Les said, ‘If we come across them alive we’ll let you know.’
Pete always thought the worst of me. He smiled across a tiger smile that meant, I don’t believe a word that any one of you has said so far, and said out loud, ‘Your pal Albie Grayling: the tank commander. He’s up in Löningen now, and laid up for a couple of days. He’d like you to look him up when you get there.’
‘How’d he get there already? How’d he get past us?’
‘He didn’t stop to hobnob with the enemy at Goch, like you did.’
See what I mean?
Ten minutes later James asked Les to stop the car.
‘Get in the back with Charlie. I need to think. So I’ll drive.’
Les tucked himself into a corner, and closed his eyes. He asked me, ‘We all just joined the Mafia, didn’t we?’ but it wasn’t a question.
Nineteen
When you get to hell it will be on your right. And from a distance it might look like any other Army camp. It was on our right, off one of those arrow-straight Kraut roads. On our left – the west – there was a wide canal, its surface rippled by a persistent wind. When the sun was on it, it glinted like cheap diamonds. The ground had been cleared on our right for about a mile. Behind that the black forest started: it was as long and as deep as you could see. Kate’s tyres hissed on the tarmac. I opened my eyes as I sensed the Major slowing us, and asked, ‘Where are we?’
‘The last place was named Lunner or Lune something. It was knocked about a bit.’
‘Why are you slowing?’
‘Tanks . . . and something a bit odd over there on the right. What do you think?’
I could see an enormous fenced-off area, high wire and dark wooden huts. It looked a bit like the R&R area at Blijenhoek. As we cruised slowly past the parked-up tanks no one tried to stop us. James pulled up at a place where a well-used earthen track left our road at right angles. They weren’t tanks, by the way, but Priests or Sextons – self-propelled guns: that is 25-pounder guns mounted on a Sherman tank chassis. Canadian jobs, crewed by artillerymen, not tankies. There was one young soldier sitting by the side of the road crying his eyes out. A Captain with a wall eye was bending down to put an arm around the kid’s shoulders. I could see a couple of the Sextons up at a big wired gate: where the track met the wire fence. There were knots of people moving about. I saw the first guard tower. I said, ‘It must be a POW camp.’
James shook his head and said, ‘I don’t think so. Hop out, Charlie, and find out what’s going on.’
The gunner Captain looked up as I approached. He looked ashen; shaken, but I couldn’t see any casualties. I didn’t salute, and he didn’t care. He held out his hand for a shake, as if he needed the reassurance of touch. He scanned my ragged kit, and lingered for a second over the small gold crosses in my lapels. The sun caught them from a break between the heavy white clouds, and for a moment they gleamed. He said, ‘I’m glad you stopped, Padre. We need your help.’
Les had left Kate by then: his nose always troubled him. He and I walked up the track to the camp.
What they tell you about birds and animals staying away from those places is not true. There were crows. Hundreds of black crows. Maybe a thousand. When they were disturbed from what they were fighting over, they made a wheeling shadow in the sky. I won’t tell you anything much about the place. What I will tell you is this.
*
Les was forty-four when he died in 1958. His war had caught up with him. One of his groups of wounds was shrapnel he picked up from a shell-burst at Dunkirk. He used to laugh that he was wounded three times, and that each time was in the arse. He once told me that the only thing he deserved a medal for was being in every retreat the Eighth Army ever made. It accounted for most of the arse wounds. The shell pieces were in his backside, his back and shoulders, and in his head. They never dug out a piece in his head, and when he was forty-four it killed him.
We’d stayed in touch; more or less. I was living in South Hampstead in London by then, and Les had been reclaimed by his tribe in Belmont, just to the south of smoky London. I visited him the day before he died, but the timing was accidental. The brain tumour and the strokes had smashed up his mind by then. Kate gave me a peck on the cheek, and said that he was upstairs; that he hadn’t got up yet. When I approached the bedroom door I could hear him weeping and moaning, and mumbling to himself. I couldn’t help remembering the able and funny man I had once known. When my time comes I hope that it’s quick; not dirty, like that.
I went into their bedroom – the small double bedroom overlooking the back garden he had begun to love. He was sitting on the edge of their high bed, in his striped flannel pyjamas, staring at the full-length mirror on the door of the dark wood wardrobe. He was gibbering. I sat beside him, and hugged him; realizing for the first time how pitifully thin and wasted he had become. Eventually he calmed down enough to tell me that the sick and emaciated people we had
