Bless ’Em All Read online

  When they got to the station Miss Tcherny had the bright idea of writing their names and addresses down and putting them in old Maurice’s pocket. Old Maurice still seemed dazed, but he thanked Miss Tcherny and patted Jimmy’s head before he went down the Tube.

  ‘Well, goodbye, miss,’ said Jimmy, feeling somehow that something formal should be said.

  ‘Goodbye, Jimmy,’ Miss Tcherny said, and added, very seriously, ‘Good luck.’

  Betty was getting impatient. She was standing outside the Gaiety Theatre, with its old and faded posters of a show starring Leslie Henson, Richard Hearne and Fred Emney. The trio was popular and had been on before at this theatre. Henson and co. might have been amusing, but Betty had already had enough of their drollery for one day. She had read every word about the show, how it was a ‘Smash Hit’ and a ‘Tonic’. She must have walked around the whole block of Bush House half a dozen times. How long was she expected to wait? Maurice had sometimes been late but never more than five minutes. Something might have happened, of course. He could have been taken ill, knocked down by a car. She had only a vague idea of the location of the business from the address on the business card he had given her. But he had said that he would meet her here.

  She noticed that a man was watching her. He was smart – well, more flash than smart. He had a dark-blue suit. The jacket seemed to be too large for him. It flapped about and hung from the shoulders in a straight line. He had a light-grey trilby that seemed to be sited at a cocky angle. He was clearly someone who thought a lot of himself. He sauntered towards her, and she turned away quickly and started walking back the way she had come.

  ‘You all right, love?’ The hoarse voice was right behind her.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Only I’ve been watching you. I thought you might be waiting for someone.’

  ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you.’

  ‘Will I do? You sure?’ the voice persisted.

  She panicked. ‘If you don’t go away I’ll call a policeman.’

  ‘I think they’re all busy, love.’ But he went away.

  There was a lot of activity at this end of the Strand. Fire engines passed, with bedraggled firemen looking exhausted, and dust carts from Westminster City Council, leaking wet red and yellow earth and clay, like droppings from giant snails, all the way down the street.

  Maurice was an hour late. This was significant. Stephen had said that she was never going to be offered a job, and this was the day when it should have happened. Would she ever see Maurice again? Had she been wrong to press him? She resolved to walk around the block once more, and then twice, and even when she left to catch the 88 bus, she kept looking back in case he had turned up after all.

  Maurice sat on the Underground train feeling as if he had been drained of all life. He had died in his head, but his body continued to walk about, getting in everybody’s way. What should he do? Should he report something to somebody? Surely some record ought to be kept. The train eased into stations and out again, rocking and roaring along to the next, Maurice not registering the names. In any case, he didn’t get out until the end of the line. And yet somehow he felt uneasy. Was there something he had neglected to do?

  Suddenly, in a pitiful close-up, he saw the face of Betty, looking cold and lost and anxious, at the end of the Strand. He had arranged to meet her. Was that today, Monday? What day was it anyway? He looked up as the train stopped again. Balham. Not far to go. But what about Betty? Would she still be there? He knew that she had a faithful, dogged quality. He had the feeling that if you told Betty to wait somewhere she might be there to the end of time. The trouble was that he hadn’t got an address for her. He had preferred it that way, just two souls meeting without encumbrances and backgrounds. It was a romantic notion that he liked.

  He got off the train and sat on a platform seat. Whatever happened now, he was over an hour and a half late. Should he go back? Would there be any point? If not, how could he get in touch with her? She was someone he could talk to, who just listened. He was in need of someone to talk to, someone who wouldn’t interrupt. Who would let him pour out his feelings about his great loss? He was going to miss Betty. She was perfect for the job.

  Bert Penrose woke up. He tried to look around him, but his head wouldn’t move. Everything he could see was white. White ceiling, white walls, white sheets, women dressed all in white, who came and peered at him once in a while. He felt stiff, but at the same time he felt as though every bone in his body was broken. His skin felt clammy, his mouth dry. He found that he couldn’t focus. When he set his eyes on something it began to duplicate itself and then float about. He could hear whispering. What was going on? Where was he? What time was it?

  Suddenly, right in front of his eyes was a pink blob with bulging eyes that were looking at him as if he was something that ought to be put out of its misery.

  ‘How are you feeling, old chap?’ If he could have laughed he would have burst his sides. The pink blob seemed have acquired a moustache and glasses. ‘We’re sending you off to Epsom.’

  Epsom? What for? The Derby? His leg was hurting. It was really giving him gyp. He tried to bend it, but it wouldn’t shift. He caught a glimpse of a white bed opposite, and, as he widened his vision, he took in other beds, in a long, neat row. God Almighty. How many people were in here? It was all too much for him. He decided to sleep it off. Whatever was going on here was clearly bad news.

  The next time he opened his eyes he saw Edie looking down on him as though she had had a nasty fright.

  ‘Bert,’ she said, ‘you’re all right’, but he could tell that she didn’t believe it. He tried to lever himself up on one arm. ‘No,’ Edie said. ‘You mustn’t move. You’ve got to lay still. The doctor said …’ She looked worried to death. There was fear in her eyes and her hands kept stroking him as if she was trying to calm him down.

  ‘What’s up, old girl?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been hurt,’ she said. ‘In Piccadilly.’ For some reason this piece of news struck him as being wildly funny. He was hurt all over. Not in Piccadilly.

  ‘It was a bomb,’ Edie said. ‘It hit a night club.’ He hadn’t been in a night club, had he? He certainly didn’t remember it. By God, Edie looked worried.

  ‘You all right?’ he said.

  ‘They’re taking you to a hospital in Epsom,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit quieter there.’

  ‘They told me. Where are we now?’

  ‘St Thomas’s.’

  ‘I’ve got a new job,’ he said. ‘At the RAC. But I’ve got to get a reference.’ Edie looked down the bed. ‘What’s up?’ he said.

  Edie looked at the ceiling. ‘Haven’t they told you?’ She looked frightened.

  Something was up here. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  Edie gulped. Something was sticking in her throat. ‘Bert,’ she said tremulously. ‘You’ve lost one of your legs.’

  This also struck him as being hilarious. Lost one of his legs? Bloody careless that was. Should have looked after it.

  ‘Edie,’ he said. ‘There’s some fags in my pocket. Get one out, will you?’

  And so the ordinary people of London would check to see whether their part in the life of the capital was still there. Some shrugged and went home. What could they do? It was all bloody silly anyway. Knocking the place about. Didn’t they know that people had work to do, their living to earn? But many hung about in shiftless groups. Now and again there was a show of mass hysteria. The appearance of a dustcart got an ironic cheer. Somebody standing outside a ruined building started to sing ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ in a loud defiant voice, but nobody joined in. There was an air of grumbling resentment in the air. This crowd could easily become a mob. What had they done to deserve this? War was one thing, but bombing cities like this just wasn’t on. Somebody would have to pay for it – probably them. The bloody government took half their money in taxes already, and it was certain that the insurance companies wouldn’t pay up. It wa
sn’t only the damage, it was the loss of earnings: days off, probably months off, it wasn’t good enough.

  That morning Charlie was sitting in the front of a ramshackle lorry heading down the A1 to London. He had hitched a lift because he didn’t dare go on the railway because of the redcaps. He had found this bloke who had been up to the Potteries in search of seconds in the way of ironmongery and china.

  ‘You can’t get nothing’, he said, ‘unless you fetch it.’

  So the lorry rattled and clinked with tin and china as it hobbled its way to the capital. The driver stopped at a roadside café that looked like a benighted shack in a western film. He ordered the full works: a whole plate of sausages, tomatoes, fried bread and an egg. It seemed like three breakfasts rolled into one. The driver scoffed his down, but Charlie found it too much in the end. When he offered to pay, the driver wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘Nothing too good for our boys,’ he said. ‘You on leave?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘Wife’s having a baby,’ he added, to lend credibility.

  ‘Gawd bless you, son,’ said the driver.

  Charlie had only been in the Army for three days, but it had been enough. The clothes were rough and didn’t fit, the boots were impossible, the food was all right, but it wasn’t what he was used to. He could have put up with all that, but it was the way people behaved that was so awful. Did they need to shout all the time? Standing so close and bellowing in his ear. And did they need to be so vulgar? Some of the chaps at work could let it rip at times, but nothing like this. It was like he had been sent to a tribe of savages. And the threats …

  ‘You may have broken your mother’s heart but you won’t break mine.’ This was all said without a hint of humour. ‘If you know what’s good for you you’ll shape up, you shit-faced bastard.’ Was there any need to be so threatening, so loud, so crude?

  He was in another part of the world. He’d been given a train pass to get to Crewe, which looked like a railway station on the edge of the world, and was bundled on to an Army lorry when he got there. Then through some bleak and cheerless countryside that seemed an altogether darker and bleaker world than London: tiny little towns, no shops of any size, rabbit-hutch cinemas, it was like going back fifty years. And then this vast estate of wooden and tin huts, with hundreds of strangers, all living a sub-human existence, ruled by shouting madmen.

  After two days he was shattered in mind and spirit. Most of the other intake seemed to be taking this outright bullying as though it was a normal way of carrying on. Then came the crosscountry run, wearing the boots, with somebody shouting at him all the way. And it wasn’t in the country at all. It was on the road, with women and schoolgirls giggling as he strove to keep up. Was all this humiliation necessary? The people who inflicted all this, the teak-faced sergeants and their arsehole-licking corporals, seemed to be enjoying it. Who had given them permission to inflict this kind of torture on unwilling recruits? After all, he wasn’t a volunteer. No bloody fear.

  The accommodation was bad enough: bunk beds, up and down, bolted together in series so that when somebody moved the whole lot of them moved, and no privacy. Everything was done in public. He was amazed at the way such ordinary matters as folding a blanket had been elevated into a precise art form and the way what they called his kit had to be laid out as though it was an exhibit in an art gallery.

  The only thing he had to relish was that last night with Rosa. It had been so sweet. She had taken all her clothes off, and the revelation had filled him with a kind of tenderness. He had stroked the contours of her body lightly, with reverence almost, feeling her skin tighten in response. It was what he wanted, but he wanted more. He wanted to claim her. To have some promise for their future life. He was going away, but that needn’t be the end of it. He would get leave.

  But when he got to the town of Nissen huts he was told that he wasn’t allowed out for eight weeks. They started on him the first day. Marching up and down like cartoon characters, shouting in unison. It was mad. The people who ran the place were completely crazy. They walked funny and talked funny. The sergeants and corporals had strange accents. Half the time he couldn’t fathom out what they were saying, and his inability to understand the instructions made them madder than ever. How could anybody think that this was reasonable behaviour?

  After two days he knew that all he could do was run away. If he stayed in this place he would break down and be no use to anybody. He thought about going to the doctor, but he had seen the doctor on the first day and he knew that the evil-looking medical man was in on the conspiracy.

  The next day there was an incident that forced his hand. There was another run in the morning, and he had a stroke of luck as he was named as room orderly. That meant that he didn’t have to go but instead had to stay in the hut and clean it up. Twenty-nine men trooped out in their white singlets, blue shorts and boots and clattered down the drive. It was a brisk, cold morning, and they would need to run to keep warm. When they had gone he luxuriated in the thought that he was alone. The first moment of peace he had had since he arrived at the blasted place. He didn’t know what his duties were. The place seemed clean and tidy enough. He moved a black screen black-out frame to sweep behind it and saw a pair of fat hairy thighs crouching there. It was one of the corporals, the fattest, dressed for the run, who straightened up and said seriously, ‘You haven’t seen me. Right?’ What was this? The Marx Brothers? It must be a lunatic asylum, thought Charlie. The corporal went outside the hut and rubbed grass and mud on his legs and shorts. He came back in.

  ‘You the room orderly?’ Charlie nodded. ‘You have to light the fire. Come here.’ He pointed through the window. ‘See that pile of coke? Get some in that bucket.’ So Charlie fetched some coke. ‘Now then. You want some paper.’ Charlie scuffed around and found two newspapers.

  ‘Why aren’t you on the run?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I didn’t feel like it,’ said the corporal. ‘So keep your mouth shut or I’ll …’ He didn’t specify what might happen if Charlie snitched on him, but Charlie knew it would be some embellishment on the ‘guts for garters’ theme. He lit the paper but it all burnt away without igniting the coke.

  ‘You need some wood,’ said the corporal, and reached out and wrenched a strut off one of the bunks and gave it to him.

  ‘It’s too thick,’ Charlie said.

  ‘So?’ said the corporal impatiently. ‘You got a bayonet, haven’t you?’ So Charlie was calmly engaged in chopping up Army property with his bayonet, that should never be out of its sheath except for dire circumstances, when the colonel of the camp marched in followed by a string of attendants: the adjutant, the RSM, the company commander and a string of assorted non-commissioned officers, all sparklingly dressed, looking as though they were in a musical comedy about military life in India or somewhere.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said the colonel mildly.

  Charlie looked around for the corporal, who seemed to have vanished. Behind the black-out, of course. And Charlie hadn’t seen him if he didn’t want his guts as garters. ‘Chopping wood for the fire, sir.’

  ‘Stand up, lad,’ somebody shouted somewhere down the line.

  ‘With your bayonet?’ said the colonel. He turned to the adjutant, a fleshy handsome man, who looked like Nelson Eddy in New Moon but lost without Jeanette Macdonald. ‘Is this man all right?’ The colonel nodded as he walked out, with the others following at a respectful distance, except the RSM.

  ‘Report to the MO in the morning. What’s your number?’

  Charlie couldn’t remember the number they had given him.

  ‘I figured not,’ said the RSM thoughtfully.

  Why the doctor? Did they think he was mad? Would they lock him up somewhere? Maybe they would chuck him out of the Army for being too daft. Anyway, he wasn’t going to wait and see.

  The corporal came out from behind the black-out screen. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That was a close shave.’

  ‘They though
t I was mad,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Yeah. You did that well. Keep that up and you’ll get your ticket.’

  Getting away was easier than he had thought. He slipped out of the hut early morning and just sailed up to the main gates and walked through. The sentries, raw and inexperienced like him, naturally thought that he had a pass or some sort of permission to go down to the town, which was about four miles away.

  He thought it best not to go right into the town. He reached the outskirts and was lucky enough to get a lift on a bread lorry that dropped him near the main road where he ran into a group of women coming off a factory night-shift. One of them calmly took his arm and walked with him as though he was a trophy, while the others made coarse remarks. She lived in a terrace of cottages near by. He went in with her and she made tea in a big mug and gave him some. There was a picture of a smiling sailor on the mantelpiece. In the harsh morning light the woman looked exhausted.

  ‘I’ll have to have a little rest, soldier, and then I’ll see to you,’ and she winked, her face lighting up briefly into a saucy grin.

  He sat on a busted armchair. It was a tiny room, with a low ceiling and poky window. The woman had fallen asleep as soon as she sat down. There was a dead fire in the grate. When the woman was sound asleep he went to the door. He could see traffic going by not so far away. That must be the trunk road. He went out quietly.

  He had to skip over the hedge a few times as military vehicles came along, but eventually the traveller in pots and pans picked him up. He felt at peace with himself. All he had to do was to get home and get his ordinary clothes on. He couldn’t stay there, of course, because they would have his home address and come looking for him. He would stay with Rosa until things had blown over. He was back in London. His home town. London would protect him.

  Mrs Bennet packed a bag. She had enjoyed herself last night, and she hoped that there would be another raid tonight. She put the kettle on to make a thermos. This was a different twist on life. All the people in the place had been together. Of course, she’d always kept herself to herself, didn’t poke her nose in where it was not wanted, but this was different. They were all in the same boat. The war – well, the bombing, really – had rescued her from her enforced isolation. They weren’t all nice people, but they were people, and they had been forced to notice her.