I had no need to go back to the War Office. The War Office came to me in the person of Lieutenant Arthur Sywell, aged forty-two, heavily built and thickset.
‘It takes all sorts to make a world,’ Ben Bolding commented, as we watched him climb out of the car bringing him from the station.
Arthur Sywell had policeman written all over him. One thing you couldn’t tell about him on sight, however, was that he was a Bachelor of Science of Manchester University. He’d also made all the most difficult climbs in the Lake District, on Ben Nevis, and Snowdon, and was the country’s leading expert on explosives, the illegal uses of. He was all copper!
Brigadier Steele spoke to me on the telephone, an hour after Lieutenant Sywell arrived.
‘Where is he now?’ the brigadier asked.
‘With the sergeant major, getting kitted out.’
‘Good. Have you had a chance of a talk with him?’
‘Yes, Brigadier, though only briefly.’
‘What’s your reaction?’
‘A bit slow.’
‘Don’t be deceived. I wanted to send him up as a technical expert. He refused to come on that basis. Said he’d join you as a volunteer, just like the rest of ’em, subject to the same disciplines. If he’s good enough, he stays with you to do the job. It’s your decision. I think you might find him useful. If not, send him back. I can use him elsewhere.’
A transformation had taken place when Ben brought Lieutenant Sywell back from the quartermaster’s. He was wearing a denim outfit, like those we all wore, without badges of rank. On his head he wore a woollen comforter. He had Innsbrucker boots, well broken in, and gaiters. In the sheath of his trousers, he carried a regulation knife. Now he looked less like a copper, more like a killer. I didn’t hope for too much; it’s no easy matter to break habits of a lifetime, and he’d been brought up on the lawful side of the book.
‘It’ll be a change for you,’ I said.
‘The other side of the fence?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can adapt to it, sir.’
‘Can you adapt to this? I call you Arthur, you call me Major. You call the men by their Christian names – though the use of the word Christian is purely academic, and they call you whatever they think fit, but, I hope, sir.’
‘I get that, Major.’
‘Brigadier Steele tells me you know a thing or two about explosions?’
‘I’ve seen the results of a few.’
‘Safe breakers? Bank robbers?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, there’s one fundamental difference, Arthur. A bank robbery, correct me if I’m wrong, usually takes place over a weekend, and the men give themselves ample time to prepare. We shall have exactly half an hour.’
‘It makes a difference.’
‘What’s wrong with the explosive?’
‘Nothing, Major.’
‘Where does the fault lie?’
‘With the men using it,’ he said simply. This was not a man I’d rattle quickly. He was sitting on a hard chair across the desk from me, not moving.
‘What’s wrong with the men?’ I said, pride offended.
‘They don’t know enough about explosives.’
‘And you do?’
‘I think I do.’
‘Right, you get half an hour, anything you ask for that can be carried, and I shall expect to see a three-foot hole in that concrete.’
Sam Levine and Dodger Bates went out of camp that evening; they returned with a sack and stains of undergrowth on their elbows and knees. In the sack were seven cock pheasants and a partridge. ‘Got to leave the hens alone, haven’t you, or there be no young ’uns for next year,’ Dodger said. Sam had been an apt pupil. Even Harry Landon, and he had lived among game for years, approved of the birds.
‘Going to eat or sell ’em?’ he asked.
‘What use is money where we’re going? I need the energy.’
Dodger and Sam were sitting on their bunks plucking pheasants into a satchel when Lieutenant Sywell opened the door of the Nissen hut and stood there coughing tactfully. ‘May I come in?’ he asked Alf Milner, nearest the door.
‘Watch it, coppers…’ Sam said, his voice East End, low down.
Within seconds the pheasants and the sack were under the bed, the satchel of feathers hanging in a locker. Lieutenant Sywell walked slowly up the hut. At the far end Corporal Taffy Andrews and Harry Landon had pushed their beds parallel to the wall to provide more space. Each was wearing blue PT shorts, socks and plimsolls. Each had a commando knife in his hand; they were practice-fighting.
‘Don’t let me interrupt anyone,’ Sywell said. He stood near the stove watching Andrews and Landon as they crouched defensively. Harry moved small steps, never off balance. Taffy moved larger, occasionally pouncing, hoping to get round the knife Harry held by its handle, now down. It could slit a gut when it came up, and Taffy knew Harry was totally ruthless once he had it in his hand. All the boys knew that one day they may have to face a German ruthless as Harry, without mercy. There could be no better training. Harry, small steps, crowding Taffy back towards his bed, an inch at a time. Taffy knew it, darted to Harry’s right side, but the low knife point still faced him on a hand and arm firm as a piston rod. Taffy danced left; Harry deftly flicked the knife across to his left hand.
‘Stand still, you’re not in the bloody ballet!’ he said.
Sweat stood out on Taffy’s brow as he crouched, right hand holding the knife forward, left arm extended.
‘If you think you’re going to use that left hand to push my knife to one side I wouldn’t bother,’ Harry said, grinning. Then he pounced. His right arm swept up, across, round and down; pace forward faster than Taffy’s eye could see, movement a blur of speed that left him gripping Taffy’s hand carrying the now useless knife trapped clenched to his side iron hard. Harry’s knife point was between Taffy’s legs, the edge of the blade against his testicles.
‘Want to become a choir boy?’ Harry asked, still grinning. A shout of approval from the lads watching the fight. Dodger stood beside Lieutenant Sywell. ‘Noboby can take one off Harry Landon, sir,’ he said.
Harry pulled himself away from Taffy, who stood there looking ruefully at his useless knife. ‘You’ve got to develop your speed, Taffy,’ Harry said kindly, ‘and watch it when a man starts talking to you. The expression of his lips while he’s talking hides what he’s going to do.’
‘You’re too good for me.’
‘Harry’s too good for all of us,’ Dodger said; but then he turned to Sywell, a crafty look on his face. ‘Why don’t you have a go against Landon, sir?’
Sywell glanced around, quickly. All had heard. No one spoke, but each face carried the same statement: ‘Yes, copper, let’s see what you’re made of.’ He looked at Harry standing there supremely confident, and at that moment Taffy Andrews pushed his knife, handle first, into Sywell’s hand. The circle about them was a ring of expectation. Harry tensed, ready, his hand dropped, blade point aimed at Sywell’s middle, his left hand forward, his arm bent, rock steady iron hard.
Without appearing to look upwards, Sywell flicked the knife point first into the beam above his head. All eyes went to it in admiration. Sywell dived in under Harry’s arm, twisted it palm uppermost, banged his shoulder into Harry’s chest and pulled with all his strength. The cantilever of Harry’s elbow was in the wrong direction for Harry to escape; he was carried helplessly forward up and over Sywell’s shoulder in the oldest police throw of them all. As he went down Sywell straightened, holding on to Harry’s wrist. Harry’s shoulders and back hit the floor flat with a sound that reverberated through the hut. He plucked Harry’s knife from his fingers, leaned across with his knee paralysing Harry’s arm muscle and placed the point of the knife at Harry’s throat.
‘I was taking cut-throat razors off race gangs in Brighton long before this war,’ he said quietly. He stood upright, flicked again, and Harry’s knife stuck in the beam not an inch from that of Taffy Andrews. Now the men were all grinning at him; he’d won his crown of laurels. But for the grim look on his face, several would have slapped his back in approval.
‘I came looking for a couple of volunteers to help me blow a hole in concrete,’ he said. They all volunteered. He accepted Dodger Bates and Harry Landon.
‘Now you can get back to plucking your pheasants,’ he said to Sammy Levine, ‘and the word is policeman, not copper!’
Together we drove out to the village in the jeep. Arthur Sywell examined the hole scabbed out of the concrete. I went and sat in the jeep. I would not be the one to blow the hole in the concrete on the job; let him do it first, and then he could replace the man who was to do the job. Dodger Bates was explaining to Arthur exactly how they had tried to blow the concrete.
When they were ready, I pulled them back out of the cellar.
I started my stopwatch. ‘Right, just the two of you, and you have exactly thirty minutes starting from now.’
If any man was going to criticise my lads, he would need to justify that criticism by actions. ‘Put up, or shut up,’ that was my motto. Or as Ben Bolding liked to say, ‘Piss, or get off the pot!’
They took twenty-five minutes to set the charge; four minutes longer than the previous slowest time.
When the explosion came, it was louder than anything I’d ever heard any of my men achieve. I looked at Ben. He shared my feelings. An almighty cloud of smoke came billowing out of the cellar, and fierce tongues of yellow and red flame. I waited until the smoke cleared, then went into the cellar. The scab he had blown in the ceiling was fifteen inches in diameter, six inches deep.
‘Not much of a hole, is it?’ I asked.
Arthur Sywell kept his temper. We drove back to the camp in silence.
‘Do you still think the men are at fault?’ I asked him when we were back in my office. He was furious, but had the sense not to show it. He knew, as I did, that he was on probation.
He asked my permission, then got on to the Ordnance Depot at Pateley Bridge from which we obtained our explosive supplies. Through them, he spoke to Dr Sewidge and the man at ICI who had manufactured the explosive. He gave him the batch number, and the man checked his files and test reports.
‘I guarantee that explosive is perfectly sound,’ the man said. Arthur Sywell had asked me to listen on the extension earpiece. Like all boffins he was mortally offended we should criticise his work.
‘It isn’t all right,’ Arthur insisted – ‘it doesn’t do the job, and that’s the only criterion of what’s all right and what isn’t.’
‘Look, you have two requirements. You want penetration, and you want silence. What Dr Sewidge and I have given you is a compromise, I’ll grant, but it will still do the job.’
Together we set up explosions on the concrete ‘tables’ that had been erected, there above the Yorkshire Moors. We tried the explosive all ways. I tried, Dodger tried, Arthur Sywell tried. The only conditions I imposed were that the task should be completed in a half an hour and the only material to be used should be portable and relatively easy to procure.
We didn’t pierce a single table.
Two days after the telephone call to ICI, I called a meeting in my office of Arthur Sywell, Peter Derby, the sergeant major, Dodger and Sam Levine. ‘The purpose of this meeting is to try to find any reason I should not suggest to the War Office this job be cancelled. The boffins can plan as much as they like but unless we, the men actually involved, can do the job with the materials available in the stated time, the job should be cancelled. No one likes to be a pessimist; especially when I’ve watched all you men putting so much effort into preparing yourselves; but I would be a fool to take you over there on the pious hope that everything will go all right.’
I looked around at them, one by one, inviting each to pluck from the air the one possibility I had overlooked. It was a forlorn hope.
‘Couldn’t we use twice the quantity of explosive,’ the sergeant major asked, ‘and take a chance on getting out?’ It was a thing we’d done before, and the chance had come off. We blew a bridge an arms train was due to cross near the Dutch railhead at Genepp. As luck would have it, a plane came over as we were preparing the blow, and dropped a few bombs. The rail guards thought the explosion they heard was yet another bomb, and never guessed until it was too late that we had split the rails. We couldn’t rely on bomber support for this job. ‘Believe me, Ben, the quieter we are the better. This job depends on it. It’s got to be as quiet as if we were blowing the High Street branch of the Westminster Bank on a Saturday night.’
We discussed several alternatives during the next twenty minutes; always we came back to the same snags. No noise, fast penetration, men in and quickly out again. I said it again – ‘this time, we’ve got to be in and out again as quietly as if we were blowing the Westminster Bank.’
I saw a look come to Arthur Sywell’s face. ‘What is the deadline?’ he asked, quietly.
‘In forty-eight hours I have to tell the brigadier to cancel the job, otherwise he will assume it’s still on.’
‘Give me that forty-eight hours?’ he asked. ‘If I can blow a hole in that concrete within forty-eight hours under the conditions laid down, can the job be put on again?’
‘If you can do that, the job will never be off.’
‘Give me the forty-eight hours, Major.’
He had something in his mind he didn’t want to talk about, not at that meeting. I wouldn’t press him.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘you can have it.’
The meeting was adjourned, and we returned to basic training. Arthur Sywell made a call to the War Office, to Brigadier Steele, and within the hour the brigadier called him back and gave him permission to carry on. Still I asked no questions. He left the camp in my own jeep, wearing the denim outfit in which we had tried the abortive explosive experiments. There was nothing military about him as he drove out of the gate; he looked more like an engine room stoker than an officer and a gentleman. I had a full report from him later of what happened. Apparently, he drove like a madman over the moors to Durham. The Military Police stopped him once and called the camp to verify his story – they assumed he had stolen the jeep and was AWOL.
Five hours later he was being shown into the governor’s office of Durham Prison. Waiting for him, as he had requested, were Fred Pike and Joe Stanhope. As soon as he arrived, again as he had requested, the governor left his office and shut the door behind him. Arthur Sywell sat on a hard chair in front of the governor’s desk. Both men were looking warily at him. They were old sparring partners.
Fred smiled at him. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Sywell,’ he said, ‘fancy seeing a nice girl like you in a place like this, and what lovely weather we’re having for the time of the year!’
‘That job you did in Hatton Garden, Fred? How did you get through the walls? You’re the only two men in the country could cut through concrete like that!’
‘Where’s Hatton Garden, Inspector?’ he asked, a look of cherubic innocence on his face.
Both men were in their early thirties, two of the best safe breakers in the business. Arthur Sywell had put them inside when they tried to ‘do’ a woollen mill in Bradford to get the payroll.
‘I’ve got a job for you lads,’ he said, ‘if you’re both man enough to take it. Mind you, it’ll need guts.’
‘What’s in it for us?’ Fred Pike asked. Of the two men he was usually the leader – he’d had a rough and tumble upbringing in Bristol by the docks, and this had given him a fierce independence. Joe Stanhope, on the other hand, had come to crime from greed. His family life in Crosby near Liverpool had been eminently respectable, and he had lacked for nothing.
‘There’s a decent life for a start, and there’s a free pardon. You can walk out of this prison with me today, and if you do this one job, that’s your lot as far as the past is concerned.’
‘And the job, is it straight or bent?’
‘It’s a war job.’
‘That means it’s bent!’
Joe Stanhope was smiling. ‘You know, Inspector,’ he said, ‘you ought to try it in here sometime. We have a marvellous life. Three squares a day, and all found. Our own air raid shelter. Sometimes I think of those poor devils conscripted into the foot sloggers, marching up and down a barrack square with a sergeant major bellowing at them. I’m quite happy to be here in my little nest.’
‘Hang on a minute… this job, where is it?’ Fred asked.
‘In Europe, that’s all I can tell you.’
‘Where the Germans are? You must be out of your mind.’ Joe laughed. ‘I’ll stay here, thank you.’
‘Hang on, will you?’ Fred said. ‘What kind of a job is it? Obviously, it must be a safe or something, otherwise why should they need us. Is it a safe?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Is it a bank vault?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Well, you’d better make up your mind,’ Fred said. ‘We’re not going to take part in something unless we know all about it, now are we? So you’ve either got to open your trap a bit wider, or shut it completely.’
‘It’s a vault.’
‘A bank vault?’
‘Sort of.’
‘What do you mean, sort of? Is it a bloody vault, or isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s a vault, but not a bank vault. There’s a bank next door, but we’re going into the vault behind it.’
‘Pity. If you’d said we was going into the bank, we might be interested. Any money in this vault?’
‘I don’t know.’ Could he risk a white lie? By the time they found out, it could be too late. ‘There might be.’
‘“There might be.” What do you take us for?’ Joe asked.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what I take you for, since you ask me. I take you for a couple of fellows who’ve gone wrong in the past, and since that time have worn a badge that says “criminal – keep away.” I think that if you had a chance to get rid of that badge once and for all, you might enjoy doing so. I think you’re also a couple of Englishmen and you might, just for once in your life, enjoy doing something on the right side.’ He stopped. Joe had extended his left arm, and was moving his right hand across it as if playing a violin. ‘Hearts and Flowers, Inspector,’ he said. ‘We’re branded, and you know it. We’re criminals, lags, gaolbirds – and we always will be.’
‘I’m giving you the only chance you’ll ever get to wipe that out in one go,’ Arthur Sywell said.
‘Bollocks!’
‘No,’ Fred said, ‘let him talk – I think he’s got something.’
‘But I don’t want anything. I’m very comfortable in here, thank you, living in the style to which I have become accustomed, as they say.’
‘We get a free pardon, Inspector?’ Fred persisted.
‘That’s right, and we tear up the files. Born again.’
‘Just one job in Europe somewhere?’
‘Just one job.’
‘And you get us there, and bring us back?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And when we get back, we get a discharge from the Army – I gather we’d be joining the Army or something?’
‘If you wanted one, we would give you a discharge. Or alternatively, you could stay in a cushy number in the Army, in the RASC driving lorries, or something like that.’
‘This job, what does it involve?’
‘That’s something I can’t tell you, except that it means blowing a hole in concrete.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
Fred thought about it for a long minute. Then he took hold of Joe’s arm and walked him over to the window. There they talked together earnestly in low voices. From time to time Joe would look round at the inspector. Arthur Sywell was glad he had not put on his full military uniform. He had guessed, correctly as it turned out, they would have had a bellyful of uniforms and might welcome seeing him dressed as one of the boys.
Finally they turned round.
‘It’s like this,’ Fred said, ‘we’d like to do it but we can’t make up our minds if you’re on the level about the pardon. We’d hate to do the job and then find ourselves whistled back inside. If we get the pardon first, we’ll do the job. And we want a lawyer to draw up the agreement.’
Arthur Sywell could have laughed out loud. Two convicts, without a notion of legality between them, a totally amoral pair of ruffians, and they wanted an agreement drawn up by a lawyer! He walked across and opened the door. The governor was sitting in his outer office, his face thunderous. It was quite apparent he didn’t like this intrusion.
‘I’d like them released right away,’ Arthur Sywell said.
The governor was cold and formal. It was only because he had received a telephone call from the Home Office that he didn’t make his feelings more clearly known. ‘Full co-operation’ the call had requested. Right, full co-operation it was. Arthur Sywell left the prison fifteen minutes later in a jeep with the two men, without a guard. Fred Pike and Joe Stanhope, however, were handcuffed to each end of a chain which passed through the bed of the jeep seat. ‘Since you want to play it legally,’ Arthur said, ‘that’s the way we’ll do it. I’ll take the cuffs off when we’ve worked out a legal agreement with your solicitor. You can take the cuffs off to sign the contract, and that’s the last you’ll see of them.’
The prison governor insisted he sign for the handcuffs.
I was outside my office when the jeep came in through the gates with its two passengers, and Arthur Sywell driving. The guard on the gate stopped him when he saw the two strangers, but Arthur vouched for them. I had spoken on the telephone with him before he left Durham, and as requested had brought a solicitor from Ilkley, and a colonel from the Judge Advocate’s department.
The jeep drove across the camp square, and stopped outside my office. The two men in the back didn’t look around them, uninterested in their surroundings. Arthur jumped from the driving seat and bent over each passenger’s lap. They rubbed their wrists as he released them, and I caught a glimpse of the handcuffs. I had a moment of misgiving – other men walked into this camp as volunteers; these two, doubtless former ‘associates’ from Arthur Sywell’s police past, had the appearance of being shanghaied. He refastened the handcuffs before he led the men inside my office. I didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. Unless he was prepared to remove those handcuffs I had no intention of meeting the men. If they joined the unit they must do so willingly, with no physical restraint. I couldn’t spend my time in Europe locking and unlocking handcuffs. Nor could I afford the time it would take to have them watched. If they came with us, they’d travel as we did, free as the air.
The troop was on the short range at the bottom of the camp, practising knife throwing, bows and arrows, steel pin throwing. I went down and watched them. They were all becoming remarkably proficient. There’s a technique to throwing a knife or a steel needle completely unlike dart throwing. You throw the knife or needle point first, but your hand moves in a flat trajectory, and the final jerk just before you release the projectile is the one that gives speed. Accuracy is something you can’t teach. Men either have it or don’t – something to do with the co-ordination of the eye and the arm muscles. If you have that co-ordination, with practice you’ll hit the target every time in a circle not more than two inches diameter. If you haven’t that ability, you might as well pack it in. No man could qualify for 404 without that ability. Silence was going to be of paramount importance, the silence that only a knife can give.
I arrived back in my office as the men were signing the agreement the two solicitors had hurriedly drawn up. It had been typed by my own orderly, who was an ATS girl seconded from the War Office. Later that day, an official from the Home Office would arrive in camp, and another officer from the Judge Advocate’s department, an impromptu ‘court’ would be held, and the whole matter would be legalised.
I stifled my grave misgivings about the two new men, and prepared to keep an open mind until I had seen them in action. That came at six o’clock on the same evening. Pike and Stanhope were shown the concrete floor of the village house, and their eyes lit up when they were handed the plastic explosive. Pike chose a fresh section of the concrete and made ready his charge. Then he asked us all to leave the cellar, except Joe Stanhope.
‘If you see how I do it,’ he said, ‘you won’t have any use for me, will you, and I could be back in Durham before bedtime tonight.’
I saw the logic of that and ordered all the men out.
Pike and Stanhope walked leisurely out of the cellar ten minutes later. They’d cut five minutes off the time it normally took Dodger and Sam Levine to prepare. They walked to the corner and there they stood, away from the blast. When it came, the sound was considerably less than the previous explosions, more a low crump. No black cloud of smoke billowed out of the cellar, and there were no tongues of yellow flame. I was the first inside the cottage – a gaping hole was in the floor, two feet six at least in diameter, easy to get all the men through. The ground floor room was a shambles where the concrete lumps had been projected against the ceiling and the walls. Very little damage however had been done in the cellar.
The other men crowded into the cellar. I looked down on them from the ground floor room. Fred and Joe both looked modestly at their efforts; Dodger and Sam were full of enthusiastic approval, pumping them on the back. I caught the lieutenant’s eye, anxious still and questioning.
‘Okay,’ I said to him, ‘the job’s on.’
The whoop from the cellar almost brought the remains of the plaster from the ceiling.
I called for the records of all the men, all the notes the training officers and I had made of each man’s successes and failures, and settled down to make my final selection. After the first initial excitement a pall of gloom spread over the men’s quarters. One Nissen hut had been set aside as a canteen for the men. It contained a billiard table and a dartboard, and was served by the Naafi and volunteers from the WVS in the nearest village, Grimsback. A few men wandered over to the hut through the dark of the camp, but there was no joy there. One of the WVS normally would have spent the evening fending off the good-natured suggestions of the soldiers. Not one of them made a pass at her this evening. Supper was served in the mess hall at seven o’clock – liver, onions, mashed potatoes, and suet dumpling for sweet, covered in treacle. The men sat toying with their food. At eight o’clock I switched off the light in my office and went out. The officers’ mess occupied one end of a Nissen hut, the other end being our kitchen. A further Nissen hut contained sleeping quarters for all three officers – the training officers were based on the camp outside Ilkley. As I walked through the ranks of Nissen huts to my own quarters, the men drifted out onto the street. In my hand I carried a buff folder which each of them knew instinctively contained a list of the selected names. The CSM occupied half of the Nissen hut nearest to the officers’ mess. He too was sitting in the doorway. As he saw me coming down the street he got off his chair and walked outside. He was not wearing a hat. As I came past he stood to attention. Looking up the street you could see the silent knots of men, all standing rigidly to attention.
‘When will you tell them, Major Rhodes?’ the CSM asked softly. ‘They won’t get any sleep until they know.’
I stopped. This was part of the job I hated. How do you distinguish between the men who, on the surface, have been trained to the same pitch of perfection? How do you tell a man ‘No, I don’t think your temperament will fit in with what we have to do’? Damn it, these men were all volunteers, they all wanted desperately to come with me. Of course, there were simple rules – you don’t take a man who wants to go for the wrong motives – you avoid the Oxbridge Death or Glory boys, the sadists, the brutes, the cowards who didn’t yet know it, the men whose wives exerted an extra pull on their loyalties. But how do you tell the good man he isn’t quite good enough? How do you tell the eager man he isn’t quite adept enough? I turned round and faced them. The CSM moved his hands quickly and all the stationary figures jumped suddenly to life, running into a half circle in front of me. There was no disorderly scramble. All stood ‘at ease’, but not ‘easy’.
All, I noticed, were wearing the coveted green beret. Ben Bolding had donned his too.
‘I can only take twelve men with me,’ I said, as soon as they had formed up. ‘But I’ve selected twenty from which to pick that final twelve. I shan’t do that until just before we leave. I’d like to keep you all, but from now on the training has to be so intensified I can’t afford the time to deal with more than twenty. All you men are good,’ I said, ‘and that has made my job of selection harder than I’ve ever known it to be. The ones I haven’t selected must not feel that, in any way, I am saying they were inadequate to the job we have to do. I merely think the twenty I have selected will do the job more safely, more quickly, more effectively.’
My voice carried on the night air. Fred Pike and Joe Stanhope had been put in a barrack room with six other men. I could see them standing among the six men, a part of the entire group of men before me. Faces leapt at me in the gloom, incidents from the arduous weeks of training, names of men, personal foibles I had found in them.
‘Now, as to the future. The men I have selected will stay here in the camp with me, the other men will be sent home first thing in the morning on leave. Any man who wants to go on leave tonight can do so, or there’s a dance down in Timble – there will be transport laid on. The selected men, of course, will not leave camp, since the training resumes at five o’clock in the morning. I’m not going to give you any pep talk. I shall merely say thank you for volunteering for this assignment. Sergeant Major.’
‘Yes, sir?’
I opened the folder. ‘This is the list of men who don’t go to the dance in Timble,’ I said. The crowd tension was broken, and faces cracked in smiles.
‘Right-o, you lads,’ the sergeant major called, ‘now listen to me. I’ll read the list once, and once only, so pin your lugs back.’
The company sergeant major knew what he was doing; in a flat military voice he called out without pause a list of twenty names.
‘Right-o, you lot,’ he called out when the list was complete, ‘fall out and double away to bed. And keep your hands above the blankets. The rest of you, how many want transport to a dance in Timble?’
Without exception, they raised their hands.
‘Rendezvous at the top of the camp by the guard room in thirty minutes, okay. Right, dis-miss!’
I turned to go into my quarters.
‘Do I go dancing, Major?’ Ben Bolding asked.
I took another sheet of paper from the file and handed it to him. It was headed OFFICERS FOR 404. On it was my own name and that of Captain Derby, Lieutenant Arthur Sywell, and Company Sergeant Major Ben Bolding, MM. ‘Get back in time for parade at five o’clock in the morning and the night’s your own,’ I said.
Bates, Dennis Geraint Roscoe, only son of a Maidstone butcher and his wife; conceived within a week of his father’s return from the First World War in 1918; celebrated his twenty-first birthday in a Naafi canteen in Dover, waiting for a boat to take him to France with the British Expeditionary Force in early December, 1939.
Dennis Bates went to Maidstone Grammar School, and took a school certificate and matriculation with six distinctions. On the day he was due to return from summer holidays – they’d all been to Scarborough for two weeks – to start his two years of studying for the higher school certificate, he went to the side of the old Maidstone coaching road with no more than he stood up in, as they say, and thumbed a lift to London. He never returned home.
When the Salvation Army eventually traced him he was sailing as a deckie out of Fleetwood – trawlers for the Grimson Line – earning four pounds a week including his share of the catch. Since he refused to attend night school while ashore, refused to study in his few brief hours off-watch on board, he had no chance of getting a mate’s or a skipper’s ticket. ‘Bloody waste,’ Old Grimson said, each time he signed him on again for thirty-eight days as a deckie.
His mother and father travelled all the way to Fleetwood in the desperately gay summer of 1939 to try to persuade him to return home. A friendly dockside radio operator keyed the message to the skipper of the Marigold, and Dennis jumped ship at the harbour mouth. He never collected the few belongings he kept in digs in Aisley Road, Fleetwood, never claimed his pay nor share of the catch money, and was never seen in Fleetwood again. His mother and father waited forty-eight hours, then returned home with the money in an envelope. When they arrived in Maidstone his father cleared the room that had belonged to Dennis, and burned everything in it before turning it into a workshop for his marquetry. Until Dennis’s mother died two years later his name was never mentioned in that house. When Mrs Bates died – of a broken heart the neighbours said – Mr Bates paid for a personal message in the Telegraph, Express and Mail. ‘Dennis Geraint Roscoe Bates. Regret to inform your mother passed away. Father.’ He never got a reply. He had installed a walk-in fridge in his butcher’s shop in Maidstone in 1939 – one of the many improvements against the day he hoped Dennis would take over. In 1942 he stumbled in the fridge late one evening, the door closed, and they found him next morning frozen to death.
In 1942 Dennis was in the Royal Fusiliers stationed at Brixham. In the interim he had travelled to France, returned in a small boat, and was now taking a course as a driver. Dodger, as he was now known, was six feet tall and weighed eleven stones. His fair hair defied combing, and he had grown a blond moustache. He was good at throwing a dart, at drinking, at boning boots and blanco-ing equipment. He had an enormous appetite, an immense stamina arrived at and cultivated on the four-hour dog watches trawling off the coast of Iceland, and a slow temper. He was a pathological outsider. He talked to no one in the barrack-room, answered in the briefest possible way when asked a direct question, and never volunteered information about himself.
When the MT course was finished, Dodger was posted to a unit of the Royal Fusiliers at Crossgates near Leeds in Yorkshire, whose main task was to guard a munitions factory into which parts of the Woolwich Arsenal had been evacuated. Dodger’s job kept him away from the other men of the unit. He sat perpetually behind the wheel of a lorry. Even when Dodger had no official assignment, you would very often find him up there, just sitting. Whichever lorry he took over was always the cleanest and best maintained lorry in the unit. The Army has a maintenance system for its vehicles, and a driver can usually run through the procedure in a matter of minutes each day. When Dodger wasn’t driving or sitting in the cab, he would be going through the maintenance drill, point by point. After a spell on the heavy lorries, Dodger was given the pick-up trucks to drive. He didn’t much care for this, since it put him in more intimate contact with passengers, many of whom insisted on talking to him. Best of all he liked to drive the commanding officer, a lieutenant-colonel dredged up from between-the-wars retirement. The colonel never talked with the drivers. The others resented it – to Dodger it was paradise. The colonel began of habit to select Dodger to drive for him, and Dodger’s immaculate pick-up truck, which shone like a civilian car despite the coarsely applied camouflage paint, was frequently to be seen parked outside the commanding officer’s billet.
Everything would have been fine if human nature hadn’t been as it always is – if the silent colonel and his equally silent driver could have been left to themselves to travel the byways of wordless thought. But the other drivers saw in Dodger’s preferment a threat to themselves and their positions.
Dodger was never miserable or dour; he carried a tireless smile that gradually imposed itself on all the other drivers. He was regarded, at first, as being a ‘bit thick’. This gave way to an accusation of ‘slyness’. It came to a head one Sunday, when Dodger had been warned by the commanding officer they would be taking a trip to Selby. The pick-up was ordered for 1400 hours. Dodger parked it outside the commanding officer’s hut at 1345, gleaming bright. The tank was full of petrol, the sump full of oil, the radiator and the battery filled with water. The spark plugs and points had been cleaned with meticulous care, the pressure of each tyre exactly matched its opposing one. At ten to two another driver came alongside in a fifteen hundredweight lorry.
‘You’ve left your work ticket on the bench behind the door in the garage,’ he said.
Dodger patted his top pocket. ‘Pull the other one!’ he replied, his smile never varying.
The second driver came along on a motor bicycle. ‘Thank God I caught you before you left,’ he said. ‘You forgot to sign the petrol requisition and the MTO’s hopping mad.’
Dodger merely smiled and shook his head.
The driver smiled and shook his head in imitation. ‘You’ll be for the high jump,’ he said, ‘if you don’t get back and sign it.’
Dodger shook his head and smiled.
As the driver rode away on the motorcycle he called – ‘Your nearside back tyre is down, you know.’
Dodger smiled.
He wouldn’t have smiled if he had seen the third driver standing by the back of the pick-up while the second driver had been talking to him. The third driver poured a half a milk bottle of piss into Dodger’s petrol tank.
The colonel was furious when the pick-up broke down ten miles on the way to Selby, with the nearest telephone box over a mile away.
The next day Dodger put in his application to join the Commandos. The first initiative test that Dodger was ever given, by a million to one chance, was to break into the Ordnance Factory at Barnbow near Crossgates. The unit of the Royal Fusiliers was located within the Ordnance Factory barbed wire perimeter. Dodger broke into the factory, stole the day’s production log as a souvenir, and paid a call on the cookhouse of the Royal Fusiliers detachment Motor Transport Pool.
Once in there, he unbuttoned his trousers over the porridge that would be heated for breakfast for the drivers. There was a lot of piss – he’d been saving it!