‘I wish you wouldn’t swear.’
‘You’d swear if you’d been posted to Dungeness.’
‘You’ll still be able to see me if you get any time off.’
‘I’m sure that was exactly what was in the RAF Board’s mind when they decided!’ I shouldn’t have snapped. It hurt her. She looked down.
‘I thought you didn’t want to go to Egypt?’
‘I didn’t, but that’s not the point. I didn’t want to go to Dungeness either. Even less, in fact. Have you ever been to Dungeness?’
‘Once; one night with Terry. I bruised my bum on the pebbles.’
That lifted it: my black mood, I mean. I grabbed her around the waist, swung her and gave her a hefty kiss. She threw a Force Nine right back at me. We went down to the small hut I bunked in, even although it was the middle of the morning, and when we came out again it was as if we had settled something rather good. She followed me into my office and grabbed me for another kiss, saying something like, ‘I don’t ever want to be without you for good, Charlie.’
‘I can cope with that, sweetheart.’ Why are the good ones always married? ‘I’m mad about your belly,’ I told her, ‘. . . and your legs, and . . .’ Sometimes I say the right thing.
She smiled. ‘That will do for now, Charlie.’
The way I saw it bloody Dungeness was as bad as a living bloody death sentence. Devil’s Island without even the Devil for company. But Dungeness was only going to be a stepping stone to somewhere nastier, of course: the station designation number of its location had a large black T behind it so I was in for some more bleeding training in something or other.
Then they would probably stuff me in an aircraft again.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Dungeness. If you haven’t then you made a good decision. It’s a fat thumb of a few trillion pebbles sticking out into the English Channel, battered by wind and wave, with the French looking on from the other side. It’s the least hospitable place, after Bergen, in the whole world . . . and has more flies than an Egyptian karzi. Believe me; I know.
There was a lighthouse on it in my time, but that may have fallen down since the bastards built a nuclear power station next door in the Sixties. That should tell you something: they only put nuclear piles where no sensible people go. I suspect that the lighthouse was in fact surplus to requirements – any sea captain who had experienced the dubious attractions of Dungeness before would hug the French coast twenty miles away, just to stay away from it.
You can take it from that little outburst that I was not enamoured of the place. At that time, as well as the lighthouse, it had a large, damp, concrete bomb-proof box: especially for me. And rain of course, and the bloody wind never stopped blowing. I still hadn’t had a uniform issue, so I reported in my old RAF battledress blues which had long since lost their proper buttons. The black ones I’d sewn on looked much better anyway. Three shirts, one spare set of thins, five pairs of socks and my washing kit . . . and I also had a small pistol a mate had once given me, tucked into my flying jacket’s pocket. Charlie Bassett, gent, reporting for duty, sir. Able, but far from bloody willing.
By 1952 we hadn’t quite got round to taking down all the barbed wire we’d strung along the South Coast. That was probably something to do with still not trusting the French not to invade us while our back was turned: you know what they’re like. In 1377 the bastards sailed right up to Rye, a neighbouring port, burned it to the ground and stole the church bells. As far as Rye, Sussex and Kent are concerned a state of war still exists between them and the Frogs, and will until we get those bells back. As far as I’m concerned we should have left the barbed wire up – we’re going to need it one day. They had even overlooked a landmine or two, so no summer went by without news of a family being blown to kingdom come making sandcastles on a beach. I suppose Dungeness had some sort of excuse for the rusty wire . . . there were still live firing ranges just round the corner at Camber: still are, come to that.
At least they’d taken the gate away, so the road along the spit started at a gap in a barbed-wire fence left there to discourage the holidaymakers. And also a corporal in RAF uniform. He was unhappy-looking and definitely familiar. The little bastard from the Croydon medical unit. I stopped my old Singer alongside him.
‘Mr Bassett is it, sir?’ He hadn’t a clipboard of names this time, so I guessed that I was the only one expected.
‘Of course it is. We met a few weeks ago.’
‘So we did, sir.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Posted, sir; same as you.’
‘No, I mean what are you doing here at the end of the road?’
‘I’m to drive the car, sir.’
‘I don’t need a driver.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir, but you do. I’m to do the driving and you’re to do the walking. CO’s orders, sir. Everyone walks up to the station the first time. She says it’s good for us.’
‘She?’
‘Yes, sir; the CO’s a Wren officer. If you don’t mind my saying, sir . . . it does seem odd to begin with, but you soon gets used to it.’
‘It’s a training station, right?’
‘No, sir. It’s an OLP, but there’s always a couple of people like you around going through the refresher.’
‘I’m not sure about OLP.’
‘Operational Listening Post, sir. We got them all up the East Coast now,
