Special Group 404 had taken over a deserted village on the moors of North Yorkshire. There had been a street with six houses, a pub, a village shop-cum-Post Office with a battered enamel plate advertising Hovis bread and Horlicks, and a large brick misery-faced Methodist chapel. All the buildings bore the scars of war. Not a half pane of glass was left in the window frames, and more than one door was propped with a stick. Gardens that once had been tended cottage-style with proud-headed chrysanthemums, Michaelmas daisies, sweet Williams, now were rank with nettles and head-high goldenrod. Roses, clematis, wisteria and honeysuckle, no doubt thriving on the nitrate in cordite, rampaged over the walls of houses and the Post Office. Amid the couch grass you would have found self-seeded pansies and polyanthus struggling bravely against the onslaught of total war, but you never had time to look. On each side of the street concrete observation posts had been erected, black-eyed cavern-mouthed silent watchers from another world. The village had formerly been a rendezvous for Saturday afternoon cyclists and hikers up from Timble. Mrs Tannin in the fourth cottage down from the Post Office had once a modest mouth-to-ear reputation for ham-and-egg teas, eight around the big table in the front room and no space if you arrived late. Mrs Tannin now made munitions in Bradford, and her boys had gone to war, along with the cyclists and the hairy stockinged, knobbly-kneed hikers.
Once upon a time you couldn’t walk up that village street on a Saturday or a Sunday if you came from Bradford without meeting ten men you knew. Now, with concrete-clad watchers permanently on guard, it would be a good man who’d get up that street even under cover of darkness, without a bunker spitting bullets, grenades, thunderflashes, and militarised nastinesses at him. Sometimes the blank cartridges were replaced by live rounds and tracers; the observers were all marksmen with a military licence to shoot to wound. Of the hundred and three men who had volunteered for Special Group 404, three had been killed by accident and twenty-two had been wounded. The remainder had heard the hungry whisper of live ammunition, the impact thud of nickel-plated lead seeking flesh to slap against the stonework walls. Selection by elimination, training by doing, each error costly, each failure final; it was that kind of unit. Special Group 404. had a quiet, night-time, ruthlessly efficient job to do and there was no room for mistakes.
I waited with CSM Ben Bolding in a pill box concrete bunker overlooking the Methodist chapel. It was getting on for midnight. The year, 1943. That morning early it had started to pretend to snow, and the ground was covered in dark grey slush; the month was November.
My name is Robin Rhodes and I stand six feet two, a height that can be a damned nuisance jumping out of a plane with a parachute strapped to your back. In the old hole-in-the-floor tail jump days of bombers hastily converted for drops, many times I had scythed forwards through the hole ‘ringing the bell’ as they called it, smashing my face against the badly protected rim. Now a nose permanently bent to one side adds to my attractiveness, or so they tell me! I was a seasoned campaigner of twenty-eight. They promised me this was my last job. CSM Bolding was a thin rat-faced Yorkshireman, lean as a ferret. He had a thin rasping voice that could never have cleared a barrack square, but he never needed to. He was a corporal when he joined Lieutenant Rhodes in 1941 in one of the first of the Special Groups. Since that time we had always been together. Ben Bolding had only one ambition, to survive the war.
‘Why did you join the Special Services?’ I asked him.
‘Destiny’s a deceitful bitch,’ Ben Bolding said, ‘and I want her in my own two hands, where I can see what she’s doing. None of this “once more into the breach” lark. If I’ve got to fight, I’ll do it independently. Just me and a few people about me I can trust. That’s my style.’
‘You trust me?’ I asked.
‘Until the Lady Destiny tells me not to.’
‘And if I say jump, you’ll jump, every time?’
‘Ah, now that’s another matter. You’re an officer, and I’m a sergeant major. Yes, sir, I’ll jump, sir! Lead me to the edge, sir! But you and I, Major, we’ve soldiered often enough together to know that there comes a time, perhaps only one occasion, when you’ll say jump, and I might not go. I might think about it first.’
‘And you’ll be dead.’
‘I know I will. That’s what I mean by trust. If I could guarantee to jump that one time, I know I could stay alive. I think that, if you’re the one telling me to jump, I’m more likely to do so than if it was any other officer I’ve served under.’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere.’ I had to laugh at him. We were standing relaxed in the concrete bunker. Over at the far side of the bunker, a corporal sniper couldn’t hear what we said; he probably wasn’t interested.
‘It will, you know, Major. It’ll get me over there, wherever we’re going, because you’re the only officer I could say a thing like that to and that in a way is trust.’
What a strange man he was, Ben Bolding, how well and how little I knew him. I knew all his physical mannerisms, I could detect him instantly in a crowd of men by no more than the style of his movements. I crawled through a field with him and though six feet away felt him tense when he spotted a sentry. I always knew, instinctively, which way he would move in an attack. Never any need for me to say, you take the left, I’ll take the right. And yet vast depths of his mind I could never hope to fathom. I didn’t trust him at all. I knew his motives were based on self-interest and survival. For some reason he had come to believe he stood a better chance of survival with me. I didn’t trust him always to tell me the truth, when the truth was important to someone else; I knew he’d always follow a straight line of expediency, no matter the cost.
One time two of our men were picked up, drunk and disorderly, in Hurstpierpoint. We were due to start training for a job; it was the last night of liberty for a long while. The men were wheeled in front of me. I didn’t want to sentence them but there is a very straightforward code of discipline and the military police wanted them punished. ‘Were these men drunk?’ I asked the sergeant major. ‘I was with them all evening, sir, and can swear they never touched a drop of intoxicating liquor.’ That was a lie I was able to accept. No, I had no trust in Ben Bolding, but a faith that whatever he did it would be for the ultimate good of himself, and the immediate benefit of our particular objective. He knew damned well that having those two men could have meant the success or failure of the job we were about to do. He wanted the job to succeed, that was the immediate objective. But he wanted to get out of it alive, and that was the real motive behind his lie.
‘What do you think about this lot, Ben?’ I asked him.
‘Not much. We’ll be lucky if we get a dozen.’
I was bound to agree with him. ‘Where’ve they all gone?’ I knew where they’d gone. We’d lost them on jobs. Over forty men in a year, good men, all gone.
‘They all forgot to jump,’ he said.
At the far end of the street a lorry pulled up and men started to disembark.
‘Time to go back to war.’
As we walked out of the pill box, the corporal with a sniper’s flash on his arm took his place at the pill box aperture.
‘Live ammunition tonight,’ I reminded him.
‘Yes, Major.’
We walked down the street together. At the far end, large wooden hoardings were mounted on steel wheels; some had windows cut in them, others had doors. I referred to the drawing in my map case and then men from the lorry pulled the hoardings down the street, erecting them in front of the existing buildings by the lorry’s lights. When they were in position, what had formerly been a village street now appeared as the corner in a town. It was a startling transformation.
Six men and an officer had stayed in the back of the lorry. The vehicle was driven a quarter of a mile down the road and the tense silent group disembarked. I walked after them, found them grouped round the officer in a tight circle. All wore denim trousers and battledress jackets; their faces had been blackened with burned corks, and on their heads they wore the traditional green beret of Commandos. The officer saluted while his men stood to attention.
‘You’ve been briefed, Captain Derby?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Major.’
The odds against survival were great. Possibly one would get through, possibly two. Certainly no more. The course was the toughest I could devise, and technically the most difficult.
‘You get a half hour for this phase,’ I said, ‘and remember we shall be operating at all times under actual field conditions. That means the ammunition we shall be firing at you will be live, any men you might encounter will carry out their instructions to immobilise you by any means possible. As far as the War Office is concerned, this whole area is designated a battle zone, and any man who dies tonight will have the sole satisfaction of knowing his next of kin will be informed he has been killed in action.’
‘Do we get a stripe if we’re wounded, sir?’ one of the men asked cheekily. It was Bates. He already had three red strips sewn vertically down the arms of his ‘best’ uniform, souvenirs of Dunkirk and a couple of ‘moonlight’ jobs in France.
‘I’ll sew it on for you personally, with a machine gun,’ I promised.
‘I want you off at exactly 0300, Captain Derby,’ I said and left them at once.
Dodger Bates shivered, and that wasn’t solely on account of the coldness of the night. Walking into live ammunition was never something you took in your stride; nothing sounded so evil as live bullets punching the air about you. Taking apart a mine or a grenade was simple by comparison; a purely technical task you learned over and over again, until if necessary you could do it blindfold. There is a lot of free air about your head, and a bullet is small. The mathematical chances of being hit are negligible. When a man is firing at a hundred yards, his sights need only be off by a cat’s whisker and he can miss you completely. But somehow, despite the mathematical possibility, Dodger had already been hit three times by bullets. Jokingly the fatalists among them said, ‘If it’s got your number on it, you’ll get it.’ It had to be something like that, since the mathematical possibilities were against it. It had to be predestined, guided by some all-seeing eye. It had to have your number on it.
The night was cold, the sky overcast. Thank God for that. At least they’d have a dark walk up that long street.
‘Let’s go,’ said Captain Derby. Each man knew exactly what to do. Dodger Bates was first. He started slowly forwards down the road, keeping twelve inches away from the hedge. Two men came behind him, the captain, the other three men, each man twenty feet behind the man in front. It was a risky grouping, but one they would need. They couldn’t afford to be further apart than that, and to be closer would be suicide. Fifty yards, then stop. Freeze into the side of the hedge. Listen! Not a sound. Look! Nothing in sight. Glance back. Next man ten feet behind. Advance. Fifty yards, feet down flat, weight on the balls of your feet ready to jump in any direction. The first mortar is always short of target. They do it deliberately. It’s easier and more accurate to lift a mortar than to drop it, so they take the first sighting short a fraction, ready to lift. Trouble is, they aim for the centre of a patrol, and the short shot gets the front man. Weight on the balls of your feet and listen for the crack. That gives you one second before it drops down out of the sky at you. Remember Knocker, at Dieppe? Bashing ’em back like cricket balls, despite the impact fuse. Asked him how he managed it afterwards. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you take care not to hit them on the end, don’t you?’ That he hit them at all was a bloody miracle. Poor old Knocker, his parachute didn’t open on that job in Holland. He candled, went down like a stone, in the long drop. Is that somebody standing with his back to that wall, there, twenty yards ahead, just by the first building? Crafty sod; he’s standing back from the corner in the shadow. That’s a joke, the whole bloody place is a shadow. Strange how much you can see though, at this time of night. Or is it morning? That wall’s just a fraction lighter than he is, and he stands out like a shadowgraph etching. I’ll have that bugger. Dodger was carrying a Thompson submachine gun – well, if it was good enough for Al Capone, why not – though he had to admit it made him feel like a gangster. Thank God they’d done away with the circular magazine; they’d got this clip beneath the butt and that was a lot happier, wasn’t it? And you could carry ten clips in your pockets. Patch of shadow ahead; into it, and go sideways. Look back. Next man’s seen the sidestep. Good, he’s lifted the barrel of his gun and they’ll all know, or those who can see him will know, something’s wrong. Now sideways into the shadow. I bet that sod by the wall has lost me. Right, quick nip right, still in shadow, round the back of the building. Yes, there’s room to get round between the building and that hedge. Go along the side of the building to the corner. Number two will have moved up. Let’s pray to God he spots the man against the wall. Right, flat on your face. Best way to look round a corner; they never look at foot height. Yes, there he is, in the shadow. Not moving either! That sod’s a damned sight too still. Ten feet to go to get to him. Can’t be done. Right, down the leg. Steel rod fifteen inches long, three sixteenths thick in the centre, sharpened to a point at each end. Could throw it, but oh the risk if it misses. Right, down the other leg. Steel caps and a wire between them. Put the steel caps one on each point of the steel rod. Flex it. That works a treat. Same leg, steel pin ten inches long. An arrow. Watch the point, sharp as a virgin’s teeth. Marvellous how they make these arrows solid at the tip, and a tube all the way down to keep the weight forward. Put the arrow against the wire of the bow, pull back, aim, let go.
The arrow sped across the short space to the throat of the waiting figure, and there it stuck, through the neck, into the wall behind. I heard the whang of the arrow and smiled. That Dodger, you couldn’t fool him! The figure was a booby-trapped dummy. If Dodger had dashed across the space to tackle it, he’d have stumbled across a trip wire that would have sent a flare sky high. Lesson number ninety-seven or thereabouts – watch a motionless figure, ten to one he’s a booby-trapped corpse. No live human can stay so still for so long.
It must have taken the courage of a conviction, however, for Dodger to risk firing an arrow into what could have been the throat of one of his army mates. Teach them inhumanity.
Dodger had seen the trip wire, and was dismantling the mechanism that would have fired the flares.
Now they were back in formation, going up the street.
Dodger would drop to the back, behind Lance Corporal Levine, and number two would take his place.
Damn that number two. Where the hell does he think he’s walking, down Brighton Pier? Doesn’t he realise he’s crossing an open strip, with the light from the sky behind him? The corporal sniper was itching to shoot.
‘Seen him?’
‘Yes, Major – I’ve had him for the last five paces.’
‘Then why the hell haven’t you fired?’ Ben Bolding snarled. He too was disappointed. The sniper took aim again, and squeezed the trigger. The shot must have passed a quarter of an inch from the soldier’s ear. He dropped to the ground. RTU. He was lucky to get away with his life. Two more men had been eliminated by the time the patrol reached its objective, the fourth facade down the street, and the face of Captain Derby was grim. He took his position by the side of the wooden wall and waved Dodger Bates forward. They were all belly flat, crawling through the slush and crystalline snow. Dodger grinned cheerfully across the small alley. Lance Corporal Levine was crawling behind Dodger. Together they crossed the yard between the two cottages behind the wooden facade. Captain Derby crawled after them, keeping them in sight. The other men had crawled round the building, and by now would be in position on the corner. There had been a pig stall under the cottage on the left, and flagged steps led down to it. Dodger went first, his pack off his back hanging in his right hand. Lance Corporal Levine unslung his pack, and crouched on the edge of the stairs. There might be someone in there, there might not. The cellar door could be booby-trapped, but that’d never deceive Dodger. If there was any reason he couldn’t just walk through that door, he’d find it soon enough. Meanwhile, it was Captain Derby’s job to make certain no one came into this yard, that no hidden gun barrel poked itself out of one of the top windows. Dodger found the charge in the hinge of the door. Open that door and the hinge would crush the detonator and they’d all be in kingdom come. An old rusted spade was by the back door. Dodger examined it carefully, then picked it up. It had not been booby trapped. He inserted the blade of the spade under the door and lifted gently. The door rose gradually. The lintel above the door was loose. Dodger let the door down again, then used the spade to prise out the lintel. He passed the balk of the wood back to Levine. Then he lifted the door again and took it off its hinges. The door started to fall outwards, but Dodger caught it and swung it aside. There was no one in the cellar. It was a risk he had had to take. The detonator was set on the outside of the hinge – the door had lifted past it not a quarter of an inch away. Almost contemptuously, Dodger lifted the detonator off its wiring, and showed it to Sam Levine. He buried the detonator in the soil beside the top of the flagged steps leading down to the cellar, then together they went inside.
A concrete slab floor had been poured into the ground floor room of the cottage. There in the cellar they were beneath it. Dodger’s task was to blow a hole in that concrete slab, about two feet across. Once the hole had been blown, they had to climb through it. The ‘exercise’ finished when they were all knocked out, or when they were standing in the room above that cellar. They had a half an hour from start. Twenty minutes left. Now they were inside the cellar, Captain Derby crawled back to the wooden facade and took up a position where he could see down the street, ready for any simulated attack I might mount. In the cellar, Dodger and Sam Levine would be preparing the charge for blowing. Now that Alf Burdon had gone, RTU’d with a blue streak down his face, Dodger Bates was the best explosives man we had. Tonight it had better work. Someone was creeping down the side of the facade, on the other side of the cellar steps. In his mouth he held a thunderflash, a large ‘banger’ that, in the confined space of that cellar, would blow the senses out of Dodger and Sam Levine. Captain Derby cursed under his breath. That man, whoever he was, had just passed a so-called sentry, posted to prevent him. The sentry must have been knocked out. Damn. That left only Dodger, Sam Levine, and Captain Derby from the original seven. The captain went stalking. Slowly he crept forward along the buttress of the wooden facades. When he had gone fifteen feet, he was slightly to one side of the crawling intruder, who had at least twenty feet to traverse before he could get close enough to lob his thunderflash. Whoever it was he was good. You could hardly see his movements as he crossed the ground. The captain knew he would never be able to overtake him moving at that speed. He rose up into a crouch. He took a large stone, and lobbed it over the head of the crawling figure to the far side of the small space between the cottages. The stone clattered. The crawler stopped. In one bound Captain Derby leaped across the intervening space and landed with his knees in the small of the crawling figure’s back. The crawler gasped, and slumped even flatter on the ground, unconscious. Captain Derby turned him over. Another lad for RTU – Brian Johnson, one of our best signallers. Captain Derby dragged him back against the wall of the wooden facade, away from the bomb blast due in exactly three minutes. Suddenly he detected the faint sounds as Dodger and Sam Levine came scrambling back up the cellar steps. They flattened themselves against the wall and edged to the corner, dropped to the ground and waited. Five seconds later, there was an eardrum-shattering blast as the explosives went off, and a puff of black smoke edged with the yellow tongues of the explosive flame rolled up the flagged steps. No sooner had the shock wave subsided than Dodger and Sam Levine dashed back again into the courtyard down the cellar steps, Captain Derby at their heels. A large scab had been scrooped from the concrete bed. It had not been pierced. Most of the blast had thrust itself downwards and sideways to the walls, all of which had cracked. A hole three feet across and two feet deep had been blown in the cellar floor, and all the wooden joists on which the concrete floor had been laid were snapped at their ends. The mobile generator outside was switched on, and with the wander light in my hands I walked down the cellar steps and into the cellar itself, the light illuminating the crestfallen faces of the three men. They were covered in dirty slushy mud, shivering with cold and disappointment. I walked across to the scab chopped from the concrete.
‘Didn’t get through, eh?’
‘No, sir.’ They shook their heads, looking miserable. I didn’t tell them that I had been testing that explosive up in the moors for over a week, and had not cut concrete with it. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘it’s not your fault.’
‘If only we could double the amount, Major,’ Dodger Bates suggested.
You can’t tell a man too much; some don’t complete the training, and your security is shot to hell. ‘Believe me, Dodger, if we could use another spoonful, I would. But this amount has been calculated for us, and we shall just have to make it go through.’ Dodger’s face was glum. ‘I thought it wouldn’t be like that in the Commandos,’ he said. Captain Derby made a motion to stop him, but I put my hand on Peter’s arm. ‘No, let him speak; you thought what wouldn’t be like what, Dodger?’
He was our most cautious man, a loner, a man apart. Dodger thought things out for himself. It could be dangerous, for often the discipline we needed was purely instinctive. Often I’d see Dodger mulling a thing over in his mind, and then, when he had been able to accept it, become a demon in its execution.
‘When I first volunteered for the Commandos,’ he said, starting slowly, ‘I worked it out that with a force like this, we’d get the best of everything to work with, I mean. I was fed up with the stuff they’d been handing out to us in the Fusiliers, rusty shovels, picks with broken handles, all that sort of stuff. Now here we are back at the same situation. We’ve got to blow a hole through a piece of concrete, and it won’t work because the equipment we’re using isn’t right. We need sandbags to tamp that explosive flat against the concrete. We need air drills to start us going with a few sinker holes. We need blast runs to crack the concrete. What do we get? Slap the stuff up against the roof and put a detonator in it and blow. No wonder half the puff goes up the steps outside, wasted force.’
He was right, of course. He couldn’t know that not all the instruments and equipment in the world would help us. We had to get into 404 with limited help, we had to do it quickly, and get out again; for once it was most important we got out. Usually, once we’d done a job, blown up a power station, derailed a train, knocked out a gun battery, our own importance had vanished. Getting the men who did the job back home was an act of military charity. They didn’t need us once the power station had gone sky high. This time, we had to get in and get out again. But I couldn’t tell Dodger, not yet. There was, however, something I could tell him.
‘I don’t want this to go any further, Dodger, but I think’s safe to say that you, and Sam Levine, will be on the next job with me.’
They looked relieved. Dodger put his doubts away, momentarily. ‘You all did an excellent job of getting here – it wasn’t your fault you couldn’t complete the assignment.’
Even Captain Derby was liable for the RTU penalty should he make an error, despite his rank and seniority. He too looked vastly relieved. ‘Off you go,’ I said, ‘back to camp and into bed. We don’t want you catching pneumonia, not if you’re coming looking for Germans.’
Switching on the generator was always the signal for the end of an exercise. An ambulance parked outside the village was brought in to take out any casualties. Brian Johnson was carried aboard. Captain Derby, Dodger and Sam Levine cadged a lift and away they went.
It was still snowing, that heavy damp snow that soon turns to mush. I shared the thermos of brandied coffee with Ben Bolding. Somehow, I had a disinclination to go back to camp. We talked over the exercise as we always did, going over each point of the route and the performance of each man. We were both agreed that Dodger and Sam Levine would come with us, and Captain Derby. The village was now peaceful and all the staff men who helped set up these exercises had gone back to warm billets. The war had ended for a few hours. In the distance, over the moor, searchlights licked the low clouds probing the skies above the towns of the West Riding. German bombers were out. Occasionally we could hear the dull crump of shells, see the white hot fire of incendiary explosions. A fighter screamed low over the moor, one engine flaming. On the ground, all was peaceful, the tick of our jeep the only sound.
It was November 1943. For a short time I was out of the war.
Finally I told the driver to take us back to camp, the lid of the thermos clasped in my hands. The night air had cleared, the snow had stopped, and now I could see over the stretch of moors, down into Wharfedale. My Professor of Organic Chemistry used to live down there, in a large house with a large garden. I took packets of examination papers out to his house, and his wife gave me tea on the lawn. There’d always be a package to take back, but it would never be ready. I enjoyed tea on the lawn with the professor’s wife. I learned from her those standards of womanly charm and grace I would never forget. I hated the packets of examination papers. Even in those days of peace I handled them as if they were explosive.
Brigadier Steele looked after me at the War Office. I was a hybrid, neither Army, Navy, nor Air Force. Even though the military mind had organised skulduggery into Commandos, Special Air Services and combined operations, apparently there was still room between the interstices of legitimate warfare for bastard outfits such as mine. I knew the reason why; we were on the strength of no unit, and could be written on and written off with equal facility. We belonged to no one; no one could be charged with responsibility for us. Brigadier Steele had promised this would be the last job. ‘The invasion’s bound to come soon, Rhodes, and then you can go back to being a soldier.’
He was in no position to make such a promise. I was prepared to accept what the brigadier must tell me to do in the name of expediency; I didn’t expect always to be told the truth, and didn’t therefore object if he should occasionally tell me expedient lies. But I had a right to demand that the mechanicals of our bastard existence, on which so much depended, would be impeccably effective. Tomorrow, I would go to London, to the War Office, and there play merry bloody hell. I was going to have the biggest row over that explosive they’d heard in a long time.
The amount Dodger had used should have blown a hole neat as a can opening, but it hadn’t. Just what the hell did the boffins think they were playing at? The prescription had been quite specific; for once we had an exact description of our target. There was no reason at all why they couldn’t turn up an explosive that would do exactly what we asked of it. Or so I thought.
I was going to take a troop of men into Europe to do a simple job. Every second we were over there those human lives would be under risk. We had planned everything, of course, but who has ever seen a paper plan that works exactly on the ground as you have drawn it on the board? I’d had enough of cock-ups.
‘Remember Liebville?’ I asked Ben.
He chuckled. ‘She was lovely!’ he said.
‘Not that, you randy devil!’
Liebville is in the south of France, and the Maquis had discovered the Germans were making small parts for bomb fuses in a factory. We went over, Special Group 22. On the way across, the plane developed engine trouble and dumped us in the sea. We were supposed to meet a leader of the Maquis. Incredible though it seems, he overslept. Perfectly normal human error. He overslept. It threw the whole operation into chaos. We never did get to the factory, and were lucky to get out through Portugal. We were holed up in Lisbon, waiting for a plane to Ireland. Ben Bolding had been hidden in the home of a fado singer. As he said, she was lovely. He was glad to get out of Lisbon for a rest.
I was determined that 404 would not be another Liebville.
Up here on the moors, I was testing men’s spirits to ensure they were of the finest calibre available. The boffins had nothing else to do but supply us with explosive that worked. What the hell did they think they were playing at?
‘How thick will the concrete be?’ Ben asked. His mind had been turning on the same problem.
‘It was twelve inches thick when it was laid in 1941 – they might have poured a screed on top of that; the maximum thickness will be fifteen inches.’
‘We’ll never do it,’ Ben said, ‘and then we shall look like silly buggers, shan’t we? It’ll all be wasted.’
‘We will do it,’ I said quickly. ‘You trust me… I’ll make such a stink tomorrow.’
Ben smiled, relaxed on his seat. He’d heard me making a ‘stink’ in the past. ‘Any coffee left, Major?’ he asked.
With the brigadier was Professor Challoner of Birmingham University, FRS; a nervous little man called Sewidge from ICI, with picric-acid-stained fingers, halitosis, and the degree of Doctor of Science; and a full colonel from the Royal Engineers with letters strung behind his name like bunting. ‘The problem couldn’t be more simple, it seems to my lay mind,’ I said when the introductions had been completed and I had read their impressive qualifications from the typewritten sheet an ATS girl had placed before me. The brigadier wanted no nonsense – my little BSc looked miserable in such a constellation. I was no more than a technician; my job was to see their laboratory experiments were made to work. They just damn well would not work! Not up on the Yorkshire Moors. There was a helluva lot of talk across the table about thrust and pressures, moments of forces, but when they got to electron parameters I’d had it. I daydreamed. Smoked. Drew bosoms of impossible size on the top page of my doodle pad. It was Doctor Sewidge who first observed my lack of interest.
‘Can we ask the major to contribute his thoughts in the matter?’
‘It doesn’t work. It’s as simple as that. I’m not concerned to do a long involved research into why it doesn’t work – I only want something that will work, and I need it soon!’
‘We all accept that,’ the brigadier said, crisp as burned bacon rind, ‘but we want to know what you suggest?’
‘On the question of explosives, if this distinguished gathering has no suggestion to make I’d be foolish and presumptuous even to try. But here’s a thought I’ve had. What do we usually do in the Army when we want an outrageous job done?’
The brigadier smiled. ‘We get an outrageous man to do it. That’s why you’re here!’
‘But outrageous though I may be, Brigadier, I have no specialised knowledge of explosives and concrete cutting, and that, it seems to me, is vital. I’ve blown down bridges, blown up culverts, cut railway sleepers and lines, brought down overhead telephone systems, but I’VE NEVER CUT A HOLE IN CONCRETE!’ I said each word slowly and carefully. All right, let them charge me with dumb insolence.
‘I can see what’s he’s getting at,’ Professor Challoner said to relieve the tension. ‘We ought to forget our theories, and look for someone who’s had practical experience in civilian life of cutting holes in concrete with explosives. It should be easy to find such a person from the staff of one of these larger construction companies.’
But it wasn’t, as they discovered. It was very easy to find men who’d mixed concrete under oil and water emulsion fifty fathoms deep in the Persian Gulf while smelling of Attar of Roses. But all the concrete had been laid. No one had ever, it seemed, needed to cut it precisely and swiftly. We could find a hundred men who specialised in jackhammer techniques for smashing concrete to little pieces – but that took a compressor and a jackhammer, daylight in the middle of the High Street stuff. That early in the war, it seemed nobody had needed to slice concrete, swiftly. The military system boasted it could find anyone to do anything – poachers could cross country silently and I had my share of them. I had men could climb buildings – former steeplejacks. I had men could smell Germans a mile away. Ferrets give off a slight odour when they detect a rabbit – a ferret handler develops a nose on him like a bloodhound. Safe makers crossed the line and opened safes, motor mechanics dismantled vehicles, watch makers made sense of even the most delicate mechanism. We were trained to throw knives by a lad who’d thrown ’em at his wife for a living, and I once was taught to fall by a stunt man who’d worked with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, out in Hollywood. But we didn’t have anyone who could blow a neat three-foot diameter hole in concrete in the conditions under which we had to work.
I went back to Yorkshire.
‘When we’ve worked it out or found someone,’ the brigadier promised, ‘you can come back.’
Notice in a public lavatory – ‘My mother made me a queer.’ Beneath it the words, pencilled in, ‘If I send her the wool, will she make me one, too?’ Not very funny, is it? My name is Peter Derby. I’ve got a million of them, all about queers.
I don’t know how I got to be this way. My private parts are possibly a little on the small side, but not noticeably so. Certainly at school no one ever laughed at me or ridiculed me because of them. I’ve never been over-dominated by women – my mother was a marvellous person and we got on very well together; but then my pa was a marvellous person, too, and we got on very well together, too. Of course, he thought I’d done all the usual things, and so I imagine did she. He thought it very wise of me not to get married early, to wait until I came into a bit of money, from Grandpa’s estate.
I know lots of girls. I played tennis with them, danced with them, even necked with them, but do you know, I just don’t like the taste of a woman’s mouth. It’s as simple as that. I’ve explored their bodies to see what happens, to them and to me. Clinically speaking the experiment has been interesting. But nothing ever happens to me, if you know what I mean. Well, assuming you don’t object to the anatomical details, I never get an erection. Not with a woman. I’ve had girls in my room at The House, and no fear of anyone coming in since we weren’t that kind of family, and I’ve taken off all their clothes and really explored them. But nothing has ever happened to me. One time, I tried to put myself in. I wasn’t hard, but I tried to get in thinking something might happen when I was inside. But I couldn’t get the damn thing in. She was very understanding. Said: Don’t worry, we’ll try again some other time. We never did, of course. Yet the first time I saw Jamie Morrisson in the shower I was as hard as a stallion. Now how do you account for that?
No traumatic experiences when I was a baby, no nanny forcing me back on to the potty, no dominant mother, absolutely no desire to wear girls’ clothing and yet, with a girl nothing, with a boy an indecent stalk!
Everything was fine, just fine until I met John. He owns a garage and Pa lent him money when he wanted to expand. John was not the sort of fella I’d take to socially. A bit common, if you know what I mean, though he did his best to hide it. I happened to meet him one day up at The House when he was talking to Pa, and frankly that was it. I really fell in love with him, in the most dreadfully sensual way. I wanted to hold him, fondle him, stroke him, I wanted to be with him all the time. We used to talk together on the telephone for as long as ninety minutes. Luckily he felt exactly as I did, though he’d been wise and had taken a wife for the sake of appearances. We used to meet all the time. Pa still thought I was being sensible protecting his investment. Well, then the war came and I knew I’d have to go, and so I joined the county regiment. It meant I could live in the local barracks and still get in a bit of hunting from time to time. Pa was very good about the wine cellar and pheasants and things, and since John failed his medical (he had a flutter in his heart and I teased him it was love!), I had the best of both worlds, the new army life and the civilian comforts I’d left behind.
Of course, we all thought the war would be over in fifteen months. One day John was at The House seeing Pa; Mother was there and had a few people in for bridge; I was orderly officer and would be going along later. During the afternoon the gas main fractured, or so they said at the inquest, and The House just blew up. Of course everyone thought it was a bomb and the anti-aircraft battery opened fire until they ran out of shells. They were all killed at The House.
I went wild for a month or two. In London. With guardsmen and sailors and anybody I could pick up.
Then I met this MP chap, who had me transferred to a job at the War Office – that’s how I got my captaincy – and by that time I had become what the French call a pederast.
One night my MP friend had arranged a party. Six of us for dinner at his place in Victoria, and afterwards some new films he’d just acquired. They’d been smuggled out of Sweden by an escaping prisoner-of-war. My date couldn’t come to the dinner party and one of the boys there rang someone for me. ‘You’ll love him,’ he said, ‘he’s a virgin and he needs the money!’ When the boy turned up, it was like seeing John again, John all over again. Love at first sight, I suppose. We had the meal and I noticed this boy Philip was drinking practically non-stop. We settled down with the brandy and watched the films. Afterwards we all went to bed.
Now, let me explain something. Whatever two adult people may want to do together is all right by me. I believe in freedom. Some of the things men and women do together I consider infinitely more degrading than the things two men or two women do together. And there’s a lot less love about it. It happens that I prefer men to women, boys to girls. I find boys more attractive aesthetically than women. I think the male human form is much more beautiful than the female human form with those great bags of flesh hanging from her chest and wide hips. Breasts I find absolutely revolting. The whole point is freedom of choice. If a man prefers that sort of grossness, then let him. I don’t. So you see, I don’t feel guilty about being a homosexual.
It’s important to understand that.
The following morning Philip woke up, as I had told him he would, with a terrible hangover. I gave him my cure, two eggs whipped up in milk with a large brandy, and he seemed better after that. We stayed in bed for a while caressing each other. I was reluctant to leave the bed, reluctant to let him go back to his barracks. Eventually he got up and I persuaded him to have a shower. He had such lovely feet, I’d spent hours just carressing his toes. After the shower he put on that terribly rough uniform, and had to go. Of course, I gave him a little present, but that’s not important. I was convinced he hadn’t been with me for the money – I was alive again and in love again, and all the horribleness of the last few months had disappeared. I still missed John, of course, I was still shaken by the loss of both my parents, but I knew that with Philip, some of the less creditable excesses of the past few months would be forgotten. I determined to take him to my tailor to have a decent uniform made. I made all sorts of wonderful and exciting plans.
That evening the police went to the flat in Victoria. They’d traced Philip there since he’d written down the address when he took the telephone call in the guard room, when we had telephoned to ask him to come to the party.
When Philip got back to his billet he took his rifle, loaded it with a bullet he’d been keeping as a souvenir, put the end of the barrel in his anus, and pulled the trigger. With his toe.
The MP had it hushed up, of course. He was very good at arranging things. He even got me into the Commandos. I felt I had to go somewhere to prove I was still a man.