‘The same as we’ve been doing all the way through Froggie Land, Cloggie Land and Belgium. Clocking intelligence and signalling it back: don’t tell me you never noticed?’
‘I noticed, but I thought you were practising for now,’ I told him lamely. ‘What happens next? Tonight?’
‘Major’ll fix us up with digs, or we’ll sleep in the car. I think it’s been harder for the Major to fix up the three of us, than when we were just the two; although he ain’t said anything. He’ll sit in the back of Kate, code up his notes, and tap them out back to base. Then we’ll eat if we can find someone with something to sell.’
‘And if we can’t there’s always spam and beans in Kate’s boot?’
‘There you are, Charlie. You were watching all the time.’ I was back to Charlie again. Les must have been relaxing. God was in his Heaven, and all was well with our twenty square feet of the world.
James worked his magic. We finished the day with a thin mutton stew, and mountains of powdery potato. You had to ask yourself how the Highland Division had managed to miss that, when they swept through a couple of days earlier. It made you wonder what else they might have missed. I know that it made Les tense.
We billeted in a detached wooden barn behind the bar. The yard between was rough-cobbled from coaching days. All of the accommodation was on the first floor. The ground floor was open, as if the building was on stilts. There was a neatly stacked log lump, a few roughly squared bales of straw, and room beside them for Kate if her blunt radiator stuck out. After we had eaten I noticed that Les went outside to her to run his maintenance checks. I took him out a piece of black bread and lard, pressed on us as a treat. He was working by the light of a small shuttered oil lamp sitting on Kate’s bonnet.
‘You all right?’ I asked him.
‘No. Twitchy.’
‘Any idea why?’
‘If I had, I’d tell you and the Major, and we’d be out of ’ere, wouldn’t we?’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll leave you to it.’
He had her plugs out, and was washing each one carefully in a small tin of petrol.
‘No. Don’t mind me. I get like this sometimes when we’re near the Front. I got this feeling for weaknesses in the line; I don’t know how.’
‘You feel that now?’
‘Yeah, Charlie, and I’ve felt it every time Jerry has come back at us and we’ve been sent scarpering.’
I sat alongside him on Kate’s running board, filled and lit my pipe. If I didn’t get some tobacco soon I would be suffering.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Make sure the Major knows I’m serious – sometimes he treats me just like I’m an old woman – and have everything you don’t need for the night stowed in Kate. Just in case we leave in a hurry. That OK?’
‘You’re in charge.’ I punched him lightly on the arm. The petrol slopped on his trousers. ‘Sorry.’
It was dark by seven. The inn didn’t have any other customers: probably because we were there. James helped the owners with the washing up, and gave the old man a paper that made him Chief of Police, or Master of the Municipal Sewer or something. There were a lot of bows and smiles after that, and the deal was sealed with a glass of syrupy, clear spirit that tasted of raspberries. I wasn’t that keen: it stuck to my teeth. James had met it before. I noticed that he tossed it right to the back of his mouth. Then he wiped his lips on the back of his hand. The hotelier poured us another round of the thick stuff in little glasses, but made it plain that that was the last. He wiped a fat finger around the neck of the bottle to catch a drop, and put it in his mouth. We were sitting around a small fire on smaller three-legged stools in the small bar. Our landlady’s cheeks were rosy: that must have been the heat. James was showing off for her. Were these people the enemy? It seemed ridiculous, but a week ago they had been, and if God’s Grey Jerries came back, they would be again. Did Winston and Adolf ever sit with their feet to the fire, and wonder how it had ever come to this?
The crude sleeping accommodation above the first floor of the barn was a single room, entered through a hole in the floor from a wide wooden stair. Long ago the animal feed would have been stored there. Our hosts had built a simple raised sleeping platform across about a third of it, and a stack of thin pallet mattresses stood in a corner. A heavy rope hung along one wooden wall; over it about twenty things like grubby eiderdowns were draped. There was a wash hand basin with a rust stain in one corner, and a toilet partitioned off with plywood in the other.
The woman showed us around the facilities. She made up one bed by pulling one of the straw mattresses onto another and dropping a couple of the quilts on them. James tried his luck by pushing her face-first onto them, rolling her over and lifting her skirts. He can’t have believed his luck when her legs opened so easily. I thought they looked plump and white and welcoming. Then she rolled over again, and gave him a haymaker around the side of his head that laid him on the floor alongside her. Then she offered him a big hand on the end of an arm the size of a ham, to haul him back onto his feet. Definitely nothing frying tonight.
When he asked, ‘No hard feelings, old girl?’ she plainly didn’t understand, but laughed, so that seemed to be all right.
I asked her, ‘What’s this for?’
