The Captain and the Enemy (7 page)

I will try to reproduce part of a typical lesson in geography.

‘If you want to go from Germany to Spain, how would you go?’ he asked me.

‘I’d take a plane,’ I said.

‘No, no, that’s against the rules. We are playing a sort of game. Like Monopoly. There’s a war on, so in this game you’ve got to go on foot.’

‘Why not in a car?’

‘You haven’t got a car.’

I was still puzzled by his own car. Had he paid for it and how had he got the money or was it like that smoked salmon lunch?

He had bought a school atlas and he laid it open before me, and I think he was relieved to find that I could read a map reasonably well with all the symbols and colours which indicate rivers, railways, mountains.

‘I suppose I’d walk into France,’ I said.

‘Oh no, you wouldn’t. France is under enemy occupation. There are Germans everywhere.’

I tried again. ‘Belgium?’ I suggested.

‘That’s better. There are Germans there too, but you’ve been given an address, see. A safe house. A bit like this basement here. In a town called Liège. Find Liège.’

He spelt the name out for me and I found it, but I still felt a bit at sea. ‘Why do I want to go to Spain?’

‘Because it’s neutral, and then you can get to Portugal and so to England. Where’s Portugal?’

After a little search I found Portugal. ‘Portugal’s on our side,’ he explained, ‘but you have to reach Spain first. How do you do that?’

Now that I knew geography was a kind of war game I began really to enjoy it. I looked closely at the map.

‘I’d have to go through France somehow in spite of the Germans.’

‘That’s right. You find in the safe house that there are four Air Force officers in hiding like you and there’s a brave young woman – no older than Liza – and she’s going with you. All the way to the Pyrenees by train. The Pyrenees are mountains. Find them.’

This took longer, for I got mixed up with the Ardennes on the way.

‘But why don’t the Germans stop us?’

‘She’s got false papers for all of you. The others can talk a bit of French. Better than the Germans can anyway. You can’t, so she binds up your jaw with a bandage, blood-stained, so that you can’t speak. A bomb casualty, she tells everyone, and she’s in charge of you. As for the others she says that she just happened to meet them on the train, and they’d made friends. You get through Paris safely and you change trains. You get out finally at a place called Tarbes.’ He spelt the name out. ‘Now find Tarbes.’

It was only a game we were playing and I didn’t take it as a piece of history. How much of the Captain’s story was true I don’t know to this day, but I certainly enjoyed our lessons in geography, especially when I passed over the Pyrenees by night, barefoot in the snow, listening for the sucking noise made by the boots of the German patrols. All the later geography lessons have faded from my memory, so that even today I can’t visualize Spain and Portugal with the same clarity as West Germany, Belgium and France, but in Spain the geography lesson would sometimes merge into history.

The Captain had a special sympathy for Drake and Sir
Henry
Morgan. ‘They were pirates,’ he said, ‘sailing the Seven Seas in search of gold.’

‘What did they do with it?’

‘They seized it from the Spaniards.’

He spoke of the Spanish mule trains which carried the gold from the Pacific side of Panama to the Atlantic (he marked the route on the map) and how Drake ambushed them on the way.

‘They were thieves?’

‘No, I told you. They were pirates.’

‘What did the Spaniards do?’

‘They fought hard. They were real sportsmen.’

‘People got killed?’

‘People get killed in boxing too.’ He was silent for quite a while, thinking his own thoughts. Then he said, ‘Thieves steal trash. Pirates steal millions.’ Again there was a prolonged moment of reflection. ‘I suppose you might say that thieves could be called pirates too, but in a very small way of business. They haven’t had the luck and opportunity which the pirates had.’

This particular lesson would be broken by a lot of silences, and a few geographical names. When I tried to get him moving too rapidly into Portugal I failed. He said, after one silence, ‘If I had the money I’d like to go where Drake went – Panama and all the countries over there where the gold came from, but Liza wouldn’t be happy – she wouldn’t feel at home. All the same one day perhaps …’ I put my finger on the map and said for the second time, ‘But Portugal. What’s Portugal like?’

‘An agglomeration of sardines.’ He used a word which I doubt if either of us really understood. ‘Forget Portugal. Did they teach you poetry at school, boy?’

I began to recite a piece which at school I had been made to learn by heart. I have forgotten it now, but it was about brave Horatius keeping some bridge or other. He interrupted me, ‘Give me King Kong any day of the week.’ He added apologetically, ‘I’m not one for poetry as a rule – but there’s a bit of verse which sticks in my head by a fellow called Kipling. Oh, they wouldn’t have understood him at your school. “Brave Horatius”,’ he repeated with scorn. ‘What a name for a man. Kipling wrote what a man feels, anyway a man like me. He sort of speaks to me. Perhaps if only Liza felt the same way we might have been out of here long ago and we’d be rich and snug and safe.’

‘Aren’t you safe here?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer my question – at least not directly.

‘God bless the something islands,’ he said,

‘Where never warrants come,

God bless the just Republics,

That give a man a home.’

‘That’s poetry?’ I asked.

‘That’s poetry, real poetry, Jim. It speaks to you. They can stuff your brave Horatius. Do you know what I dream of?’

I don’t know why but I answered, ‘Tortoises?’

‘Tortoises! I don’t dream of tortoises. Why on earth should I dream of tortoises? When I dream it’s when I’m awake, not when I’m asleep. I dream of all that gold which Drake took from the mules in Panama. I dream that we are rich all three of us, rich and safe, and I dream that Liza is able to buy anything that takes her fancy.’

‘Does she dream it too?’

‘I know very well she doesn’t, and I don’t think she likes me to dream it either.’

I am doing my best to describe a typical lesson which I received from the Captain, but I realize only too well that my description cannot be factually accurate. It has passed through the memory and the memory rejects and alters, much as the Captain may have changed a lot of facts when he recounted his wartime experiences. Sometimes Liza sat with us during a lesson, and I noticed then that her favourite story – of his escape to Spain – which even found a place in his language lessons as well as his geography ones (on one occasion at least he even attempted a bit of modern history) – became more detailed when she was with us, and the details did not always tally; it was as though with Liza in his audience he wanted to make the story a bit more interesting. Perhaps, I sometimes thought, he may deliberately lie a little. For example when he described to me his escape with his companions across the Pyrenees he told me – that I’m sure – how they lay in the dark listening to the noise of the boots made by the German patrol, but later when Liza was sitting with us he added a dramatic detail, telling how a stone was dislodged and fell from above and struck his ankle and to this day in damp weather the pain came back and he would find himself limping, something which I had never seen him do.

(2)

The beard did not last more than a week or two. One morning when I came down to breakfast I found the
Captain
was busy shaving it off. Perhaps because he was whistling at the same time he cut himself twice. ‘I never feel at home in this thing,’ he told me. ‘It always reminds me of those fuliginous days in the Pyrenees. No chance of shaving there. Anyway Liza doesn’t like it. She says she gets prickled.’

He turned around, razor in hand, to where Liza was making the tea and exhibited himself. ‘That’s the way you like it, Liza?’

‘I don’t like to see you bleeding.’

‘A little blood-letting does no one any harm.’ That was a phrase that I’m quite sure he used, for it remained in my head for years, though I have no idea why. They were also the last words I can remember him saying for some weeks, for he didn’t come in that day for supper, and the next morning he wasn’t there for breakfast.

‘Where’s the Captain?’ I asked.

‘How would I know?’ Liza said in a tone which, when I think of it now, comes back to me as almost a cry of despair.

‘But he said we were going to have another history lesson,’ I complained with the egotistic disappointment of my age, and, just as I feared, it was a religious lesson from Liza which took its place.

The religious lessons had been much less of a success with me. Of course at school with the Amalekites I had attended what my fellows called ‘Divvers’, but I was a bit vague about the events in the New Testament except for the birth at the inn (not the sort of inn I felt sure which served gin and tonics), the crucifixion and the resurrection. All these had impressed me like a fairy story with
an
unlikely happy ending. (I never really believed that Cinderella would marry the Prince.)

Liza had obeyed the Captain’s instruction and bought me a Bible at a second-hand bookshop, and I dipped into it now and then, but I found the old-fashioned language very difficult and the business of the Virgin birth confused me. One evening before she turned off the light over my sofa I asked Liza to explain it. ‘I always thought a virgin meant …’ But she interrupted me quickly and left me in darkness. I thought that perhaps she didn’t like talking about babies because she hadn’t succeeded in having one of her own and the word ‘virgin’ obviously embarrassed her too.

All the same – to please the Captain – she would ask me every Sunday to read a bit of the Bible out loud to her, but I soon discovered a way of escaping this routine by twice choosing passages which she couldn’t possibly explain. For this I dived into that part which was called the Old Testament and this except for the history of the Amalekites had played a very small part in Divvers.

I asked her first if the Bible was a holy book, and she said, ‘Of course it is.’ So I read her this: ‘And thou, Son of Man, take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber’s razor, and cause it to pass upon thy head and upon thy beard: then take the balances to weigh and divide the hair. Thou shalt burn with fire a third part in the midst of the city, and thou shalt take a third part and smite about it with a knife, and a third part thou shalt scatter in the wind. Thou shalt also take thereof a few in number and bind them in their skirts.’

I asked, ‘Do you think the Captain was doing all that
when
he cut himself shaving? Whose skirts …?’ But Liza was gone before I could finish my sentence.

The second time of reading aloud I had come on a really good passage. I said, ‘This is difficult. There are words I don’t understand. Will you help me?’ And I began to read.

‘And the Babylonians came to her in the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with some. So she discovered her whoredoms and discovered her nakedness. Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt.’ I probably mispronounced ‘whoredoms’, but anyway Liza left without explaining the words and she never asked me to read aloud again.

(3)

This time the Captain when he returned was again wearing a moustache, though in a different style and colour to the one I had known. It was in the late dusk when the code rang and we hardly had enough time to greet him before the bell began to ring again – imperiously. I had grown accustomed to think of any bell which rang as a form of code, and this one had a kind of familiarity, but one thing was certain: it couldn’t be the Captain for there he stood in the kitchen holding his breath as he listened. I had a good memory and at the third ring I felt pretty sure that its imperious sound indicated that my father stood outside.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘but I think it’s the Devil.’

‘Don’t open the door,’ Liza said.

‘No, let the bastard in,’ the Captain said. ‘We are not afraid of him.’

I was right. It was my father, and he was not alone. What was far worse, my aunt was with him.

‘So there you are,’ my aunt rapped out, ‘Victor,’ and I suppose I must have flinched at the hated and almost forgotten name.

I think my father noticed my fear. ‘I’m sorry, Jim,’ he said, and I gave him credit for remembering this time my change of name, ‘I had to bring her, for she’d have come anyway without me.’

‘Who’s this woman?’ my aunt demanded.

I had gained a little courage from my father. ‘Liza’s my mother,’ I said with defiance.

‘You are insulting the dear dead and departed.’ My aunt had always the strange habit on certain occasions of talking like the Book of Common Prayer. I suppose that it came from all her church going.

‘I do think,’ the Devil said, ‘that we should all sit down and discuss matters in a quiet and civilized way.’

‘Who’s that man and what’s he doing here?’

‘Haven’t you eyes?’ Liza spoke up at last. ‘He’s having a cup of tea. Is there anything wrong in that?’

‘What’s his name?’

‘The Captain,’ I said.

‘That’s not a name.’

‘It would really be much better, Muriel, if you sat down,’ my father said, and the Captain pulled up a chair and my aunt sat on the edge of it as though she feared her bottom might be infected by whichever of us had sat in it last.

‘She’s been employing a private detective,’ my father
told
us. ‘I don’t know how he got on the track. They are damned clever some of those fellows, and of course your neighbours probably talk.’

‘I know which one,’ Liza said.

‘She asked me to come with her. She said she was afraid of violence.’

‘Afraid?’ the Captain asked. ‘That one afraid?’

‘Kidnappers,’ my aunt spat out.

‘Now, now,’ the Devil said, ‘you are not at all just, Muriel. I told you it was a fair game and that he won.’