DAVID FIDDIMORE
A Blind Man’s War
PAN BOOKS
To:
23162882 L/Cpl George. A. oBrien
A2 Wireless/Op, The Royal Signals (retd)
and
The other National Servicemen and Policemen
who went to fight our end in Cyprus:
you did us proud lads, thank you.
How do you say ‘thank you’ . . . to Charlie’s hard pressed editors, those who provide the word pictures and technical information which make these stories work, and the many readers who write to him with stories which are often stranger, funnier and altogether more interesting than those he could dream up alone?
The best I can come up with is to print it at the beginning of this book, and hope that you notice.
Bless you all.
Contents
One: Toast and Tizer
Two: Hello, Pete
Three: Love and Bullets
Four: Teamsters are Very Nice Men
Five: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
Six: Lost John
Seven: Where the Hell is Loughborough?
Eight: Hello, Pat
Nine: Spontaneous Reproduction
Ten: On His Blindness
Eleven: Murder Mile
Twelve: Let’s Hear It for the Dead Men
Thirteen: The Chanctonbury Ring
Fourteen: Returned to Sender
Fifteen: The Lone Rider of Santa Fe
Sixteen: Aphrodite
Seventeen: Love for Sale
Eighteen: The Black Spot
Nineteen: Chasing the Dragon
Twenty: Last Orders, Please
Epilogue: Last Words . . .
The Last Post
Chapter One
Toast and Tizer
It had been a decent late-summer’s day until Dieter said, ‘Are you going to get married, Dad? Because I can’t see how we’re going to manage if you don’t.’
‘I hadn’t planned on it.’
That was the sort of reply Hopalong Cassidy would have made before thumping a Red Indian and blowing on his knuckles.
Thinking back on it I must have been thirty-two by then, and Dieter about fifteen. We had met in Germany in 1945, when he was a little lost orphan boy. I hadn’t intended to adopt him; it was something which had crept up on me. We were sitting in the bar of the Happy Return, a pub owned by my old Major and his woman Maggs. It was next door to my bungalow down on Bosham Bay.
Maggs always referred to herself as ‘the Major’s woman’, and enjoyed the matrons clucking in the back pews every time she went to church.
‘Explain,’ I asked Dieter.
‘I’m going to the Merchant Navy College: you agreed.’
‘So I did.’
‘So what happens to Carly? He can’t live next door on his own, and even here with Mrs Maggs and the Major he’ll be terribly lonely.’ Carlo was my other son, although like Dieter he wasn’t a biological connection: he was the result of the liaison between Grace, my lover, and an Italian deserter. In Carlo’s case I had been left, literally, holding the baby when his mother and her Italian bailed out . . . But that’s another story. I hadn’t intended to adopt Carlo either. ‘We haven’t been separated since you brought us down here; I’ve been more like a father to him.’
‘More like a father than me, you mean?’
‘I didn’t mean that, Dad, but you’re not exactly here as often as other dads, are you?’ He was right. The little bugger usually was. He added, ‘Don’t think we’re not grateful to you for taking us on. It’s just going to be tricky for Carly when I go away next year.’
I lit my pipe. He sipped his ginger beer. I sipped my pint of bitter and glanced at the bar clock, wondering when I could allow myself the first whisky of the night. James – the Major – had just restocked, and I was keen to start sampling.
‘Did you have anyone particular in mind?’ I asked Dieter. ‘For me to marry I mean?’
He gnawed his lower lip. ‘There was that red-headed girl you brought down here a few times after you got back from Egypt. You seemed to get on well; you certainly made enough noise after you went to bed for the night.’ Whenever he came out with something like that I wondered whether he was really only fifteen. I’d collected him on a battlefield; holding onto the hand of a dead teenager he thought was his brother. ‘And she got on well with Carly.’
‘June. But she didn’t get on well enough with me to stay, did she?’
‘Did you ask her?’
He always put me under the cosh.
‘I was getting round to it.’ She had another boyfriend who had slipped in when I was abroad. I still see her when I visit the company’s head office, but she became engaged to marry this new guy, and couldn’t see her way into letting him down when I got back. These things used to happen all the time in the war – we didn’t have too much time then to fret about them. June was one of my boss’s secretaries; our heady romance had been going well before the War Office jerked my chain in 1953 and sent me to Egypt. ‘How long have we got before you go?’
‘About six months . . .’ He looked rather longingly I thought at my pint, swallowed the last of his ginger beer, and stood up, saying, ‘I have to get back. Carly’s struggling with his English homework, and I promised I’d help him.’ A German boy helping an English boy with his English homework – you live and learn, I suppose. Despite his Eyetie name Carlo was as English as the icing-sugar primroses on a chocolate Easter egg.
There was a rush later, and I helped James behind the bar – between pulling pints I asked him, ‘Are you giving Dieter beer when I’m not around?’
‘Yes, Charlie. Someone has to teach him how to drink. He gets half a pint a day; usually when he gets back from school . . .
