In Pale Battalions (51 page)

Seeing off Donna at Heathrow and travelling back alone to Swindon had left Harry feeling sorry for himself, however.

He was in no mood to begin emptying cupboards and filling bin-bags. He walked away from the station past the boundary wall of the former Great Western Railway works, then crossed the park and made his way up to Radnor Street, where his old primary school, now converted into offices, stood opposite the entrance to the cemetery.

For the first time in Harry’s memory, the gravestone commemorating his father, Stanley Barnett, killed in an accident in the GWR locomotive erecting shop when Harry was three, no longer stood in its familiar place near the highest point of the cemetery. It had been removed to have the name of Ivy Barnett added at long last to the inscription. Harry stood for a few minutes by the flower-strewn mound of earth that marked the spot where his mother’s coffin had been lowered in on top of his father’s two days ago. He breathed the clear spring air and gazed towards the flat horizon. Then he turned and slowly walked away.

Leaving the cemetery on the far side, he seriously considered making for the Beehive, his local pub in those distant days when he had been a Swindon householder in his own right and co-proprietor of Barnchase Motors. But he reckoned a descent into beery nostalgia would not be a good start to a week of solitude and toil, so he headed downhill instead to the Market Hall, where he bought a couple of lamb chops for his supper before returning to Falmouth Street.

It was a mild April afternoon of watery sunshine and war-bling birdsong. Even the office blocks of downtown Swindon contrived to appear, if not attractive, then at least inoffensive, in the restful light. The Railway Village was quiet and tranquil, a condition the average age of its residents generally guaranteed. Turning his back nobly on the beckoningly bright yellow frontage of the Glue Pot—or at any rate deciding he should put the lamb chops in the fridge before allowing himself a swift one—Harry crossed Emlyn Square and started along Falmouth Street.

He saw the two men ahead of him before he realized it was his mother’s door they were standing at. They were about his own age, which he would once have described as old, but, now that he had attained it, seemed merely a bemus-ingly high number. One was short and tubby, anoraked, tracksuited and baseball-capped. The other, through scarcely much taller, was thinner, his clothes shabby and old-fashioned—beltless raincoat, crumpled trousers, laced shoes in need of a polish. He had a full head of white, tousled hair, a beak-nosed, bony face and a put-upon stoop. His companion looked contrastingly at ease with himself, staring at the unanswered door of number 37 with his hands thrust idly into his anorak pockets, sunlight flashing on his glasses in time to the gum-chewing motion of his well-padded jaw.

They were debating something in a desultory fashion, or so a shrug of his shoulders suggested. A battered leather suitcase and a smarter, newer holdall stood beside them on the path.

Harry did not recognize them, nor could he guess what they wanted. Whatever it was, though, he felt certain they had not come to see him.

Then the thinner of the two spotted him and touched the other’s arm. A word passed between them. They turned and looked at Harry. As they did so, he stopped. And everything else stopped too, even the chewing of the gum.

“Ossie?” the fat one said after a moment of silence and immobility. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

No one had called Harry “Ossie” since his National Service days, which had ended fifty years ago and been largely forgotten by him for almost as long. While his brain sent a none-too-nimble search party off in quest of memories that might explain this turn of events, he opened his mouth to speak—but found nothing to say.

“It’s Jabber. And Crooked.”

The words lassoed Harry’s scrambling thoughts and wound them in. Jabber and Crooked: the nicknames of two of his comrades from the strangest and most memorable episode of his spell in uniform. Mervyn Lloyd, dubbed

“Jabber” on account of his talkative nature; and Peter Askew, whose sobriquet of “Crooked” counted as a salutary example of National Service wit. For Harry’s part, “Ossie” was a reference to his middle name, Mosley, inflicted on him by his father in tribute to none other than Oswald Mosley himself, much to Harry’s lifelong chagrin.

“Don’t you recognize us?”

Technically, the answer was “just about.” The years had wrought their changes with a heavy hand. Lloyd’s Welsh lilt had survived, but his spry figure had not. If he had denied being Mervyn Lloyd, Harry would not have argued. Askew, meanwhile, had been bleached and bent by time, like some potted plant left outdoors through too many winters.

“Bloody hell,” said Harry at last. “It really is you two.”

“Good to see you, Harry,” said Askew, who had never been one of the most assiduous deployers of nicknames, perhaps because he resented his own.

“Well, it’s . . . good to see you.” Harry shook them both by the hand. “But . . .”

“You look surprised,” said Lloyd.

“I am.”

“Didn’t you get Danger’s letter?”

Johnny Dangerfield was evidently a party to whatever was going on as well. It had to be some kind of reunion to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their demob.

Harry could think of no other explanation, though left to him the anniversary would have been allowed to pass unmarked. “I’ve had no letter,” he said, frowning in puzzlement.

“You must have. This is the address Danger gave us.”

“I haven’t lived here in years, lads. Decades, actually. It’s my mother’s house. She died recently. I’m only over to clear the place out.”

“We struck lucky, then, didn’t we, Crooked?” Lloyd grinned. “Danger asked us to drop by on the off chance, Ossie, seeing as we were both coming this way.”

“Sorry to hear about your mother, Harry,” said Askew.

“Thanks, Peter.”

“Where are you over from, then?” asked Lloyd.

“Canada.”

“All right for some. How’d you end up there?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ll bet. When d’you go back, then?”

“A week or so.”

“Perfect. How d’you fancy a couple of days north of the border?”

“The border?”

“Scotland, Ossie. Johnny’s arranged for us to get together at Kilveen Castle this very weekend.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. All the old crew. Well, those who are still in the land of the living. Those he’s been able to track down. We’d nearly given up on you.”

“My mother must have forgotten to forward the letter,”

Harry mused. “Or else it went astray.”

“Well, you know what the post is like these days. But never mind.” Lloyd clapped Harry heavily on the shoulder.

“We’ve found you now.”

two

The road that led young Harry Barnett to Kilveen Castle in March 1955 began at Swindon Labour Exchange two years previously, when he passed a per-functory National Service medical and asked to enlist in the RAF, commonly believed to be a softer option than either the Army or the Navy. The half a dozen weekends he had spent gooning around in the RAF Reserves out at Wroughton swung it for him and six weeks later his third-class rail warrant to RAF Padgate dropped through the letterbox of 37

Falmouth Street.

After the trauma of basic training, he was despatched to Stafford, where his suspended career as a filing clerk in Swindon Borough Council was regarded as suitable grounding for work in the stores. There was to be no soaring across the sky for Aircraftman Barnett, for all his boyhood fantasies of Battle of Britain derring-do. His unit had its feet firmly on the ground.

It was amidst RAF Stafford’s cavernous repositories of the equipment and effects of disbanded wartime squadrons that Harry met his future business partner, Barry Chipchase.

Though the same age as Harry, Chipchase had acquired a maturity beyond his years, one feature of which was his unerring eye for the main chance. The moment when Barnchase Motors collapsed under the strain of his wheeler-dealing and Harry finally saw his friend for what he was lay nearly twenty years ahead of them. At the time, Harry was happy to follow Chipchase’s lead where the pursuit of female company and a fast buck were concerned. What could have been a tedious sojourn in the Midlands became—under Chipchase’s tutelage—an education for Harry in the wilier ways of the world.

At first Chipchase funded his activities through straightforward black marketeering, but the demise of rationing forced him to resort to other methods of turning a profit.

During 1954, he reigned supreme as the station’s fixer, trading everything from weekend passes to cushy postings and, beyond the gate, more or less anything that had not been bolted down. Harry was his trusted assistant at the outset and, by the end, his loyal partner.

That end came early in 1955, when, with only a few months left to serve, Chipchase overreached himself.

Siphoning off fuel from the station tank to sell to local farmers and smuggling out surplus mess furniture to flog round the pubs of Stafford was not enough for him. He wanted to go one better—and bigger. The stores held several collections of silver belonging to squadrons unlikely to be re-formed short of a Third World War. Much of it, Chipchase calculated, would never be missed and could be put to better use providing him and Harry with what he called “demob dosh”—a nest egg for a fast and loose future on civvy street.

The plan foundered, as such plans often do, on bad luck.

When Air Chief Marshal Bradshaw saw a silver salver bearing the insignia of a squadron he had once commanded for sale in a shop in Birmingham, he initiated an inquiry that led the RAF Police by a winding route to the barrack-door in Stafford of Aircraftmen Barnett and Chipchase. The game was up.

It was useless for Chipchase to protest to Harry that the deal he had struck with a certain nameless individual had been based on melting down the silver, not on selling items intact. He should have realized he was doing business with people he could not trust. It was a point Harry had ample opportunity to expound upon during the weeks spent in the guardroom cells awaiting court martial. The prospects, explained the witless flight lieutenant appointed to defend them, were bleak. For such an outrageous offence against the honour as well as the property of the Air Force, a sentence of six months or more in detention could be anticipated. And those months would then be added to their service. With a conviction for theft round his neck, Harry would probably find he had no job to return to in Swindon. His future suddenly looked far from rosy. And Chipchase’s stubborn insistence that he would somehow contrive to get them off the hook failed to improve the view.

Then,
mirabile dictu
, came salvation. Chipchase tried to claim credit for it, but Harry was more inclined to thank his guardian angel. The station CO, Group Captain Wyatt, summoned them under close guard to his office a few days before the court martial was due to be held and offered them, much to Harry’s incredulity, a way out. Volunteers were needed for a special project of three months’ duration. No details were forthcoming beyond Wyatt’s dry assurance that it would not involve being parachuted into Russia. If they signed up for it, did as they were told unquestioningly throughout and generally kept their noses clean, the charges would be dropped. If not . . .

But refusal was scarcely an option, as Wyatt must have anticipated, since he had already arranged for their kit-bags to be packed. He wanted them off his hands. And they were happy to go. Chipchase theorized later that retired air aces might have cut up rough if they had discovered how little care was being taken of their old squadrons’ silverware. A court martial would have attracted unwelcome publicity. The top brass had probably sent a message down the line that it was to be avoided at all costs. He and Harry should have held out for a better deal.

The one they had got was still pretty good, though. Forty-eight hours later, they arrived at Kilveen Castle, an outstation of RAF Dyce, near Aberdeen, and met their fellow volunteers for special duties of an unknown nature.

There had been fifteen of them in all, three of whom were drinking tea and taking their ease fifty years later in the kitchen at 37 Falmouth Street, Swindon. “Ease” was of course a relative term in Peter Askew’s case. It occurred to Harry that he was one of those people who had never quite got the knack of life, which was a pity, given how much of it had now passed him by. Mervyn Lloyd, on the other hand, was a stranger to inhibition. And to silence. He was currently living up to his nickname by summarizing the contents of the letter from Johnny Dangerfield Harry had never received.

“Seems Danger made a packet in the oil business, which took him back to Aberdeen. The castle’s been turned into a hotel. That’s what made him think about staging a fiftieth anniversary reunion of our little band of brigands. Got the University to approach the MoD for our discharge addresses and started writing round. There was a good bit of forwarding and phoning after that. One or two have fallen off the twig. Well, you have to expect that at our age. And one or two—like you, Ossie—were hard to track down. But Danger’s done a bloody good job, all things considered. I’ll leave you his latest round-robin to take a shufti at. The long and the short of it is he’s booked the castle for this weekend.

Just us. And it’s a freebie. Danger’s paying. His treat. Well, he’s probably got a bargain price this early in the season, but it’s still bloody generous of him. Seven of us are going up on the train from London tomorrow. I’m staying with my daughter in Neasden overnight. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s putting up Crooked as well. Turned out he and I both live in Cardiff, so it made sense for the two of us to travel up today. Plus it meant we could stop off here and see if you really were a lost cause. Which I’m happy to say you aren’t.” “You’ll come along, won’t you, Harry?” Askew asked plaintively. “It wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“No more it would,” said Lloyd. “The invitation’s too good to refuse.”

“Is Barry going to be there?” Harry asked, guessing as he spoke that Chipchase would have proved peculiarly elusive.