at least playing at it. We’ve had to take them in trucks and push them off the tailgate. That’s an airborne landing! Why couldn’t we have had to invade England from France. Then we’d have more room.’