It bloody rained, and we got stuck between a column of muddy Brit Sherman tanks and a small convoy of smaller Morris trucks full of troops. There were about ten of them being shepherded by a Dingo scout car, and each contained about ten men. The tanks didn’t stop for nightfall, but outside yet another small German town the infantry did. So did we.
I helped James whilst Les brewed up. I rigged his aerial for him; looping it over the highest branch I could reach. He held his earphones up to one ear only, which meant that I could listen in to the other earpiece. He had done that before when he was worried about signal strength, and his keying. He needn’t have worried. I told you he had a good hand. His signal was all encrypted, of course; so it meant bugger-all to me. So was the acknowledgement from the other end, and the brief message that followed it.
Then the operator sent something in clear. He or she sent Tuesday’s Child, which brought me out in goose bumps. The Major signed off and put the ’phones back in their rig in the suitcase lid. He looked tired. Asked me, ‘What did you make of that, Charlie?’
‘Different hand, different operator. The way someone uses a Morse key is like a signature. You only have to hear someone once, most of the time, to be able to recognize them again. Ever since we set out the guy you’ve asked me to listen to has been the same person. This guy is someone different.’
James said, ‘OK . . . and now tell me about Tuesday’s Child; it wasn’t in my briefing anywhere. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It does to me, James. That was Pete’s way of telling us that he fixed your communication problem. Tuesday’s Child was a Lancaster bomber, one of the best. Pete and I completed our tours in her.’
‘OK . . . Where is she now?’
‘In hell with all the others. She crashed and burned the day we gave her to another crew. Bad bitch.’
‘Tuesday’s Child?’
‘That’s right, James. Grace. We named her after Grace.’
‘I see.’
He didn’t, and I hoped that he never would. He asked me, ‘You Tuesdays stick together then? After you finished flying together?’
‘Don’t know. Pete’s the only one I’ve met so far, and I thought he was dead.’
‘Are you pleased that he’s not?’
‘Yes. Yes I am. What’s this about, James? What are all the questions for?’
‘Just asking,’ he said. ‘Just interested.’
I didn’t believe him either. Life’s not that tidy.
That night I retuned the suitcase for them. The noise came out of a neat speaker the Krauts had built into the lid. We sat around Les’s fire, which threw out a surprising heat. It wasn’t far from our small tents. Kate’s back door was open, and from the suitcase we listened to Johnny Mercer doing ‘GI Jive’, and Louis Jordan doing ‘Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t My Baby?’ Later there was a Glenn Miller hour from Paris. Probably from that bloody club the Americans captured me in. Dinah Shore had flown in, and was doing ‘Stardust’ with them. Somewhere a few miles up ahead people were fighting and dying at the arse end of a bad war, and Dinah was singing ‘Stardust’.
They told you lies when they said that the worst things to be seen on the march across Europe were the concentration camps, and what was left of the people who had lived in them. They weren’t the worst things – and I know because I saw three camps, and there were things even worse than that.
They never told you about the big German cities. The big German cities laid flat. The big German cities full of dead people . . . or how we invented the microwave oven fifty years before its time, and flung whole bloody communities into it. I’ve told you before: I was never afraid to ask the questions.
We drove through a small town. Every house, shop, office or tenement I saw was smashed and burned. Two churches had been spread about a bit, but the cinema had managed to remain intact in the town square. Maybe that was a pointer for the future. The town hadn’t only been bombed: I thought an army had fought its way through it. There were no people and no stray animals, except a thin fox I saw rummaging in a shop window with smashed glass. The smell of burning seeped inside Kate, like stale cigarette smoke clinging to your jacket after a night in the pub.
The Major said, ‘I think that they used to have a car factory here,’ as if that explained everything.
‘I’ve been to the briefings,’ I told him. ‘We would have crapped all over it even if it had only made prams.’
There was a GI standing on our side of the road at a crossroads just the other side of the town. He wore a scarred chamberpot helmet, a weatherproof coat, and had a big twostrapped pack thrown over only one shoulder. His back was to us, and the hand held out with its thumb up was brown. He turned and smiled when we stopped by him, and held out the hand to me. I had to open the car door to speak to him. We did the ritual: touched, grasped and shook. I liked his open smile, and hoped he wasn’t on a runner again. I said, ‘Hello, Cutter.’
‘Hi, Charlie, Les. Hello, sir.’ He gave James a cursory salute and the Major attempted a return serve. All James did was succeed in knocking his cap off. He cursed, Damn.
I asked, ‘Are you running again?’
‘No, Charlie. Same as you, travelling. Under orders this time. They liberated Bremen yesterday, and they have a field hospital that’s going under.’
‘They ordered you to walk to Bremen?’
‘Shit no. There was a motor bicycle, but I wrecked it. I ran into a dog the other side of town. Pity. It looked a good dog. It was certainly the only dog they got left.’
‘See any people?’ That was James.
‘Nossir. I guess they all evacuated. Someone else’s problem now.’
‘Wanna lift? We’re going that way too.’ That was Les.
‘Yes please,’ Cutter said. ‘You want me to ride in the back with the General, or up front like the enlisted men?’
‘Charlie can sit in the back,’ Les said. ‘I want you up here where I can keep an eye on you.’
Cutter rode with his pack and helmet clutched possessively into his lap. I asked him, ‘What do you have in the pack? Booze? Silk knickers for the Fräuleins?’
‘The tools of my trade, Charlie, and that ain’t them. I’ve as much penicillin as they’d let me have. If we flogged it I’d be worth my weight in gold to you today.’
‘Not that you’d ever sell?’
I’d gone too far. There was a bit of a sulky silence, and then the Negro said, ‘What’s the point of my cutting folk if I can’t keep them alive with the proper drug afterwards?’
I said, ‘Sorry,’ and meant it.
A while after that the Cutter asked, ‘You boys mind if we stay in touch while we’re all still in Bremen? I don’t know what it’s gonna be like up there. They may not like me.’
In a cobbled dairy yard on a hill closer to Bremen we found five British Army trucks. They were all time-expired AEC Matadors, just like Obadiah. They were parked neatly alongside each other, burnt to a crisp, and still smoking. The rubber smoke made my eyes water. We had slowed up, and then stopped to rubberneck, when we saw a jeep on its side in the ditch outside. When we walked over to examine it we could see that the jeep had heavy-calibre bullet holes in its cracked windscreen, and bullet slashes on both of the front seat cushions.
There was a small, deserted cheese factory – two rooms in a two-hundred-year-old shed – alongside the dairy. Behind it we found fresh graves, with identity discs hanging on the rough wooden crosses. Some of the crosses were surmounted by British helmets; another bore an officer’s soft cap: half of it had been torn away, and it was stained with blood.
James was with me. The colour left his face. He lifted the cap, and then said, ‘Bollocks,’ softly. Like a whisper. Then he flung it away from him. He prowled the yard with his revolver in his hand; Les with his Sten. There was no one there to shoot at, of course. The Cutter seemed the least moved.
‘We in trouble?’ I asked him.
‘No. They’re long gone. It takes three hours to burn out a truck as thoroughly as that.’
I’d forgotten that he’d been a policeman once, and cops know things like that. James and Les searched the sheds and the house. The Cutter told me, ‘Wasting their time. Does your Major still have his radio?’
‘Yes,’ said James. I swung on him, scared. So did the Cutter. James had come from nowhere. He said, ‘Sorry,’ and, ‘Yes, I do have it. Why?’
‘I wondered if you might think to send a signal to Charlie’s friend Pete. I understand that he’s a policeman again, just like I used to be.’
‘Again?’ I asked him.
‘Yes. He was one before the war, didn’t you know?’
‘Bollocks,’ I said.
‘Precisely,’ James said.
Why hadn’t we known that?
McKechnie and Les left us to it. In the house Les got a brew going. James said to me, ‘I’m flying a bit blind here, old son: sending a signal to an operator who appears to have been substituted for my regular, by your flaky pal.’
‘. . . because your own operator was playing against you, James. Trust me.’
‘Maybe . . . and maybe we’d better go back to sir until this bit’s over with.’
‘OK, sir. It’s your call: forgive the pun. We can either report this, and the law can still catch up . . . or not report it, pass by on the other side, and maybe they never will.’
‘Pass by on the other side: isn’t that sort of what your pal accused us of before?’
‘Yes. We’re good at it, obviously.’
‘You want me to call him up, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fine.’ It wasn’t. He was pissed off. He sounded as if he’d eaten bitter aloes. James sprayed a short burst of Morse. He had encrypted it, and assured me that the essential detail was there. I wasn’t reassured. He had asked the operator to forward it urgently to Tuesday’s Child. That was neat. We only waited ten minutes for a response, which was Morsed back in clear as, Tx. KKK50.
James showed me, and asked, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘It’s either Pete, or someone who reads old prewar RAF shorthand. It says, Thanks, I will formate on you in 50 minutes. Pete will be here within the hour.’
‘. . . and pigs fly.’
‘Stop grumbling, James. Sir. Come and have a cuppa. We’d better not tell the Cutter about the KKK. He’d take it very personally.’
The room in which Les had discovered a working stove was in what had once been a small farm kitchen. On the way there I said, ‘At least they gave them a Christian burial.’
‘The Czech is probably a Catholic,’ James told me. ‘They can be strict about these things. Why don’t you go and say a few words over them? Just in case no one else has.’
‘You know I’m not a proper parson, sir. So it won’t bloody do.’
‘I’m the bloody Major, and you’re the bloody Captain, and that’s all there bloody is to it! So do as you’re bloody well told, and go and get your bloody book.’
The only good things to happen were that they joined me at the gravesides, didn’t take the mickey, and said Amen in all the proper places. I don’t know why, but at a grave of one of the driver privates I became suddenly convinced that the occupant had a young family. I made a picture of them in my mind. Horsing around, unaware that they no longer had a dad. I suddenly couldn’t go further. My voice went away somewhere, and James stepped in and finished it for me. When we did caps on, and walked back to the office, James grasped my upper left arm, and guided me as if I was a blind man.
But I was still pissed off with him afterwards – with this public school thing of wanting to give all the orders, and still wanting to be one of the boys. Besides; it was my sore arm that he had grabbed. I took the char Les offered me: it was in a big chipped mug he’d found – it held about three-quarters of a pint. He’d also slapped a generous waxer into it: brandy this time. I think that he had the contents of a small off-sales bar in Kate’s boot. Anyway, I walked outside with it. I’ve told you that it looked as if the cheese factory had once been part of a small dairy farm? Its muddy yard was cobbled. I walked across it to the old farm fence away from the main road: I didn’t intend to go into the field beyond, but I suppose that Les was keeping an eye on me anyway, because he wandered up behind me. Leaning on the fence. The tea in the mugs steamed.
I said to Les, ‘When I’m an old man, and telling stories to my grandchildren, do you think I can say I fought my way across Europe with you and the Major?’
Les flicked his fag-end into the field. I could smell the brandy in the tea.
‘Not much fighting so far, but yeah, why not? You could say that. Why?’
‘Because the only people I’ve helped kill so far are three Yanks. People may not want to hear about that.’
‘Yeah. I can see that, but the bastards deserved it.’
‘Yes, they did. But you do see what I mean?’
‘I do, mate . . . but what’s worrying you then?’
‘All these bloody coppers, I expect. Wherever I’ve gone since I left the squadron I’ve had coppers of some sort at my heels. It started when I saw Pete shoot a copper while I was still on the squadron, and helped him to get rid of the body. There was also another body he’d brought back to the squadron with him from London. There was another one: a bastard of a catering officer on our station, who was knocking about the kids who worked for him.’
‘So that’s another three, as well. Do things in threes do they, your lot? You killed ’im too, did you?’
‘No. I didn’t kill any of them. Pete shot the copper because he was going to shoot me: I’d caught him rummaging through Pete’s gear. It was to do with the death of some Polish general in an air crash.’
‘Sikorsky, that would be.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I think you’ll find it was in the papers. You didn’t kill this . . . catering officer, then?’
‘No. By then Pete was in the black market, and so was he. I don’t think Pete did it. I think he probably asked someone else on the squadron to do it. They drowned him in an old field latrine.’
Les fished a cigarette out of his beret and lit up.
‘You really don’t let up once you start telling it, do you, Charlie?’
‘I was just worried about the coppers. I’m worried that they are still trying to rope me into this.’
‘Anyone else know about this?’
‘Mr Clifford. And anyone he’s chosen to tell.’
‘Do you think that you’ve killed any Krauts in the course of your private little wars?’
‘Bloody hundreds I expect. I dropped bombs all over them, remember?’
‘You got nothing to worry about then, ’ave you? You scored more goals than own goals.’
‘It’s not a bloody game.’
Pete was beaten to the draw by a jeep and an ambulance, which came from the Bremen road. That surprised me; they must have been better organized up there than I thought. The jeep slithered into the courtyard, and disgorged its driver – a stylishly dressed Major. He saluted by waving a leather-covered swagger stick at his cap, which had a leather peak. Les took no chances, and gave him something like a salute. So did I. He said, ‘Major Hendriks. Ira. South African Military Police, but don’t get in a lather . . .’ He had that nasal SA drawl I’ve always liked, ‘. . . I’m not a proper policeman. I do the science.’ He said African as if it was spelled Efrican.
‘Like Sir Sydney Smith in England, sir?’ Les.
‘Yes, Private. Well done. You’ve got some bodies, and burned-out lorries for me, I understand.’
I was tongue-tied, so it was Les again.
‘Our Major’s inside, sir,’ he nodded to the dairy office. ‘And the tea he’s drinking’s not too old.’
‘Thenk you, Private. What’s the matter with your Captain? Don’t he speak?’ I think that he was just trying to break the ice.
‘He’s just a Chaplain, sir. Only talks to God these days.’
‘Oh, I see. One of those. Carry on.’
After he sloped off I told Les, ‘Supercilious bastard.’
‘I would agree with you, sir, if I knew what it meant.’
There was a driver and three SBAs in the ambulance; a neat little Austin job. The SBAs climbed out of the back with spades at the ready. Les showed them where the graves were, and watched them get to work while he smoked fags with the driver. That is to say he listened. He never passed up the opportunity to find out what was what in the other people’s war.
Soon after that a small Yank communications aircraft, still covered in black and white Normandy stripes, landed on the road outside. Pete was keeping his word; it had taken him less than fifty. His uniform had silver tabs added to its shoulder boards, red flashes to the collars, and he wore a flash black-peaked cap with some silver braid around it. Like the SS. Both James and the South African who went out to meet him paused, and saluted. After a few words with them that I failed to catch he walked slowly over to me. I asked him, ‘What the fuck have they done to you, Pete?’
‘Colonel Pete. They made me a Colonel.’
‘Who?’
‘The Polish government. They want their soldiers to have some clout at the conference tables of the victorious.’
‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
‘I told you: the Reds are going to be in charge for a long time. I go home in this uniform they sling me in a camp. I go home dressed as a miner, or a welder in the shipyard – maybe I’ll stay safe, an’ make trouble for them.’
‘Why go home at all? Why not stay in England?’
‘Not a focking chance, Charlie. Can’t you see the way the wind is blowing? The English won’t let Polish soldiers stay, the Reds will say Please send our gallant heroes home, so we can lock them up in the empty concentration camps, and the Brits will only be too glad to get shot of us.’
‘Why do you think we’ll betray you?’
‘You betrayed everyone else for hundreds of years. Am I so different?’
‘Somebody told me you were a policeman back in Poland. Was that true?’
I suppose he took a few seconds to think about it. Then he said, ‘Yes. That was true. Are you happy now?’
The wind got up from somewhere: it blew the smell of burned rubber from the lorries around us. The sky was leaden. Les was watching murdered men being exhumed without turning a hair, and James was off fretting because Pete had ignored him, Major or no Major. I said, ‘This is a stupid conversation, Pete. Go and talk to James; he’ll only take it out on me and Les if you piss him off.’
‘OK. Thanks for telling me you’d found the lorries. People don’t tell the cops nothing these days.’
‘Anything. They don’t tell the police anything . . .’
‘Nothing,’ Pete insisted. ‘They tell cops nothing . . .’
‘Nor would you,’ I told him. ‘Not when you were on the other side.’ Then reality checked in, and I added, ‘. . . only you were never really on the other side.’
Bugger him. Bugger the lot of them. I wanted to find Grace and say my piece; make sure that she was all right, and then go home. For the first time in my life, I thought, I had a decent plan. When we gathered up, and went out to Kate we had to skate close to the American plane. I think that we called the type a Cricket. The pilot grinned, and raised a hand to me as I moved past. It was Tommo. He was in a flying jacket. He looked shagged out. I thought briefly about Cliff; how come so many of these types had learned to fly? The Cutter was commandeered by the SA Major, who wanted to do a quick and dirty autopsy on the bodies. Hendriks promised him a lift into Bremen as a reward. The black man looked very unhappy as we drove away and left him.
The Cricket zoomed low over Kate an hour later. They would be in Bremen before us.