We set off at midnight. In our packs we had brought raincoats which we wore. We took off our gaiters and let trouser bottoms hang over boots, our only disguise. We didn’t want to be caught wearing complete civilian clothing. Dodger pocketed his lead weights.
We left in twos, one soldier, one partisan. We made no attempt at concealment once we came to the edge of the town, but walked through the suburbs talking to each other. Several times we were passed by German motorised patrols, but no one took any notice of us. Why should they? In the suburb of Minsal, bicycles had been left waiting for us at several inconspicuous points. Mine was a lady’s bicycle; the pedal had been bent at some time and clanked against the frame every time it turned round. Artoise and I rode side by side. She occasionally clutched my saddle. Soon we came to the factory area and more people were about. There were more Germans, too. Away from the principal roads, down back streets and back alleys, we took a route longer than the directions, but safer. We finally abandoned the bicycles in a scrap yard, about a quarter of a mile from the Signals Data Storage Centre, to be reclaimed by the partisans to whom they belonged. We walked the last few hundred yards down the mean streets of the industrial quarter. At the bottom of one street the main road we couldn’t avoid crossing carried a steady flow of traffic, workmen going on shift by bicycle, German patrols on motorcycles and in cars. All the way we talked, quietly but continuously. There is something less suspicious about people who talk together, especially a man and woman. Mostly we talked of sport, about putting the shot, her life at Louvain University, my youth, her experience, my world still to come, her world dying about her. All my sentences began, ‘After the war’; most of hers ‘Before the war’. Often she referred to ‘La force de ta jeunesse dorée’. ‘When that force is gone,’ she said wistfully as we walked along, ‘your whole life becomes a compromise between what you wish and those things of which you still remain capable; the number of your capabilities decreases every year, like the roll call of your blood relations.’
‘But surely, you have an increasing experience; new knowledge?’
‘To do what? To know how to become more unhappy, to know of the many things you miss from life, and will never live long enough to see again? Ah, les salles boches, ils ont volé ma jeunesse.’
The youth they had stolen was ended long before the war, but I couldn’t tell her that. She was dreaming of potency, of achievement without doubt, gone like yesteryear but still unforgettable. ‘You’ve had a wonderful life,’ I told her. ‘Yes I have, and now where has it gone? Now I fight and kill, and my only prayer is that next time there is an opportunity to fight, Roget will not pass me by as a fat old woman, fallen into a monstrous decrepitude!’
Striding along beside me I doubted Roget would ever dismiss her as decrepit. ‘This war,’ she said, ‘is hell.’
I agreed with her too quickly.
‘Oh, not in that way. The war will go on for ever. It is our hell on earth. We have caused a cataclysm that will never end. When the actual fighting has stopped we shall find we have destroyed ourselves. Like fruit trees after a storm, we shall find we shed our fruit and grow no more.’
‘And God will let this happen?’ In her voluminous clothing I had noticed a cross on a steel chain when she extricated the grenade.
‘God has flown to another world on another planet, leaving us to kill each other.’
We crossed the road between the traffic, turned right, and walked along an alleyway. I was shaken by the finality with which she had spoken. At the bottom of the street a narrow alleyway led to another street. We started to walk down the alleyway.
A German soldier walked towards us from the other end of the alleyway. We kept on. We would meet at the centre. I smelled her fear sweat. Her hand clenched and unclenched behind her back as she walked along, though you could not discern a lack of confidence in her stride. When we reached the German she continued to walk forward in the centre of the alleyway. He pressed himself against the boards remembering, from who knows where, some relic of courtesy. She passed him. He moved out in the centre and came forwards. Now it was my turn to press into the boards. His eyes glittered with cruelty. He raised the butt of his rifle and jabbed it as he went past, into the pit of my stomach. I doubled over, the bile of suppressed hatred rising in my gorge. Then he stopped and turned round.
‘Where are you going?’ he bellowed suddenly in German.
Artoise turned round and spat her Flemish at him. He couldn’t understand her. ‘Where are you going?’ he repeated. ‘Speak German, or I’ll have you shot.’
Again she talked rapidly back at him in Flemish, with no trace of fear or servitude; rather did she imply by her tone of voice, ‘How dare you challenge us.’ She brushed past me in simulated fury and brandished the papers with which she had been provided against such an emergency. It said that we were mother and son, workers entitled to our rations and to move about the district. He glanced only cursorily at it. Artoise eyed him up and down, every bit as arrogant as he was, though she had the look of a bitch accustomed to making dogs crawl. Two of the fly-buttons of his trousers were undone. A gleam came to her eye. She reached out and flipped the buttons. His hand shot down in an involuntary gesture to cover himself. He glared at her.
‘Not much Strength Through Joy left there, is there?’ she asked him in her bad German; then ‘Nichts Kinder machen,’ she said. It was a phrase the girls used to torment the Germans – don’t make any children. Use me as you must, like a rutting animal, and I’ll stay here like a log while you grunt out your satisfaction. But don’t leave any small part of yourself inside me, don’t breed any more beasts like yourself, Nichts Kinder machen! He glared at her, turned and marched away leaving us unmolested.
‘He’ll be late back to camp,’ she said to me, giggling at her little triumph. ‘He’s been in a brothel; he’d better hurry.’
‘You approve of the brothels being open?’ I asked her, disgusted despite myself.
‘Of course! The girls do valuable war work. They get plenty of information out of these German louts – it’s amazing what a man will tell a girl when he’s been between her knees.’ I was still shocked.
‘That surprises you, doesn’t it? You’re not the first male hypocrite I’ve met,’ she said angrily.
We walked along the alleyway in silence, then suddenly she stopped and turned around. She was still angry. ‘Here’s something else that will shock you,’ she said. ‘Every so often we put a girl in there with a venereal disease. You’d be surprised how many of the Herrenvolk we succeed in infecting before they find the girl responsible. The girl works overtime, and they keep a score on the side of the bed. One girl got over two hundred on her score sheet before we lost her!’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Hospital, in Germany, then labour camp. With luck she’d be able to kill herself somewhere along the route.’
I don’t know when I’ve been more revolted. Somehow I was able to discount everything we did, everything we were trained to do – but this involvement of young girls in this fashion, deliberately spreading vile diseases known to man, was something I couldn’t tolerate. She must have seen the look on my face. Her mouth set in a grim pudgy line – at that moment she looked, not like the shot-putting champion of Louvain University, but the Madam of some back-street whore-house.
‘War is a dirty business, monsieur,’ she said, quietly but with an intense venom. ‘The first to forget that fact are the soldiers themselves. To them, war becomes a team game, our side, their side, and who’s going to win. Nobody is going to win this war. Every single human being is being degraded by contact with this war. All the men can do is kill, devise new methods of killing, and kill again. The women have to drag out an existence – for many of them the enemy is no more tangible than bad breath because there’s no toothpaste, dirt, disease, no milk for the children, brutish rape, broken limbs, and a complete lack of sanitary towels. In these circumstances death itself can appear a wonderful release. But you, of course, being a man, would understand none of those things. For you, it’s up to the team, Long Live the King, and kill, kill, kill!’ She walked on.
Halfway along the alleyway, a closed boarded door was set in the wooden hall. She looked up and down the alley then turned suddenly and opened the door. We stepped through into a yard on the other side. The yard was filled with timber recovered from derelict buildings. The smell of sawn wood hung over the yard, smells of sawdust and varnish. Under a shed at the far side of the yard were piles of old furniture, sofas with stuffing torn from them, wooden-backed antique chairs. The furniture maker himself waited under this shed, sitting in an old armchair, smoking a pipe. At least, he was holding a pipe in his mouth but when I got to him I noticed the bowl was empty, and his eyes were rimmed with sleep. Poor devil, he had been sitting there all night, merely to ensure the Germans had not laid a trap for us. Artoise introduced me to him and again I shook hands. We crossed his yard. Under the eaves of the long shed was a door, set high against a wall. A pile of furniture with a wardrobe on the top had been stacked against this wall, carelessly it seemed, but in such a way as to make an innocuous ladder to the door hidden inside the wardrobe; we had the strange experience of climbing into the wardrobe, which had no back, and climbing through the door which opened within it. Through the door a gully between two roofs was about two feet wide and lined with asphalt material. On each side the roofs of the buildings below rose steeply. The buildings below were furniture storage sheds.
We walked boldly along the gully between the two roofs, a distance of about two hundred feet. At the far end, the roofs ended sheer and beneath us, about three feet down, was the top of a wall. We crawled along the top of this wall, and suddenly there it was in front of us, like a forgotten oasis in the middle of a desert. I had seen the small yard many times in photographs – it was about fifty feet square and entirely surrounded by walls. Apparently the ground of the yard was owned by the cabinet maker; before the war it had been his intention to roof it and extend one of his storage sheds by knocking out a back wall. To our left was the back wall of the bank building; there were no windows on this side of the building except a small grille set at floor level about two feet high and four feet long. Behind the grille was a wooden door. Straight ahead of us was the back wall of the Signals Data Storage Centre, with no windows, and made of solid concrete we knew was four feet thick, reinforced by steel rods. To the right was yet another wall, again no windows, and behind that wall a yard larger than this one in which motor vehicles were parked during the day. The Data Storage Centre was not in constant use; a small staff came on during the day and worked on the top floor – they were not due on duty for another five hours, or so we had been informed. The photographs we had received of all this area, smuggled out by the partisans, had been taken from this wall on which Artoise and I were sitting.
Artoise was to stay with me as ‘liaison officer’ during our attempt to crack the vault. I imagined Roget had disposed of her in that way; she was too important to him to be risked in the cut and thrust of street fighting. Certainly I had discerned an extra affection between them when the partisans had been milling about in the barn, like two older people watching with tolerance the innocent peccadilloes of the young.
There was, strangely, no way into this yard, other than over the wall on which we were sitting. The concrete Data Storage Centre sealed it completely from view. It was ideally suited to our purposes.
Artoise and I were the first to arrive. Two by two the others came. As soon as each partisan saw my men launched into the cabinet maker’s yard, they left to take up positions near the road below to draw the Germans off after the explosions. My men ran along the gully between the two roofs and dropped down off the wall into the yard. Corporal Andrews and Sergeant Levine (‘You owe me a week’s pay, Major’) carried a steel manhole cover, provided by the partisans; I had noticed it in passing in the cabinet maker’s shed. Harry Landon broke open a door concealed in the ground. Beneath it a short flight of improvised steps led into the space the partisans had dug under the vault to extract the petrol cans. All the preparations we had requested had been made. A heap of sand, gravel and two bags of cement stood in one corner of the yard, doubtless smuggled here after dark sack by sack. There was also a water butt, three quarters filled, and beside it four twelve-inch diameter baulks of timber each about three feet long, and an enormous hydraulic jack.
Fred Pike arrived, closely followed by Joe Stanhope and Ben. They had carried the explosive. ‘No incidents?’ I asked Ben.
‘None at all. It was a cake walk.’
Fred looked at the manhole cover appreciatively; Taffy and Sam carried it down the steps into the cellar, then came out for the timber baulks. I hadn’t spoken to Fred since my one question in the woods; he had had the sense to keep out of my way other than to attend the briefing sessions I had given them all. I knew his role in this job was paramount, but I kept on seeing Arthur Sywell’s static line flapping at me, and the evil grin on Fred’s face as he jumped out of the plane. Damn it, I couldn’t work out the rights and wrongs of Fred and Arthur, Fred and the job, or Fred and me. Of one thing I was certain; once this job had been completed satisfactorily, I wouldn’t want Fred within a hundred yards lest I yield to a sudden paroxysm of fury and clamp my fingers around his windpipe.
Frank Farleigh and Alf Milner didn’t arrive. I gave them ten minutes, then sent Artoise to look for them, or for information about them. Frank was quiet, immensely strong and reliable. What he lacked in imagination he made up in method. He wasn’t the sort of man to be caught out in a careless mistake. Alf Milner was a here-there-and-everywhere sort of a man, not the sort to be taken easily.
When Artoise came back I could see from the look on her face that both had been taken.
‘How did it happen?’
‘One of our girls,’ she said, ‘had a punctured tyre! Your man Farleigh stopped to help her.’ Trust Frank; natural gallantry would be the one thing to penetrate normal caution. I blamed myself – it was a human emotion I had overlooked. We should have trained with girls! ‘When the next group of two arrived they tried to get the bicycle off the road quickly…’
‘…instead of riding on and ignoring them.’ That would be Alf’s way; see a mate in trouble, bustle about trying to help him. Alf wouldn’t care about the woman; he’d see Frank stuck there and immediately his every-which-way-mind would seek some method of getting Frank out of difficulty.
‘…and a patrol came. The girl who caused all the trouble with her puncture got away and reported to Roget.’
‘Where will the Germans take them?’ I asked.
‘The headquarters at Beerenbarracks. Roget has already sent an ambush. With luck they’ll get away and you’ll see them here.’
‘I won’t. They all have strict instructions. Any man taken is on his own, and must not compromise this operation by coming here. No, if they get away, they’ll head for the coast, or for Sweden or Portugal.’
‘Won’t they go to the aeroplane coming to pick you up?’
Damn Roget! No one was supposed to know about that aeroplane except he and I. Of my own men only Peter Derby and Ben knew the landing location. If any were captured I didn’t want them giving away under torture our one escape route. Artoise and Roget must have been closer than I thought. Damn the war and women!
‘They don’t know where the aeroplane is going to land. And what’s more, you shouldn’t know that, either.’
Her face lit up with mischief, but I was in no mood for coquetry. ‘Roget and I are very very close,’ she said. ‘A man needs a woman at a time like this.’
‘Is that why you kept the brothels open?’ It was a mean hard thing to say, and I would have withdrawn the words had they not already spilled hot from my mouth. She was shocked, hurt, but not angry. She gestured with her hand, an ineffectual movement to brush away the stupidity of all of mankind.
‘That you think yourself some sort of bird of paradise, some species of god to be able to dispose of women as you do! Voilà une femme, eh, Dieu, a portion of which I will serve myself, like some small but tasty snack, a veritable appetite breaker?’
I cannot adequately translate her vehement French, the pent-up bitterness which escaped from her. It was true. I had thought of her as a woman of consolation, a morsel to quench the appetite. I put my hand on her arm. ‘I beg pardon of you,’ I said. ‘No, beg pardon of Roget, that you think he is a man who needs to spill his secrets into a woman’s bosom like a frightened child beneath the pillows. We discussed the matter of your landing an aeroplane, since I have a certain topographical knowledge, and I was the one to suggest the landing place, since only I knew it.’ We were standing at the edge of the gully, above the wall. She had her back to the yard. I had mine to the cabinet maker’s shop. ‘Stand perfectly still,’ she said, her voice silent, but edged with menace. I had no idea what she intended. I stood still. She reached into her clothing and produced a grenade.
‘Stand still,’ she said. She let her hand swing gently behind her, and then, with a quick up and over movement, she flung the grenade into the air above my head. I turned round rapidly. A German soldier was walking along the gully towards us from the cabinet maker’s. In his hands he held a machine carbine that pointed in my direction. He made a quick upwards jerk with the machine gun to indicate I should raise my hands. His hand was tight around the stock of the machine gun. At that moment the grenade Artoise had lobbed in the air came down on his shoulder. The gun was jerked from his grasp by the sudden impact. The grenade lay at his feet. I dashed forwards. When that grenade exploded it would awaken the entire neighbourhood. I skittered along the gully. The German had gone down on one knee, scrabbling for the gun and the grenade, eyes staring out of his head. As I neared him I kicked upwards. The force of the blow under his chin snapped his head backwards and he fell over. I picked him up in one swing and dumped his body on the grenade. Only two seconds left. At least his body would stifle some of the noise. Artoise still stood where I had left her. I went back towards her in one long low dive, scooping her backwards off the end of the roof. Then we were falling. I contrived to twist and landed backwards, body flat , on the ground. I pulled my head up tucking my chin on my chest and, as my shoulders hit the earth, I yanked myself over in a backwards roll carrying Artoise with me in a flurry of skirts, throwing her sliding along the earth. The backwards roll took some of the impact of landing but the vertical drop had an impact that had to make itself felt somewhere. It did. In the shoulder I had wrenched coming out of the plane. Men came rushing out of the cellar. Anger made me forget my pains. I picked Artoise from the ground, a shaken bundle of clothing, and pushed her against the wall. Then I stopped. The grenade had not exploded.
‘Just your damned luck,’ I hissed at her, ‘the grenade was a dud. If that bloody thing had exploded, you’d have given the entire game away. And now we have the job of defusing the damn thing.’
‘How could it explode?’ she asked, not a bit abashed by my violent treatment of her, ‘I didn’t pull out the pin.’ I climbed back up the wall and raced along the gully. As I had supposed, the German was dead. I dragged him off the grenade. The pin had not been pulled. Artoise climbed the wall after me. I threw the grenade to her; she caught it deftly and tucked it in her clothing. I dragged the German towards the end of the gully, then paused, and crawled up and over the roof to my left. I wasn’t going to risk the gully door in the cabinet. Another German in the yard below was menacing the cabinet maker with his machine gun. An isolated patrol, they must have followed the last man to arrive into the wood yard.
The German was too far away for an accurate bow and arrow shot. I cursed. Artoise had come crawling behind me. She raised her head slowly against the side of the roof and saw the German.
‘Now throw the bloody thing again,’ I said, ‘and still don’t take out the pin.’
‘Oui, mon Dieu,’ she said, a mocking look on her face. She took out the grenade, hoisted herself where she could get sight of the German, and launched it. By God, she was deadly accurate with those things. The grenade rose silently in the air then came down on a long slow parabola, turning and twisting in its flight. The German was watching the cabinet maker, his head slightly forward. The grenade hit him on the back of his neck beneath his tin helmet, a perfect rabbit chop. He fell forward on his face. The cabinet maker looked around bewildered. I leaped off the roof, and dashed over to him. The German was out cold. The back of the top of his spine was bent at a curious angle.
‘Who are they?’ I asked the cabinet maker.
‘Two men going back to camp. They had been out on late-night pass. They saw the last two men come in, and were suspicious.’
We dragged the soldier out of sight behind the furniture in the shed. The partisans would dispose of the bodies later. I climbed back up through the easy route in the wardrobe. Artoise was ransacking the German soldier’s pockets.
I left her to it. I had an explosion to attend to.
The manhole cover had been inverted and filled with explosives, packed tightly packet by packet. Detonators had been placed in the explosive and the wires led downwards through the two small holes in the manhole cover, shaped like a bowl six inches deep, two feet in diameter. It had been made of half-inch steel to support enormous weights. On the clandestine radio we had asked Belfière to supply such a container; Fred was delighted with it. He was chuckling with pleasure when I came back into the cellar. As soon as he saw me he fell silent. I examined the charge. Around one of the detonator tips he had screwed silver foil from a cigarette packet. We had not brought it with us among the official stores, and for some time English cigarettes had been packed without foil.
‘What’s that?’ I asked Fred, suspicious.
‘That’s what got me my pardon,’ he said, cockily. ‘It makes sure we get through the concrete.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t mind telling you, now. It’s a delaying fuse. All this explosive on the outside will go up first. There should be just enough to cut the concrete, if it’s as thin as you say. That second charge is delayed a fraction of a second until the shock wave comes back, and then the second lot, here in the centre, goes up, and punches the plug of concrete out of the hole. By using a double charge like this, you get double the kick of the first part of it. But your timing’s got to be dead right. If your second charge going up meets the reverberation of the first charge coming back, you’ll be in a helluva mess.’
I left him to it. The timber baulks were placed under the manhole cover, and then the pack was placed in the centre. The jack was slowly pumped up, its central ram about ten inches across lifting the manhole cover tight against the concrete floor above.
In the cellar we had been working in four feet of space since on our instructions, the partisans had concreted the floor the previous week to tame the pressure of that ram. Slowly we pumped, the ram rising imperceptibly with each stroke. I cursed the loss of Alf Milner; he was carrying the compressed air cylinders with which we would have been able to ram the cover up under the floor within a few minutes. I checked my watch. The time was three o’clock and we had a charge to lay in the road. Finally the ram extended from the floor to the bottom of the manhole cover, jamming it tight against the ceiling. When those charges exploded, all the force of the blow would go upwards through the floor. It wouldn’t come downwards because of the ram and the steel manhole cover, a ram to tamp home the explosive, and a delayed action fuse to increase the cutting impact and keep down the noise.
As soon as the explosion was set we climbed out of the cellar and over the wall, coiling the wire with us. In the space between the two buildings we set the plunger I had carried, and Dodger went with his explosive back over the gully.
I had to climb to the roof of the building to our left, the bank onto which the vaults had been built.
The wall was forty feet high.
Ben took the iron spiked grappling hook from his pack and looped it on his nylon cord, through a metal pulley ring. The nylon cord, strong enough to support an elephant, was too thin to grasp effectively. He coiled the nylon cord at his feet, then swung the grappling hook slowly in an arc increasing from twelve inches to three feet. When he had the grappling hook whirling to his satisfaction, he let it go upwards. The grappling hook rose up through the air at the end of the double length of nylon cord, landed on the roof, slithered down the sloping mansard to the gutter, then caught on the gutter brick. The shank of the grappling hook came over the edge of the brick, but the double prong stayed on the other side, as the boffins had assured it would. Ben pulled on the nylon cord, and the shaft of the grappling hook, about a half an inch thick in soft iron, bent over, doubling the grip of the hook on the top of the wall.
I said a silent prayer for the efficiency of Belgian bricklayers – my life would depend on the strength of the mortar holding that brick wall in position. Ben pulled one nylon cord and the other snaked through the pulley attached to the hook. Attached to it was a thicker sisal rope, up which I could climb with ease since it was knotted every foot. I went up to the top as quickly as I could, then crawled along the roof gutter to the side of the building. Here the roof gutter turned at right angles and I was able to crawl forward until I overlooked the road.
Below me was a gas lamp, illuminated. Damn, it should have been out!
Near the wall on the pavement beneath me, though I couldn’t see it without bending over, was a cover for the gas main. Dodger’s task was to lift that cover, dump his prepared charge inside the hole, and pass the wire up to me. I had a reel of stout cotton, with a metal ring on the end. I lowered it over the edge, felt a short tug on the thread, then, a second later, another tug. Dodger was there. I heard a clang as he put the cover back and then the third tug.
I started to pull the thread and the wire up the side of the building.
A motorcycle patrol came roaring down the street, the blacked-out beam of its headlight illuminating only the path in front of the bike. I heard the squeal of the brakes as the bike’s brakes were suddenly applied.
Dodger exposed on the street spoke no German.
I heard the man in the sidecar call out, ‘What are you doing there?’
Dodger must have been thinking quickly.
‘Look at the drunken devil, he’s having a piss!’ the driver called, and laughed.
‘Nevertheless, I’m going to have a look,’ the man in the sidecar called.
I craned my neck cautiously over the edge of the wall. Dodger was staggering drunkenly towards the motorcycle combination. The man had risen to a half-standing position in the sidecar when Dodger got there. Dodger was still urinating as he walked, and both men were fascinated by the performance, laughing at his stumbling attempts to maintain his balance.
‘Don’t point that thing in here,’ the driver said, laughing.
It was the last thing he ever said. Dodger lifted his hands and cracked the passenger’s tin-helmeted hat against the driver’s throat. The passenger he chopped with the blade of his hand against the side of his ear. He ran round the motorcycle combination, lifted the driver off the seat and dumped him, with the other man, into the cab. Even I could see that both were either dead, or so near death as to be incapable of recovery. I had wound the thread until I could grasp the end of the wire. I pulled the ends of the wire gently until I could feel the pressure of Dodger’s hand. He had dragged the motorcycle against the kerb, under the lamp. It appeared as if two men sitting one behind the other in the sidecar were waiting for the driver to return.
I went back along the roof, paying out the wire, then left, along the gutter and down the rope. Ben took the wire from me, lashed two more pieces of wire to it and taped them, and we climbed back over the wall into the v-shaped gully between the roofs. There he connected the wires from the street to the wires from the vault, and wound them onto the terminals of the plunger.
The time was five minutes to four o’clock.
‘Where’re Fred and Joe?’
‘They’ve gone back into the cellar for a last check.’
‘There should be no need for that, if they’ve done the job properly.’ At that moment their heads appeared over the wall and they climbed up beside us.
‘Can I be the one to blow it?’ Fred said.
I let him. ‘Matter of pride,’ Ben explained.
There were two minutes to go. Fred and Joe were lying some distance from the front of the v-roof. Their work was done.
Harry Landon was lying flat on his stomach at the front, nearest to the explosion. Behind him Willie Garside, Sam Levine, Taffy Andrews, the company sergeant major, then me.
Dodger Bates was taking care of our route out. The partisans should now be assembled in the road in front of the bank. As soon as the explosion occurred, they would set off down the road, ready for the first Germans who would certainly be in the road outside the bank within minutes, in time to see the partisans escaping, or so they’d think. Certainly no one would notice or pay heed to our explosion in the cellar of the vault when they saw and heard the tremendous impact of the one in the street and the dramatic flare of the gas main, the tongue of flame that would follow it. Ten to one the Germans would call out the Belgian disaster squad from the town hall maintenance department, and several of Roget’s men were in that squad. They would take their time about repairing the main.
One minute to go. Everyone is in position. Somehow Artoise had given me confidence in Roget Belfière and I knew all his men would be in position, his diversionary explosion ready for firing. Alf Milner and Frank Farleigh taken. Hope they’ll get away, but there’s nothing you can do about it. For them the long dreary walk home on their own. Once this vault is blown and we have taken the files we want, we’ll be off running. Already they’ll be warming up the plane in England that is coming to take us home. Marvellous thought; with luck we’ll be eating a hot breakfast in camp; waited on hand and foot. Without knowing any details they’ll sense we’ve been on a job, and ply us with hot food and sympathy to assuage their UK-bound consciences. Half a minute to go. There’ll be no hot breakfast for Peter Derby. With luck he’ll get someone to put him back together again, and hide until his bones knit. Then for him the night walk, the hedge bottom and haystack route out of Europe. There’ll be no patching Arthur Sywell; he’s taken the long drop, and Fred’s lying in this gully behind me. After the job is over, I shall have to make a decision about him. Smirk, Fred, you won’t get much longer; you haven’t got away with it, no matter what you may be thinking. Fifteen seconds to go. Damn it, my balls tickle. Scratch ’em now, there won’t be time soon. Ten seconds to go. Last quick check, all in position. Roget’s watch is synchronised with mine. Suddenly I had a fear; I hope he’s remembered to wind it up! Mine had a sweep hand I watched count off the seconds. Five four three two one tap Fred’s foot. Press it Fred! Press it Roget! And an almighty boom! From the street! A boom that yanks the tiles on the roof and clatters them down again, a spume of dust and rubble lifts off the road up in the air higher than the roof and the noise comes whipping over the top, hugging the rattling tiles clacking back as the post-explosive suck plucks the air down again, and then the crackle of a soaring sheet of flame licks into the air high about the bank, dies down again, and now the roar starts as bricks and masonry loosened like stacked cans come rattling down amidst the screeching banshee of the metal edging and cover of the gas main. The cover itself was thrown twice as high as the roof top and spun lazily downwards, smashing through the tiles on the far side of the roof. I turned to Fred. ‘It didn’t explode, you dumb bastard,’ I shouted at him. From the cellar of the vault I’d heard no sound. ‘It didn’t go off!’ I screamed above the roar and the crackle of the street flames.
He was smiling that lazy insolent smile.
‘Go and look,’ he said. The first four were already over the wall and I followed them. The hole in the floor of the vault might have been cut with a tin opener, so neat were its edges. I hadn’t even heard the explosion, so well had the charge been laid. All the sound had been absorbed by the four feet concrete walls, all the explosive shock upwards, two short arm jabs of a shattering power that punched the plug of concrete straight up through the floor. The walls and the ceiling of the vault itself were splattered with crushed concrete, thick with dust and powder. The fog however quickly dissipated itself as we went in coughing. Fred followed me down and stood looking at his handiwork. It was a beautiful job. He fingered the edges of the hole, neat and sheer. The men scrambled through the hole into the vault itself; I followed them. Filing cabinets stood all round the walls of the vault. None was locked. I lost no time with the files. I had a specific job to do, and with Taffy crossed to the door of the safe. We had to jam this door to prevent the Germans getting in to realise the vault had been opened. There’d be damage to the floors and the ceiling of the room above, but this would be put down to the effect of the gas main explosion. The jammed door would be attributed to the same cause. I grinned as I thought of the planners in London. I’d make a point of telling them of our emendation to their plan. That’d wipe the smug smiles off their faces.
‘Back outside, Fred, and you too, Joe,’ I said. For this part of the operation, their place was on top of that wall, receiving the folders the men would push up to them. In the absence of Peter Derby, Ben had now taken over command of the files; his would be the job of selecting what would go, what could remain behind. He had been shown prototypes of the sort of document we were looking for.
Taffy was studying the safe door. We had seen photographs and models of most well-known safes in use in Belgium at that time, and some of the more common German safes. A safe ‘expert’ had briefed us.
This door extended the full height of the room, and was three feet wide. It projected into the room; it must have been two feet thick. All the mechanism was exposed at this side, presumably to facilitate maintenance. A plate, however, was screwed on to the actual lock. Taffy had brought a small kit of tools with him. He unwound the canvas belt and laid it on the floor. I gaped at the safe door, aghast. Of all the models we had studied, this was not one. I started back out to get Fred. ‘Hang on a minute, Major,’ Taffy said, ‘it’s an adapted Sicherstein.’ It was. On a Sicherstein vault lock, a wheel operates a worm gear screw that pushes steel roller bolts into the edge of the door seating. There are three roller bolts, each two inches in diameter. In this adaptation, additional worm gears had been incorporated to push further bolts, not only into the side of the door opening, but also into the top and the bottom. A slab of steel, doubtless fitted with roller bolts inside, also rolls backwards into the frame of the door between the hinges, so that the door could not be lifted out that way. He unscrewed the plate that covered the locking mechanism, an electromagnetic pulse bar cylinder type. When the correct setting was dialled on the outside combination, a cylinder moved along a solenoid and twisted to present another face. Only when the correct second number was dialled would the cylinder move one notch farther open. There were eleven codes on the cylinder, eleven combinations that needed to be ‘dialled’ before the cylinder would come to the end of the solenoid and the spring-loaded ‘key’ could come forward to engage into the worm gear, and permit the wheel to withdraw the bolts. The spring-loaded ‘key,’ a metal plate two inches by four inches by a half an inch thick, was held on a ball bearing spindle by one nut. We unscrewed this nut, slipped the key sideways and off. No matter what combination was dialled, no one would be able to unfasten the lock, since the wheel outside would never turn the rollers. We screwed the combination cover back on, and started to help Ben and the men. They had already collected a small pile of folders on the floor by the hole.
I dropped out through the hole and climbed the wall to the top of the bank roof. I crawled round the gutters beneath the mansard roof until I could look down on the road. The fire from the gas main was still burning, surrounded by Belgian workmen. They were shouting to men at the other end of the road, obviously waiting for them to turn off the gas supply. They seemed in no hurry. From my vantage point on the roof I could see across the road and down several of the streets that abutted it. The crackle of rifle fire was everywhere in the back streets, and from the frequent boom of grenades the battle seemed to be moving from the road, and already was at least a half mile away. Lorries came hurtling down the road carrying German troops, but none seemed to take the least notice of the Belgian work group below me. Over the arms dump, where Roget had planted his explosion, a black pall of smoke hung in the air and I could see the flash of mortar bomb explosions in the half light. It would soon be dawn, already vision was lengthening. The partisans would need to move fast to escape encirclement. Already I could see the flash of lights in streets about a mile away, behind the partisans. The Germans were bringing further reinforcements to block the back way out. I slid back down the rope and then with an upwards flick disengaged the grappling hook from the brickwork. I climbed the wall, and ran along the gully. Bless her, Artoise had not moved from her position on guard at the other end. ‘Tout va bien?’ she asked, excited. ‘Excellent. I may go now?’ I could see she itched to join the partisans. I took her hand. ‘I’m sorry I said what I did, about the brothels,’ I said. ‘That is the past,’ she said. ‘Think only of the future and escape.’ She swarmed through the door into the cabinet and that was the last I ever saw of her.
Something was wrong. A job is a chess board with every piece memorised on its square. Two of my pieces were missing.
I ran back down the gully. Fred and Joe were gone. How could that be with Artoise on guard all the time? Perhaps they had gone straight up, over a roof. Silly bastards! What could they hope to gain by leaving us now.
Rats and rabbits have an uncanny hearing system. Criminals doubtless have antennae in the mind which pick up signals we don’t hear. Certainly I had survived many times because, in an otherwise silent night, my inner antennae warned me of physical danger. This was not imagination. It was a specific and clear knowledge of actual danger. Fred must have felt it, and had decided his chances with the Germans were greater than his chances with me.
He and Joe had vanished without a trace.
In the road outside the bank I heard the clamour of a fire bell. No doubt the partisans among the Belgian disaster squad had hoped to add to the confusion by turning out the fire brigade. I heard an ambulance drive up, its siren bleeping a high-pitched wail. The burning gas had spread a thick smoke over the street, and there were metallic flashes in the flame. From streets at the other side of the road I still heard the explosion of grenades, but gradually they were moving further away. I glanced at my watch. We were ahead of time.
Dodger came scrambling down the gully. He was smiling. ‘You should have seen that motorcycle after the explosion,’ and as he spoke the fire suddenly died away. ‘Someone must have turned off the gas,’ he said.
‘Have you seen Fred or Joe?’
‘No, they didn’t pass me. Have they scarpered?’
‘Yes.’
‘That Fred,’ Dodger said in digust. ‘He was a queer one. He was a damn sight more interested in that bank there, than in the vault. Asking questions about it all the time he was, in the barn.’
‘What sort of questions?’
‘Oh, you know, Major, what was in it, how you could get inside, all that sort of stuff. He kept going on about it to the lads, how we was a lot of mugs messing about with signals data when there was probably gold and jewels in that bank for the taking. And then, here’s another thing, he nicked Captain Derby’s escape money.’
Whenever we jumped into Europe we were always given a pack containing money in German, French, Dutch and Belgian currency, for use should we need to escape through the country. We were also given a belt full of gold sovereigns. ‘I saw him putting the money into his own pack,’ Dodger said. ‘I’d give him hell for it, but there was nothing I could do, not if he was to finish this job. I’d ’a killed him.’ I had a sudden certainty of what the buggers were about! I leaped back off the wall and ran to the corner of the compound. The lads were just starting to lift out the signals material. I waved Dodger to come and give them a hand. In the corner of the yard was the iron-grilled door, only two feet high and four feet wide, doubtless a ventilation door for the bank cellars. The iron grille had been severed recently by bolt cutters. I pulled the grille back out of the way and gently pushed the wooden door. It opened. The flimsy lock had been jemmied. That’s what they had been doing when supposedly they went back to check the charge under the vault.
I slid my body through the door, five feet into the cellar beyond. The room into which I dropped was used as a cleaning store and general brew-up room. There was a stove in the corner whose chimney went up through a side wall. By the stove was a coffee-bean grinder, and on a shelf rows of coffee bowls. There were no beans in the grinder, and it appeared not to have been used for some time. A divan in the corner of the room seemed to have been used more recently. The door at the far side of the room was open slightly. I went across to it. A light was on in the cellar beyond. Joe and Fred had unpacked the surplus explosive we had brought with us, and Fred was tamping it to the ceiling, just as he had tamped the vault. This time, however, he had no manhole cover, no hydraulic ram, though I noticed he had ‘borrowed’ the four baulks of timber we had used in the vault. God. They had been busy! Two of the baulks just gave him sufficient height, one on top of the other, to hold a heavy metal washing-bowl – doubtless from the sink near the stove – in which he had placed the explosive. The wires trailed from the edge of the bowl and were coiled on the floor.
Relying on the general confusion in the streets, Fred and Joe were going to blow a hole in the bank floor and get out what they could. Then, doubtless, they’d make their own way out of the country. I turned to climb back out of the cellar. Any activity, any thought, any movement which did not increase the chances of success of our mission I regarded as treason. There it was, black and white. We were on a job, the job was all important.
I once knocked a French Commando unconscious to prevent him going to see his mother on such a job as this. She lived only two streets from a power station we were to blow; but I wouldn’t let him go. If I had known about his mother, I would never have taken him with me. He volunteered to come of course, in the expectation of five minutes by his home fireside. It didn’t work. By the time he recovered consciousness, the fuse was lit and we were running.
I was halfway out of the window when I felt the impact of a gun barrel in my kidneys. Fred was standing behind me.
‘Not so fast, Major.’ I fell gently back, dusting my hands.
‘You sound like a cheap American gangster,’ I jibed. His face flushed. I moved hard and low and fast, but Ben had trained him too well. He moved sideways avoiding my knee and chopped with the gun against the side of my face. I felt the trickle of blood down my cheek and slammed against the wall as he followed up his blow with a kick behind my knee. Groggy, I whirled to try to backhand him, but he saw my open hand and drove his fist containing the gun hard into my Adam’s apple. I choked, gasping for breath. The Adam’s apple is a killer’s target. Waves of pain ran through my head and I felt myself going under. He grabbed my hair through the beret and held my head up. I was powerless to resist. This is it, my brain flashed, a sideways chop with the gun across my upper lip beneath my nose. He shook my head roughly. He was a tough fighter we’d trained well, but we hadn’t managed to instil the killer instinct into him. Thank God. I got to my feet.
‘Don’t try anything again,’ he said. ‘The sergeant major taught us all he knows. Now walk through into the other cellar, quickly and quietly, and I’ll be behind you, Major!’
I did as he told me. He’d been a good pupil and Ben was a good teacher. I was finding it hard to breathe and had no strength at that moment for resistance.
‘Now connect those detonators and do it right since Joe will be watching you and I’ll be standing back here ready to shoot.’
I started to work connecting all the wires that came out of the bowl into the two wires that would go back to the plunger. ‘Where did you get the pistol?’ I asked. It was a Colt .45.
‘I’ve had it since Yorkshire.’
I looked at Joe as I worked. He was uneasy. I could see he didn’t share Fred’s enthusiasm for what they were doing. ‘What do you hope to get?’
‘Gold, and jewels, if you must know.’
‘And then what?’
‘We take our chances. Every day you hear of prisoners-of-war who get out of Germany and back to Blighty. Well, if they can do it, I’m damned certain we can. Do you know how many times I’ve been on the run from the police? Don’t worry, we’ll get away, and with all them jewels, we won’t be heading for England, though – we’ll bribe our passage down to Africa, somewhere nice and hot for a change, and sit out the war in peace and comfort.’
He was right, of course. They could get away. They were professionals at escaping, and Africa is a big continent. Cargo boats still came up the coast and touched at Lisbon. They could get down to Teneriffe; money is the best passport, especially if it happens to be in gold.
‘What if the Germans hear this explosion?’
‘They won’t. You didn’t even hear the vault go up, and you were listening for it; all these idiot partisans running about chucking grenades, and old Dodger knocking off gas mains. We’ll be through that floor up there and out again like a dose of salts.’
‘And what about me?’
‘That, I’m afraid, is the one thing that bothers me. According to the watch, the lads will be taking off any moment now. You’ve told ’em that nobody is to waste time looking for anybody who’s missing, so they’ll bugger off without you.’
‘Where to? I’m the only one who knows the route home.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t kid yourself. Half the partisans know it, and they must have told the lads.’
I had connected the wires. One pressure on that small box and the whole lot would go sky high. I was sorely tempted to blow the whole lot now, but I knew I couldn’t until the men were all away with that signals data. I daren’t risk the explosion being heard before the men were away.
‘Joe, get over here.’ Joe went and stood beside him. I looked at my watch. The boys would be leaving. Ben would doubtless think that for some reason I had gone ahead, relying on him to get out what was left of the troop according to our disciplines on time.
Joe and Fred were standing beside the door.
‘Another little point we have to consider, Major, is that your lads have arranged a little lynching party for Joe and me. They think we don’t know, but I could sense when I got back into the barn after my sentry duty that they had something up their sleeves. So you see, we’ve got to wait here until they’ve gone, and we can’t have you prancing about, can we? You’re just the sort of blood-and-guts bugger who’d get a couple of men and come after Joe and me, or tip off the partisans to do the dirty work for you. So I’m afraid that, just as soon as your lads get out of earshot, it’s curtains for you, old lad. Or should I still call you Major, since we’re still in the Army?’
Joe was sweating, and beads of perspiration stood out on his upper lip. ‘Remember the static line, Joe,’ I asked. ‘I could have left you dangling. You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.’
‘Very good attempt, Major, but it won’t work, will it, Joe?’ Fred said. ‘Joe knows when he’s well off.’
‘You only got me down because you needed me on the job,’ Joe said.
‘You and your jobs,’ Fred said, ‘you’ve made me sick, poncing on about England, Hope and Glory. Well, let me tell you this, Major bloody Rhodes, we only agreed to come on the job in the first place because we reckoned it was a good way of getting out of England, and there’d be a bit of loot in it. I knew when that prick Sywell turned up at the prison, it had to be a bank job, or a safe, or a vault.’
‘Joe, I could have left you dangling there. You’d have died within minutes.’
‘Well, what do you want me to to say, thank you?’
‘It’s not true the lads want you, Joe,’ I had to persist.
Joe looked at Fred, thinking. Bless God, was I getting through to him?
‘It’ll be because Fred slashed Arthur Sywell’s static line, Joe. The lads have got nothing against you, believe me. I would know if they had.’ It was a lie – I hadn’t even known the lads knew about the static line. Frank Farleigh must have seen it dangling there when he was waiting his turn to jump and I was climbing down Joe’s line. ‘It was a stupid murder, Joe, and that’s what gets the lads. If Fred could do it once, he could do it again, to you!’
Fred lifted the Colt in a demonstration of strength. Joe was looking at him, doubtless wondering to what sort of man he had tied himself. Bank robbers are not normally violent people. ‘That sod Sywell was lying to us,’ Fred said, his voice raised, ‘he said we’d be given a pardon, but I know damned well the minute we got back he would put us straight back into Durham.’ It was a stupid lie, but he was doing what I had seen so many times, working himself into a frenzy so he could kill me. Few men can kill in cold blood; that’s why army sergeant majors teach raw recruits to yell as they stick a bayonet into a straw-filled dummy, why men yell as they dash across a field in a bowels-opening charge. He started to raise the gun. I had about ten seconds.
‘I could have left you dangling on the end of that line, Joe; at that altitude with that wind blowing, you would have frozen to death in no time at all. Five minutes, Joe, that was all you had, and I risked my life to climb down that static line to you.’
‘Because you needed me for the job,’ Joe said.
‘No, damn it, because you’re a human being, and I couldn’t see you go like that.’
Now the gun was level. Fred’s finger began to pull on the trigger. He’d deceived me, he didn’t need the anger, he was perfectly capable of killing in cold blood.
Joe’s hand flashed upwards in an arc, knocking the pistol out of Fred’s grasp; I rocketed forward, my arm outstretched, a battering ram that took Fred in the chest, staggering backwards out of the cellar through the door, clutching the green box in his left hand, me following. I hit him a short-armed curved jab with all my force behind it aimed under his jawbone up into his head, my knuckles fully extended. I heard the awful crack and knew I had broken his neck. The speed of my impulsion carried me on. He fell backwards already dead and I tripped over his feet and stumbled on him. His head hit the floor. I tried to stop my hand but in that instant knew it to be impossible. My hand descended on the plunger of the little green box, and the whole cellar was filled with the muffled punch of an almighty explosion.
There was no bang, at least none I could hear. Suddenly there was an immense pressure on my body, my lungs, even my eyeballs. The air, intensely heavy, squeezed my chest. The only noise was a dull crunch like that of a heavy boot on dry snow; and then the post-explosion suction began and I was gasping for breath in air filled with dust fine as french chalk. The explosion slammed Joe to the ground and scraped the side of his face. His skin, and doubtless mine, was pockmarked with impregnations of sharp black powder particles. I dragged him to his feet, and tried to push him out through the window, but he had no strength in his arms to lift himself.
‘Sit with your head between your hands,’ I told him. ‘I’ll make my way along to the cabinet maker’s yard and wait there for you.’ I had to keep my promise to get him out and back to the plane alive. I climbed through the window. The men had all left on time as we had planned. The sand and gravel and cement were still in the corner. Soon, the partisans would clean out that vault as best they could and re-cement the floor. It wouldn’t pass inspection for long, but might give the decoding experts in Essex a few more vital hours. I climbed the wall of the compound, walked along the gully mentally checking to see the lads had left no traces of their passage. The mark of an Innsbrucker boot sole was stamped in a patch of mud in the gully. I cursed, and scuffed it with my hands. When I dropped down into the cabinet maker’s yard he was sitting in a small shed in which he kept a few machines, such as planers, circular saws. He had made himself a cup of coffee; when he saw me appear, he poured some for me into a bowl, and I swigged it gratefully. The men had left on time, he confirmed, in good spirits. They had asked about me, but he hadn’t seen me since the incident with Artoise and the Germans. It took Joe five minutes to come to his senses. I was just going back to fetch him out when he appeared in the wardrobe at the top of the pile.
‘You better?’
‘I’m all right now, Major.’ He looked horrible.
The cabinet maker looked out into the alleyway; no one was about. I shook his hand. It was all I could do. I craved the eloquence of a Churchill adequately to thank him, to tell him how much I understood the enormity of the risk he took. It was easy to be a come-and-gone soldier; he had to sit in his yard, and if ever the Germans suspected we had used this as our route of entry and exit, the Gestapo would tear him limb from limb. Roget Belfière would give me his name and address and when I was able I would communicate my gratitude to him. ‘Bon voyage,’ he said.
‘Merci.’
Over his wall, into the alleyway, and turn left. Run for a hundred and fifty yards, turn right, run for a hundred yards, along another similar alley, turn right again. Small door. Open it. Inside, a yard. In the yard other bicycles. On the bicycles, out through the front gate left along the street away from the explosion. To our right we could see the barricades; the Germans had surrounded the entire area but we were outside the cordon, the partisans drawing them in the other direction. In the distance I could hear the muffled explosions of grenades, and now the heavier boom of small calibre guns. As we rode along, Joe came level with me.
‘Major, about the cellar…’ he started to say. I cut him short, wanting no explanations.
‘What happened down there you can forget,’ I said. ‘Our job is to get back home quickly, and we have no other purpose in life at this moment, do you understand? When we get back, I shall put in a report saying Fred was killed in action. Just that. I shall never mention your part in it, understand?’
‘I understand, Major,’ he said, ‘and thanks.’
We caught up with the last two men after a mile on the bicycles. I tinkled my bell in our prearranged signal to identify us, but by now there were many people about on bicycles, early workers going to the factories. Sam Levine looked with concern at my face as I rode up beside him. The gash Fred had cut it in with the Colt had run with blood, but the powder blast had caked it – it would be as good as a dressing until we got home. Now the streets were becoming light and the false dawn before the rising of the sun spread a grey November light. I was beginning to feel the first traces of physical tiredness; mentally I was as alert as ever, but the wrenched shoulder, the fall from the wall, and Fred’s attack, had taken a toll. I never had difficulty on a job, never took any of the pills the Medical Corps offered to combat sleepiness. To me, the job was everything, and I had no fear of collapse so long as we were active. But my bones ached, and I thought with longing of the hot breakfast and bath I hoped would await us.
Tomorrow I would need to travel to London for a debriefing; that would doubtless include a psychological examination. I would see Sandy again. Half my mind flicked over the fearsome possibilities of that meeting; the other half clung stubbornly to the job. Perhaps Sandy would have been replaced at her own request by some other psychologist. They were all the same, all tainted with the academic passion for experiments, no matter what decent human emotion they sliced to shreds for their microscopes.
‘Everyone safely away?’ I asked Sam.
He nodded, eyeing my face. ‘What happened down there, Major?’
‘There’s no time to tell you now. Fred Pike’s dead.’ I saw the gleam of satisfaction on his face. ‘Data spread out, as planned?’
‘Yes, except the sergeant major’s carrying Alf Milner’s load, and I have Frank Farleigh’s.’
‘Right, off we go.’
‘Yes, Major.’
It was a good thing that they would have left me, or so I told myself. But it was also such a horribly bad thing. You crush emotion from yourself; fight to crush it in other people. You stamp out human foibles, refuse to accept their existence. ‘After all, he’s only a human being, sir,’ had been said to me so many times, and I had been enraged by it. I refuse to accept that any man is ‘only a human being’. The human ethos is the finest of all the Creations, capable of infinite ability. The very phrase ‘only a human being’ sought to reduce the marvel of humanity to the level of animals. Man is capable of anything, providing he believes that to be true. How many men who believed they couldn’t cover five miles had I loaded with a hundred-pound pack, and shown them they could cover a seemingly endless succession of five-mile stretches at unbelievable speeds? How many times had I taken men into the Highlands of Scotland on a hardening course, and kept them off food and water for days while scrambling up the sides of mountains, swimming through ice-cold lochs? The human being is capable of anything he believes in; it had become my credo. How galling now to realise that anything could include leaving me behind. Well done, chaps, good show, you bastards.
In the distance, I heard the boom of guns, the wide-mouthed ones that fire house-destroying shells. Doubtless the Germans had pinned a section in one of the houses and were busy shooting away the walls. Joe and I cycled together along the road, and turned right. Mean houses were beside the street, men and women on cycles, some walking. For them the working day started soon; for us we hoped it was nearly over. ‘Keep a regular pace,’ I had ordered, as if it was a nine-days bicycle ride. Ben and the rest should be ahead of Joe and me; Sam and Taffy were behind. We rode all the way along the street, just two more workers on bicycles. Turn left, then almost immediately right again. I had rehearsed the route a hundred times in my mind, as had all the men. We could have cycled it blindfold. Above all, to any watching eyes, we must appear to know where we were going. There must be no hesitation, no pausing at the end of long mean streets.
The Germans were waiting just around the corner. Six of them. One section. They had a tripod-mounted machine gun and automatic rifles. The machine gun was hidden behind a car, the men with the automatic rifles lying along the back of a lorry. One of the men carried a radio and had the earphones clamped to his ear, the microphone in his hand. They were looking straight down a long street, the one I had intended to use. The radio operator called out to the section corporal and we saw them all tense. A section of the partisans was being driven, or so I gathered, into the far end of that street. The Germans would let them come part way up the street and then open fire. It would be massacre. I signalled to Joe to dismount. We wheeled our bicycles slowly forwards. All my training, all my instincts told me to get out of there, as fast as I could, but somehow I could not bring myself to do it. Over the rooftops we could hear the explosion of grenades – doubtless ones we had supplied to the partisans. A wreath of smoke spilled up and over the houses down near the bottom of the street, and we could hear the explosion of larger shells and the whining of mortars. Poor bastards in among that lot. I could sense others behind me, a small crowd of people all with bicycles or walking to work. The German corporal looked round, saw us and muttered something I didn’t catch to his second-in-command. He jumped off the back of the lorry and came towards us. He herded us together in the lee of one of the buildings. I signalled quietly to Joe to stay on the periphery of the small crowd. Where we were standing we could see down the street. The crowd was silent; they knew what to expect. Typical of the German mind to want the Belgian people to witness the massacre. A salutary lesson, their Teutonic minds would say. They could never comprehend how firmly it resolved the will to resist, how strongly it would fan the flames of hatred. I felt rather than saw Sam Levine and Taffy ride up behind. They joined the crowd, inconspicuous as ever. To run for it would have been fatal.
Six of them, four of us. They have one machine gun and four automatic rifles, we all have a knife each and two grenades. No, I’d taken Sam’s two grenades up there on the hill by the wood. He was looking disinterestedly at my face, or so it seemed, chewing his gums. I knew he would be alert for anything I might suggest. He took his hand out of his pocket. In his clenched fist was a grenade. He put the fist back in his pocket. Good, he’d acquired two more grenades in the barn. Trust Sam!
Taffy was watching Sam.
We were now standing behind the machine gun, about ten feet from it. The men with the automatic rifles were on the lorry just behind the car shielding the machine gun. We couldn’t throw a grenade in such a confined space, with that crowd there.
Taffy had worked his knife down his sleeve. I saw its point in the palm of his hand.
Ten feet’s a long way to jump with a knife.
One of us for the machine gun, but that leaves only two for the four men on the back of the lorry. I couldn’t rely on Joe.
I looked at Sam, looked away from him at the machine gun.
He nodded. He’d understood. He’d take the gun.
He looked at Taffy, then at me and at the back of the lorry. Taffy understood. He and I would take the back of the lorry.
I dropped the knife out of its holster beneath the raincoat I wore and felt it in my hand. Trouble with a knife is that it can be bloody awful to get out again, sometimes. You slam it in, and it can get stuck, held by the suction you create with the blow.
Knife in the left hand. Jump up on the back of the lorry using the right hand and arm as leverage. Left arm on a wide arc in beneath his shoulder blade, that’s the quickest. Right elbow forward so that if the other German turns round it’ll go straight in his eye.
‘Grab hold of my bike,’ I whispered to Joe, ‘and be ready to go like hell.’
‘What are you going to do, Major?’
‘Watch, and be ready to move, fast.’
Look at Sam, look at Taffy, look down the street.
A group of partisans had just turned the corner and had started up the street, running past each other, facing the other way, except for the two in the front who were looking up the street. The corporal growled a quiet ‘Achtung’ – but there was no need. Everyone had seen the target.
The partisans came on up the street. At the bottom corner, a group dropped a Bren gun on its tripod and started firing short bursts along the side street down which we couldn’t see. The German machine-gunner wanted to shoot, but the corporal insisted he wait. More and more partisans were in the street – by now there must have been thirty. Then I saw the black-haired girl Sam had been with in the barn. He saw her at the same moment, looked despairingly at me, and I nodded. We were about to spring when the corporal, losing his nerve, yelled ‘Fire.’ The machine gun raked along the street, a slow rate of fire, each shot made to count. Then the men with the automatic rifles opened up. Rat Tat Tat. The rate of fire was higher than that of the larger machine gun.
We were too late. As the firing began, the section corporal turned his automatic rifle to cover the crowd. There was nothing we could do. One by one the partisans were chopped down by the rapid fire, one by one they fell on the pavée, in the doorways, across the window sills. As soon as he heard the fire, the Bren gunner tried to turn his fire up the street, against the Germans, but the bastard who invented the Bren never allowed for a fast turn when he stuck the blasted tripod legs up at the front end. Before the gunner could turn through twenty degrees, the German machine-gunner sighted on him, and held a long slow burst that whipped down the street and cut away the Bren gunner’s head.
I thought Sam would go crazy when his girl dropped, a blood red mass where her chest had been. There was nothing I could do, now, with that automatic rifle pointing at us. Sam turned against the building and was sick. The corporal jeered at him.
It was all over in a few seconds and twenty or more Belgians had been slaughtered.
The corporal glanced down the street, then waved us all on in silence. No one spoke. We rode silently past, me with Sam, Joe with Taffy.
‘We were just that bit too late, Major,’ he said. There was no hint of reproach. ‘Sorry about the spew.’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t have worked.’
I changed places with Taffy. I wanted to keep Joe by my side. Taffy and Sam dropped behind, Joe and I went as fast as we dared to catch up on the schedule. Here is the turn to the left. Down this quiet street. Here the turn to the right, following the mental map. No hesitation. Here is the barracks. Unavoidable, but at that time of the morning, the sentry should take no notice of us. A platoon of soldiers was forming up in a hurry on the street outside the barracks; reinforcements against the partisans. The street widened in front of the barracks; we rode past them averting our gaze in simulated respect. I bent my foot so the cleated rubber soles of my boots would not show; Belgians were not well shod by that time in the war. Joe nearly knocked down the German sergeant who stepped backwards without warning. The German bellowed at him, but I willed Joe to keep on going, muttering ‘pardon monsieur’ as it came my turn to pass him. The sergeant mollified, turned his early morning spleen against the platoon laggards. How dearly I would have liked to heave a packet of P.14 amongst them, but that was not my task. I had abdicated all responsibility for the safety of the partisans. It had not been an easy thing to do. We could stop our bicycles at this approaching corner and lob a grenade back amongst them. Hold it in your hand long enough after you’d pulled the pin and it would explode on impact. I bet I could get twenty with that one throw. But it must not be. We turned at the end of the street, went along for a half mile, and were in the country.
It would be a fine morning for November when the sun eventually struggled through. Now the air was heavy with dew, the fine penetrating moisture that pierced your clothing. Thank God we were on the move; we’d have been miserable crouching beneath a hedge.
I pinged on the bicycle bell, three times. Joe heard the signal and stopped. He got off his bicycle and examined the front tyre. I halted beside him as if to commiserate. Ben, Harry Landon and Willie Garside ahead of us had been stopped by a patrol in an open pick-up truck, and two men on the pavement were searching our lads. Two men in the open back of the truck, hunched in overcoats, had machine carbines on their laps.
‘We’ll have to have a go at ’em,’ I told Joe. Our men were carrying signals data. ‘We’ll go from the outside of the vehicle, okay?’
It wasn’t okay, but it had to be done.
‘You go first, eh, Major?’
I outlined my plan to him, we mounted, and set off down the road. Ahead of us was a T-junction and the patrol had our men on the right-hand side at the bend of the road. We were riding up the right-hand side, of course, and would pass near the open truck. I rode ahead of Joe. Our men were standing with their hands on the wall, and the Germans were searching them. The two men in the back of the truck didn’t look particularly alert. How I longed for a rifle; it would have been child’s play to pick them off. As I drew nearer I felt the old taste rise in my mouth, that here-we-go-again bile of too constant killing. It would be worse for Joe, since he’d never done it before. The men in the back of the Mercedes glanced along the road towards us but took no notice. Huddled in greatcoats, they were too somnolent to care.
The two by the roadside were opening the briefcase Harry Landon carried strapped to his wrist. In it, I knew, were Signals Data Centre papers. I rode my bicycle slowly forwards. The soldiers in the truck paid no further attention to me. At the crossroads I slowed, dismounted, turned the bicycle left, between me and the truck. I pinged the bell twice. The man at the back of the truck leaned out to see nothing was coming down the road, then waved me on. I had shifted the grip of my left hand to the centre of the handlebars, my right clasped the back of the saddle. In one swing I lifted the bicycle clear of the ground and tossed it onto the back of the truck, entangling the two guards. The chain wheel caught the face of one of them. I followed the bicycle forwards, reached through the frame to grasp a machine gun, jerked up the muzzle and sprayed the two men conducting the search. It was a wild burst but the Germans dropped instantly. So did Willie Garside. Ben Bolding sprang to the side the moment he heard the crash of the bicycle against the back of the truck after the two warning ‘pings’. He came round in a fast arc and grabbed the machine gun of the man nearest him. I sprang back just in time as he sprayed both men in the back of the truck, the bullets whipping savagely past me, flying off the bicycle frame.
Willie had taken a bullet through his side, below and to the left of his heart. A through-and-through wound; it would give him hell for a day or two but was not serious. I ripped the bandage from my field dressing pocket and pushed it into his hand. He was only half conscious. I jerked him upright, sat him on his bike, and with Harry on one side and me on the other, we rode away hell for leather down the road. Banging my bike onto the truck didn’t seem to have injured it. I would have liked to take the truck, but didn’t dare risk a change of plans at this stage. Anyway, the lorry was only two miles away, and we could keep Willie going for that distance. Joe rode in front with Ben, completely bemused by the speed of what had happened. He was carrying Willie’s briefcase, and that gave him a sense of purpose. Half a mile down the road which ran through well-tilled farm fields Willie seemed to get a new lease of life. ‘I think I can manage now,’ he said. We let him pedal ahead until he was level with the others, and Harry and I dropped back a hundred yards. We were not challenged again. I looked back. Sam and Taffy had almost caught us up. I waved them on and Harry and I dropped behind them.
The lorry belonged to the German Army. It had been ‘borrowed’ on false papers from a Vehicle Repair Depot. The engine sounded like it; at first I doubted it would get us to our destination without breaking a valve stem. All the others were inside the back of the truck, hidden beneath the closed canvas. When Roget Belfière saw us arrive, he slammed down the bonnet and got into the cab. He was wearing only overalls and would pass for a mechanic. We threw our bicycles over the tailboard and climbed in; I took a rapid count; all were there. The driver let in the clutch, and the lorry coughed into movement, rattling and clacking its way along the road. There was safety, however, in the noise it was making. Several German patrols passed us, and through the canvas cover I saw each give us a derisory grin. Belfière had chosen a lorry with a doubtful engine deliberately; ten miles past where we intended to abandon it was the Vehicle Recovery Depot for this area, the lorry’s graveyard. The engine must have consumed oil like whisky; black clouds came belching from the exhaust up into the air, sucked into the back of the lorry. ‘If we don’t get there soon,’ Sam Levine said, ‘we shall all be sick as dogs.’ We rolled the canvas an inch or two all round to blow the smoke from the back. It helped a little but not much.
Eight miles down the road, the lorry turned off down a cart track, towards a farm, through a lane into a valley behind low but steep hills. The farm belonged to one of Roget’s men. We climbed down, and the driver took the lorry away. For him a long slow drive around the town, to abandon the decrepit vehicle somewhere on the other side. If it ever got there.
We spread out in the hedge bottom, and waited. Only ten minutes to go, so close had our timing been. The valley had been fertile land before the war, ploughed for crops. Since the war, however, it had been allowed to go back to grass. The actual field was unusually large for a Belgian farm, and ringed with trees. On the hills above the field partisans had been sitting all night to warn us of any German infiltration. They had been luckier than their compatriots in the town. There had been no signs of activity. The morning developed its early promise, and the sky was clear. The nearest anti-aircraft battery was on the outskirts of Liège; the plane would come in low, and go out hugging the hills, hedge-hopping across Belgium. Only when it had reached the sea would it be safe to rise, and for that we had two hundred miles to go, through a corridor of firepower.
We patched Willie’s side with sulphanilamide powder and a field dressing. ‘You didn’t need to shoot me to prove what faith is, Major. I believed you already.’ He grinned.
‘Sorry I shot you,’ I said, ‘that damned gun kicked left. The armourer ought to have a look at it before he re-issues it.’
‘You ought to have left him a Weapon Report.’
He knew the wound was not severe, though it had begun to ache furiously. A wound is a surprising thing; in the abstract the thought of a bullet ploughing its way into your body is terrible; when it actually happens, and it had happened to me four times, the effect is very small. The first shock of course is sickening, since you do not know at that moment of impact what damage has been done. The fear of crippling is worse than the fear of death. Many men would prefer to die by a bullet than be maimed to live afterwards in a cripple’s wheelchair. Once you realise, however, that the bullet has passed through you, you can accept the wound. It doesn’t lessen the pain, but makes it acceptable.
Willie was quite cheerful, but that too was normal. The immediate aftermath of a bullet wound is always a rise in temperature and the feeling of good humour that accompanies it; only later when the white corpuscles begin to fight back does the temperature go down and with it your morale. That’s when the aches suddenly become intolerable.
Roget looked sombre as he came across to me. I didn’t relish the thought of our conversation.
‘What was it like?’ I asked him.
‘Pas bon, pas mal.’
I had to ask him. ‘How many did you lose?’
‘I saw twenty. There were others.’
‘Artoise?’
He nodded. I had an inkling of how much she had meant to him.
‘You have all the signals data?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Alors, ça vaut tout.’
Was it worth all the lives so generously offered, so wilfully squandered?
The whole operation had been Roget’s idea. But for him we could never have known about the Signals Data Storage Centre. But now, would he still think it worthwhile?
‘You think so, Roget?’
The dullness went from his eyes. ‘I am absolutely convinced, Monsieur le Major,’ he said firmly. ‘Though the deaths are matters of an infinite regret.’
‘Especially that of Artoise!’
‘Yes, if you’ll permit a little sentiment. Artoise was of my generation, she could understand me without the constant need for explanation. The young ones are fierce, but they ask me too many questions I can’t answer.’
‘Like, why should we die for a group of Englishmen?’
‘Ah, no, you mistake me! Like why should we not die, so long as we can take the Boches with us. Death is not a problem to the people of your generation, Major. You haven’t seen sufficient of life to fall in love with it. You’ve not become greedy for it, as we old ones.’
‘And Artoise?’
‘There was a time when Artoise was greedy for life. Recently she had wanted to die.’
‘She told me. Not that she wanted to die, but that life had become a hell to her, that God had left us to our own devices.’
‘She must have admired you very much, monsieur, to be able to say those things to you.’
He did not cry. The old man must by now have shed so many tears he was dry of them. I could say nothing to help him. We had flicked death too often, too close to too many people for me to be able to commiserate with anyone; for us death had become an acceptable necessity, a factor you included in all your calculations. The circumference of a circle equals two pi times the radius, but no one can ever know exactly how big pi can be. You divide one well known number by another and the answer is an imprecise, approximate ‘pi’. We could divide the known advantage to us of the signals data by the known risk we would take to acquire it, but the unknown factor, the number of deaths we would suffer along the way, would always elude us.
‘She died quickly?’
‘Yes, a bullet.’
‘That’s a blessing.’
‘Yes, the only one.’ For a moment he doubted. He put his hand on my arm and looked questioningly at me.
‘We are going to win the war, Major?’
‘Yes,’ I said, with parrot-like sincerity. ‘We are going to win the war, Roget. Thanks to you, and Artoise, and hundreds like you…’
‘When will you start the second front?’
‘Next year.’
‘This signals data? It will help?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Tell them about us, won’t you?’ The people in Europe always asked us this – tell them about us. Sometimes we were interviewed by a journalist after one of our jobs, and we tried to ‘tell them’ about the people locked in Europe. It never worked. We could never get the human interest right; the stories were never complete. We knew these people for such a short time, in such a false way. Cowards became heroes, heroes revealed themselves to us in the one lifetime’s moment of cowardice. I had learned to suspend judgement.
‘Yes, we’ll tell them.’
I left him then, and drew near to my own men, my own kind. I could understand them, and felt comfortable in the knowledge of their needs. With Roget I felt like a man who watches another slowly dying of an illness he cannot diagnose.
Roget’s men, or what was left of them, were guarding the valley. They might appear a rag-tag-and-bobtail crew, but had earned our respect. We owed our lives to them individually, collectively, and on behalf of all those who lay crumpled on the pavements of Liège.
‘The plane will be down in five minutes,’ I said, glancing again at my watch. ‘You all know the drill. He’ll come in badly since he can’t run back and manoeuvre for take-off. The sergeant major and Dodger will help the pilot turn the plane round by chocking the wheels. I want all the rest of you out of sight until that plane is ready for take-off, and then you run over that field like bloody rabbits. Harry, you give me a hand with Willie. We shall be flying low all the way to the coast to avoid the heavier ack ack, so we may get a bit of small arms fire up our backsides.’
‘Do you mind if I walk home, Major?’ Dodger Bates asked and the others laughed. He might stand a better chance on his own two feet; he’d walked out of Europe three times already and he knew the long way home.
‘That’s up to you,’ I said only half-jokingly, ‘but there’ll be breakfast waiting for us in England, served by some of those WAAFs they keep on airfields especially for returning heroes. And then there’ll be leave, after you’ve had a pay day, of course.’ Each man was entitled to sixpence a day danger money – they’d draw an extra shilling for this little trip.
‘I’ll ride,’ he said.
‘It’s always the same when I ask for anything,’ Frank said to his mother as he towelled himself dry. ‘You always say, I’ll have to ask me dad, and he always says I’ll have to ask you. And then there’s never any brass. It isn’t as if I wanted the earth, is it? All I want is a bit of carpet in me bedroom to put next to me bed, something to put me feet on when I get out of a morning.’
Frank had been back from the works for an hour, eaten his supper in his muck, which his mother didn’t like, and had washed himself, as he always did on a Friday, in the large tin tub in front of the fire in the living room that functioned as kitchen, sitting room, bathroom in their one-down two-up back-to-back house in Hunslet. ‘Getting ideas above your station, you are,’ his mother said. ‘Just because you’re earning two pounds ten a week.’
Frank was wearing his navy blue suit with the chalk stripe, double-breasted, with deep lapels, and a metal spring along the collar line to stop the lapels bending over. Frank couldn’t stand creased lapels – they gave a jacket a scruffy, slept-in look.
He put the collar on to the back stud sticking from the back of the neckband of his shirt. He laced the tie into the collar and came and stood before the fire, trying to fit the two tabs of the front of the collar into the front stud. His thick fingers fumbled at the stud. His mother watched him and then stepped forward in pretended exasperation. ‘Here, let me fix it; you’ll have the collar black bright before you’ve even worn it, the way you’re going on.’ She stood in front of him and gently prised the two tabs on to the long stud. He put his arms on her waist, feeling the straps of her pinny between his fingers.
‘What is my station then, old love?’ he said.
‘I don’t know with you, you’re that forward with yourself,’ she said. You’ll be going down to the dance hall tonight, and meeting some smart lass, and the next thing you know you’ll be buying her port and lemons. Nobody never bought me no port and lemons, except at Christmas. The next thing you’ll find she’s living at Armley and you’ll have a long walk home all that way.’
‘Maybe she’ll be worth it?’ he said.
‘Nobody’s worth it, all that much,’ she said. ‘There’s hundreds of nice girls round here, and they’d be glad to meet a nice smart lad like you that looks after hisself a bit and dresses nice, and there’s not one of ’em would think of ordering anything but a glass of stout. Yes, and they’d hang on to that for an hour or two.’
‘Can’t you see, Mum,’ he said, as she clipped on the second tab and stepped back to let him knot the tie, ‘that’s not what I want. I want the best I can get.’
‘That’s the snare-and-delusion,’ she said quickly. ‘The best you can get is what you’ve been brought up to. It doesn’t do no good to set your sights too high, young lad, and if you don’t soon learn that, you’ll come a nasty cropper. The higher they fly, the heavier they drop, that’s what they always say,’ she said. She picked up the heavy tin bath half full of water, carried it over to the low stone sink, and placed it there. He made no move to help her – had he tried she would have stopped him. After all, he was wearing his best, wasn’t he? She took the overalls he had discarded, and dropped them in the still-warm water to soak. They would stay in there until the water was cold. Heat was something you didn’t waste. She took his shoes from the bottom cupboard, got out a rag and a tin of Cherry Blossom, and began to polish them for him. He sat on the hard chair and picked his toenails clean with the prong of a fork before pulling on his socks.
‘Can I borrow Dad’s cig case?’ he asked. She got up and opened the oak bureau which stood against the wall. From it she took the curved gunmetal case, opened it, closed it again, and handed it to Frank. ‘You mind that now, it was my wedding present to your dad,’ she said.
‘I know, love, you told me.’
‘Just so long as you value it.’
‘Honest, love, I’ll guard it with my life.’ He scratted about in the overcoat he wore to work and pulled from it a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes. He opened the packet and took out the cigarettes one by one, and slid them beneath the yellow elastic of the cigarette case. She put his shoes in front of his feet and picked up the empty cigarette packet. ‘Gold Flake, eh? Going up in the world. What’s wrong with Woodbines?’
‘On a Friday night, love? Go on,’ he said, ‘have one.’
She hesitated. ‘Go on!’ She slowly took one.
‘Aren’t they big?’ she said, and put it on the mantlepiece next to the rent book and the vase in which she kept her hair grips.
‘Aren’t you going to smoke it, then?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll save it for later when I’ve got me feet up. That’ll make a nice treat for me of a Friday night.’
‘Well, don’t go giving it to our dad!’
He stood in front of the mirror and brushed his shoulders where the white dust of dandruff showed against the navy blue of his jacket. He put the cigarette case in his inside pocket, a box of matches in his outside pocket. He lifted the silk handkerchief higher in his pocket, rearranging the folds. He took his navy blue overcoat from behind the door. In the pocket was a white silk scarf he wound round his throat. She stood up. He had tied the scarf like a muffler.
‘Not like that,’ she said. ‘Let me show you.’ She undid the knot in the scarf and draped the scarf round his neck, tucking it beneath the lapels of his overcoat so that only a half an inch of it showed. ‘That’s how they wear ’em,’ she said.
‘Go on, how would you know!’
‘I saw a photograph, in the papers. That’s how Adolph Menjou always wears his scarf.’
He was standing at the far end of the ballroom when first he saw her dancing by, in the Veleta.
‘That’s her,’ he thought.
He waited four dances until they had an excuse-me waltz. He was all right with the waltz.
‘Where do you come from, then?’
‘Roundhay,’ he said.
‘My my, posh up there, isn’t it?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘All right? I wished I lived up there.’
‘Where do you live, then?’
‘Armley.’
‘What you doing after – I mean, would you like a drink?’
‘Fast worker, are you?’
‘No, but with these excuse me’s, you never know!’
‘We could have a drink. I’ll have to tell me friends.’
‘That’s all right then, isn’t it?’
She asked for a glass of stout. He insisted she have a port and lemon. ‘It makes me drunk,’ she said, giggling.
‘Well that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How you getting home?’
‘Last tram.’
‘I’ll come with you, if you like.’
‘That’ll be nice, but how’ll you get home? It’s a long way from Armley to Roundhay.’
‘I’ll get a taxi.’
‘Posh, aren’t we?’
On his way home he passed his dad, sitting by the brazier, drinking his mashing. His dad made room for him on the box outside the little wooden hut, poured half his mashing into a pot he fished out of the hut and made both up with more water from the kettle.
‘Brought you a present,’ Frank said. He got out the cigarette case.
‘Here, you look after that. It was a present to me from your mum.’
‘I know,’ Frank said without exasperation. Somebody always has to say something. Whenever you bring out the fag case, somebody has to say ‘Careful of that, it was a present.’ Every time you put your hand on a girl’s chest she says ‘Cheeky.’ If you’re lucky enough, as he had been that night, to get it up her skirt, she has to say, ‘Keep your hand to yourself,’ as if you were going to take it off at the wrist and leave it there for always.
‘Gold Flake, eh? Going up in the world, aren’t we?’
‘Go on, it’s Friday night. Smoke yourself to death!’
‘Seen this?’ his dad said, tapping the newspaper he’d been reading when Frank came along. ‘The way they’re talking, you’ll be in the Army before you know where you are. You can go in my old mob, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.’
‘I bloody well won’t – you can keep your footsloggers.’
‘They was good enough for your dad.’
‘Well, they aren’t good enough for me.’
‘Ideas above your station, that’s what you’ve got my lad.’
When he came home from the Commando training his dad was sitting in the kitchen, washing his feet, and his mother was getting the tea ready.
‘Well, they’ve filled you out a bit, haven’t they?’ she said.
‘How long you stopping?’ his father asked.
When he was ready to go back, seventy-two hours later, his father came to the door with him. ‘Here,’ he said, and pushed his cig case into Frank’s hand. ‘Tek this with you.’
‘You look after that,’ his mother said.
‘I know, it was your wedding present to me dad!’