Les, hanging half out of the car, and shooting back at the Yank, hadn’t collected much glass. While the Major and I checked each other up, he cleared the crap out of Kate, and by the time we came back he’d got a brew-up going, on the desert stove he carted around in the boot. That was dry earth, or sand, mixed with petrol, and crammed into a large bully beef can. Once you lit it, it burned on a low flame until you tossed it out. I remember that fresh char in a big ally mug, so hot you could hardly hold it – with milk I’d probably pulled from a cow myself not long ago, and three spoons of sugar – as one of the finest cups of tea in my life. The right thing at the right time. Eventually my hands stopped shaking.
Some time Les asked, ‘Anyone know what the fuck that was all about? Those bastards have been looking at us for days, just to make sure. Even the tankies said, I wonder what they’re looking for? Remember? Is there anything I should know?’
I remembered, and I felt shifty.
‘For some reason the Yanks haven’t exactly taken a shine to me, have they? Look what they did to me in Paris. But I honestly don’t know what I’ve done to them.’
‘Nuffink,’ Les said. ‘Not official, anyway. You surely irritated that Snowdrop Lieutenant, though . . . what was his name?’
‘Kilduff.’
‘That’s right. I’d be surprised he took whatever it was personal enough to order their bloody Air Force out after you. Anyway, how would he know where we were?’
I said, ‘He could have worked it out. He knew where we were heading.’ Then I gulped and took the plunge. ‘. . . and I phoned him from that telephone in Brond and pissed him off. It seemed funny at the time.’
Les went very still. Froze with his tea mug half to his mouth. When he moved he stood up. He said, ‘I’m going to have a waxer in my char. Anyone else?’ He produced a rum bottle from Kate’s capacious boot, and we all got a dollop. It was all theatre to disguise how angry he was. The Major got me off. He sloshed his fortified tea around in his mug and observed, ‘There could be another reason. You remember when we first saw that flight of Lightnings?’
I said, ‘Yes. There were four of them. Our first stop after Laon. They crossed that town square when we were at a cafe.’
Les recalled, ‘One of them had a sun painted on it. He waggled his wings as he crossed. I thought he was a flash git.’
‘One of us said so,’ I told him. ‘I remember.’
The Major filled it in.
‘The Flash Git’s girlfriend was the waitress at that cafe bar. She asked me about the obligations of Allied servicemen if they got local girls pregnant. I told her how to stake a claim.’
Les asked him, ‘When did she ask you that?’
‘While I was rogering her.’
He looked away in one direction, and Les looked away in another. Les took a deep breath, held it for a lifetime, and said, ‘. . . And her boyfriend never came back, did he? Only the other three. Yes: I can see that pissing off his pals!’ He got up and threw the dregs of his tea into the hot can. They hissed like angry vipers. On the other side of Kate from us he opened the front passenger door, and slammed it violently shut. Then, across her bonnet, he said in a deceptively calm tone, ‘One of you two stupid bastards almost just got me killed . . . and fer nuffin’.’ No exclamation mark. No sirs. Less than full marks for sentence construction, but it was down-beat, which is why it drove home.
I looked at my drink, and did the same as Les, throwing the dregs on the makeshift stove. The snakes hissed again. I said, ‘Sorry,’ and felt it.
What surprised me was that James said the same.
‘Sorry, old man.’ Then, ‘My mistake.’
Les said OK, but sounded subdued; and then we were back on the road. Les drove – to make up time he said – but I think that it was so he didn’t have to speak to us. I understood: when I was a Sergeant in the RAF I used to think that most officers were stupid. I think that I must have begun to doze. I turned up the collar of my jacket to deflect the gale blowing through Kate’s cabin. James sat stoically upright in the back, his cheeks reddened by the icy blast.
I awoke with that dreadful start of your chin hitting your chest as your neck muscles finally relax. Les said, ‘Blijenhoek about ten minutes. This is just about as far as we got last trip. Should be a checkpoint in about a mile.’
There was.
Thirteen
It didn’t look like an R & R station for tired troops to me; it looked like a sodding battlefield. The checkpoint was a staggered twin-barrier job, with a nasty great Sherman tank looking down its 75 at you from the second one. There were too
