Snow was falling on the river Maas, drifting before Steve’s eyes in huge irregular flakes that settled on his eyelashes and drifted gently down onto tanks, TCV’s and every uniformed figure in sight until everything he could see was blotched and patched in a wintry piebald. It was November and bitterly cold, the flat Dutch polders needled with frost and the roads that traversed them treacherous with ice.
For the past ten days the battalion had been at rest, billeted with the Dutch and usually inside in the warm, unless they were on outpost duty or servicing their vehicles or taking in supplies. Steve had spent most of his leisure time writing letters, for Barbara had written to him every day, long rather muddled epistles telling him about her working day, and how she couldn’t believe she would never see Norman again, and that she was still living with Aunt Sis, and what a waste war was, and how she’d gone dancing with Betty and then felt guilty about it afterwards ‘so soon after the funeral’. Squashed at the end of her first letter she’d added a postscript that made him ache with pity for her.
I am sorry to go on and on like this but I got to tell someone and if you were here I would tell you. If that upset you just tell me and I won’t do it again. Only I’ve done it this time, so that’s a bit late but you know what I mean.
He wrote back at once to reassure her, saying that she must tell him everything and that it didn’t upset him. ‘Far from it’ But answering her letters was more difficult. In that first long letter he’d said all he could bear to say about death, and now he was stuck for words.
In the long slog across France he’d found all sorts of ways to offer comfort to his mates – a fag lit and handed across, a sympathetic thump on the back, sometimes just a companionable silence – but they were all actions. If he could have seen her, it would have been easier. He could have put his arms round her and stroked her face and kissed her and that would have told her everything. Now he felt he was repeating himself, no matter how hard he tried to comfort her, using the same worn phrases over and over again.
He told her he was glad she was back at work, approved when she said she was staying with Aunt Sis for a bit longer. ‘I know she’s untidy but she’s a marvellous politician and a doughty fighter in a good cause. I wish there were more like her.’ And when she wrote to say that she’d been dancing with Betty again, he sensed that she was worried about it and applauded that too. ‘She’s a good kid, our Betty, even if she’s as bad as I am on the dance floor. Don’t tell her I said so or she’ll give me what-for. Have fun anyway, when you can.’
Not that there was much fun in his own life. On the ninth rest day they were issued with winter uniforms – leather jackets for the infantry and multi-zippered snow suits for the tankies – so, like it or not, it was obvious they would soon be on the move again. They were war-weary and winter-weary and seriously below strength, and to make matters worse an order called ‘Python’ had come through to inform them that troops who had served overseas for more than five years were to be allowed home.
Dusty was disgruntled to hear it. ‘I could ha’ done with another ten days’ rest,’ he complained. ‘Never mind goin’ home. Some bleeders have all the luck.’
‘Stop bellyaching, you miserable old bugger,’ Steve said. ‘They’ve earned it, all they’ve been through. All across Africa an’ all the way up Italy and now this. You’d cut off PDQ if it was you.’
Dusty had to agree with that but he was still discontented. ‘What are they gonna do with the rest of us?’ he grumbled. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’ The battalion had taken so many casualties that it was down to a third of its original number – a fact that neither of them cared to think about too often.
‘Here’s Sergeant Morris,’ Steve said, squinting at the bulky figure trudging towards them through the curtain of snowflakes. ‘Ask him.’
‘Reorganisation,’ the sergeant told them. ‘The three Queen’s regiments are being amalgamated. We’re all being informed tonight.’
‘An’ what’s happening to us?’ Dusty wanted to know.
‘We’re being joined up with the 9th Durham Light Infantry and the 2nd Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment. Good lads.’
That was better news. But Dusty accepted it grudgingly. ‘Not before time.’
‘Wasn’t what I come over for though,’ the sergeant went on. ‘You’ve waylaid me. No, what it is, I got a notification for Private Wilkins. Official.’ And when Steve took the envelope looking puzzled, ‘It’s your promotion come through, old son. You’re being made corporal. Changes all round, you see.’
‘Corp, eh?’ Dusty said when the sergeant was out of earshot. ‘Jammy bugger!’
‘It’s my hard-earned reward’, Steve said, ‘for putting up with you all these months.’ But although he joked about it, he was proud to be promoted. It was something to write home about. Unfortunately the 9th Durham Light Infantry were driving into camp even as he spoke, so there was no more time for letters. It was all action.
They took to the road at daybreak the next day, back to the familiar pattern of fear and tension, action and reaction. It was a dark, damp, depressing morning. The rising sun was watery yellow and tentative. It flushed the horizon with the faintest pink which faded in five minutes, and once risen it diminished in size and colour until it was simply a dull white disc in a sky the colour of dirty bandages. To the north, where woods rustled and brooded, snow still covered the tops of the pine trees with a white fringe, but it had melted everywhere else, and the roads they travelled were awash with slush and mud from one embankment to the other. To the south there was so much surface water on the polders that they looked like sheets of lead and the dykes that divided them were sullen grey and swollen. It was going to be a hard slog. But at least this time they were up to strength and had two formidable new weapons to support them, a tank adapted to clear mines with long whirling flails and another that was reputed to be capable of throwing out a tongue of flame a hundred yards long.
As Dusty said, ‘Can’t wait to see that.’
The first went into action almost at once. They hadn’t made more than half a mile before the leading tanks ran into soggy ground. Two were so badly bogged down, that the remainder were ordered to find firmer ground. And that turned out to be a minefield. Two tanks were knocked out instantly, a third was hit by a 75-millimetre, and at that point, the flails were ordered in to clear the mines. They did it in sensational fashion, blazing along the edge of the field, long flails whirling and touching off mines as they progressed, the noise and colour of the explosions highly dramatic in the grey of the day.
Steve and Dusty and their mates watched it with great satisfaction, but then the first skirmish began and the attack was too immediate for them to watch out for anything except their backs. There was a sudden purple flash, then a call to halt and take cover, and then shells came screaming towards them out of the woods.
A hundred yards ahead, the surviving tanks had halted too and one was blazing away with Besa tracer, left and right, up and down, blasting the whole of the front of the wood. Beads of fire sprayed at the trees, struck them and whirled off again. Steve and his mates lay where they’d landed behind the embankment with their weapons ready and pointing at the trees, as bursts of enemy tracer sailed, a hundred feet up, over their heads.
There was an officer crawling along the embankment towards them, yelling to them to keep their heads down, and as he approached, a sniper’s bullet sliced off the metal pip on his left shoulder. Seconds later one of Steve’s troop was hit in the hand. Glancing back he could see blood jetting over the stock of the man’s rifle and heard him groan as he slipped into the mud.
‘Too bloody close!’ he muttered as he began to wriggle back to his casualty. Bullets were thumping into the earth all round them and he checked their trajectory automatically, realised that they were coming from a nearby tree and looked up to see a familiar grey-green shape among the bare branches with its rifle cocked towards them. The casualty would have to wait. ‘Sniper!’ he yelled. ‘Two o’clock!’ Then things happened at speed and in confusion, as he and the troop let off a volley of fire. The sniper was wounded but struggled to stay aloft, was hit again and fell. And then there was an outburst of machine-gun fire from the distant woods that had them all scrambling back behind the embankment.
Steve was pleased to note that he was still calm. He took out the wounded man’s field dressing and bound up his hand. ‘It’s a clean wound,’ he told him. ‘You’ll be out of it now. Back to Blighty.’
‘Thanks, corp. D’you get him?’
‘Yep. Won’t shoot anyone else.’
But the fire from the woods had them pinned down and that was getting worse. It was coming from a concrete pill-box they could just see at the edge of the wood.
‘Now what, corp?’ Dusty said.
Steve was trying to work it out. The machine gunners had a good range and there was no cover apart from the embankment, so it would be suicidal to run out into the field, and although they could lob a few grenades, they wouldn’t do enough damage unless they could get them through the door. But before he could answer, the flame thrower had arrived and was in spectacular action.
The flame it threw was a hundred yards long and spurted from the gun like a dragon’s tongue, bright yellow and scorching everything in its path. They could feel the heat of it from where they crouched, smell the wood burning, hear the roar as it engulfed the pill-box. Dark figures tumbled out into the wood, some on fire and screaming. And the guns were silenced. It was the most dramatic thing Steve and Dusty had ever seen. As they told one another much later that evening, standing by the leaguered tanks, smoking and chatting like the old comrades they were.
‘S’been a fair old day, all in all,’ Dusty observed. ‘Snow’s stopped. Jerries retreated. Them flame throwers worked a treat. We shan’t have so much nonsense with the buggers now. They was giving up in droves. How many prisoners did we take, d’you reckon?’
‘’Bout forty.’
Dusty gloated. ‘That’s the style. Lock ’em all up, rotten bleeders.’
They smoked in silence for a minute or two, looking out over the flat dark countryside. I’ve not done too badly, Steve thought, for my first day as corporal.
‘’Nother day gone,’ Dusty said.
‘Marked off?’
‘Yep.’
‘How many’s that?’
‘Five months, two weeks and three days,’ Dusty said with great satisfaction, and began to sing. ‘Oh eleven more months an’ eight more days I’ll be out of the calaboose. Eleven more months and eight more days they’re going to turn me loose.’
Home, Steve thought, and remembered it suddenly, with a yearning that cramped his guts. Warm chairs by a warm fire, the smell of bacon frying, the wireless playing. The High Street full of crowds, the row of shops, Dad’s tobacconist’s, Mum’s butcher’s. The Town Hall. Barbara running down the steps holding his hand. Barbara in bed with those white arms round his neck pulling him closer …
There was a muffled roar from somewhere in the distance, immediately followed by three more in quick succession.
‘What the hell’s that?’ Dusty said, as they both turned to look.
Across the river, in German-held territory, four white vapour trails were climbing the sky, two to the left, two to the right.
‘Ack-ack?’ Steve wondered. But there were no explosions. The trails simply went on climbing, higher and higher, forming four white parabolas in the ink-black sky. They couldn’t be buzzbombs because they flew straight, once they’d been launched. They weren’t planes either because they were climbing too fast. But if they weren’t bombs or planes, what the hell were they? There was something sinister about that long trajectory heading out to sea.
‘Some sort of gun,’ Steve decided, being practical. ‘Long range. They’re testing it.’
‘Good job they ain’t firing at us,’ Dusty observed. ‘That’s all I got to say.’
But London was on the other side of the Channel. Oh Christ! They couldn’t be firing at London, could they?
They watched until the vapour trails faded and disappeared.
‘Ah well!’ Dusty said, stubbing out his cigarette under the toe of his boot. ‘We shall know soon enough. I’m for a spot of shut-eye.’
Sis and Barbara sat up late that evening too, although they hadn’t intended to. Sis had a lot of Union letters to catch up with and took down her writing box as soon as the cloth was cleared. Barbara made up the fire, and sat in the armchair beside it, to darn her stockings and sew a button on her blouse. Then she was at a loss to know what to do next.
‘I s’pose I really ought to tidy up some of your papers,’ she said, gazing into the fire. ‘I keep tellin’ Steve thass what I’m here for.’
‘You could try that lot on the sideboard,’ Sis suggested, without looking up. ‘The file labelled Beveridge Report. The dog-eared one. It’s mostly newspaper cuttings. I’ve been meaning to get it sorted for ages.’
‘How d’you want it done?’
‘Chronological,’ Sis said. ‘There’s dates on most of ’em, somewhere or other.’
So the file was discovered and the sorting out began, with the date rewritten in red ink in the top right-hand corner of each cutting, ‘so’s you can see it’.
At first Barbara simply restored order without looking at any of the documents. But then she discovered that one of them was a letter.
‘You don’t want this in with the articles, do you?’ she asked.
Sis didn’t look up. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a letter to The Times.’’
‘Who from?’
Barbara looked at the signatories. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York and the Archbishop of Westminster, and the Moderator of the Free Church Council.’
This time Sis looked at her. ‘Five agreed standards for social organisation after the war,’ she quoted and grinned. ‘I should just say I do. Your Steve gave me that. Read it.’
So, as it was Steve’s gift, Barbara sat on her heels and read the list. It was a considerable surprise, for although two of the items on it were what she would have expected from a group of churchmen, that a ‘sense of a divine vocation must be restored to man’s daily work’ and that ‘the resources of the earth should be used as God’s gift to the whole human race, and used with due consideration for the needs of the present and future generations’, the other three were not.
‘Thass amazing,’ she said as she read.
Sis grinned at her again. ‘What is?’
‘They want to change the world. They say we ought to do away with “extreme inequality in wealth and possessions”. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? And they want every child to have – what is it? – “equal opportunities for the development of his peculiar capacities”.’
‘Quite right,’ Sis said. ‘At the moment the only kids who get to grammar school are the bright ones who win scholarships and the ones with rich parents who can afford the fees, whether they’re bright or not. That’s unfair and wasteful.’
The implication of what she was saying made Barbara feel as though her head were swelling. ‘So what they’re saying is, if you win a place at the grammar school, they think you ought to take it?’
‘’Course. That’s obvious.’
‘I won a place an’ didn’t take it,’ Barbara confessed. ‘Pa wouldn’t let me. He said he couldn’t afford it.’
‘That don’t surprise me,’ Sis said, with sympathy. ‘I knew you’d got a good head on your shoulders. So there you are, you can see what a waste it was.’
‘Yes.’
‘So what we got to do is win this election an’ see it never happens again.’
‘How would you do that? I mean, if they can’t afford it, they can’t an’ thass all there is to that.’
‘See that they earn a good wage for a start. Then they’d be more able to afford it. That’s one way. An’ if the kid wins a scholarship, it should win a grant at the same time.’
That seemed a wonderful idea to Barbara. ‘If there’d been a grant when I was eleven I could have gone,’ she said. ‘But wouldn’t that cost a lot of money?’
‘Waste costs a lot of money,’ Sis told her. ‘You leave a house without repairs and in the end it turns into a slum and you have to pull it down and build a new one. Which is another thing we got to do.’
‘What? Rebuild the slums?’
‘Pull ’em all down, the whole damn kit and caboodle, and start afresh. We got a head start in the East End, thanks to Hitler. One bomb on a terrace in that neck a’ the woods an’ they all fell down like a pack of cards. Jerry-built you see, nasty bug-ridden hovels. Not fit for human habitation. People live in some terrible places in this country, more shame to us. Houses with no running water, dirty little earth closets out the back, bugs in the wallpaper, black beetles. Nobody should have to live like that.’
‘No,’ Barbara agreed, remembering the North End. ‘Slums should be pulled down.’ And she thought what a difference it would have made to her life if she’d grown up in a place like Childeric Road.
‘Decent home,’ Sis said. ‘That’s the basis of a decent life. An’ I know what I’m talking about. I’ve lived in some pretty crummy places in my time.’
That was a surprise. ‘Have you?’
‘Very crummy some of ’em, specially when I was a kid. We was always hard up in them days. Used to go hopping to make a bit extra. Steve used to come with us. Picking hops all day an’ off to the pub to drink ’em in the evening. An’ then back to talk politics round the camp fire till we couldn’t keep our eyes open.’
‘Not in those days, no,’ Sis said. ‘He was too little. Used to listen though. All ears he was. I reckon it was the making of him. He knew what sort a’ world he wanted by the time he was fourteen, I can tell you that. Very idealistic, your Steve. When the Beveridge Report came out he bought a copy on the day it was published.’
‘An’ I always thought politics was just about money and taxes and that sort of thing!’
‘Depends on your politics,’ Sis laughed. ‘Ours is about ideas. You should read the Report.’
‘Yes,’ Barbara said thoughtfully. ‘P’rhaps I should, if he bought it the day …’ But before she could say anything else, there was a long dull explosion.
It sounded a long way away but it went on for much longer than anything they’d heard in the last few months, and that puzzled them. When the last reverberation had faded, they got up, switched off the light and opened the curtains to see if they could see where it had been. There was a faint glow on the horizon.
‘Something’s gone up,’ Sis said. ‘Ain’t a buzzbomb though. That I do know. Unless they’re makin’ ’em twice the size.’
‘We’ll hear about it tomorrow,’ Barbara said, as they left the window and went back to their sorting.
The next day the rumours were contradictory. Some people said it was a gas main, others an accident at a munitions factory, others a house struck by lightning. It wasn’t until late afternoon that any real news came through and then it was alarming. Whatever it had been, it had happened in Chiswick and had done tremendous damage. ‘Knocked down half a street,’ the clippies told one another. ‘Terrible casualties. Ever so many killed.’
‘Then that’s no gas main,’ Heather said trenchantly, when Sis called in at the butcher’s on her way home. ‘Don’t give me that. It’ll be another bomb. You mark my words. An’ if there’s one, there’ll be more of them.’
Sis made a grimace because it sounded all too likely.
‘How you getting on with Barbara?’ Heather said, very casually.
‘OK,’ Sis said. ‘She ain’t a bad kid.’
But Heather had closed her face. ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ she said. ‘I reserve judgment on that one.’
But she was proved right about the rockets. The next morning they were woken just after dawn by another thunderous crash and during the day there were three more. There were no official statements, but everybody knew that London was under a new bombardment. News of the explosions passed swiftly along the tram grapevines. This was a bomb that arrived without warning. Some said it travelled so fast you heard it coming, with a ‘sort of swishing noise’ after it had exploded. And it was huge. Every explosion caused immense damage and the blast was felt for miles around.
There was still no official explanation. But a few days later there was an explosion in Dairsee Road and three days after that another in Lewisham and by then local knowledge of what was happening left no one in any doubt that these were rockets of some kind. One man had seen one of them, ‘like a telegraph pole flying horizontally at about 6,000 feet. It was a brownish colour,’ he told the local paper, ‘and flying much faster than a buzzbomb. It left a trail of brown oily smoke.’
‘Ain’t we had enough?’ Barbara’s passengers asked one another as they climbed aboard her tram the next morning. ‘First the Blitz an’ then the buzzbombs an’ now this. They really got it in fer us!’
‘They’re evacuating the kiddies again,’ another said.
Hazel and Joyce said they’d rather stay where they were. Joyce was only going to be at school another term and then she’d be out at work. ‘Like our Betty says,’ she told her parents, ‘if it’s got your number on it, it’ll get you wherever you are. Ain’t that right, our Betty?’
Betty was more interested in her new perm which hadn’t taken properly. ‘I shall look a sight Sat’day,’ she complained. ‘She ain’t half made a mess of it. Lionel’ll think I’m a freak.’
Joyce persisted. ‘But ain’t that right, our Betty?’
‘What?’
‘If it’s got your number on it it’ll get you.’
‘Oh that. Yeh! No point worrying about it. It’s not as if you can get out the way. You can’t, can you. Not if you can’t hear it coming. Best thing’s just to get on with your life an’ forget about it.’