One warm day, Pudsey gives them a basket containing bread, cheese and two bottles of ginger beer and tells them to ‘get theirselves away up above’ for a picnic. Rosie and John push breathless Mam up the path, while Jean runs on ahead with the twins. Mam lies on the heather, plump and pink, thanking the Lord for the blessed relief of getting the weight off her feet. She looks beautiful, her fair hair spread out, the brightness of the sun blotting out the lines on her face. She pats the heather. ‘Come on, Rosie. It’s like the best sprung mattress.’
Lying there together, Mam takes Rosie’s hand and rests it on her belly. ‘Feel that! He’s kicking, my big, strong boy.’ A ripple of movement tickles across Rosie’s palm. ‘Alexander, I’m going to call him. There’s no one to stop me, here.’ She turns her face to her daughter and smiles so happily Rosie feels tears behind her eyes. Poor Mam. Da had point-blank refused to go along with the fancy names she’d wanted for them all. Theodore, Vanessa, Winston, Laetitia. She could have been Laetitia!
‘Alexander’s a nice name,’ she says.
Alf runs up with a few crinkled whinberries. He feeds them to Mam one by one and a little pearl of dark red juice trickles down from the side of her mouth.
The weather’s colder a fortnight later when John and Rosie, herding sheep into a pen one Sunday morning, see a curl of smoke rise from the lane below. They run a little way down the path and see it comes from a car, apparently broken down. A figure detaches itself from the vehicle and starts up the road. Rosie watches the tiny shape move forward and catches her breath. ‘It’s Da,’ she says. Neither of them can bear to tell Mam, peeling potatoes in the kitchen. Instead, they watch Da advance up the lane and through the gate, swinging a tin can in one hand.
Pudsey comes out of the barn, rubbing muck off his hands with straw. He looks at the children and then their father. Da, keeping his eyes on the farmer, dips the tin can into the cattle trough.
‘Problems with your car?’ Pudsey enquires.
Da sets down the filled can and walks a little nearer. ‘Hole in the radiator,’ he says. ‘I’ve come for my family.’
The two men face each other. Da’s shorter but stronger looking, dark and fierce. Pudsey looks soft-boiled in comparison. ‘What about the bombs?’ he says.
‘There are no bombs.’ Da flicks his eyes over John and Rosie. ‘Get your Mam. And get packed up.’
That was the end of it. Pudsey walks them to the gate and even gives Da an egg for the radiator. They trail down the lane with Da carrying the can, John the suitcase, and Rosie leading the crying twins. Only Jean is pleased to be going home.
Da’s in a foul temper all right, muttering about the ‘dirty menashin’, who’d seen them off with a triumphant ‘I told you they were gypsies!’ to her husband. Rosie knows he’d have hated having to find out where they were, hated the exposure involved, and the expedition would have been expensive for him, too. Though he buys and sells cars, Da never keeps one to drive himself. But at least he doesn’t shout at Mam, probably realising she’s now almost completely safe inside the protective shell of late pregnancy. Instead, he blames Rosie for the whole thing; for tricking him, for forcing him to fend for himself, for the terrible sin of leaving kin for a life with gadgies. ‘Ye could have put a stop to her nonsense. It was up to ye.’
The twins cheer up when they see the car, and the novelty of actually getting in and being driven sustains them through the whole tortuous journey, which takes four hours because the egg only half works and they have to keep stopping for water. It’s after blackout by the time they get back to Gateshead and Rosie has to strain to see the white markings on the road to guide her father. She has a terrible headache by the time he drops them at home and goes off somewhere into the night with the car.
Up the back steps they go, past Mrs Wainwright’s washing and Mr Pole’s door, seeping its old man smell. Looking out of the window the next morning, Rosie thinks you’d never know there’s a war going on, because this Gateshead looks exactly the same as the town they’d left.
In the months that follow, Rosie’s time in Middleton shrinks in her mind to the size of a photograph, its people small faces you have to bring close to your face to recall. It becomes a moment of light, frozen, before the shutter clicks and the square goes black.
2
Falmouth, 5 March 1942
It took a count of six to cover the ten feet between the oil tank and the shelter of the wall. Philip shone his torch at his watch: 04.20 hrs. Shit. Two minutes behind. Tucker joined him, breathing hard.
‘Strang’s copped it,’ he said.
Automatic gunfire burst out again, but off-target, well to the left of them. Did that mean they’d got here unseen? Got to get on, got to make up the time. Philip peered around the edge of the wall and then stood up, shouldering the heavy pack: 04.21. Start counting. He ran the distance in thirty, found the stairway, ducked down the first few steps and waited for Tucker. Thirty-nine, forty. A searchlight swooped across the opening and a machine gun opened up.
A voice screamed out: ‘You’re hit, Tucker… Lie down!’
Revise plans, think, think… Philip started down the steps fast, too fast, stumbling in the darkness; the weight of his pack nearly threw him down the stairwell. How many steps gone? Christ, forgot to count. Twenty? Must be twenty. Can’t see a thing. He went on down the steps until his feet hit the level floor. Left turn. Just ahead, the turbines and the pumping gear. Yes. Philip shone his torch on to his wrist. 04.24. Eight minutes. He couldn’t do it. Revise plans. Okay. Just the big one. He hefted off his pack and pulled out the packages of plasticine, the detonators and the cordtex. Seven minutes to lay the charges and get out. Four hundred and twenty seconds. One, two, three…
He began moulding the stuff to the first big casting joint, but his torch skittered away. Swinging round to retrieve it, he smashed his forehead against hard metal. Christ! He moved on to the next joint. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one.
The quiet around him deepened. Whatever happened up there, down here his fingers must dance their delicate routine around the joints, keeping time with the numbers mounting in his head. At three hundred and fifty he ran out the cordtex, connected the charges to the main ring and counted a further twenty to check his work, flicking the torch beam quickly over the machinery. Okay. Looked okay. He picked up his pack, pulled the pins and charged full pelt for the stairs. Fifty to get up. Lift those fucking legs!
At the top, Tucker’s white face loomed out of the gloom.
‘Get your head down.’
Both men crouched, covering their heads.
Four hundred and nineteen, four hundred and twenty. Four hundred and twenty-one. Philip looked up. The stars in the night sky had faded a little with the first pale wash of dawn. ‘Mission accomplished, I hope. Why aren’t you dead anyway?’
Tucker tapped his thigh. ‘Only a leg wound. Got permission to proceed with you to the assembly point.’
‘Any more guns?’
‘They seem to have fucked off somewhere else.’
‘Let’s go then.’
‘Hang about. Being as I’m injured, hadn’t you better carry my pack?’
‘How about a tourniquet? A nice tight one?’
They jogged the last 500 yards to the embarkation assembly point, located behind one of the large storage tanks littering the dockyard. Their CO, Jimmy Burns, emerged from the shadows, stopwatch in hand. ‘Where’s number three?’
‘Caught in enemy fire, lock gate two,’ said Tucker.
Burns wrote something in a small notebook, tucked his pencil inside and shut it. ‘Report 06.00 hours,’ he said, and walked away.
Philip flung himself down on the cold concrete. Tucker, limping convincingly, sat down beside him. There would be no embarkation today, of course. The exercise finished, they now had an hour to kill before the debriefing, while another commando team inspected the work. Time to wind down, if that was possible. Philip turned his collar up against the breeze,
punched his pack into some semblance of a pillow, and lay back.
Footsteps. The outline of a man coming towards them. A large man, broad-shouldered. Anderson. Philip tensed. The fastest and strongest man in the six-strong demolition squad, Anderson would be on his usual mission to find out who’d ballsed up. He loved to crow. Philip closed his eyes but Anderson’s voice intruded. ‘Make it in time?’ he said.
‘Just,’ said Philip.
‘Looks like we’re the only survivors from our lot.’ Anderson grinned, his teeth big and white in the dim light.
‘Matter of fact, I’m bleeding to death,’ said Tucker.
‘Where’s Murray?’
‘I dunno. Off writing a poem somewhere, I expect.’
Philip was still counting. Sometimes it took him half an hour to stop. He woke up in the night counting, counted stairs, seagulls, boats, his own breaths.
‘It won’t be as hard as that really,’ Tucker said. ‘They’re just trying to put the wind up. Keep us on our toes. Don’t you reckon?’
Anderson still loitered. ‘Oh could be a lot worse than that, Tucks, me old China.’
A hundred and eight. Sadistic bastard. A hundred and nine… ‘Thought of joining the Spanish Inquisition, Anderson? Your talents are wasted in the British Army.’
‘Mr Educated. Better off back at university, you’d be.’
Tucker intervened. ‘All right, all right. Don’t start bloody arguing, you two. I’m trying to get some sleep.’
‘Night night, then. Sweet dreams.’ Anderson paused for a reaction, and not getting one, wandered off towards the harbour wall.
‘When did Strang drop out?’ Tucker asked.
‘02.16.’ Philip knew Strang was getting jumpy. Well, they all were. He hoped Anderson wouldn’t find Strang.
Tucker said, ‘I don’t reckon it’s going to be as hard as that. Do you?’
‘Let’s get a bit of sleep before the post mortem.’
‘Then we can go back to the digs for breakfast. Get Rosie to do us a fry up.’
‘Is that her name? You’re a fast worker.’
‘Not the time to hang about it, is it?’ said Tucker, settling himself for sleep, head propped on his pack, hands clasped on his chest. He just needed a dog curled under his feet to be the picture of a plump medieval knight on his tomb.
Philip closed his eyes. Despite the chill his body still felt warm from its exertions and he should have been able to sleep. But his imagination got to work. Tucker hit, his eyes wide and terrified, blood pumping from a huge wound. You’d just have to go on: helping jeopardised the mission and endangered everyone else. ‘If you were hit,’ Philip said aloud, ‘I’d want to help. You know that, don’t you?’
Tucker said nothing.
‘Tucker? Edmund? Anybody there?’
Philip sat up and rummaged in his pockets for a cigarette. The counting still whispered in his head, but for a second or two he felt elated. He’d done it. If it went like this on the day, he’d get back. Though nothing had been said, all the indications were that day would be soon, the move yesterday down to Falmouth pretty obviously the final stage of their training. He lit a cigarette, inhaled and blew out a long snake of smoke, his brief sense of triumph dispersing.
If only the Brits could defeat the Germans somewhere, any old where, but collapse followed defeat on all fronts, increasing the pressure that it was somehow up to you to do something about it. The news a fortnight ago of the loss of Singapore had made everyone desperate to get on with it. But get on with what? Not fighting the Japs, he felt sure about that. It would be France, surely. One of the ports, chock-full of Nazis with big guns.
The worst part was the sense that everyone else relied on you to do your bit. He knew he’d cock it up; let everybody down. His heart began to thump fast in his chest. Control it. He pulled back his shoulders, took some deep breaths, scanned the horizon for an object to focus on. He had disciplined himself to do this; to find something and drill into it with such intensity of thought that it drove back panic.
Beyond the docks lay the dark sprawl of the town, and rising into the sky, a church spire… In the Gothic style. Early fifteenth-century perhaps. Concentrate. Concentrate.
A child again, Philip leads Abel, Davy and Will up the winding stairs of the bell tower. He can hardly believe that he’s got them here, playing his game. Now, halfway up, he pauses, pivots, and looks down. Their uncertain faces moon up at him. ‘Watch the step here,’ he says.
When he’d found them earlier, scuffing up the dust around the old marble horse trough, they hadn’t been friendly. Well, Abel was never friendly.
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Got any sweets?’
‘No.’
‘You can tell yer dad from me that he’d better keep his sermon short Sunday. I damn near died of boredom last week.’
They’d all turned to stare at Philip.
‘Are you going to play cricket? I’ll field for you if you like.’
‘Nah. Got no ball, have we?’
So something had happened to the ball, something he was expected to know about. They’d watched him, like cats waiting to pounce.
The idea had just come to him, like magic. ‘We could go down to the church—’
‘What for? Get enough of that tomorrow.’
‘There’s some new bells…’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘You can climb up…’
Now they follow Philip up the winding stone stairs of the bell tower, placing their sandals carefully in the worn grooves. Some of the floor of the bell room has mouldered away, but it’s solidly boarded up to a distance of about four feet from the staircase, and the men who replaced the bells have left several planks spanning the joists. Lying on one of these and wriggling forward, you can just reach out to touch the nearest bell. Philip’s done this several times before. He often comes up here on his own.
The three boys cluster together on the patch of floor. They stare at Philip as he lies down and starts to edge along the plank. On either side of his body, there is a drop of sixty feet or so down to the room the bell-ringers use. But he isn’t frightened. Lying on the plank, he can see the stone walls and, in one of the narrow windows, a neat round construction of grass and mud. A martin’s nest.
He reaches the end and peers down. Far below, it seems, the pale new ropes hang down. Philip lets go of the plank with one hand, stretches his arm towards the smooth curve of the bell, and with the tips of his fingers touches the gleaming metal. He strains towards it, trying to push it. The bell refuses to move, but the plank lifts slightly at the other end.
‘Look out, Seymour,’ Abel hisses.
Philip edges back along the plank and stands up.
‘Can I go next?’ Will looks at Abel.
‘Go on then.’
Will’s eyes are bright. He lies down on the plank, gripping its edges with his hands and knees. Then he squirms his wiry body quickly along to the end. An undone shoelace dangles into space. Clamping his red knees even tighter, Will lets go of the wood with one hand. It wavers in the air for a moment, and is then brought sharply back to the plank. Will wriggles back and gets up, flushed and grinning. ‘It’s dead scary, that.’
Davy’s turn. He doesn’t go so far along as Will, and when he gets up his face is white.
All eyes are on Abel as he lies on the plank. Larger and heavier than the others, it seems to bend a little beneath him. Slowly, Abel draws up his legs to move forwards. He hesitates for a moment and then abruptly shifts backwards and stands up.
‘What’s the point? It’s boring.’
Triumphantly, Philip leads them down the steps to the vestry. Nobody had gone along as far as he had. Only he had touched the bell…
Philip felt himself smile at the memory of his brief victory on the plank. He didn’t want to think about afterwards. It was good that he had this knack of making the past blot out the present, and perhaps the pictures he conjured up were signifi
cant. He had been brave then, on the plank, braver than any of them.
Tucker groaned and sat up. ‘Fucking hell!’ He scratched his head vigorously. ‘Give us a fag, Phil. I’ve had this fucking horrible dream.’
‘Another one?’ Philip handed over the pack and looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go until the briefing. Nine hundred seconds.
‘What was it about then, your dream?’ Philip started counting.
3
Falmouth, 8 March 1942, morning
There was always a new rumour going round. First France, then West Africa, now Norway. Tucker had gone over the possibilities endlessly the previous evening. They were still talking about it when Jimmy Burns came to the door with a message, cancelling training and instructing them report to St Stephen’s Church Hall in the town at 10.00 hours. Some chap was coming down from London to talk to them all. Tucker dusted toast crumbs from his jerkin.
‘There. See? I knew they’d have to spill the beans after Wednesday. About bloody time somebody told us what was going on. I bet you it’s Norway.’
‘It’s probably the Reichstag.’
‘The what?’
‘The parliament building. In Berlin.’
Tucker considered for a minute. ‘Nah. It wouldn’t be that. Wouldn’t be doing all this bloody swimming if it was that…’
Irony was wasted on Tucker. ‘A lot more sinking than swimming, lately.’
Today, as on the previous two days, they had been due to practise leaping from a bobbing rowing boat on to a sandbank – wearing full packs, of course. Only Anderson could do it without falling into three feet of cold seawater, so in real conditions most of them would drown.
‘Perhaps he’s coming to tell us it’s all off,’ said Tucker. The two men looked at each other for a moment. Rosie, the landlord’s niece, came in to clear the plates. She wore a flowered apron and her hair was in a long dark plait down her back. Smiling shyly, she addressed Tucker.
The War Before Mine Page 2