A Possible Life (2 page)

‘It’s going to be a devil of a job getting any young staff at all,’ said Little. ‘During the last war my father had to dig a lot of old men out of retirement. They were making it up as they went
along
, keeping one step ahead of the boys in Hillard and Botting. But I shall still have Baxter.’

‘Yes. He did his bit, I suppose.’

‘Oh God, he didn’t give you all the “Sandpipers” stuff, did he?’ said Mr Little. ‘I do wish he wouldn’t do that. He had a game leg and never got nearer to the fighting than Étaples. He was a quartermaster in charge of handing out kit. Not his fault.’

‘What about you, sir?’ If ever there was a time to ask, Geoffrey thought, this was it.

‘Messpot.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Mesopotamia. I was happy to miss the Western Front. This was a small price to pay.’ He pointed at his eye. ‘You’ll be all right, Talbot. No trenches this time. It’ll be all tanks and movement and high-level bombing. Write to us if you like. I know Mrs Little would like to hear. She’s got quite a soft spot for you.’

‘Thank you, sir. I will.’

As a graduate from an ancient university, Geoffrey was expected to become an officer. Out of loyalty to the county of his birth, he offered his services to the Duke of Hampshire’s Regiment, whose honours included the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 during the War of the Austrian Succession (what on earth had that to do with Micheldever, Geoffrey wondered) and the Siege of Havana in 1762, where it had suffered heavy losses owing to dysentery. Ejected and reabsorbed in countless infantry shake-ups since Waterloo, its members were by 1939 known simply as the Musketeers.

After four months at officer cadet school in Colchester, during which he learned the rudiments of leadership (‘Always let the men smoke during a briefing’; ‘The first thing that happens in action is that the radio breaks down’), Geoffrey was sent to join
the
1st Battalion in Norfolk. Looking through the window as the train left Swaffham, he noticed how the sandy pine forests started to give way to a different landscape, unchanged for centuries, dark, self-absorbed, as though its inhabitants had not often stirred themselves to make the journey to King’s Lynn, still less the odyssey to London. He took a notebook from his case and began one of his secret verses – in pencil so an eraser would leave no trace of the clumsy first draft.

The hedgerow cannot hide where last the may

Like spring snow daubed it reckless white.

Now, flowers gone, the thorns assert their day

And this fair land is entering the night.

He wondered whether ‘may’ – by which he meant hawthorn – should have a capital ‘M’ or if that might make people think it referred to the month. ‘Fair land’ sounded archaic, but it echoed what he felt – such true affection for a part of England he had never seen before, heightened by the fact that it might soon be under attack from the skies. There was also an irksome echo in ‘reckless white’ – something second-hand, owing its existence perhaps to Shelley’s ‘hectic red’.

The 650 men of the battalion were assembled at a shabby Queen Anne house that had been offered to them by its impoverished owner. The bedrooms were designated ‘officers for the use of’; the outhouses, barns and stables were filled with bunks and makeshift beds for other ranks, while the medical officer set up his surgery in the old butler’s pantry. Geoffrey was instructed to present himself for dinner at the officers’ mess in what had been the library, a pleasant room with a large fireplace and marble surround, above which hung the Musketeer colours in magenta and gold. There were oak-fronted cupboards and double doors leading into a comfortable sitting area – the last room, it
appeared
, the owner had been able to afford to heat and keep habitable.

Geoffrey had just taken a cocktail from the mess servant and was trying to conceal his sense of being all at sea when he saw someone he recognised. Standing with his back to the fireplace, smoking a cigarette in a bluff, aggressive way, was the monumental figure of ‘Tiny’ Trembath.

‘What on earth are you doing here, Talbot?’ he said.

‘The same as you, I presume.’

‘It’s all a mistake,’ said Trembath. ‘I meant to go into the navy. Too late. Then the Gunners, but I failed the trigonometry. Now I’m in the bloody infantry. They look an absolute shambles, don’t you think?’

Geoffrey found himself bristling a little, as though he had already developed a loyalty to the Musketeers. ‘I expect we’ll be billeted together,’ he said, in a neutral sort of way.

Trembath looked Geoffrey up and down, as though imagining the prospect without relish.

‘I suppose so,’ he said eventually. ‘I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.’

On the fifth day there was a ‘night op’, the first time the junior officers were allowed out to take charge of some men without an NCO to keep an eye on them. They were meant to find their way, using compasses and a map reference but no torches, to a secret enemy position at Location X, where they would take possession of a Nazi flag to an accompaniment of blank rifle fire. This first part of the exercise was supposed to take only four hours, and from Point X they would receive their orders for the rest of the night, culminating in the safe transfer of the Nazi flag to secret position Y. Trembath and Geoffrey were in charge of A Section, but there was a second group, B Section, who would of course try to get there before them.

At five o’clock, when it was already almost dark, they started
to
black up their faces with burnt corks from wine bottles they had emptied the night before in the mess.

‘Rather a fitting end for such a disappointing hock,’ said Geoffrey, smearing his forehead.

‘Don’t be an arse, Talbot,’ said Trembath.

The section walked for three and a half hours through the Norfolk countryside towards the sea, the men toiling under the weight of their packs and complaining that they were not allowed to smoke.

‘You know damn well you can’t show a light after blackout,’ Trembath told them. ‘Get a bloody move on or the other chaps’ll beat us to it.’

Geoffrey had been put in charge of map-reading, not something that was easy to do by the light of a winter moon. Eventually they found themselves by a village green.

‘For God’s sake, Talbot,’ said Trembath as the men sat on the grass. ‘We’re supposed to be going across country not on the bloody trunk roads.’

‘It’s hardly a trunk road, it’s a village lane.’

‘Here. Give me the map.’

While Trembath was wrestling with the outsize piece of paper, Geoffrey looked about him. On the other side of the road he thought he could make out the shape of an inn sign swinging gently in the breeze; and while Trembath struggled to get the map laid out to his satisfaction on the grass, he walked quietly over to it. Through the blacked-out windows came the sound of glasses chinking and low, contented conversation. Geoffrey checked the luminous hands of his watch: 20.45 hours. He eased up the latch of the front door and went down a short flagged corridor into a room with wooden settles and a small serving hatch. Silence fell in the room as Geoffrey asked for a pint of best bitter and the barman bent over the tap on a wooden barrel.

As he put down the glass on the counter, he said, ‘Do you want a Lord Nelson with that?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Geoffrey. He hoped it might be a sandwich, or a pie, but it turned out to be a small tot of something that smelled of cloves. The beer, though still, was fresh; the Lord Nelson was sweetly aromatic. Two minutes later, Geoffrey was back with Trembath on the grass, ready for the battle ahead.

‘Sorry. Call of nature. What do you think?’

‘I think we should follow this path here.’ Trembath prodded his forefinger against the map. ‘Then we go across country.’

‘Jolly good,’ said Geoffrey. ‘You take over the map-reading, I’ll push along the stragglers from behind.’

‘I say, Talbot, I—’

‘No, I don’t mind. It’s your turn. Off we go. Fall in, please, men. Come along.’

Trembath’s route took them through a field behind the pub, then into a copse, where he consulted his compass by the light of a match.

He sucked in his breath. ‘I think the enemy will be well dug in. They’ll have a bunker in some deeply wooded area, a natural fortification. That’s my guess. I think if we follow this bearing, north by north-west, and just about here …’

There followed an hour of walking over fields, climbing fences, regrouping, head-counting and grumbling. The ground was becoming marshy and hard to walk through. Geoffrey, who was now beside Trembath at the head of the section, wondered what it must be like for the men who hadn’t had the chance to play as much sport as he had; some of them were clearly city types on whom a ten-mile hike must be starting to take its toll. By now they were all knee-deep in water. Geoffrey trailed his fingers through it for a moment and licked them: salt.

Then the going underfoot seemed suddenly to change again; it
was
becoming drier, then sandy. Ahead of him Geoffrey could make out undulations – not hills exactly, but mounds or rises that stood out in the dark winter countryside.

And now there was something odd – yet familiar – about the soil beneath his boots, and in a moment, it came to him. He was walking on a seaside golf course. There were no flags to confirm his suspicion, the ground staff having doubtless taken them down for the night, but he could see where the cropped grass on which they were walking gave way to rough on either side of a fairway. Geoffrey had no doubt that 200 yards or so ahead, among the dunes, they would come to an even more close-cut area: the green.

‘Trembath?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Yes, we’re heading north-north-west on a bearing of—’

‘No. More exactly. More colloquially.’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Talbot?’

‘We’re on the eighth hole at Burnham.’

‘The Royal North Norfolk?’

‘Yes.’

Trembath said nothing, though he grunted a good deal.

‘Can you make out that shape in the distance?’ said Geoffrey. ‘The one that looks as though it’s built up with railway sleepers and filled with sand?’

‘Just about,’ said Trembath, non-committally.

‘I was just wondering. Do you think that might be the enemy bunker?’ said Geoffrey. ‘A natural fortific—’

‘Pipe down, Talbot. If we don’t get a move on, B Section’s going to beat us to it.’

At that moment, there came the sound of rifle fire about half a mile east of where they were standing.

‘Too late, I think,’ said Geoffrey.

‘Quick,’ said Trembath, ‘let’s get our men over there and ambush them.’

‘We can’t go forward on to the beach,’ said Geoffrey. ‘They’ll have patrols there.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. Sergeant Turnbull said, “Stay off the beach, Mr Talbot.”’

‘Did he really call you “Mister”?’

‘Yes. Look, we’ll have to go back the way we came, then pick up the coast road towards Wells. The guns weren’t far away.’

‘Come on then,’ said Trembath. ‘Let’s get a bloody move on.’

‘We’re on the eighth fairway now, so if we cut back through—’

‘I don’t want a lesson in course management. I played here in the varsity match.’

‘Don’t tell me you got a golf blue as well,’ said Geoffrey.

‘Halved my match at the eighteenth. The race is to the swift, Talbot. Come on.’

The men fell in and began to walk back the way they had come, but before they reached the seventh tee, they came to a halt. Ground that had earlier been marshy, then knee-deep in water, was now submerged by the sea.

‘We’re cut off, sir,’ said Hill, one of the other ranks; known as ‘Puffer’, he was a tobacconist in civilian life. ‘Tide comes in here at a hell of a lick. It’ll be six feet deep in places.’

‘How do you know?’ said Trembath.

‘Used to come here on holidays, sir.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to wade through it.’

‘Can’t wade, sir. It’ll be too deep. And some of us can’t swim.’

‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, man. It’s only a few yards across. Come on. Get going. All of you.’

Reluctantly, holding their rifles above their heads, the Musketeers entered the icy tidal waters that cut off the eighth hole from the mainland.

Geoffrey felt his feet slip from beneath him. He was swimming – a clumsy breaststroke towards the higher ground he could make out just in front of them. He had never been much of a sea-bather and was finding the water almost unbearably cold. He was not alone in feeling the chill; a good deal of shouting and groaning came from the section as it half swam, half splashed its way towards the out-of-bounds beside the seventh.

To warm his drenched and freezing troops, Trembath told them to proceed at the double back to the coast road between Brancaster and Wells. As soon as they got there, they would be allowed to smoke; he had seen them stick their cigarette packets beneath their forage caps as they went into the water, like householders saving their most valued item from a natural disaster.

This order seemed to Geoffrey an idea of near-genius. He had thought the extent of Trembath’s cunning might be to make sure his batting partner faced the fast bowler while he enjoyed the youthful leg-break lobber at the other end; he had never thought old ‘Tiny’ might be capable of such insight into the mind of the soldier. A few minutes later, smoking and steaming by the side of the road, the section caught its breath.

Geoffrey resumed map-reading duties, and shortly afterwards A Section, chilly but in good spirits, arrived at Location X – a telephone box set back between the road and the ‘staithe’, as the locals called the area of jetties and moorings by the sea. Here they were rewarded with hot chocolate, pork pies and more cigarettes before pressing on towards Location Y.

The bracing tidal water and the nicotine had left the men exhilarated, eager to outflank B Section, and attentive to all commands. They went at the double through the grounds of a stately house that looked, in the darkness, like a lunatic asylum, lacking only a water tower to set off its grim west facade. At one o’clock they found Location Y in a cherry orchard in the grounds of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and an
hour
later they ambushed a complacent B Section on a country lane with thunder flashes and vigorous hand-to-hand fighting, resulting in the capture of the Nazi flag. It was not until they were back at battalion headquarters just after dawn that they saw that one of their number was missing at roll call. A. J. ‘Puffer’ Hill did not answer his name.