2

Whether the lighthouse was to be dimmed, or blacked out, or camouflaged was the talk of the public bar. ‘Mark my words,’ said Sam Binns, ‘they dim it and there’ll be consequences I wouldn’t want to answer for. I wouldn’t want to answer for the wrecks, for a start. And mark my words,’ he said, ‘there will be wrecks if that lighthouse is dimmed.’

Joe Seddon set down his pint. ‘And then where’s your herring? Speaking personal.’

The barmaid, by the pickled eggs, polished a glass. ‘Oh, I see. So we’re to carry on as per usual, are we? “Hello, Fritz!” You might as well say, Coo-ee, we’re over here! We’ll be bombed to smithereens.’ Festooned under the tobacco ceiling were dusty glass floats, red, purple and green, drawn up in a shabby net under the match-boarding. Above the portrait of the King was a pair of Coronation paper flags, somewhat curled out of their original jauntiness. A few of the film people were drinking at a table by the door and from time to time the barmaid’s glance rested on them: to no avail. She was regretting the money she’d spent on her hairdo. Not even her husband had noticed.

‘What I want to know,’ said Sam Binns, ‘is how you’d go about camouflaging a great big thing like that. I mean, you can see it from Whitmarket. You can’t tell me sandbags is going to do it.’

‘They could paint it,’ said Joe Seddon.

‘I’d like to see that ladder,’ said the barmaid.

One of the film people, coming up to the bar to order a round, broke a rule and stepped into the conversation; broke two rules, in fact, by revealing he’d been listening to it. This person, a plump, pimply lad hardly old enough to shave, explained that it was most likely that the lighthouse beam would be screened or narrowed in some way, perhaps with the use of dark cloth or hardboard, and that the timings of the beam would be coordinated centrally with shipping schedules. At the bar they listened in silence, not knowing that this information was a second-hand recounting of what the boy had been told earlier that day. When the pints had been pulled and carried off slopping to the table, they moved on to a subject that was more impenetrably local.

Eddie Grogan carried the pints across the pub with its sticky floor of dampened sawdust. Dougie was drawing, pencil describing great arcs across his sketchbook, a lock of hair flopping over his beaky nose. ‘Here’s the change, Mr Birdsall.’ Eddie spilled the coppers on the table.

‘Mmm,’ said Dougie, without lifting his eyes from the page. ‘Thanks for getting them in.’

The camera operator, Frank Moss, said, ‘What’s that you’re having, Eddie? A ginger beer?’

It was obvious what Eddie was having. ‘No, sir. Same as you.’

‘Seventeen, aren’t you, Eddie?’

‘Eighteen in two months.’

‘Well, if you don’t tell, I won’t.’

Eddie sat down. ‘Went well today, didn’t it? The filming?’ Dougie glanced up and smiled. Talking about filming made Eddie feel like King Vidor, with his own canvas director’s chair and cigar. He couldn’t quite believe the luck that had fetched him up at the Unit: when he was eventually called up, as he was bound to be, at least he would have lived a little. ‘Quiet, please’; ‘turn over’; ‘cut’: these words he loved. They were a small crew – no sound recordists on this occasion – and he was the most junior member of it. But junior or not, one of the things you learned on the job was that you weren’t necessarily the only one learning.

‘Anyone know what the forecast is?’ said Dougie.

‘More of the same, by all accounts,’ said Frank.

‘That’s a shame.’ Dougie swivelled his sketchbook in front of Frank. ‘This is the sort of thing we’re missing.’

Eddie craned his neck. The drawing was of a harbour in storm conditions. You could taste the spray, hear the wind sheer in the rigging. Dougie’d pencilled an oblong over the top of it. Eddie had seen him frame his eyes with his fingers in the same sort of way.

‘We could have filmed that in Grimsby,’ said Frank. ‘It was blowing a gale up there.’

‘We couldn’t have filmed that in Grimsby because it was blowing a gale,’ said Dougie. Grimsby had been a bit of a disaster. There were lots of shots they’d missed at Grimsby. They’d got other shots instead.

‘We can’t be held responsible for the weather,’ said Frank.

‘Tell that to Macleod.’ Dougie put on a Scottish accent: ‘Ye’ll just have to sit it out, laddie. A guid deal of filming is waiting.’

‘Aye,’ said Frank, ‘it’ll cloud over soon enough.’

They laughed.

Macleod was the head of the Unit. People called him McGod.

‘How many cans have we left?’ said Dougie.

‘Four,’ said Eddie promptly, feeling like the kid at school shooting up his hand with the right answer.

‘Is that all?’

‘We finished one filming the boat this morning and used up another two by the tower.’

‘You got a little carried away there,’ said Frank.

‘The light was perfect.’

‘The girl wasn’t half bad either,’ said Frank. ‘Although unconvincing as a fishwife, I should have thought.’

‘That’s not why I shot her.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Frank. ‘I was forgetting your private collection.’

‘Very amusing.’ The truth was Dougie didn’t know why he’d filmed her. But it was in the nature of his work to find images even if he was unsure how he would eventually use them. ‘The camera loved her. You must have noticed. You were looking through it.’

‘That’s not all I noticed,’ said Frank.

Eddie said, ‘I liked the boat. Nelson. That was a nice touch.’

‘Eddie,’ said Frank with a wink, ‘your mistake is to assume he knows what he’s doing. There’s such a thing as luck, after all.’

‘Nothing to do with luck,’ said Dougie. ‘Everything to do with keeping your eyes open.’

‘Coincidence, then.’

‘I don’t believe in it.’

‘If you’re going to bang on about surrealism again, I’m going for a piss.’

‘Be my guest,’ said Dougie.

‘What’s surrealism?’ said Eddie.

‘The chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella, someone once called it.’

‘Oh,’ said Eddie, none the wiser.

Frank got up from the table. ‘Don’t listen to him, Eddie. It’s all a load of balls.’

The Unit operated out of premises in Soho Square. There was also a makeshift studio in Blackheath, formerly a school art room, and which, with its painted plywood sets, still resembled one. Together they comprised the home of British documentary film-making, a genre that some viewed as ground-breaking, others thought insignificant and a few considered dangerously left-wing.

Everything ran on a shoestring, nominally under the aegis of the Post Office, whose promotional wing they were, although you would not perhaps be aware of this were you to watch some of the films they produced. Macleod preserved a degree of latitude in that respect: as a form, the documentary – or ‘interpretive realism’, with the stress falling on the ‘realism’ – was in some significant part his creation.

Frank came back to the table and sat down with a sigh. ‘Christ. Even the Gents smells of herring.’

‘Eddie,’ Dougie said, ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to pop back to London first thing and collect some more stock for us. Will you do that?’

Eddie said that he could do that. ‘How many cans?’

‘Six ought to do it. No, make it ten.’

‘Ten?’ said Frank.

Dougie said, ‘It would be a pity not to film the church, seeing as we’re here.’

‘That hulk of a place?’

‘It has an angel roof, rather a fine one.’

Frank looked blank.

‘Carved angels all along the nave. Fifteenth century.’

‘Let me guess,’ Frank said. ‘Ships’ figureheads? Is that the connection?’ He was thinking of the worm-eaten specimens in the seamen’s museum, which had been a devil of a place to light, and tatty with it. ‘Otherwise, even I can’t see how you intend to stitch footage of angels into a documentary part financed by the fishing industry and purporting to be about it.’

‘You’re beginning to sound like McGod.’

‘McGod pays our wages.’

‘For now,’ said Dougie. ‘I wouldn’t like to bet on who’ll be paying our wages this time next week.’

It was past nine and the news, and the pub was filling up, a few couples, a swaggering group of noisy lads and one or two solitary drinkers. The fishing contingent was well represented.

‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends,’ said Frank, lifting his glass.

‘Or close the wall up with our English dead.’

Shakespeare, thought Eddie. Almost certainly Shakespeare.

He watched the two men. They were both wearing what he had come to regard as the Unit uniform: baggy flannels, none too clean, tweed jackets with sagging pockets, stained and holed pullovers. He would have liked to dress the same, but his mother wouldn’t let him go out looking like that. Dougie, who could be debonair when he wanted to, had a paisley scarf knotted at his throat like a cravat.

‘You’ve gone quiet,’ said Frank, raising his voice over the blare of the bar.

‘Mmm.’ Dougie traced his finger through the wet rings on the table top.

‘I shouldn’t waste your time brooding over her. She’s obviously married. More to the point, so are you.’

‘Mind your own bloody business, Frank.’ Dougie drained his pint. ‘If you must know, I’m thinking that no one in this country has a clue what lies in store.’

‘It’s unlike you to make such sweeping statements.’

‘I mean it. Unless you’ve experienced total war, you’ve no idea what it’s like.’ A small muscle tightened the corner of his mouth.

‘On the contrary, I’d say that thanks to certain elements of the press the public imagination is rather overstimulated in that department. Why else are people killing their pets?’

Dougie lifted his eyes. ‘Nothing prepares you for it.’ He pushed back his chair.

‘Where are you going?’ said Frank.

‘I’ll see you later, back at the digs.’

After the noise and blaze of the pub, outside it was cool and still, the first tease of autumn in the air. Here and there in the lane leading down to the sea a few houses were observing an unofficial blackout in advance of what was daily expected to be enforced with warnings and fines; in most windows, however, a little light glimmered, and glimmered was the word, because electricity had reached by no means all the town’s households.

A tang of brine and rotten bait, and a fisherman went past swinging an oil lantern. Further along the front the lighthouse swept its great beam over the sea. A couple came out of the pub into a triangle of light and stood embracing on the slicked cobbles.

Dougie Birdsall had given five months to Spain, a trifle set against the life his friend and colleague Ellis had given. He could no longer remember the name of the village where Ellis had been killed – if he’d ever known it, he’d blanked it out, he supposed. They had fetched up there after a week’s march through the maquis in the freezing cold, scraps of burlap wrapped round their boots, hunger gnawing their stomachs, and afterwards he had never been able to find the place on a map, perhaps because he had never been entirely sure where they had set out from, or in which direction they had gone – by then the great cause had become a disorganized horror of betrayal and folly. He had forgotten nothing else about that day, however, and added to the burden of this knowledge was the certainty that others would soon share it.

The shingle sucked and rattled as the tide went out. In the wild, lonely sound he could hear the wide grey skies of these low-lying marshes and trees bent crooked by a wind that blew straight from the steppes across the North Sea. Never before had he been so aware of the country as an island, lighthouses strung along its coast shining their beams over the deep, black waters.

War: now there was a subject, he thought.