Just as I was about to climb in the front passenger seat alongside him, and kip until he woke up, the flight of Lightnings crossed the air above me again, on their way back. The racks on their wings, which had contained armour-piercing rockets for the low-level stuff, were empty now . . . And there were only three of them: not the four seen an hour earlier. The one that was missing was the one which had the big, friendly sun painted on its nose. Inside me I gave that Gallic shrug: maybe the flash git was walking home. You never know. I woke up when I felt the car shift under me as the Major settled in the back seat. He pulled the door shut. Les yawned and stretched, nearly braining me. James told me, ‘I told you so.’
‘Told me what?’
‘That girl. Her boyfriend is one of those fighter pilots who flew over the square this afternoon. She says he always shakes his wings at her.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Excessively agricultural.’ He coughed one of those weak apologetic coughs. ‘But any port in a storm, and all that.’
*
Some distance out of town, with the light all lost, Les stopped us on one of those straight, tree-lined Roman roads that crisscross northern and central France. England radioed a check into his HQ, wherever that was, and Les filled our tanks from a jerrycan. When we got going again James soon fell asleep, whilst I performed the little navigation feats that were required under the light of one of those right-angled WD-issue torches. The miles sang under Kate’s wheels. Les whistled ‘Lili Marleen’. Life was OK, but I remembered an evening I had once spent in a field with Grace, when I had never been happier.
PART THREE
Belgium: March 1945
Eleven
Les stopped the car once at about 0430. I awoke with a start. Someone was talking to Les from outside the car. A torch flashed briefly in my eyes, and on England’s sleeping face. When I focused on the stranger’s voice I found that it was reassuringly English – a Brummie, I think – and we were at some kind of checkpoint which was lit by subdued half-lights. I heard a match striking, and smelled tobacco smoke. Les said something I didn’t catch. I was too busy trying to get my body to move from the curled-up position it seemed to have set in. The stranger laughed, and his torchlight flicked briefly on my face again. The white and black pole in the narrow gleam of our shrouded headlights lifted, and Les got us rolling, winding up his door’s window as he did so. It was chill; I could feel it getting into the car.
He doffed his beret, with one hand still on the wheel, and handed it to me, saying, ‘Dig us out a couple of fags.’
So I did, selecting a couple of roll-ups from his store. He put the beret back on one-handed. I lit the fags with my American lighter, and we smoked companionably in the darkness. I asked him, ‘What did you tell that frontier guard about me?’
‘That you were a Chaplain on his way forward. I think there’s a lot of burying to be done.’
The sky was lightening a little a long way to the east. I said, ‘I didn’t realize that dawn would be as early as this.’
Les gave a grunt. It might have been a laugh, or it might not.
‘It isn’t. That’s Monty’s moonlight. You never heard of it?’
‘No.’
‘They do it on nights of low cloud. They shine hundreds of searchlights forward and upwards, until the light is reflected back down by the clouds. It means there’s enough light for the poor bastards to fight under.’
‘Monty’s moonlight?’ I said, not quite believing him. ‘That’s right. You still never heard of it?’
‘No.’
I rolled the window down an inch, and ditched my dogend. I hunched down in the seat again, and dozed.
Les woke me at about six. The roads were wet but I had missed the rain.
‘I want to get off the road and laager up – preferably with someone nasty near by to look after us if Jerry decides to come back. A nice snappy light tank squadron would do. Look for hedges that have been arseholed by something big and recent. You can follow tanks across the country by the flat stuff they leave behind them.’
‘Flat stuff?’
‘Like I said: ’edges, flat houses and flat people . . . flat everything.’
‘There!’ shouted England, who was fully awake. He was pointing to a signpost leaning crazily to one side at a point just in front of us, where the road was crossed by a country lane.
‘Tank spoor!’ the Major yelled. ‘Knew it! Tally ho!’
We turned left onto a lane which wasn’t much more than a track, and followed what they assured me was a tank trail of broken tree branches and scarred verges.
I asked them, ‘What if they were Jerries heading the other way?’
James gave me the withering idiot stare before he answered, ‘Well: the signpost would have been knocked in the other direction, wouldn’t it?’
They were usually right. We turned right, off the road, when we found a hedge with several large holes smashed in it.
‘Told yer,’ says Les. ‘If they’d been coming towards us there’d be shite and mud all over the road. There ain’t.’ After two more fields we found them, grazing like cows, and steaming in the weak sun. Most of them had parked up around the edges of a humped meadow. A couple of them had their engines running and were crowned by tell-tale plumes of thin blue exhaust smoke. Les gunned us up alongside one which had two limp pennons on a radio mast. Kate’s engine block ticked as it cooled and contracted. A brown job Captain about twelve years old was
