A Ripple From the Storm (19 page)

Piet said, grinning: ‘Women! We’d better make a rule that no one can come to group meetings unless their temperature is normal.’

Tommy said: ‘But it wasn’t Jimmy, it was Bill, wasn’t it? I mean, Jimmy did the talking, but you could see it was Bill all the time.’

Piet affectionately thumped the side of his fist against the boy’s head and told him: ‘Now you shut up for tonight, and we’ll give you a lift home. Who’s for a lift?’

Down in the street the ‘town types’ saw Jimmy under a lamp at a corner, surrounded by the three other RAF men. He was shouting and gesticulating; they were, apparently, trying to stop him from doing something.

Then they saw Andrew, obviously in a bad temper, going off by himself away from the others. The three: Bill, Murdoch and Jimmy, linked arms and strolled down the pavement, three abreast, so that the groups of townspeople coming the other way, out of the pictures, had to move off the pavement to make room for them.

‘Bloody Raff,’ said Piet, angrily, ‘time they all went home to where they belonged.’

Chapter Four

Murdoch said, after Andrew’s square back: ‘Bloody arselicker.’

Bill said; ‘That’s right. All things to all men, that’s Andrew.’

The men had come out of the group office united in hostility towards ‘the people from the town’. Andrew had joined the others in making disparaging jokes all the way down the stairs. Already he had left them: he had said to Jimmy, ‘You made a proper balls-up of that, mate.’ Bill had responded instantly with a jeering: ‘Stoo-pid, ain’t we?’ Andrew maintained a gruff mateyness while he said: ‘We didn’t want to smash everything up, but just to change the policy.’

At which Jimmy had exclaimed: ‘I’d like to smash it up smash this whole bleeding town and everything in it.’ He let out a short quivering shout of rage, his fists clenched: the others laid calming hands on him, but he shook them off, scowling at them and at the people passing. Then, when he was quiet, Andrew said: ‘Well, I’m going to catch that bus if you aren’t,’ and left them.

When Bill said: ‘That’s right, all things to all men …’ the other two nodded fierce agreement. Yet almost instantly they felt hostility for Bill too: his tone was too jaunty. Jimmy and Murdoch were tense, angry and miserable because of what had happened. Bill was not: they saw that his alert grey eyes held nothing but interested speculation. He was not with them. He said: ‘Are we going to take the bus? Because I haven’t got an all-night pass.’

‘To hell with the bus,’ said Murdoch, but in such a way that the others knew he would catch it at the last moment. They linked arms and swung down the street. Main Street at eleven o’clock; the cinemas emptying, the hotels filling. The three young men, their uniforms slack and untidy, charged along the pavement, watching out of the corners of their eyes how the groups of townspeople moved aside to let them pass. Had any man shouldered them, or said anything challenging, their fists were tightened for the fight. But the men, most of whom were accompanied by women, gave them acute thoughtful glances, and saw to it that the pavement was clear half a dozen paces before contact became likely. After the three airmen had gone past, some of the townsmen muttered: ‘One of these days I’m going to beat up those

Half-way down, Carrie Jones, accompanied by a girl-friend, came into view walking towards the airmen. As the two girls saw the three airforce men, their bodies tightened defensively, and they moved out to the edge of the pavement. Half an hour earlier Carrie had sat in the same room with them, but now they had become ‘the RAF’ and she was careful not to look at them. Murdoch let out a wolf-whistle when he was four yards off. The colour deepened in the girls’ cheeks and they looked distressed. Bill said, with authority: ‘Here, let up, man!’ Murdoch, his face and hair glowing in one wild red flame of aggression, whistled again. As they swung past the two girls, Bill said, grinning: ‘Comrade Carrie.’ She turned fast, saw who it was, and nodded, while her whole body expressed hurt and resentment.

‘What are you treating our girls like that for?’ said Bill. Again he spoke jauntily: it was the form of reproach. Murdoch stopped dead, Jimmy with him. ‘What’s that for?’ Murdoch demanded. ‘Who’re you getting at? She didn’t even look at us.
Comrades.’

Bill said, in the same tentative way, as if he might be testing, or finding out something: ‘You frightened her. That’s a stoopid way to go on.’

‘Och, hell,’ said Murdoch. His heated, wild, unhappy face seemed to be flying apart, and his light wild Scots blue eyes were furious.

Jimmy said, with his usual desperate earnestness: ‘Whose

side are you on? I don’t hold with whistling at our girls, but she just treated us like dirt.’

Bill fell back from the other two; he had, it seemed, lost interest in them. ‘We’re going to miss the bus,’ he said, already moving off. jimmy and Murdoch linked arms, and said with hostility: ‘Go to bed then,’ and ‘Tuck yourself up warm.’

Bill walked back the way they had come towards the bus, his back, like Andrew’s earlier, set self-consciously against their critical stares.

Jimmy and Murdoch, deflated, all the aggression gone out of them, leaned against a pillar outside a shop. Murdoch lit a cigarette, hunching one shoulder out against the wind, cupping the flame close inside his hands – it was a cool, absolutely still night, the stars blazing high above the low coloured glare that spread above the small town.

Murdoch said: ‘Och, well – let’s get ourselves back to camp.’

Jimmy said nothing. He was breathing deep and hoarsely, and his eyes were fixed. He had an all-night pass, but for some reason had lost interest in what he had been going to do. Murdoch nudged him, and he automatically followed Murdoch along the pavement without speaking. The street was now almost empty of townspeople, but odd groups of them still made their way along the pavement, and now the two airmen gave way to them, not looking at them. When they reached the bus-stop, the bus was just reversing towards them. They jumped on as it went forward. Andrew was seated well up towards the front, reading. Bill was sprawled out, apparently asleep. Jimmy and Murdoch settled at the back, close together.

‘Back to the concentration camp,’ said Murdoch.

‘That’s right,’ said Jimmy gloomily. But there was pleasure in these remarks, a masochistic pride in their fate.

‘There’s that match against Guineafowl tomorrow,’ said Murdoch. Now he was smiling and relaxed again. ‘We’ll win it,’ he added. ‘We’ve not lost a match yet.’

Jimmy did not answer. The half-jocular ‘concentration camp’ made him think of the great barred gates of the camp, the high wire fence. He shifted his shoulders inside the thick confining uniform. He had an all-night pass. Why was he here then? If he got off outside the gates and made his way back to the main road, he could thumb a lift back to town – if one of those bastards could bring himself to stop for an airman! It was a permanent source of bitterness in the camp that many of the townspeople refused lifts to airmen. But he remained with the others. The men descended together from the bus, and, feeling the constriction of the high wire barricade all around them, like a pressure on their minds, moved forward in a body for a dozen steps, before drifting off in ones and twos towards their huts. Bill and Andrew went off in different directions by themselves; Jimmy and Murdoch did not see them: they were locked together in a warm sentimental mood that excluded everyone else. Walking very close they ambled towards the crude shed which had been home to them and to eighteen other men for two years. It had a flattened, crouching look under the big sky; dozens of exactly similar huts surrounded them. Murdoch said in his real voice – seldom heard and, surprisingly even to himself, a voice neither rueful, nor humorously pained; but quiet, earnest: the voice of a boy confronting wonder: ‘Do you know what this mucking place reminds me of, Jimmy boy, do you know?’ The movement of his progress, which was loose and wild, like that of a tenderly-gawky stick-insect, stopped in a defensive pose. Jimmy came to a standstill beside him. They were so close they could feel the heat of each other’s sides.

‘What?’ said Jimmy, as Murdoch’s breathing continued to frost the moonlit air.

‘Think of the maintenance bench. Do you see what I mean?’

Both men, fitters, worked from a long, grimed and shiny table littered, though methodically littered, with dozens of small, hard and angular bits of metal.

Jimmy staring, his mouth half-open, saw the sheds and huts of the camp diminished to the scale of their workbench, an arrangement of precisely-made machine parts. He felt, as Murdoch did, imprisoned, but the warm substance of his body insisted against the vision. There was a moment of painful striving between the two: the ugly mechanical regularity of the camp, that had the obstinate look of metal parts and tools, and the full hot insistence of his breathing body.

He said slowly: ‘That’s it. You’re right. Everything’s just machines these days.’ But even as he said it, and saw Murdoch’s face ease away from the painful knowledge of failed communication, into a smile of grateful comradeship, he felt, in the flesh of his finger-tips, the engine parts he handled all day. His big bony fingers moved unconsciously, in mastery of metal. In the tips of his fingers he felt inert, lazy steel, uncommunicative until he touched it and it took on life. Now his ears, that had been sealed from habit, against noise, opened to a roar of aircraft: several hundreds of yards away on the runway, an aeroplane stood roaring and quivering under a beam of arc-lights, and the sound made Jimmy see the plane he had worked on that morning. He had slid into its proper place a tiny smooth glob of metal, and the dead part of the machine sang into life.

Murdoch insisted again, clutching his arm. ‘See what I mean?’

‘I think I’ll stick to aircraft when the war’s over,’ said Jimmy.

Murdoch let his hand fall: he felt as if Jimmy had turned and walked away from him. He dreamed of something different when the war was finished. He did not know what, but his uncle had a small fish and chips bar in Edinburgh, and recently he had been thinking of writing to him. He thought: Jimmy’ll be in a san by the time the war’s over, the way he’s going on, silly bugger, and no one can tell him he’s sick, no one can tell him anything.

He said: ‘I’m hungry.’ He was thinking of the warm smell of food that pervaded his uncle’s fish shop.

Jimmy said: ‘I’ve got some chocolate in my locker.’

The door of their hut was open, half a dozen paces ahead, an oblong warm light. Their beds were at opposite ends of the hut. In fact these two men had not felt close before; both had other mates, beside whom they worked and with whom they went out into the town, when the group gave them time.

Jimmy remembered that as well as the chocolate there were several dozen
Watchdogs,
still unsold from last week. He said fiercely: ‘I’d like to see one of those comrades, they call themselves, taking on a working-woman’s job – it’d kill them in a day.’

‘That’s right,’ said Murdoch. ‘They don’t know what hard work is, and that’s a fact.’

They drew together again, thinking with bitterness of the girls in the group, who had rejected them, treated them with contempt – so they felt.

They went forward into the hut. The men were lying or sitting on their beds. The radio was on. Nostalgia filled the hut. Vera Lynn was singing:
When You Come Home Again.

Jimmy’s bed was nearest the door. Murdoch, not wanting to separate from his friend, sat on the foot of it. ? youth sprawling on the next bed looked up and said with an automatic friendliness: ‘Joe for King.’

These two, Jimmy and Murdoch, were the Reds of the hut. It was known they were members of a secret group in the town. They sold several dozen
Watchdogs
each week. The airmen bought willingly, but seldom read the newspaper. They were buying a share in the current mood of optimism, which they felt but could not define. Russia was doing well; they felt goodwill towards the Red Army because they felt that in some complicated ways its successes showed their own government as incompetent. Each one of these men thought of every man above him, from corporal up, as incompetent, slovenly, and out for himself. They hated the whole officer hierarchy with a cheerful impersonal bitterness.

They also felt that after the war things could not possibly go on as they had before. They had jeered at the Atlantic Charter, and greeted the patriot speeches of the high-ups about better times coming after the war with a steady contempt as bait for suckers, the suckers being themselves. But all the same … things could not go on as they had; and the victories of the Red Army in some way proved this.

Yet they protected themselves against disappointment by disbelief. All round the camp men greeted each other with ‘Joe for King,’ but it was jaunty, and the clenched fist of the greeting quivered in a parody of fervour. They bought the
Watchdog,
gave three times the proper price for it, but did not bother to read it. They would leave copies lying about the canteens, the reading-rooms, or sticking out of their pockets to annoy officers. There were several home-made red flags in the camp, and they would be brought out sometimes and flaunted about to the accompaniment of wild, insurrectionary but always self-parodying speeches.

Over the beds of the men in this hut were pictures of girls, family photographs, and several had pictures of Stalin, captioned: Joe for King, or Uncle Joe.

Both Jimmy and Murdoch had large pictures of Stalin torn out of newspapers, but theirs were inscribed: Comrade Stalin.

Jimmy returned the greeting to the next bed, sat himself down beside Murdoch, and became angry with himself for being here at all. He said: ‘I’m thinking of getting back into town.’

Murdoch said: ‘Take it easy, Jimmy boy.’

‘I mean it.’

‘But you won’t get out again now.’

‘I know how. You can come too.’

‘I haven’t got a pass.’

‘You can get back the same way.’

Murdoch was uneasy. He recognized the set and inflamed stare of Jimmy’s eyes. Privately he thought of Jimmy as not only sick, but crazy. And in spite of his own reputation as a firebrand, which he was proud of, he was a young man who liked order, and was uncomfortable breaking rules.

Jimmy said: ‘You coming or not?’

Murdoch had not expected the challenge so quickly. Jimmy was standing up, tightening his belt.

‘Och, man,’ he said, laughing weakly, ‘I need my kip.’ He got off the bed.

Vera Lynn’s voice was so loud and strong and sweet that the bright thick air in the hut throbbed. The men were singing with her in a group around the radio, and Murdoch wanted to join them.

Jimmy shouted: ‘You’re scared, that’s it!’ Now his whole being was concentrated behind the desire that Murdoch should come with him. He glared at his friend, hating him.

‘Scared, is it?’ said Murdoch, affronted. Then, seeing where this would get him, he slid off into his familiar humorous plaint: ‘I’m dead with sleep, and that’s the truth.’ He did not allow himself to meet Jimmy’s set and aggressive jaw; but said: ‘I’m for bed,’ and moved off fast.