James said, ‘OK . . . and now tell me about Tuesday’s Child; it wasn’t in my briefing anywhere. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It does to me, James. That was Pete’s way of telling us that he fixed your communication problem. Tuesday’s Child was a Lancaster bomber, one of the best. Pete and I completed our tours in her.’
‘OK . . . Where is she now?’
‘In hell with all the others. She crashed and burned the day we gave her to another crew. Bad bitch.’
‘Tuesday’s Child?’
‘That’s right, James. Grace. We named her after Grace.’
‘I see.’
He didn’t, and I hoped that he never would. He asked me, ‘You Tuesdays stick together then? After you finished flying together?’
‘Don’t know. Pete’s the only one I’ve met so far, and I thought he was dead.’
‘Are you pleased that he’s not?’
‘Yes. Yes I am. What’s this about, James? What are all the questions for?’
‘Just asking,’ he said. ‘Just interested.’
I didn’t believe him either. Life’s not that tidy.
That night I retuned the suitcase for them. The noise came out of a neat speaker the Krauts had built into the lid. We sat around Les’s fire, which threw out a surprising heat. It wasn’t far from our small tents. Kate’s back door was open, and from the suitcase we listened to Johnny Mercer doing ‘GI Jive’, and Louis Jordan doing ‘Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t My Baby?’ Later there was a Glenn Miller hour from Paris. Probably from that bloody club the Americans captured me in. Dinah Shore had flown in, and was doing ‘Stardust’ with them. Somewhere a few miles up ahead people were fighting and dying at the arse end of a bad war, and Dinah was singing ‘Stardust’.
They told you lies when they said that the worst things to be seen on the march across Europe were the concentration camps, and what was left of the people who had lived in them. They weren’t the worst things – and I know because I saw three camps, and there were things even worse than that.
They never told you about the big German cities. The big German cities laid flat. The big German cities full of dead people . . . or how we invented the microwave oven fifty years before its time, and flung whole bloody communities into it. I’ve told you before: I was never afraid to ask the questions.
We drove through a small town. Every house, shop, office or tenement I saw was smashed and burned. Two churches had been spread about a bit, but the cinema had managed to remain intact in the town square. Maybe that was a pointer for the future. The town hadn’t only been bombed: I thought an army had fought its way through it. There were no people and no stray animals, except a thin fox I saw rummaging in a shop window with smashed glass. The smell of burning seeped inside Kate, like stale cigarette smoke clinging to your jacket after a night in the pub.
The Major said, ‘I think that they used to have a car factory here,’ as if that explained everything.
‘I’ve been to the briefings,’ I told him. ‘We would have crapped all over it even if it had only made prams.’
There was a GI standing on our side of the road at a crossroads just the other side of the town. He wore a scarred chamberpot helmet, a weatherproof coat, and had a big twostrapped pack thrown over only one shoulder. His back was to us, and the hand held out with its thumb up was brown. He turned and smiled when we stopped by him, and held out the hand to me. I had to open the car door to speak to him. We did the ritual: touched, grasped and shook. I liked his open smile, and hoped he wasn’t on a runner again. I said, ‘Hello, Cutter.’
‘Hi, Charlie, Les. Hello, sir.’ He gave James a cursory salute and the Major attempted a return serve. All James did was succeed in knocking his cap off. He cursed, Damn.
I asked, ‘Are you running again?’
‘No, Charlie. Same as you, travelling. Under orders this time. They liberated Bremen yesterday, and they have a field hospital that’s going under.’
‘They ordered you to walk to Bremen?’
‘Shit no. There was a motor bicycle, but I wrecked it. I ran into a dog the other side of town. Pity. It looked a good dog. It was certainly the only dog they got left.’
‘See any people?’ That was James.
‘Nossir. I guess they all evacuated. Someone else’s problem now.’
‘Wanna lift? We’re going that way too.’ That was Les.
‘Yes please,’ Cutter said. ‘You want me to ride in the back with the General, or up front like the enlisted men?’
‘Charlie can sit in the back,’ Les said. ‘I want you up here where I can keep an eye on you.’
Cutter rode with his pack and helmet clutched possessively into his lap. I asked him, ‘What do you have in the pack? Booze? Silk knickers for the Fräuleins?’
‘The tools of my trade, Charlie, and that ain’t them. I’ve as much penicillin as they’d let me have. If we flogged it I’d be worth my weight in gold to you today.’
‘Not that you’d ever sell?’
I’d gone too far. There was a bit of a sulky silence, and then the Negro said, ‘What’s the point of my cutting folk if I can’t keep them alive with the proper drug afterwards?’
I said, ‘Sorry,’ and meant it.
A while after that the Cutter asked, ‘You boys mind if we stay in touch while we’re all still in Bremen? I don’t know what it’s gonna be like up there. They may not like me.’
In a cobbled dairy yard on a hill closer to
