Snakes and Ladders Page 8

  She was unsurprised. “And what were you telling him, if it’s not private?”

  “No. I was just telling him that it had all been a bloody waste of time, that’s all.”

  “God! What a dreadful thing to say.”

  “And He’s out too.”

  “Who is?”

  “God. He’s all balls really.”

  “But you used to be mad about God and Jesus and Mary and all that …”

  “How does it go, do you remember? ‘When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now that I have reached man’s estate …’”

  “I know.” She was bored by my banality. “‘I have put away childish things’.”

  “Growing up,” I said.

  Later, when everyone had gone to bed, I sat in Gareth’s little room among his dusty bits of wireless set, acorns and used stamps and sorted ruefully through my own collection of possessions and papers which I had kept with me through the years. There wasn’t much; and what there was fitted into a worn crocodile briefcase which I had taken from a Japanese General later hanged for War Crimes in Java. My parents’ letters in a thumbed bundle, a packet of assorted snapshots, my Identity Card and dog-tabs, polished with old sweat, a pressed daisy from the grass at Dover Castle, a Tiger’s Eye ring which Harri had given me and which I had never worn, the blue notebooks in which I had written my poems for Vida, page after page filled with pencilled non-rhyming misery, and the small buff-cotton covered book, Newnes Handy Touring Atlas of the British Isles. This had constituted my diary and started on the first night at Catterick Camp.

  It had belonged to my father, and when I ran out of pages I just inserted more so that it bulged lumpily. Every page was scattered with a wedding-confetti of figures and letters minutely inscribed with a mapping-pen and coloured inks. Every place I had ever visited, even for a night, was ringed in black on the maps, or else neatly squared if written on the extra pages when I had gone overseas. Every course I had attended, every promotion attained, every date was methodically inserted in the margins, over hill-contours, the green plains, or the blue spaces of the Irish, English and any other neighbouring sea or channel, even on the inside covers and across the Index. It was a flurry of indecipherable hieroglyphics which overlapped each other like chain mail and were as difficult to penetrate.

  And in any case, what did any of these laborious entries mean now? It was all over for me, as I had been comfortingly reminded at dinner, and the past must be considered the past. I had survived after all; my war was officially done and something much worse, because I had forgotten how to manage it, was ahead. Peace.

  I stuffed the little book back with the rest of the debris of time and stuck it in the bottom of the yellow-oak wardrobe. It was late anyway, and far too difficult to work out; leave it all for another time.

  * * *

  Which is now, thirty years or more later, up here in my workroom. The buff cover is stained, mosaicked with rings of long forgotten Bovril, tea, or beer, the spine shredding threads of cotton, cardboard corners split. Inside, however, all is pristine, hills and rivers, seas and lakes, woods and commons as bright as the day in 1906 when they were first printed, now densely annotated with the crimson, blue and green pen marks of my secret messages.

  For secret is what some of them certainly appear to be. What on earth do they all mean now? For although I obviously set everything down minutely so that in some distant future I might be able to warm myself with the recollections so meticulously gathered there, I seem to have left very few clues to aid myself, and the code (why on earth did I try to use a code? Was I frightened that I, or it, might fall into enemy hands perhaps? Or was I just being unusually secretive, even for me?) seems arbitrary and to have no key that I can now remember. Some things are written in the clear; most in fact. And the dates present no problem, nor the places ringed or squared in black. “Blackburn”, for example, is easy. An arrow to the margin says “Street Fighting Course. 30.4.43–3.5.43. Bloody. Sick after Chimney”. But then there are scatters of jumbled letters and figures. For example, “T.T.H.PG.M. P.C.” poses a bit of a problem. This set beside “Matlock Bath. Hydro Hotel. 26.10.43 APIS”. More understandable when you know that APIS stands for Air Photographic Interpretation Section. The other letters are the problem. The PG is isolated, without punctuation, which is presumably the start of the message. And I now remember that from the “start” I would place the first initial of each successive word left and then right of the unpunctuated two. Arriving thus at P.G.H.M.T.P.T.C. which I decipher as pathetically, Please God Help Me To Pass This Course. Which He did. With extremely high marks, which is why I finally became a fully qualified Air Photographic Interpreter and was ordered to leave my furious Brigadier to report urgently to London. Air Photographic Interpretation (the reading of aerial photographs taken from a height of anything between 1,000 to 30,000 feet) is very much a question, in simple terms, of observation, an eye for detail, and memory. I was happily possessed, to a modest degree, of all three, due in the main, I feel sure, to an apparently witless game which my father made us play as children. In a shop window how many pots and pans, how many with lids, how many without? How many tea pots, plates with blue rims, jugs with pink roses? Make a mental list, look away for a moment or two, look back and check. In the Underground, look at the people opposite. Memorise the faces. Look at the feet. Look away. Who had the bunion, the toe-caps, the brogues, spats, lace-ups or buttons? Even the breakfast table was not spared. After a good look one closed one’s eyes while he very slightly disarranged the setting. Look again. Was the label on the marmalade facing you before? Was there a lump of sugar in the tea spoon? Had the milk jug turned its back? Two or three pieces of toast in the rack?

  I had no idea that this childhood game would one day prove to be the key to a life in a war; without it I would very likely have had my twenty-four hours (or whatever it was) life expectation as an Infantry Officer and that would have been that. As it was I became a moderately accomplished specialist in an extremely complicated branch of Army Intelligence for the remainder of my service. And no one was more surprised than I, or more delighted. I loved the detail, the intense concentration, the working out of problems, the searching for clues and above all the memorising. It was, after all, a very theatrical business. How many haystacks had there been in that field three weeks ago? Look back and check. Six. Now there were sixteen … did the tracks lead to them and not away from them? Were they made by tracked vehicles or wheeled ones? Guns, tanks or radar maybe? Or were they, after all, only haystacks, it was June … but the tracks led inwards. A hay cart would have been parallel and left turning-loops … these ended in the little stacks. Too short for tanks, too round for trucks … probably 88 mm guns … a long, silent, painstaking job.

  In the high-ceilinged sitting room in a requisitioned mansion flat in Ashley Gardens, Victoria, sitting on folding chairs at rough wooden tables we were first shown a big relief map of a part of some coast-line. It stood squint on the dusty marble mantelshelf. Did any of us know where it might be? Some made guesses, no one was right. It was actually upside down we were told, could anyone say now? We twisted heads and necks and with a cheerless laugh the Briefing Officer swung his map into its correct position and before us stood the Cherbourg peninsula and all the Normandy coast. The planning of D Day had commenced.

  It was not, as my Brigadier had thought, just a cushy job. To be sure at the beginning of planning I spent all my time in Ashley Gardens or hunched over maps and photographs in a servant’s bedroom high in the roof of a hideous house once owned by a sauce and pickle manufacturer at Medmenham on the river. But as the time drew near for the actual assault I was moved down to Odiham RAF Station and seconded, for the duration of hostilities, to 39 Wing of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Where they went I also went, and since they operated from little landing-strips ripped out of the corn fields and orchards as near to the fighting as they could be got, life was not without interest. Preserving it being the main one.

&n
bsp; I was a bit late for the landings as it happened. Packed and ready to leave, bad weather suddenly forced a postponement of the actual day, and worrying reports reached us from ground sources of a German Panzer Division moving, by a disastrous coincidence, into the Bayeux area which we had not expected nor discovered on our photographs, since this was a completely unexpected move. With twenty-four hours therefore in hand, and flying almost impossible because of cloud over the dropping zones, we none the less searched the new photographs which came in hourly, desperately trying to ascertain the whereabouts of this new Division. It took a good deal of time and when I was finally shoved on to a Dakota, minus my cap which I had left behind in the rush, and clutching a vast bundle of uninterpreted photographs and a small canvas kit-bag, everyone, or everyone who had survived, had landed, and after an extremely bumpy trip across the grey heaving sea, with bursts of German flak drifting below like dandelion clocks, I was set down among the trampled corn and told to dig myself a hole in a nearby hedgerow. The Flight Lieutenant who gave me this excellent advice, together with a small shovel, said that he really couldn’t like the whole business less, but that there was some tea brewing and that as long as some idiot didn’t drop a shell right into the middle of things it would be ready in a jiffy. It was a very confusing afternoon at St Suplice.

  It was a pretty confusing kind of a war altogether. Fluid, sometimes dangerous, exciting, often uncomfortable but never, at any time, boring. There wasn’t time for that. We never sat about, as my father’s generation had had to do, trapped in waterlogged trenches staring bleakly across a hundred yards of mud to the German line for months on end. We were constantly on the move and the very nature of the work kept me fully occupied day and night, either working at the photographs which streamed into the truck hourly in fine weather, or down in the line briefing brigades, companies, platoons, sections and even individuals on the terrain and hazards they could expect to find before them during their attacks; the depth of ditches, width of streams, minefields and lines of fire. We worked shifts day and night … fourteen to sixteen on, ten or eight off. If we were lucky.

  During what was brightly called the Rest Period I used to take my paints and brushes and go off recording what I could of that devastated summer landscape in company with my RAF counterpart, F/Lt. Christopher Greaves, an artist before the war, and together we sought some kind of relaxation from the stress in painting. Our perhaps eccentric behaviour did not go unrecognised. Owing to the fluidity of the line we were as often in front of it as in it, or behind it: generally unwittingly. Eventually the Air Ministry made us Unofficial War Artists and allowed us to continue, retaining the product of our free time as their property until the end of hostilities when it was all returned to us and we had an exhibition at the Batsford Gallery in London, only a few weeks after the events and sights we had recorded had passed into history. But the buff Touring Atlas doesn’t say much about this; just the long lists of names and the jumbled letters too confusing now to decipher.

  The names, however, remind, as well as the forgotten ones like Ste Honorine de Ducy … or Caulille … Paris is there, Brussels, Louvain and the drenching rain and mud … the race towards Eindhoven and Nijmegen Bridge, hearts high that a breakthrough was in sight and that we’d all be home for Christmas. Then the catastrophe at Arnhem and the dreadful days of fury, frustration, despair and defeat which followed. The brimming dykes at Driel; helplessly staring across the wide flowing river to the burning city, the chatter and crump of machine guns and mortars, crimson tracer-bullets ripping through the night, the little huddle of Dutch civilians weeping, not for themselves, but for the few returning guests departing from what someone on the Staff had chosen to call “a party”; scattered, ashen, straggling back desperately across the strong current hanging on to rubber dingies or anything which would float; the mouth sour with the bitter knowledge that we had lost. Ninety per cent successful they had said at Headquarters; what could a ninety per cent failure conceivably look like? The only decipherable mark I have made against Arnhem is a neat black cross. It seems fitting.

  On my twenty-fourth birthday I crossed the Rhine and the curtain went up on the terrors. The first slave labourers, shaven heads, striped shirts, too weak to cheer; the ruined desolation of my ancestral town, Kleve (paradoxically a target which I had helped to select myself), the April sun in Belsen, the woods at Soltau, the empty eyed façades of thousands upon thousands of streets, and the sweet stench of rubble-buried-dead in Berlin. In Hamburg crumbling spires, twisted rusted girders silent as the mass grave it was, save for the lapping of water and the sparrows. All these are marked, and finally there is Luneberg and the capitulation on the heath. That evening, in a state of mindless euphoria, we set fire to the Mess tent and watched from a sandy hillock as it blazed into the night until all that was left were the glowing spiral-springs of six looted armchairs glowing like neon in the drifting embers. Behind us in the fire-reflection two German women stood holding silent children.

  “Kaput,” said the older woman, “Alles Kaput.” They turned and moved away through the springy heather into the dark, leaving Christopher and I alone with the cooling symbols of our own finish.

  But it was not, after all, the end for me; three weeks later I was on a troop ship bound for Bombay and Calcutta to join the planning for the next invasion. Malaya … and, after Hiroshima, off to another war in Java … a civil war this time in which we were to play no part save that of Police … and since there were no photographs and no sorties, for we had no planes there, I was jobless until I replaced the G.O.C.’s A.D.C. who was due for demobilisation, and thus came full circle in my military career. There had been nothing brave, no gallantry, no wounds, no grievous personal losses; what you might call a comfortable war … but quite enough to last me a lifetime. The final entry in the buff Atlas is written in the clear.

  “Sail Batavia. Home seven weeks. The End.”

  Chapter 4

  It was a tired, shabby, bomb-blasted London to which I made my nostalgic pilgrimage. However pleasant it was to be among my family once again, and it was, the changes had been too great for an immediate settling-down. I was restless, unhappy somewhere, bored truthfully. And running rapidly out of money. Hillside Cottage, cosy as it might be, was not the home in which we had all once been so young and happy, and in which our early years had been formed. I missed space, white paint, high ceilings, solid doors, the geography of hall and stairs and landings, of my father’s office, the cool drawing room massed with philadelphus in June, my bedroom, private, rowan at the window, the little twisty staircase to the attics … above all the space and light. Now, familiar furniture in the cramped, low ceilinged rooms, was suddenly unfamiliar, and there was nothing to do at all beyond long solitary walks over the Downs to the windmills, or up to the Matsfield Arms for too many beers before lunch. And with Elizabeth, and even Gareth, away, there was no one to talk to apart from my mother, and she, busy about her small domain, admitted cheerfully that I got under her feet, so I moved listlessly from one room to another ahead of her Hoover.

  Sometimes on my solitary walks up the lane to the Downs I used to meet a pleasant, pale woman pushing a pram looking almost as bored as I felt. We smiled at each other and one morning even greeted each other with something illuminating like, “It’s cold, isn’t it?” or “Might rain later”, and on another occasion we actually stopped hesitantly and she said I had been away, hadn’t I?, and I’d told her that I had, and she said wasn’t it good that it was all over. Only I wasn’t at all sure that I agreed. She pushed her baby on up the hill and I went on towards the windmills. I didn’t speak to anyone else for almost a week … except my father when he came back, late from The Times. Apart from one or two passing commercial travellers in the pub, and the pleasant blonde woman in the lane, life was fairly silent for most of the day.

  “That’s Mrs Lewis,” said my mother, over our heavily rationed lunch (another thing I was finding it difficult to adjust to). “She’s terribly sweet, t
hey bought that great big house at the end of the lane when the Blitz got really bad. Her real name is Vera Lynn, but you know her, surely?”

  * * *

  The bull frogs were croaking by the lily-pool. Below in the valley, the rice-fields lay glittering in the sun like scattered handbag mirrors among the plantations, blinding the eyes. Sitting on the little terrace of my house under the heavy speckled shade of the bougainvillaea, Harri and I sat listlessly in the Sunday heat drinking American beer from cans and listening to Vera Lynn singing, for the hundredth time of playing, “Room Five Hundred and Four”, which made her, Harri, excessively sentimental and me beerily romantic. We usually followed it with Judy Garland and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” which she equally loved, a sentiment which Chopin might not have fully endorsed.

  Every Sunday, when my duties permitted, and if there was no attack warning from the perimeter wire, she and I would sit together on the terrace and have our little concert in exactly the same way that Lally, my sister and I, in the distant days of the Cottage in Sussex, would have ours while we polished the lamps, trimmed the wicks, or just shelled the peas or top and tailed the gooseberries. Time lost. Time remembered. My collection of records was almost as small as Lally’s had been … about eight or nine, looted from the already-looted bungalows and villas of the Dutch who had either been murdered in the name of Freedom or else despatched back to Holland by us, the unwilling Police Force in this sad, ravaged, island, Java. But Vera Lynn’s record was the most precious since it was almost new and borrowed from an accommodating officer in “A” Mess who had recently come out, and who swapped it for my recording of “Great Themes From Opera” which was very much older, badly scratched by rubble and dust, since I had found it among a pile of debris and scattered papers, in the once-trim flowerbeds of a burning villa, and which we had played until we knew every note and every instrument—it took a great many years for me even to be able to bear Rossini whistled in a street.