‘Uh-huh . . . I thought you said he was a Scot?’
‘He was: he just don’t sound like one. He likes this place. He says he’s gonna take his stage name from it after the war. Donny Löningen.’
‘I don’t think that that sounds quite right.’
‘You’re being picky, Charlie, but I’ll pass that on.’
‘I saw one of those camps,’ I told him.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I did, too.’
We didn’t speak of it again.
Les came in and stood behind me. He said, ‘ ’morning, sir,’ to Albie, and gave him something that might have once started out to be a salute. ‘You had some more bad luck, then?’
‘It could be worse; I jack off with my left, so that’s OK.’
I asked, ‘Jack off?’
Les told me, ‘Wank.’
And James, who’d slithered silently in from somewhere said, ‘Masturbate. Have you asked him about Grace?’
‘No, he hasn’t, but he may.’ That was Albie still in there.
‘You’ve seen Grace?’
‘Yes, but not to speak with. She was with that group of foreign medics we talked about, when they were rounded up by your Redcaps for getting in a fight. They kept them in a prison tent up to their fannies in mud. I saw them as they were carted away, and loaded into the back of a lorry.’
‘Did she still have the child?’
‘I think so. The big German girl who started it was nursing a baby, and I don’t think they got two.’
‘When was that?’
‘Yesterday; day before. Ask the guys. I wasn’t being too sensible after I lost my hand.’
‘Where do you go from here?’ I asked him.
‘Bremen and Hamburg. I gotta see Hamburg. It’s the most complete medieval city centre in Europe.’
I chose not to tell him what we’d done to Hamburg a few months ago. I asked him, ‘Are you OK up here? Isn’t this the British sector?’
‘Yeah, but I was lucky. The Brits haven’t anything as fast as us, so we’re sorta out on loan: hired guns. I’ll see you in Bremen then? It’s all moving rather quickly now.’
‘Not if we see you first, Albie,’ I told him.
Outside, James passed some comment on Albie’s pasty colouring, and asked me what I thought.
I called it the way I saw it. ‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’
‘By inches,’ Les said, and we fell about laughing. That’s how it was.
James told us, ‘At least you’re closer to Grace again.’ Then he asked, ‘Didn’t your Yankee gangster say that one of her travelling companions had been put in hospital, and then dragged out by the MPs and banged up? I wonder what happened to him?’
Les stopped, and offered us fags from his beret. It was the first time I had seen the Major accept.
Les said, ‘I suppose that you could go all Majorish again, sir, and shout in somebody’s face until they tell you.’
James said, ‘Do you think that it would work up here?’
They both looked at me. Les asked, ‘Charlie?’
‘We’ve got nothing to lose,’ I told them, and threw in, ‘An’ I’m bloody hungry. We could find some grub, maybe, at the same time’ . . . for good measure. The ideas seemed to go together quite well.
There was a small, well-ordered camp of decent-sized canvas tents that looked as if they kept the wind and water out. The MPs’ post was in the centre of a field of mud that had once been a football pitch. There were two jeeps with full weather equipment, and a Dodge personnel carrier, parked between their tents. James led us in a wade over to the largest of them. As the mud built up on my flying boots they became harder and harder to lift: I was in danger of stepping out of them. I was pleased to find that they were our own proper MPs: there wasn’t a Yankee Snowdrop in sight. The senior man was a Sergeant with knobs on. He explained that he had had a Warrant Officer once, but that the guy had been driven back to safety with some kind of exhaustion. I forgot myself and said, ‘Right-hand fatigue: bloody officers are all the same.’
The MP looked startled. James told him, ‘Don’t mind the Padre. He was a Sergeant himself, not so long ago. He forgets himself from time to time.’
The MP looked doubtful. He said to me, ‘I’m sorry, Padre. You’re the first Chaplain we’ve had up here for a while, and I didn’t expect you to sound like that.’
‘That’s OK, Sarge. I was only given the short course: they left me with the wrong vocabulary.’
He had winced when I used the word Sarge: they probably had a special name for his rank in the Military Police. But at least I was speaking with a policeman and a Non-Commissioned Officer who could understand a five-syllable word. Wunderbar. James showed him some sort of identity card I hadn’t seen before. It had diagonal red lines superimposed on everything else. It must have said that we were gods newly descended from Olympus, because the MP visibly stiffened in every sinew.
James did the friendly officer bit, and talked about a bit of this, and a bit of that. None of it seemed to make sense to me because it was about football, which is about as tactically interesting as trees growing. The Sergeant, whose name was Arnisson, said that he followed the women’s game, and that in Sheffield, where he came from, it wasn’t unusual for a crowd of 25,000 to turn out to watch two teams of women footballers kicking the shit out of each other. He’d shown us to camp chairs: Les stuck his feet out, and closed his eyes.
‘We’ve been on the road for days,’ the Major told the MP, ‘trying to catch up with a group of doctors and nurses trying to get through the lines to help the Jerries.’
The MP said – and there was a glint of triumph in there somewhere – ‘I knew that there was something dirty about that lot . .
