Chapter 2

Standing in the check-in queue, George and Susanna exchanged the tolerantly amused but patronising glances of established residents in a foreign country when surrounded by visiting tourists. As usual some of the visitors hid their nervous excitement by talking more loudly to each other than was strictly necessary merely to overcome the airport hubbub, and more for the benefit and enlightenment of others within earshot.

“I insisted on a room with a pool view. I mean, I put my foot down and, for once, these people managed to understand me.”

“Our room was huge but the maid would insist on coming in every night to turn down the bed just as we were getting ready to go out. I gave up telling her. Sometimes you just can’t get through to them, can you?”

Others, usually the men, bolstered their self-confidence by offering their companions unnecessary pseudo-technical explanations of airline and airport procedures, reassuring themselves more than their listeners, with an accompaniment of forced laughter, that they were in the know and therefore, in control of the situation.

“I expect we’ll be using the same equipment outbound as we did inbound.”

”These bags are going to get checked by sniffer dogs; I hope that naff perfume of yours isn’t leaking, Dora.”

Just behind Susanna and George there were a couple of big, family groups of big people. Overweight, sun-burnt pre-teenagers tried to look cool but only achieved sulky; two solid, meaty mothers with curly tints were squeezed into bright tee-shirts and tight skirts that made them look older instead of younger, while fathers with vests stretched over paunches and sporting trainers worn with white sports socks in a parody of athleticism tried unsuccessfully to herd noisily excited children and piled luggage into a semblance of a queue. Further back still were two fluttery women in late middle age, sisters perhaps, twittering with suppressed excitement over the still-novel experience of international air travel. Judging from the airport trolleys piled with luggage, most of Susanna’s fellow travellers had been on a two-month visit without access to laundry facilities. She could guess what the suitcases would hold: crumpled and unworn dresses, jackets, jeans and chinos ‘for the evenings’ and several months’ supply of shampoos, lotions, hair conditioners, toothpaste and sun cream, in a range of strengths, ‘in case they don’t have them there’. One of the ‘cool’ teenagers bumped its trolley into the back of Susanna’s legs for the third time. She turned and looked into the expressionless face.

“Sorry, love,” called a florid female popping out from the group three or four places back. “Watch what you’re doin’, Justine.” Susanna looked again at the shapeless teenager. She has assumed it was a boy.

“What can I have?” whined Justine’s sister, seeking a snack or sweets. Or was it a brother?

Somewhere in a parallel queue an Essex voice was whingeing.

“That ‘ire-car I just ‘anded in is the fourth motor I’ve ‘ad in two weeks. The first blew an oil seal goin’ up a mountain. Then they tried to palm me off with some little fing I couldn’t sit upright in. The third one blew a tyre an’ would you believe it, the spare was the wrong size! Anyway, the nuts was seized and I broke two studs tryin’ to get them off. Typical, in’it?”

The rest of the queue consisted mainly of young Britons. Their faintly green pallor, visible through the tan, and slow, painful movements suggested they had been partying right up to the last moment and probably hadn’t been to bed, at least not to sleep. Susannah guessed that the tour bus had plucked them straight from whatever they had been doing an hour ago and disgorged them at the airport. A squeal and a chorus of guffaws indicated where one of the girls had been groped; apparently one traveller, at least, was less hung-over than his companions. The British press had been having a ‘field day’ reporting the drunken antics of these youngsters in Greek resorts. George thought that the public sex and nudity were more amusing than reprehensible but was surprised that the local police had been so tolerant for so long. Probably the tourist board had had a hand. He pointed out the group with a sideways nod but Susanna didn’t understand. She just smiled and held his hand. George abruptly turned his back on the parallel queue as one girl pointed a camera at her companion, threatening to snap him as part of the background.

“God, I hate this,” he muttered.

“You could have come with me.” Susanna looked up into his face seeking confirmation that his annoyance was prompted by the imminent separation but realising, as she spoke, that queuing at a holiday airport was the cause of his irritation. “Why don’t you go? It’s a long drive and there’s the ferry back; I can manage one suitcase, you know.”

“No; I’ll see you safely checked in, at least. After that you’re the airline’s responsibility. Christ, if the air conditioning in here is working, it’s being overpaid for the job it’s doing,” he added, seeking a change of subject. They shuffled forward and Susanna noticed four girls and two men at the check-in counter several places ahead. Although Mediterranean-skinned the girls looked pale. Certainly they weren’t returning holidaymakers. Their cheap, crumpled tops, poorly fitting jeans, and more than anything, nervous body language, fidgeting and fiddling with their hand baggage and their uncomfortable, frightened glances around them and at each other meant they were not locals looking forward to a trip to Europe. The men, who seemed overdressed for the climate in jackets and trousers, were at the counter and evidently handling the tickets and passports for the whole party with the girls only joining in to give monosyllabic answers to the check-in girl’s questions. At last Susanna found herself at the desk and responded to the mechanically-delivered questions to confirm that she had packed her bag herself, nobody had tampered with it and that she was carrying no knives, scissors or other sharp instruments in her hand baggage. Her case, bearing its Heathrow label rolled away from her on the conveyor belt before toppling on its side and disappearing, presumably to be subjected, she smiled inwardly, to the attentions of the sniffer dogs. Turning from the counter, she almost collided with the bleak-faced George who had been standing close behind her. He opened his mouth to say something but his words, whatever they were, changed to a grunt of annoyance as the suitcase on Justine’s trolley caught him behind the knees so that he sagged and stumbled forward into Susanna’s arms, and they both laughed.

George’s preoccupied look was the result of daydreaming, not heartache. The words ‘field day’, applied to the press coverage of holidaymakers’ behaviour, had summoned up for him a vivid image of a schoolboy incident. Joining the Combined Cadet Force had not been exactly compulsory but everyone, including George, did it anyway. The headmaster, formerly a public school housemaster, made it clear to parents that he considered the CCF to be character building and that a number of valuable privileges depended heavily on membership. References to potential employers and to universities would of course describe academic achievements but there would also be comments on a boy’s character and the role played in important school activities such as the cadets. In particular, nobody who had not been a cadet was likely to be suitable to become a prefect. The prefectorial privileges of wearing brown shoes and walking on the quadrangle grass meant little to most pupils but as only prefects were allowed to leave the school at lunchtime, most fourth and fifth years aspired to the role, especially those who regularly spent hours in Saturday morning detention as a result of illicit, midday trips to the nearby betting shop. George’s Saturdays were mostly spent blanco-ing his webbing to the correct shade of matt, khaki green and Brasso-ing his beret-badge and belt fittings to the point where, carefully aimed, they could be used on sunny days to inflict temporary blindness on the enemy. Pressing the creases into his battle-dress had been soul-destroying. The trousers and blouse (why not jacket?) were made of thick, hairy and horribly itchy material that stubbornly refused to take or keep a crease. Some cadets shaved the insides of their creases in an effort to make it more amenable to a wet cloth and iron. Others used soap inside their trousers to ‘set’ the material in shape with interesting results on rainy days. George used Copydex to glue the creases in, effective when standing but producing a raised ridge on the knee and thigh when seated. But the greatest effort was reserved for the boots. Issued new, these were iron-hard and dimpled all over, so naturally the dimples had to be polished out – especially on the toecaps and heels. Hours of character-building work with the back of a heated spoon would eventually reduce the dimples to the smoothness they could have been made with in the first place. Then the polishing started. Some recommended pouring molten, black polish over the toecaps and heels, then putting the boots in the fridge before quickly polishing them. Others favoured using a banana skin to reach the required, glittering shine. High-gloss varnish was a good short-term fix but it tended to crack, chip and flake giving rise to more work that it originally saved. On the advice of his father, George stuck to spit and polish; a good layer of Cherry Blossom applied with a rag-covered finger then spit and round and round and round with the finger and spit again and round and round and round. Eventually the shine slowly emerged on the boot as the tip gradually wore away on the finger. All this military finery was worn to normal lessons every Friday morning before being paraded, inspected and marched around on Friday afternoons. During the day, belts were carried by the edges with finger-tip care, sitting was avoided or, if unavoidable, done with straight legs to preserve creases; steel boot-studs and heel plates made boys slither on polished concrete corridors so that the ban on running was enforced by necessity. Gleaming toecaps were guarded against scratches and chalk dust more carefully than dragons’ gold. Once a year, instead of marching up and down in the playground all afternoon shouting, ‘one-two-three, one-two-three, one!’ in unison, while themselves being shouted at by prefects dressed as corporals and the school caretaker dressed as a sergeant major, they would take a packed lunch (to be eaten, like all packed lunches, as soon as they got on the bus) and trundle off to be taught field craft and hiding in ditches. The high spot of the day was the opportunity for a mock battle when they would be rewarded for lugging around bolt-action, Lee Enfield rifles stamped ‘WD 1939’ by being allowed each to fire five blank rounds. Some would be told off to lie behind trees or bushes and provide ‘covering fire’ while the rest charged, like Dad’s Army, through thunder-flashes towards an imaginary enemy. A real enemy, would, of course, have mown them down but their characters would have been fully formed first, so that was all right. The field day in George’s mind had been held somewhere in gently undulating open country dotted with hawthorn bushes and covered with tussocks of grass. They had just been issued with the usual five rounds of blank .303 ammunition and the instruction that, on pain of a year’s detention, they must account, on completion of the exercise, for all ammunition by producing either the unfired rounds (an extremely unlikely eventuality) or the empty brass cartridge cases. As usual, they were dressed in full, hairy-wool battle dress but some individuality in the form of old belts painted in camouflage patterns, army-surplus water canteens and similar accoutrements was permitted. The keener cadets and NCOs wore khaki face nets, intended to make snipers invisible to their victims, as rakish scarves. In the interests of preserving the hard-won gleam of their best boots, most boys wore something else. George was in Wellingtons and was with a group of half a dozen or so other boys, probably a ‘section’, and they were ‘waiting for orders’. There was always plenty of time spent hanging around waiting to be told what to do and when they questioned their NCO about it, they were told it was to create military realism. Faced with the prospect of more hanging around followed by an hour of crawling around in long grass with an antique and exceptionally heavy firearm cradled in their bent arms, the topic of how to get out of doing it naturally came up. Cooper described how ‘Tommies’ in the First World War would sometimes shoot themselves in the foot to avoid having to go over the top. However, he continued, having been issued with blanks instead of live rounds, they did not have that option. He demonstrated. Cooper was wearing dirty white plimsolls. The ambulance left just as the boys were being paraded by Major Crabtree, alias the woodwork master, for a lecture on safety with firearms. The lecture was interrupted by someone pushing an airport trolley into the back of George’s legs.

Awkwardly silent with the imminence of their first separation, George and Susanna weaved through the queues and abandoned trolleys towards the departure gate.

“See you in a week… or less,” said Susanna.

“Yeah. Give me a call as soon as you’ve seen Valerie. And give her my love, won’t you?”

“Of course. I’ll ring as soon as I arrive. Look after yourself, won’t you? Drive carefully on the way back.”

They kissed fleetingly and unsatisfactorily, unsure what to say now the moment of separation had arrived, before Susanna turned and walked quickly through the gate, turning once to wave briefly as she hesitated at the immigration desk long enough to hold out her boarding pass and passport to the bored, cursory glance of the official behind his glass screen and turning a corner to vanish from George’s view.