The airfield outside Fécamp had been a grass field used by German fighters during the Battle of Britain. We asked for it back again some time after D-Day, and laid a prefabricated metal runway, made up of steel links. Cliff got it almost right this time, but the track was wet from a morning shower, and caught him out. His approach was a shade too fast. Halfway down the strip, with all three of our wheels on the deck, he applied the brakes and slid out immediately to the left. One main wheel slipped off the metalling and dug in, while the rest of the plane tried to fly on. We did the handbrake left turn, then stopped with a distinctly loud metallic cracking noise, at right angles to the track. This all took place in less time than it’s taken to tell you.
Raffles, not strapped in, ended up on the floor. He muttered, ‘Effing hooray!’ but I’m not sure whether that was out of anger or fear. My strap had dug into my shoulder, almost dislocating it.
Cliff said, ‘Balls!’
An American female voice came over the radio, ‘Cliff, get your heap off the edge of my runway. I have 47s due in twenty-five minutes.’
Airfield control was from a caravan like the one I had known at Bawne: it seemed a long way away, but within a couple of minutes a jeep was moving away from it. A blonde girl in USAAF duds waved to us when she bailed out of it.
Cliff said, ‘Hello, Wendy.’
She replied, ‘Hi Cliff, hi Major . . .’ but she made for Raffles, and gave him a hug saying, ‘How’s my man?’ Then she spotted me, and said, ‘New boy.’
Raffles unwrapped her and said, ‘No. Nothing like that. We’re just giving him a lift to Paris. This is Charlie.’
I said, ‘Hello, Miss.’
‘Hello yourself, Charlie. Welcome to France.’
‘This is my first time over.’
‘Watch those girls in Paris. Come on.’
While we were climbing into the jeep Raffles told her, ‘Mr Clifford did well to keep us on our wheels.’
‘I didn’t doubt him for a minute.’
‘Pleased to hear that, Miss.’
‘You wanna drive me, Raffles?’
Raffles drove. She sat alongside him unwrapping the small brown parcel he’d magicked from somewhere, while James England, Cliff and I squeezed in behind them with our three bags. I looked over her shoulder at her tits, and the parcel on her lap. As far as I could see her tits were great, and the parcel contained several pairs of stockings, a couple of half-bottles of gin and a couple of packs of fat Turkish cigarettes. There was also what looked like an irregular lump of shiny dark brown ear wax, about the size of a thumbnail. The American girl said, ‘Thank you, hon. Will you all be staying tonight? They’ve opened a small estaminet down the road.’
There was a pause. Then, ‘Maybe on the way back, Wendy.’ The Major; at last. That was good: I’d begun to wonder if he’d died. ‘Charlie’s in a hurry to get to Paris.’
‘So was I, when I was his age.’ She turned and gave me the full blast of her smile: her lips were the colour of pumping venous blood. I’d seen some of that splashed around in aeroplanes. She must have been all of twenty-five years old.
Cliff said, ‘I’ll be staying if I can’t hitch a lift back. You can take me instead.’
‘OK,’ the woman said. There was something careless about it. False gaiety.
Halfway back to the control caravan Raffles stopped the jeep, got out and walked away to vomit on the grass.
‘He’s scared of flying,’ Major England said to me. ‘I don’t know why he does it.’
He wiped his mouth on a great handkerchief before he got back in. Wendy leaned over and gave him a hug again.
The caravan was crowded, so I stepped outside. Thirty feet away there was a concrete dispersal pan up against a perimeter hedge. One of those huge Queen Mary trailers sat on it, its load shrouded by a torn camouflage tarp.
I wandered over to it, trailed by Cliff, and pulled back the tarpaulin for a closer look. It wasn’t a large aircraft, but it was more or less all there, except for the radial engine. Its wings and struts had been disassembled and laid on the trailer, strapped to the fuselage. I recognized the horrible little Norseman. Cliff wasn’t paying close attention. The aircraft looked knocked about a bit, but not in bad nick. There were a couple of holes in the front screens which could have been bullets. Nothing big had touched it, unless the missing engine had copped it.
I told Cliff, ‘I think I know this aircraft.’
Cliff looked up, and then there was something funny. He looked rattled. That was a first. He said, ‘No you don’t. Can’t do: it’s been here for months.’
‘You’re wrong, Cliff. I’ve flown in it. I was given a lift in it up to Ringway, just after my tour ended.’
‘No, Charlie. That must have been another one.’
‘Don’t be an arse, Cliff. I know that I’ve been on this plane. I’m in the RAF too, remember. I was on this one and Glenn Miller was snoozing just behind me.’
He pushed me out of the way, and hurriedly started to drag the tarp over it again.
‘Charlie, I know that if you say that again, I’ll have to take out my revolver, push its barrel into your mouth, and pull the trigger.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Want to try me?’
It was such a stupid thing to get steamed up over, but there was a vein pounding on Cliff’s temple, and his cheekbones had gone white. I nearly said it, but then Major England’s voice cut in calmly.
‘Leave the boy alone, Cliff: you’ll scare him.’
He had ghosted in again. Cliff relaxed. Had he been prepared to do it? I asked him, ‘Have you got the twitch?’
He gave me a very thin smile, which went with his moustache. Then he said, ‘Yes,’ and laughed. ‘All the time. Sorry.’
The Major told him, ‘I’ll sort Charlie out, OK?’, put his arm around Cliff’s shoulder, and shepherded us both back towards the caravan.
An Army Humber saloon was rumbling up: it bore an Army Service Corps flash on its wings. It looked low on its springs and very second-hand. On the narrow area of scuttle between the passenger cabin and the engine, the name Kate was painted in army stencil white. The Major told me, ‘You’d better get acquainted with Raffles’s mistress: you’re going to be inside her for a few weeks.’ He laughed as if he had said something amusing.
Cliff walked away, and climbed back inside the caravan. When Les climbed out and opened the boot there appeared to be another half car in pieces inside it. Also the contents of a small bar, and a corner grocery shop before rationing. We squeezed our bags around the machinery parts. The Major told me, ‘It was something he learned in the desert. There’s nothing much on this old bus he can’t replace if he has to.’
Raffles had both wings of the bonnet up. I asked England, ‘Is there much to do before we leave?’
‘Buggered if I know, old son. I don’t think that he trusts anyone else to work on her. If I was you I’d stretch out on that groundsheet and get the last of the sun, while you can.’
‘What about Cliff?’
‘I’ll sort him out, OK?’
‘That’s what you told him about me.’
‘Exactly. Toddle along now. We’ll call you when we’re ready to move: won’t leave without you.’
I picked a spot that put the caravan between me and a gentle breeze. The sun was getting some iron into it again. I must have dozed, until I sensed a movement, and Wendy’s soft American voice.
‘Shove over, bud.’ I did, and she sat on the edge of the groundsheet just not touching me. ‘Mother Wendy’s medicine . . . here, I brought you this.’ This was an opened bottle of red wine. She said, ‘I’ve dozens of them.’
I propped myself up on an elbow to drink. We took alternate draughts from the bottle until it was half emptied. We watched Raffles working on the car. She held the bottle up to the light and asked me, ‘Tell me, Charlie Nobody, is it half empty, or half full?’
‘Half full. Definitely.’
She rested her head on her drawn-up knees, and moodily watched the Humber coming to life.
‘I was your age once,’ she told me; then got up and walked less steadily back to the caravan, taking the bottle with her.
Sitting in the car with Raffles, with the galloping Major behind me writing spells in his little notebook, felt better than being shouted at by Cliff. I asked our driver, ‘How far are we from Paris?’
‘About a hundred and thirty miles as the crow flies; about a hundred and eighty, two hundred, the way we’ll go.’
‘Say five hours then.’
‘Say two days’ – that was the Major – ‘if we’re lucky. You should see what you blue buggers did to the roads.’
‘I think it serves you right, sir,’ Raffles told me. ‘Your lot made the holes; now you get to drive round them.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Don’t mensh.’
‘Will there be somewhere to stay?’
‘ ’course there will, Mr Bassett. We came this way before.’
‘Would you mind keeping it down lads.’ That was the Major again. ‘Man in the back trying to get his sums right.’
Raffles and I grinned at each other. I was happier when he was looking at the road.
The first roadblock was after about six miles. A Redcap in battle gear waved us down at a pole across half the road. He had a stick with a white wood circle on the end; traffic, for the directing of. Raffles drove with his Sten in his lap. He pulled up a few feet short, and the hairs on my neck stood up as I saw him flick the Sten’s safety before the copper reached us. The Major didn’t even look up. Raffles wound down the window. I sensed that he was smiling at the man.
‘Wotcha cock. What’s up?’
‘UXB. That field down there, about twenty feet from the road.’ He turned and pointed away from us, and to the right. ‘Some Sappers are looking for it.’
‘One of ours or one of theirs?’
‘Theirs. The Sapper Sergeant said it was a five-hundred-kilo job, from the entry hole it’s made in the ground.’
‘What were they bombing, French cows?’ Raffles gave his little relaxed laugh, and asked, ‘Wanna fag?’ He took off his beret, and offered the copper a roll-up from about thirty ready made he kept in there. I always noticed how careful he was replacing his beret; I never saw him drop one.
‘Thanks. Don’t mind if I do, and you can slip that safety on now.’
Raffles laughed again.
‘That’s what all the French tarts say.’
They lit up. Raffles blew out the match and tossed it on the verge. As it touched the grass there was the flat thump of a close explosion, and in the field an immediate small cloud of that odd yellow-grey coloured smoke that the Kraut ordnance always generated. The car rocked. The policeman staggered. We were showered in mud, grass and small clods of earth. The copper swore. Then he said, ‘Found it.’
‘Do you think you’ll find them?’
‘Doubt it. No one’s screaming.’
‘Can we move along then?’
‘Yes. Take care until you’re clear of the lane. Thanks for the fag, mate.’
‘Pleasure.’
Raffles eased us carefully along the country lane. It was bordered by high hedges. There was a hole in the hedge on the right-hand side, and the smoke drifted through it. On the windscreen in front of him was a small red splodge. He tapped the glass to draw my attention to it.
I said, ‘We once came back from somewhere – Lübeck, maybe – with fifteen feet of human guts draped over the wingtip. Lanc just blew up in front of us and we flew through the remains.’
‘The trouble with you RAF johnnies,’ Major England said, just to prove that he didn’t miss much, ‘is that you always have to cap a good story.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you detention tonight. You can stay at home and look after Kate, if Les and I are on the town.’ I thought that this had been a slip of the tongue until he added, ‘Sod it, Les; I can’t keep up the Major baloney much longer. Are we far enough away from England yet, do you think?’
‘Yessir.’
‘You tell him then.’
‘This is a small car, Mr Bassett, and we’re a small team, so from now on, if it’s all right with you, sometimes I’m Les, and sometimes the Major’s Jim, or Jimmy or James.’
‘What about me?’
‘Charlie; that right?’
‘Yeah: pleased to meet you. It makes life easier, doesn’t it?’
‘So say thank you to Jimmy for saving your life.’
‘Thank you, Jimmy. I didn’t know he had.’
‘That shows you how good he is.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Back at Fécamp. You were stupid. Cliff would have killed you.’
‘Oh, that. I wasn’t sure.’
‘We were.’
We were stopped at two more blocks before nightfall, and diverted off our route three more times. When I asked Les why, James answered for him.
‘Mines. Jerry left them as a going-away present. We must have driven down that last lane about . . . how many times Les . . .?’
‘Four.’
‘. . . four times, without seeing them or setting one off. Funny, ain’t it?’
‘Yeah; very funny,’ I told him. ‘Remind me to laugh.’
‘That’s the trouble with you RAF johnnies,’ Les said. ‘No bloody sense of humour.’
We stayed at a small inn just outside a place named Gournayen-Bray. It was showing no lights, but that was because they had a good blackout. Up close to the iron-studded front door you just got a glimpse of the light feeding out beneath it. Raffles hammered twice, with the flat of his hand: it sounded thunderous. Then he shouted, ‘It’s Mr Raffles, and the Major.’
Then he hammered again. The door opened immediately. He turned to me, and said, ‘I arranged with them how many times we’d knock, and what I’d say. It’s worth your remembering, in case you’re on your own on the way back.’
‘I couldn’t remember the way here, and I don’t know what the place looks like. It’s dark.’
‘That solves that problem, then, doesn’t it?’
He nosed inside, the Sten held vaguely at the port before him. In the small panelled reception we were met by a tall, thin woman and a boy of about fourteen. The boy had bulgy eyes of the palest blue-grey colour, and a massive goitre. You knew immediately that he wasn’t the full shilling. The boy had admitted us, and bolted the door behind us.
Raffles said to me, ‘This is our friend Madame Defarge.’
The woman laughed. It was a bitter sound, but she held her hand out to me.
‘Madame Demain. Your friend Raffles is droll.’
‘Not my friend. My driver.’
‘Make him your friend, Monsieur . . .?’
‘Charlie.’
‘. . . Monsieur Charlie. You will find him a useful friend.’ She paused and then added, ‘And a good one.’ The smile she directed at Raffles seemed genuine enough.
He asked her, ‘How is the boy?’
The boy’s right hand had begun to tremble. She took it in her own.
‘As you see him. Perhaps a little better.’
‘You have had news of Monsieur Demain?’
‘None since January . . .’
James England seemed to have nothing to add to the conversation.
The boy’s trembling increased. His shoulders shook. Madame hoisted the sails of the most beautiful language in the world, and gave him a dozen or so sentences as fast as Browning machine-gun fire. He stuttered a couple back.
The Major had squeezed in behind me, and said, ‘That’s the trouble here. Neither Les nor I were picked for this job for our fluency in French. I can just get by in German, and Les even has problems with English. I don’t know whether she said something reassuring, or told him to cut our throats in our sleep.’
I told him, ‘The boy’s terrified of me because he hasn’t seen me before. He thinks that I’ll attack her. She told him that I was a friend of Les’s and wouldn’t harm them because they were too useful to you. She also told him not to make any trouble because they need the money.’
‘Good God. Why didn’t you say you spoke the lingo?’
‘Nobody asked. It’s something I’m learning from people like you.’
‘What is?’
‘Need to know.’
Raffles guffawed. Then he said, ‘Tell her that you speak good French.’
‘Fairly average French,’ but I did. Her raised eyebrows told me something about how Brits were regarded by their geographically closest ally. Thickos.
Raffles spoke again.
‘Tell her that I have tinned meat for her this time, from the Americans; butter and cigarettes. I’ll get them from the car shortly.’
I did. She looked curiously downcast, almost ashamed. I told her that we appreciated her accommodating us, and that we wished to put her out as little as possible. I also spoke directly to the boy, and told him that I wouldn’t harm his mother.
The woman smiled at last, and murmured, ‘Grandmère.’ At least I’d said something right.
That night I slept on a soft mattress between stiff, clean sheets, in a room that I could lock from the inside. It was as I did that, that I realized I was the only one without a weapon of some sort. I slept with the curtain open, hoping to let in the starlight, but cloud had blown south-westerly along the Channel in the evening, obscuring them. You could never have it all.
In the morning Les produced enough bacon sarnies for the five of us. The makings had been in the boot of the Humber, scattered among spare parts. That accounted for the vague whiff of petrol as I bit into one. The boy smiled shyly at me. I gave him a bobby-dazzler in return. When he took my hand he said nothing except, ‘Monsieur,’ but made it plain that he wanted to take me somewhere.
In the full light I could see that the building was timber, framed in narrow red bricks: probably medieval. It had steep roofs and tall gables. On one gable end was a faded painted advertisement for Citroën cars, which included a legionnaire and a distant tricolore. It was even more distant now, because at some time since it was painted it had received a burst of small-arms gunfire. There was a large, partly cared for garden behind the house, with unfamiliar vegetables in hopeful rows . . . and an unkempt apple orchard, in a corner of which was an unmistakable something the shape of an adult’s grave.
The boy said nothing. He stood in front of the mound with his hands crossed; his head bent, praying. I copied him. Then he took my hand again, and led me back inside. Les, Jimmy and the woman were washing the sarnies down with clear, home-made cider – the family’s only contribution to the meal. They’d saved a share of it for me. As we left Les gave her some dollars, a small tin of coffee beans, a pair of stockings, and a small raincoat that would fit the boy. These were parting gifts. It was as he passed her the last item that she started to cry; silently. The boy put his arm around her waist and leaned in closer.
England muttered, ‘I hate this bloody war. Absolutely.’
After an hour the gloom had lifted. Les whistled ‘Lili Marleen’ again, and drove with his elbow out of the car window. I worked through my logic for them.
‘The boy . . .’
‘Mathieu: Matt . . .’ Les told me.
‘. . . Matt. He was scared that I was going to attack the old lady. That means he’s probably seen someone else attack a lady. His mother perhaps. That’s her grave in the orchard.’
England gave a wry little chuckle. Les told me, ‘No. That’s all right as far as it goes, but almost completely bloody wrong. You would never make a good tec, would you?’
‘Where did I go wrong?’
‘Almost everywhere.’
‘I’ll tell him.’ James England took over. He was James or Jimmy, again.
‘The Jerry took Demain’s son, Matt’s father, away to work in 1941. He didn’t come back. Someone told her that he was some sort of trustee at the camp at Natzweiler: there are mainly women there, so your average Frenchman will probably feel quite at home. After that, nothing. Now old Matt’s not too bright . . .’
‘I noticed that.’
‘About six months later he saw what he thought was a man attacking his mother in the orchard. Only the chappy wasn’t attacking her. They were having the horizontal meeting of parts.’
‘I see.’
‘I think that maybe you do, this time.’
‘What happened?’
‘Matt brained him. Gave him one over the napper with a ruddy great sledgehammer they kept for killing the pig. Every orchard had its own pig before the war.’
‘Was it some Jerry?’
‘Good Lord, no! It was his father’s brother. His uncle. The old lady’s second son. They buried him in the orchard to save fuss, and soon after that his mother left them.’
‘How did you find all this out, if you don’t speak the language?’
‘We know someone who knows someone who does. It’s how this business works.’
‘What business?’
‘Spying, of course. What else did you think Cliff does?’
Oh, I see, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
‘That reminds me.’ It was Les this time. ‘I need to stop for a slash. Anyone else?’
We stopped overnight at another grass airfield: Beauvais. Goering had watched the Battle of Britain from there, until he got bored with not winning. A squadron of Typhoons had arrived before us, and there seemed to be a lot of grumbling about nothing going on. There were no permanent messing facilities, but they offered us a big tent with a kerosene heater, Tilley lights, camp beds and blankets. There were eateries in the village. I looked over England’s shoulder at the map, and couldn’t help myself.
‘Beauvais. Look, Croydon was almost as close to Paris as this!’
‘Paris tomorrow, Charlie. Les knows what he’s doing. We piddle around these bloody side roads because the main roads have either been blown up by your lot, or are blocked to buggery by priority traffic. Trust him.’
Les chose where we ate. From the outside it was the least promising eating house in the town. There were chairs and tables on the paving outside some of the others, with drinkers and diners spilling out on them. Mainly servicemen accompanied by young women. I say mainly, because I saw one large elderly officer in German field grey, with all the silver buttons, dining at a small round table with a pretty woman in her thirties. The officer sat very erectly to table. A neatly dressed lad of about five stood patiently alongside the woman.
I asked, ‘Wait a mo’ – did you see that?’
‘Naw,’ Les said. ‘I’m off duty.’
‘It was a bloody Hun, sitting there.’
‘I’ve seen him before,’ Jimmy told us. ‘There must be a story behind that.’
‘Didn’t either of you ask?’
‘None of our business, old boy.’ He sniffed. He made it plain that it was none of mine either.
It turned out that Les was looking for a cafe where we could eat inside, and as far from the front window as possible. He found a place at the end of a terrace of more or less intact houses. Inside it, the tables were clad in red and white checked oilcloth, and the room was warm. It was dominated by a montage of three large national flags on one wall: American, British and French. The tricolore looked a bit tired and faded, but the other Allied colours were fresh and clean. From the nail marks in the wall behind you could see that the display had recently displaced a predecessor.
Les got us a table by the far wall, near the kitchen door. He sat with his back to the wall, whilst England and I sat at the ends of the small table on either side of him. They asked me to negotiate the eatings, and Les passed me a roll of dollars which made the fat Frog who owned the place’s eyes water. I gave him five eventually. Les said, ‘Jimmy wants to know what we’re going to have.’
‘Rabbit. Stewed with carrots and onions. It’s almost impossible to eat French without onions.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never been here.’
‘I read it in a book. It must be true.’
‘What else?’
‘Blackcurrant puddings. The blackcurrants will be last year’s leavings: pickled.’
‘Didn’t you ask him for a bottle?’
‘I didn’t pay him for the wine. I said that we’d taste it first.’
‘Oh, my lovely boy,’ Les told us. ‘I’m going to like travelling with you.’
I asked Les about sitting so far from the front of the building.
‘The Frogs aren’t as friendly as they’re cracked up to be. Some of the Maquis commandos want us out of their country even before all of the Jerries are gone. There’ve been drive-by shoot-ups at cafes with Allied soldiers in – just to encourage us, if you like. Then there are numerous Frog Pétainists who feel betrayed, and do the same. This is far from a liberated country, Charlie, despite what the nobs say. I like to sit where I can see what’s what.’
‘Wild Bill Hickok used to do that. I saw it in a film. The only time he didn’t sit with his back to the wall someone shot him.’
‘He was bloody right the first time then, wasn’t he?’
The Major regretfully licked his dessert spoon into submission, put it down, and informed us, ‘Nobody called him Wild Bill Hickok when he was alive; that was the invention of a journalist. His peers called him Duck Bill Hickok – because he had an enormous hooter. Not many people know that.’
‘They say that guys with big noses have big pricks. I wonder if women know that?’ That was Les. I couldn’t resist the opening he’d left me; perhaps I wasn’t supposed to.
‘Don’t worry. You’ve a nice, neat, wee nose, Les.’
‘Our boy is getting bold, isn’t he?’ he told our friend Jimmy.
It was that sort of evening.
The heater must have run out sometime in the night. When I awoke my joints were stiff to breaking point, and my blankets hard with frost.
We joined an all-ranks queue for breakfast, which was bangers and mash – although the bangers were only soya links. The tea was good: brown as a Jamaican, and stiff with condensed milk. We visited the Beauvais petrol dump on the way out. Les did the deal with the Redcap guarding the stuff, and I gave him back his roll of dollars to finish it. We toured away with a full tank, two full jerrycans in the boot, and one lashed to each running board. That would turn us into a fireball if anyone shot at us, or get us to the border if need be, Les told us. I asked the silly one.
‘Which border?’
‘Germany, if necessary.’
‘And you’re ditching me in Paris?’
‘We’ll see. The Major’s decided to go wherever you want to go; so long as you’re travelling in the same direction as us.’
I looked away from him, and out of the window. The sun was shining, and Les had got quite a lick on, so the French countryside was dashing past. So England had become the Major again; there was a behavioural code at work here, which I couldn’t read. When I turned to look over my shoulder at the Major he was smiling a secret smile, and scribbling magic formulae into his small notebook again. He looked like a bloody alchemist. He was also whistling a tune under his breath so that you could only just hear it: I’ll swear it was ‘The Galloping Major’.