The Green Gauntlet (19 page)

Then he noticed his left hand. The brown leather glove was stained a bright crimson and the fingers seemed to have splayed out at all angles. He tried to lift it to have a closer look but it did not respond to the impulse, resting inertly on his knee, a red, shapeless blob. Even then he did not realise he was hit and bleeding for he felt no pain, not even numbness of the kind he had felt when a tiny fragment of flak penetrated his boot and wounded him in the foot during the El Alamein skirmishing.

The aircraft was now bucketing about the sky like a firecracker and he reached for the rubber bulb to release the hood preparatory to baling out but before he could do this he was off on a long, swooping descent, losing height in staggered drifts like one of those paper darts he and Stevie had flung about in the second form at school. He had time to think, incredulously, ‘Christ! I’ve bought it! A pooping bloody flak gun, mounted on a captured half-track made in Coventry …!’ and then the world exploded in a grinding, rending splutter but again he felt no pain and very little shock, just a sense of confusion and incredulity as what remained of the aircraft somersaulted into hillocks of soft, grey-brown sand.

The next thing he remembered was opening one eye and staring at the red ball of the sun just above the horizon and the temperature told him he was looking east. He was colder than he had ever been in his life, the cold sending feelers into his spine and under his ribs but he could see enough with one eye to realise that he was lying clear of the aircraft, now a ball of metal beflagged with ribbons of canvas and several yards nearer the sun. He wondered then at his presence here, marvelling that he could still think and reason for it occurred to him to wonder how violent had been the impact and also approximately where he was, behind or beyond the Mareth Line, or far south of it out in the Blue. He could remember very little of the incident over the oasis except that he had been knocked out of the sky by a flak gun mounted on British half-tracks, and this seemed to him a curious irony. In the days before he had been a flier he had spent his days contracting for scrap metal that went to make this kind of product.

The penetrating dawn chill worried him far more than his chances of survival so that when, out of his one eye, he saw a group of Arabs standing over him he grimaced and said, ‘Parky! Bloody parky, chum …!’ and one of the Arabs bent over him and he could smell the man’s sour body odour and note the curiosity in his brown eyes. They were approximately the same colour as Margaret’s eyes and a silly thought crossed his mind that the Welsh were a lost tribe of Israel and that this might account for the similarity. Then a spasm of pain gripped him, spreading upwards from his left side and spilling inwards from his shoulder so that the Arab was blotted out and the naked red ball of the sun was obliterated.

IV

I
t seemed to him seconds later when he opened his one eye again and this time he saw a man on a bed swathed in bandages looking exactly like a museum mummy. He studied the man a long time and slowly, very slowly, he came to equate his presence with a hospital and, by inference, could locate his own whereabouts inasmuch as he too was in bed and swathed in bandages. There were bandages all the way down his left arm and over most of his face and head. There was also a kind of frame enclosing the upper part of his body and the only movement he could make apart from opening and closing his right eye was to wiggle the toes of his feet. He thought, with tremendous relief, that he still had his feet, but he was by no means as certain that he had arms. Concentrating hard he thought he could sense a very faint tingling in other areas of his body but he could not be sure and the effort of concentration exhausted him so that he drifted away again, remembering no more until he found himself looking up into the sunburned face of an orderly who was trying to get him to drink something. He tried to co-operate for he was very thirsty indeed, the drops of lemonade or whatever it was striking his palate like spots of fat in a frying pan. He choked and the spasm set bells ringing in all areas of his body but after a moment or so their clamour subsided and he was able to ask the man where he was. The man, grinning in a faintly apologetic way, said ‘Tunis,’ and Andy knew by his accent that he was German. He thought, ‘Well blow me down, I’m in the bag!’ and he asked the orderly how long he had been lying there. The man told him, in heavily accented English, that he had been brought into Tunis more than a week ago by Arabs and that the war, for him as well as his patient, was over, for the Afrika Korps was pulling out and all hospital staff were under orders to remain. The man in the next bed, he said, was a Dornier pilot fished out of the bay but he would not live. His spine was broken.

Days and nights passed without any real awareness of time. The Dornier pilot must have died for he was wheeled out and another man took his place, and then he died and a third man was lowered on to the bed, and he did not seem to be so badly injured for he sat up and ate food and grinned toothily at Andy, confirming that the orderly was right and that the war in North Africa was almost over. He was an Italian from near Naples and spoke comic-opera English. ‘Mussolini no bloody good!’ he said, gaily, and drew his hand across his throat.

It was from this man that Andy learned something of his injuries, for the Italian watched his daily dressings. ‘Damn lucky,’ he said. ‘No hand, no more flying.’

At first Andy did not absorb the fact that his left hand had been amputated above the wrist and when he did it was as though all his other injuries were scratches of the kind one was likely to get blackberrying in the Coombe. It took him about a fortnight to come to terms with the fact that, from now on, he would have to live out the rest of his life with one hand and probably one of those claw-like contrivances he had seen when visiting men of his squadron in hospital at home. The prospect did not frighten him so much as disgust him and he could only accept it by forcing himself to contemplate what it would have been like if he had lost a leg or legs instead of half an arm. At that time he did not know much about the burns down the left side of his face and when the British took Tunis, and he could talk freely with the American medics, secondary shock enfolded him in a lassitude that was like a long trance. He ate and slept and exchanged a few words with the Italian in the next bed, but there was no continuity in his existence, the focal points of which were the hospital smell and the pain of having his wounds dressed.

He came out of this trance when he began his saline baths and it was then, looking into a hand mirror, that he saw his reflection and found it unrecognisable. The left side of his face was the colour of a Victoria plum, and his left eye had a permanent droop. He was so shocked that he asked the orderly to bring the surgeon to his bedside and was only partially reassured when the man said, with a mid-Western drawl, that his face would not stay the colour of a plum but would respond to plastic surgery so that the only disfigurement—if you could call it that—would be a waxiness of the flesh under his eye and round as far as his jaw. It would be stiff, the man said, and unresponsive to jokes, but it would not frighten kids in the street.

One day a blonde nurse came and asked him if he would like to dictate a letter to his wife. When he asked how she knew he was married she gave a humour-the-invalid smile and said they had his papers in the office and that in a day or so someone from his own unit would be calling. The mention of his squadron was his first real handhold back to the everyday world and he said he would get one of his friends to write a letter home. The girl seemed disappointed.

‘She’ll want to know how you’re going on,’ she protested. ‘Mail goes out of here for London twice a week. Just a note, maybe?’

What did one say in these circumstances? ‘Dear Margaret: I was shovelled up by a bunch of Arabs and am okay except that I’m short of a hand and my face is a fistful of plum jam! Look out for the one with the lobster claw when you meet the boat!’ Suddenly he turned sulky and the fixed smile of the blonde nurse irritated him so much that he could have wiped it off with a smack. He growled, ‘Scrub it, sister. I’ll wait for the lads to look me up.’

They looked him up a day or two later, Johnny Boxall and ‘Twitch’ Bannister, both of his squadron, the one with flaming red hair, the other with a slight tic resulting from a training crash in a Lockheed Hudson a long time ago. They seemed far more surprised to see him than he was to see them and Twitch said, ‘We’d written you off, Crad. Christ, you’re dead lucky. You not only pranged behind the Mareth Line but fifty miles south of Jerry’s right flank. It’s a bloody miracle! You must have got here by camel.’

They made light of his injuries and said the same things he would have said himself in the circumstances. ‘Thank God it wasn’t your leg … anyone can get around with one paw … plastic surgery on your mug will be an improvement …’ It was like conducting a conversation in nursery language. He found it only slightly less irritating than talking to the blonde nurse. They promised to write home on his behalf and he could imagine the cheery reassurance they would put into the letter and tried to forestall it by instructing them to contact his brother Stephen in Bomber Command, and describe exactly what had happened, leaving him to relay details to his wife and parents. Then they left, promising to return with gifts, and for the first time he realised that he was done with them and their kind for all time and that soon a new phase would begin for him, probably at Roehampton or some such place, learning how to operate a claw. Suddenly he rejected present and future in favour of the past, searching out moments of his life that he could pin down and contemplate like dead butterflies. Such moments, he discovered, were elusive. For so long now, ever since the balloon went up in 1939, he had been living in a world of machines and schoolboy prattle and his injuries not only prohibited re-entry into that world but definitely disqualified him for the life he had lived before the war with Stevie, Stevie’s hard-faced wife, and roly-poly Margaret with whom he identified most of his pleasanter memories.

He remembered another hospital, a long time ago, where he had lain after a car crash and Margaret, liveliest of the probationers, had come rustling into his ward with her sing-song repartee and half-hearted protests, sharing a cigarette with him by taking alternate puffs and fanning the air in anticipation of night sister’s rounds. Good days they had been, with laughter always near the surface, and Stevie, the old clot, making certain that that bloody Archdeacon’s daughter he had married had her corners rubbed off in their joint company. But now that era was as dead as squadron life on the airstrips, for outside the hospital time rolled on and there was already talk of leapfrogging the Med. and chasing Jerry up the boot of Italy.

Even when they came to measure him for his artificial hand he remained listless and moody, living mainly in the past and seeing no way of filling the vacuum of his immediate future. There was no pivot for his thoughts and this was how he came to listen to the chatter of patients around him, mainly Shawcrosse’s chatter, for Shawcrosse was the ward braggart, a tubby, sandy-haired gunner, who boasted that he would find a way of making his artificial leg show a profit in Civvy Street and skim the cream from the post-war property boom as soon as he got back to his North London estate agency.

Shawcrosse, Andy discovered, had spent some time in Canada and had absorbed some of the North American speech-idioms that he used rather self-consciously, like someone acting the role of a toughie in a second feature film. If you could overlook this Shawcrosse was original, lacking self-pity, without a trace of bitterness, getting by on a line of bluff that would have served him well in the pre-war scrap market. Andy discovered that he could admire him without liking him. He found his pseudo-frankness as impudent and engaging as the patter of an auctioneer selling tea-sets and five-pound-notes from a seaside stand. But the trained merchant in Andy saw a good deal more than bluff in Shawcrosse, recognising in him a ruthlessness and ingenuity and singlemindedness that would make him a hard man to beat in a battle of wits.

It was Shawcrosse’s boast that he would make his artificial leg show a profit that gave him access to Shawcrosse as an individual rather than a clown. ‘I’m going to do more than learn to walk on the bloody thing,’ he announced, the day they fitted him. ‘You’re going to show little Kenny Shawcrosse a thumping profit, aren’t you, my beauty?’ and he patted it.

‘As a professional beggar?’ Andy asked, and Shawcrosse looked at him seriously.

‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ he said, in a Cockney accent that had survived a temporary commission. ‘It’s a free advert everywhere I go.’

‘Don’t bank on it. After the war tin legs will be ten a penny.’

‘Yes they will,’ Shawcrosse answered, thoughtfully, ‘but there’s a right and a wrong way of exploiting them.’

‘And your way?’

‘I’m a house agent,’ Shawcrosse said, ‘and there’s going to be a God-Almighty scramble in my business when this lot’s over. But I’m the handicapped one. Handicapped but game, you follow? Half-a-dozen after the same building-plot but only one with a tin leg. It pongs! “That chap with one leg—we ought to give him a chance didn’t we, Giles? You notice the way he ploughed through that mud, struggling to keep up with us on the survey?” That’s my line from here on! I had a Rover before the war, a Rover and a bed-sit in Muswell Hill, old boy. Once I’ve got my ticket it’s a Mercedes, a country house and a suite at the Savoy when I’m not in the Carlton, Cannes. First I get backing—somehow, somewhere, even if I have to marry it. And then—whoosh. Into battle!’

Perhaps because he had always been amused by professional braggarts of whom there had been so many in the scrap trade, Andy egged him on so that soon he had a very clear picture of Shawcrosse riding the crosstides of post-war property development, where speculators who knew how to operate like bootleggers in the ’twenties would come into their inheritance within weeks of the blackout bonfire. The smartest of them, Shawcrosse said, were already moving in on a seller’s market, gambling against there being no more blitzes in and around London, but this was to stick one’s neck out. Hitler might still have an ace up his sleeve. The thing to do, providing one could lay one’s hand on capital of course, was to concentrate on land where post-war expansion was a certainty and where existing bricks and mortar were already scheduled for demolition. The market, he declared, would be virtually inexhaustible. Shawcrosse could wax almost lyrical on the population explosion that would be touched off by a million wartime marriages, prophesying that every single one of them, plus the results of another million fond reunions between couples separated by the war, meant a new semi-detached, a flatlet, or a three-bedroomed bungalow with all mod cons. He described successive rashes of new building in city, town and village with a kind of poetic frenzy that made Andy think how much his father would have detested Shawcrosse and his vulgar visions. He said, in an unguarded moment, ‘Suppose you had capital, twenty to thirty thousand of it? How and where would you begin?’