I asked Ingrid, ‘My German’s not that good. What did he say?’
‘I am not going to tell you.’
The old man laughed, and spat a few more words. They sounded coarse. When he smiled his front two teeth were missing. I remembered the French family again. There must have been homeless front teeth scattered all over Europe.
‘He lost his wife in an air raid a week ago. She was eighty-two. It was their wedding anniversary.’ I smiled at the old man then. I left her at the bottom of the steps, still chatting with the two old men.
Les asked me, ‘You ready then?’
He had the jeep radio tuned to a news broadcast. Something about the RAF attacking German merchant ships trying to escape from Germany with SS soldiers on board. The commentator could obviously see the weapon strikes, and was getting very excited – as if he was describing a football match.
‘Yeah. Thanks. As much as I’ll ever be.’
‘Mr Clifford coming?’
‘No. I don’t think so. What about the Major?’
‘Yeah. I’ll give him a whistle. He’s sitting down the steps with that Scotch guy he promoted. They’re exchanging recipes like a couple of girls. You walked right past them on the way up.’
‘I didn’t see them.’
‘Well; you wouldn’t, would you? You got that glazed look in your eyes.’
He didn’t have to whistle for James. The Major must have seen me climbing by, and followed me. He popped out of the cellar like the March Hare.
‘What’s that? Charlie in love? Are you in love, Charlie?’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like love.’
‘You’re not an expert, old boy, compared to us: but explain . . . what does it feel like?’
‘It just feels like it’s all over.’
‘What is?’
‘The bit of my life that includes chasing girls, and that sort of thing.’
‘. . . that sort of thing?’
‘You know.’
‘ ’fraid we don’t, old son.’
‘Look, I don’t want you to think I was a ladies’ man, because I wasn’t. It’s just that I’ve had a few girlfriends – mainly in the last six months. And got used to . . .’
‘. . . a bit of a poke when you felt like it . . .’ That was Les.
I told them, ‘It doesn’t feel like being in love. It doesn’t feel like any sort of emotion, except maybe a little sadness that things can’t stay as they are.’
‘Why not?’
‘Like I said, sir. Nothing luvvy duvvy. I looked at Ingrid just now, and had this overwhelming . . . knowledge, I suppose . . . I just knew I had met the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with. All over. No choice. Not any more. Sad really.’
Les said, ‘ ’strewth.’ That was a word we used at the time. ‘The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’
James said, ‘Stop showing off. The boy’s stricken.’
‘That’s what I meant, sir. Shall us get moving?’
Twenty-Nine
Lee Miller’s jeep had had the word Hussar painted on the bottom frame of the windscreen; remember? Our new one had the word Chasseur. I wondered if they’d once been stable mates. Les drove, and the Major sat alongside him, his faded trench coat blowing out in the slipstream. Not that there was much of that; Les had to pick his way around bomb and shell holes, collapsed buildings and exposed, ruptured water mains. One of them plumed about twenty feet into the air, and a group of kids danced and played around it. They ignored us. The high brick wall of an area of dockyard had been laid flat by blast for a length of about two hundred yards. It still looked like a perfect brick wall, but built horizontally rather than vertically. Those odd French painters would have liked that. Submarines on cradles had become scattered pieces of scrap. One of the pieces was a more or less complete submarine conning tower, marooned on dry land. A red flag bearing a huge maple leaf flew from the periscope housing.
We had to turn inland again. Les knew what he was up to. The old Hanseatic Hotel was in a district of warehouses and dock workers’ homes. At the end of one street of small houses there was a bomb site comprising a near perfect pyramid of bricks. Les stopped to let us see that as well: I wished he hadn’t. It was topped by half a dead woman with an outstretched arm, like a bizarre signpost pointing east. Some wag had hung a notice on it. It read, Berlin 200 miles. There’s no such thing as a joke in bad taste in the middle of a war. The radio warbled ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’: at least it wasn’t that bloody Vera Lynn woman. Les grunted. He said, ‘Someone should bury that before it begins to stink.’
He was right, really. It was just so much meat. I wondered if the kids we’d passed, playing in the water, had seen it. I wondered if some of them wondered where their mother was. Les took us perhaps another quarter-mile. Then he stopped and switched off.
The Hanseatic Hotel towered above low warehouses – one had burned; its roof was gone. The hotel was an ornate, four-storey, square building made from pale red brick. Its cornerstones, lintels and window surrounds were of a fine light-grey ashlar. Flagposts jutting out over the road carried Red Cross flags. They occasionally cracked in the breeze. In the yard between it and a warehouse painted with tarred black paint I could see a dozen ambulances parked randomly, whilst their crews stood around with cigarettes. A large seagull paced up and down the rain channel at the edge of the warehouse roof. It had a piece of blood-stained bandage in its beak, which it shook periodically. It was like one of those civilians they showed you on the newsreels, waving small flags as their liberators drove past.
As we waited, a driver in olive-green pants and vest got into a US ambulance – one of those
