The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  ‘What will you do, David?’ she said, concern etched on her brow.

  ‘Well, I can’t stay here. And I can’t keep putting you in danger.’ I paused, not knowing what else to say. What was my plan now? But I was still too tired to think straight. For now, all I really wanted was to listen to Katie’s voice. ‘Tell me everything,’ I said. ‘What’s been happening since the bomb went off in London?’

  ‘It’s been awful, the confusion and rumour almost as bad as those terrible pictures we all saw,’ Katie said. ‘It’s thought people in the south-east are still dying, although no one knows for certain. Apparently something called atomic bomb disease is killing them. They can’t stop being sick.’

  She paused, shaking her head, brow furrowed.

  ‘We don’t get much from the radio except rules and regulations. Obviously, the Germans control everything that’s said, and we’re not allowed to go anywhere that’s not essential, so we don’t see many people.’

  I attempted to interrupt.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve been careful.’

  All I heard was the word ‘darling’.

  ‘The farm’s not far and I got here okay. But they’ve also set a strict curfew and there’s even less food available than there was during the war.’ She smiled as she watched me eat a little more, slowly as instructed. ‘But we have our sources. It’s handy being farmers.’ But then her smile faded. ‘All the big cities – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Glasgow – they call them hostage cities, targets. If there was any resistance, of any sort, they say they’ll do to them what they did to London. Every night they recite the list and they don’t allow anyone to forget that they’ll drop more atomic bombs if we don’t do exactly as we’re told.’

  All those MPs who had not been in London on October 3rd had been summoned to Leeds Town Hall, where they were invited to support a motion, unanimously, that Sir Oswald Mosley should be appointed prime minister by ‘King’ Edward VIII, recently returned from the Bahama Islands. Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh MP, had attempted to object but was removed, beaten and apparently imprisoned. This rump parliament had then voted itself out of existence, granting Mosley dictatorial powers. ‘All the Germans wanted,’ said Katie, ‘was someone to sign an armistice. As you know, they like the paperwork to be in order. I’m perfectly sure Mosley takes his instructions directly from Berlin.’

  That was the gist of what she knew, almost all of it from German broadcasts. No newspapers at all had been published. But there was one more thing.

  ‘You remember my Aunt Jenny from St Andrews?’

  Married to a professor of physics, she lived in a wonderful house in Hepburn Gardens and was very convivial. More than once, Katie and I had been invited for drinks and sat in the MacDonalds’ sheltered garden, Jenny bringing trays of gin cocktails and food through the French windows from the kitchen. Barely out of school, raw undergraduates, we were made to feel like sophisticated adults.

  ‘She told my dad on the phone that odd things were going on in St Andrews. Hundreds of SS soldiers had suddenly arrived in trucks, freed from the prisoner-of-war camp over at Comrie. They immediately began fortifying the town, digging trenches right across the first and eighteenth fairways of the Old Course, for goodness’ sake. Uncomfortable, not knowing who might be listening, my dad shushed Jenny and changed the subject. But I did think that was odd.’

  More warming whisky passed between us in the candlelight. We talked of sunlit days as students in St Andrews. Katie had lived in a very grand bedsit in North Castle Street, directly opposite the ruins of the bishop’s castle and close to steps that led down to the narrow beach below it. I had borrowed money from my father to buy tickets for the Union Ball, and to look the part I had also borrowed his dinner jacket and bow tie. ‘My God,’ Katie had snorted, ‘you could get two of you in that!’ In a red silk ballgown, her mother’s pearls and scarlet, film-star lipstick, Katie looked the part. In fact, she looked even better: a real woman, not someone on celluloid. She was glorious – tall, willowy, elegant – and mine.

  ‘Close your mouth, you’ll catch flies,’ she’d said.

  Before walking along the Scores to the Younger Hall and all the buzz and racket of the ball, I asked if she would come down the steps to the beach with me. ‘We won’t go onto the sand, I promise. Just as far as the bottom step.’ We looked out over the North Sea, shivered a little in the evening breeze, and that was when I first told her I loved her.

  ‘What’s that?’ I stood up. ‘I can hear something outside!’ It could have been sheep snuffling around the wooden door at the foot of the spiral staircase, but it was sharper than that. ‘Where did you leave your bicycle?’ I whispered.

  ‘Outside the door, I’m afraid.’

  As quietly as possible, I pulled the shotgun out of its slip, flipped the top lever to break it and pushed in two cartridges. Now we could both definitely hear movement, and it definitely wasn’t sheep. I snuffed out the candle. We heard the scuff of footsteps on the spiral staircase. ‘Stay behind me,’ I whispered.

  Clicking the shotgun closed and thumbing off the safety catch, I knelt down to present a smaller target and aimed at the dark rectangle of the doorway.

  V

  ‘Christ-All-Bloody-Mighty, Wilson!’

  Just as I began to exert pressure on the shotgun’s delicate trigger, the familiar, unique, agricultural bulk of Corporal Angus Wilson filled the doorway. In the darkness, I could not see his face but those coat-hanger shoulders were unmistakable.

  ‘Who’s that behind you?’ I barked, momentarily fearing that it was someone with a pistol jabbed into Wilson’s back.

  ‘Campbell, sir. Private Campbell!’ he said quickly and, from behind this monument to oatmeal, I heard the voice of the man who found the tunnel out of Berwick Barracks. ‘Sorry, sir. Sorry about that.’

  Once Katie had relit the candle, the two men sat gratefully in the window embrasure. ‘I expect you’ve had nothing to eat for a while,’ she said, putting the remains of our collation on the napkin. Having been on the run for five days, they almost wept with thanks. And, as with me, Katie was kind enough to remind them to go slowly. She gave them the last of the cheese and I gave them what was left of the whisky. The fire of the dram made them smack their lips, visibly reviving the two exhausted soldiers. They talked of their escape from Berwick, taking much the same route as I had. Between mouthfuls of food, it was good to hear the soft-spoken accent of the Borders after all the harshness we had listened to in recent weeks. I thought how it was a pleasure to be home, even though a bleak world lay beyond the walls of the tower.

  ‘You should sit here, miss,’ said Wilson, after they had eaten every last crumb. ‘Campbell and me will be happy on the floor.’

  Both slid down the wall, blew out their cheeks, stretched out their aching legs and smiled their thanks. ‘Sorry for bursting in on you, sir.’ Wilson made it sound like he had caught Katie and I in flagrante. ‘But we knew the tower was empty. Or we thought it was. How many made it? Any idea, sir?’

  I shook my head.

  They had both seen the spotter plane and, like me, had kept themselves out of sight during the day and travelled only at night. ‘I just hope that some of them were not daft enough to go home,’ Campbell added.

  ‘None of us can go home now,’ I said.

  On the march north, the thugs who tormented us had no interest at all in who we were; no one ever asked for our papers, and even at Berwick they only counted us each morning. We were no more than numbers. But I had given my name, and I knew the little commandant would have remembered it. He would have had to report the breakout to his superiors, and no doubt suffered them coming down on him like a ton of bricks. For any soldier they recaptured, the Germans would be unhesitatingly brutal in extracting information. And out of a hundred men, some would have been much less careful than Wilson, Campbell and me. Somehow, I needed to get a message to Abbey House, to my father. Until my two comrades appeared, that had not o
ccurred to me, to my shame. I had been too concerned with my own survival to think of my father, all alone, rattling around that big house. Since my mother died, he had talked not about adjusting, about making changes, but the opposite, about continuity. ‘I shall be going nowhere until Father Doran gives me my last rites and the casket is carried across to the abbey,’ he had said. Perhaps Katie could call him to warn him, but that felt like an evasion.

  ‘So, what are we going to do now, sir? Maybe we should talk about it?’ said Campbell. A highly intelligent man, an electrician before he joined the regiment, he also turned out to be resourceful. ‘But we might need a wee bit of help.’ Smiling at us all, he pulled his knapsack onto his lap, undid the buckles and brought out a bottle of whisky.

  In the circle of candlelight, our faces bright against the black darkness behind, we were, I think, at that moment, simply glad to be alive. Stolen from a store behind a grocer’s shop in St Boswells where he once worked as a delivery boy, Campbell’s whisky warmed us.

  Straightening his back, looming large in the light, looking up from under his bushy eyebrows, Wilson repeated the question that continued to hover over us: ‘What should we do, sir?’

  The two soldiers turned and looked at me as though they were waiting for orders. Katie was quiet.

  ‘What can we do? The Germans are holding a gun, or rather a bomb, to everyone’s head,’ I replied.

  Silence settled on us as we stared at the flicker of the candle flame.

  After a time, very quietly, Katie started talking, not to anyone in particular, more as though she was thinking aloud. ‘You are all Borderers. You should remember your history, remember why places like this tower were built. What’s happening now is not really anything new. For centuries English and Scottish armies burned and killed their way across this landscape. What Borderers did then is what you should do now. They endured. You need to do the same. You need to survive. Once you’ve worked out a way to do that, you can think of what to do next.’ She shot me a fierce look, her high cheekbones gaunt in the deep shadows of the candlelight, her lips pursed.

  Katie talked of the riding times, the centuries when families banded together for mutual protection and lived their lives at the point of a spear, becoming what history came to know as the Border Reivers. When war crackled along the southern horizons and distant smoke was seen from the roofwalk outside where we sat, families drove their animals into the hills and hid from foraging, rapacious soldiers. ‘You are all outlaws now,’ she said, ‘and you will need to find a way of living, surviving, beyond the reach of those who are hunting you.’

  As the whisky bottle was passed round and we risked a second candle, the stone chamber seemed less chill. We talked of fighting spirit, of how the Borderers had distinguished themselves in battle again and again. In the regiment there was a distinctive, thrawn, can-do sense of independence. Suddenly, an unlikely example swam into my head.

  ‘Do you remember Private Sinclair, Willie Sinclair?’ I asked Wilson and Campbell.

  ‘Aye, sir, not the sharpest knife in the box’.

  ‘True, but he did have a bit of spirit. He used all his leave to go back home to Coldstream to look after his old mother. Do her garden, chop logs, all that sort of thing.’

  I could see from Campbell and Wilson’s widening smiles that they remembered the story I was about to tell, but Katie had not heard it. ‘One afternoon in Berwick, I saw him in civvies with his suitcase waiting for the bus to Coldstream in Golden Square. When I pointed out to him that he was half an hour early, he puffed out his chest: “Aye, sir. But it won’t take me long to wait half an hour.” Now that’s the kind of spirit we need.’

  After a little more whisky, I could see that Wilson and Campbell were at the end of any energy they had left. They knew it, too, and as a strange version of decorum circulated in their heads, they levered themselves upright, saying they would find a corner in the chamber below.

  When they were gone, I said to Katie, ‘It’s probably . . .Well, it really is too late and too dangerous for you to cycle home through the dark tonight. Isn’t it?’

  She was enjoying my discomfiture, smiling, cocking her head to one side, waiting for me to blunder on with this hesitant invitation to sleep with me. Even though there was no bed and we could see our breath plume into the air around the candle flame.

  ‘And don’t worry. I’ll keep my distance.’

  Still she said nothing.

  ‘Anyway, you said I had a certain aroma.’

  After a few seconds that seemed to stretch into an eternity, she raised an eyebrow and then took my hands. ‘Listen, you idiot, I’m not going anywhere. Not without you. Anyway, it’s bloody cold and we both need a hot water bottle, even a smelly one.’

  Keeping our coats on and covered by Katie’s mother’s cashmere, we lay like spoons on the straw, my face inches from her hair. With my arm pulling her close, I hoped the moment would last forever, but we fell asleep almost immediately.

  ‘Charming’ was the word that woke me. Katie was looking out of the window at Wilson and Campbell urinating off the edge of the crag the tower perched on.

  ‘And bloody stupid!’ I said, running down the spiral staircase to get them out of sight.

  Moments later, Katie wheeled her bicycle down to the wrought-iron gate to the eastern track. We had agreed that she would ask her father for his help. We could not risk another night in the tower. Someone was bound to notice activity and toing and froing around a place that was supposedly uninhabited. Would it be possible for the three of us to spend the night at her father’s farm, in the hay barn, before moving on? And could I please use the telephone?

  *

  Having been beaten very badly, the four prisoners were scarcely able to walk.

  With their hands tied behind their backs, they stumbled up the steep steps of the Guild Hall in the Marygate, not far from Berwick Barracks. The guards pushed and kicked at them until they reached the top. If any could still see through the bleeding mess of their faces, they would have made out the shape of a gallows set up just below the top step. On a cross beam, four nooses had been tied. The Germans dragged the soldiers into a line to face the crowd that had been forcibly marshalled in the street below. There was a hushed, horrified silence as the little commandant stood forward and shouted.

  ‘These men were prisoners of war and they escaped from the barracks. They were, of course, quickly recaptured. Resistance of this sort is useless and you would all do much better to cooperate. Do not forget what you are about to see. Tell everyone you know what you see today. Everyone! Heil Hitler!’

  The guards hung a sign on each of the men: Our wives and children are all dead because of us.

  And then as the commandant walked behind the row of prisoners, a noose was tightened around their necks. So that this grisly spectacle lasted as long as possible, he booted each man in turn off the step to swing and suffer an agonising death. The crowd gasped at the long minutes of choking, wriggling on the end of the rope, scrabbling to get a foothold back on the top step, each soldier finally pissing himself while the others waited and watched. After about half an hour, this obscene spectacle ended. The gallows and the bodies hanging from the crossbeam were left standing for seven days as the gulls circled above them.

  *

  ‘No, David. I am going nowhere, and that’s an end of it. We’ve been here for centuries and if these appalling people think . . .’

  ‘Dad,’ I cut in, ‘please. Listen to me. They are coming. They’ll come for you soon. Because they want to find me, because they’ll think you know where I am. They’ll beat you and probably worse. Please, please, Dad, you have to leave.’

  Katie’s father had kindly let me use his telephone but, understandably anxious about nosey operators listening in, he warned me not to be too long.

  ‘No. I will not leave, and if they do come, they won’t get in without a fight.’

  I was despairing. ‘Okay. Then please do one thing for me. Put some water an
d some food in the priest hole, and if they bang on the door in the middle of the night, hide there.’

  Both Jacobites and Catholics, my family had survived persecution in the long and dangerous centuries before emancipation, and next to a grand fireplace was a very cleverly concealed hiding place for a priest. Reluctantly, my father agreed to do as I asked, muttering something about being a rat in a trap, before hanging up.

  Although we rarely agreed on very much, my father and I were closer than we had ever been. But that was not saying much. When I was eleven, I can remember sitting at the top of the main staircase in Abbey House, looking through the bannister as my parents held their Christmas drinks party for tenants and neighbours. I think my father must have drunk too much whisky, for I heard him talking a little louder than usual to two friends. Loud enough for me to hear every word. He was complaining about someone, saying they were faint-hearted, weak, perhaps a little effeminate and, even worse, uninterested in the important things in life, like family, the land and the church. After a few moments it dawned on me that the person who had disappointed him so much was me. He was talking about me. Shocked and winded at my own father running me down, his only son, in front of two friends, not even members of our family, I never forgot those words of betrayal, and I never told my mother, or my father, that I had heard them coming out of his mouth.

  Away at school, I enjoyed languages – German, French, Latin and Greek – something my father could not begin to understand. ‘Useless, simply useless. Complete waste of time.’ Looking back, I think part of the reason I enjoyed learning about other cultures, and how they viewed the world, was an unconscious reaction to my father’s disapproval. The person he talked to his friends about was clearly not good enough, but in German or French, I could adopt an alternative identity, be someone else. And the truth is that I also took those subjects precisely because of my father’s disapproval of them. When our modern languages master said I had the best German accent and pronunciation he had ever heard from a non-native speaker, the transformation was complete. Although I did not realise it at the time, I had found another person I could be, someone who was not faint-hearted, weak, effeminate and disappointing.