Charlie's War

across the trampled grass the Scouts had left behind them. The ground sloped down, and through a screen of trees. Les had a slightly longer and slower pace than mine, so I found copying him I had a loping movement. It was strange, but quickly comfortable. As we broke through the trees I could see the ground still sloped away, to a small pond in a natural basin, surrounded by thick grass . . . maybe fifty yards away from us. On the other side of it the ground climbed away again, and into thick woods. The Scouts were skylarking. Les didn’t go any further: he sat down in the lee of the tree ring. I dropped alongside him, sweating slightly. Some of the boys had stripped off, and were swimming. I supposed that the boys who’d killed the Germans in the Elephant can’t have been much older than this. The woman must have been swimming. She lay face-down looking away from us. Her bottom was very white, like the skulls of dead German soldiers.

‘It’s their Boy Scout Field Studies badge,’ I told him. ‘The French have a different approach to biology. It’s why they end up with less queers than us.’

As we stood up to walk away one of the boys waved lazily to us. Why the hell should they care?

I asked Les, ‘There never were any mines, were there?’

‘Oh, yeah. One time there were. It was one of the first areas they cleaned up. So many kids around here, see. A sapper got chopped down there. Blown to mincemeat.’

‘So why did we go through all that stuff about the walk?’

‘So you learned it, sir: I’m not going to be around forever, you know. Now you know how to walk through a minefield. Sometimes when you see a file of soldiers crossing a minefield from the distance, all doing the walk set out by the guy in front, it can look quite comical; like some old dance, with Death leading the way. Then the guy in front runs out of luck, and it doesn’t.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

‘And remember that more men get maimed by mines than killed by them; so if you find yourself in a minefield, don’t panic. The odds are favourable – if you can get along without a foot that is.’

‘I’ll . . .’

‘. . . I know: you’ll remember that too.’

By then we were back at the Humber. The Major looked up from his little notebook and asked us, ‘Anything doing?’

‘No,’ Les told him. ‘Just those Scouts.’

James had retuned the radio, and I could hear Tommy Handley from London.

*

I felt at home in Maggs’s place: it had the mid-upper turret from a Lancaster bomber in the back garden, and she was growing things in it. The aircraft’s rear fuselage now attached to the back of a small house was her kitchen. She had created another small room with packing cases, and she showed me with pride the Elsan inside.

‘Before that,’ she told me with a disarming smile, ‘I had to go outside come rain or shine. It wasn’t funny sitting out there on a pitch-black frosty night, I can tell you.’

She made me laugh.

‘Where are you from? Originally?’

‘Stepney. You?’

‘Carshalton in Surrey. Why didn’t the Jerries round you up and lock you away?’

‘Dunno really, but my old man was a copper in Vichy on and off. That probably had something to do with it . . . to tell you the truth I think it was just that I amused them, an’ they thought I was ’armless. I wasn’t the only one.’

‘Were you?’

‘What?’

‘Harmless.’

‘If you’re with Les and the Major you know better than to ask me that!’

‘Yeah. Just testing. Where did you get the Lancaster from?’

‘I woke up one morning, and most of it was in the garden. The Boche took some of it away; the engines, the guns . . . things like that.’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t take the rest. Haw-Haw keeps saying that every British bomber that crashes in Germany gets turned into fighters to defend it with.’

‘Is that what it feels like up there, son?’

‘Yes. The buggers are still coming up at us. How did you know I was RAF?’

‘Because she’s a bloody witch,’ Major England said. Like Dracula, he’d glided out from what was once her back door, into what was now her kitchen. ‘Meet Mata-Whory: the only woman in France not punished for sleeping with the enemy.’

‘You’ve got a bad tongue on you, Major,’ she told him, ‘. . . and one which could still get me hung from a lamp-post. Remember there’s some round here still throws their right arm up when a soldier blows off. They haven’t thrown away their Jerry flags, you know, just folded them carefully and put them in the bottom of their blanket boxes, waiting for the next time . . . and to answer your question, young man, you got the look. You don’t look Army, and we’re a long way from the bleedin’ sea!’

I plugged on. ‘What happened to her crew?’

‘We stuck two at the end of the garden, poor sods, under the cabbages now. I expect your lot will dig them up eventually.’

‘What about the others?’

‘I expect they got away.’ She set her lips in a stubborn line, and crossed her hands in front of her like a nun. I wasn’t going to get any more in that direction.

The Major added something else.

‘Mrs Maggs’s husband must have heard it fall, and went outside to investigate. She found him out there the next morning too, didn’t you, love?’

She smiled. It wasn’t exactly a smile.

He finished off, ‘Deuced unlucky. One of the guns on the Lanc must have popped off as it ploughed in. Killed the little beggar. Smack between the shoulder blades. From the back of course.’

‘ ’e always was an unlucky man. I never know why I married a Frenchie in the first place,’ Mrs Maggs told me, and then kept going. ‘Mean an’ unlucky, an’ he never knew whether he was