Complete Works of Nevil Shute, page 230
The brigadier said: “Their minds seem to run on fire. The priest at the railway station and your fisherman both talked of fire.”
“And the little waxen image of the commandant,” said the major. “That had its feet melted away — by fire.”
There was a little silence. The brigadier said: “Can you imagine anything behind this talk of fire?”
Charles shook his head. “I think it’s simply hate,” he said. “Burning and scorching are the most painful, the most horrible things that they could do to Germans, so their minds are running in that way. And in the background of their minds that thought of fire, subconscious, colours everything they do or say. I tell you, sir, they aren’t like ordinary chaps.”
The brigadier nodded. “That’s probably the truth of it. We’ll just have to leave it at that.”
I do not know a great deal about the next three months of Charles Simon’s life. He was commissioned almost immediately into the Royal Engineers as a first lieutenant, and shortly afterwards he was promoted to captain. He worked for a time at Chatham upon coast-defence projects, but the next thing I really know about his movements is that he was sent down to Dartmouth, at the beginning of May.
He had a job of work to supervise there on the foreshore, just outside the mouth of the harbour. What it was I do not know. It kept him down there for about a month, and for that time he lived in a billet half-way up the hill towards St. Petrox.
He was still slightly uneasy in his uniform, though desperately proud of it. He knew that he was foreign in his ways and he sought out the company of other officers to study them. Dartmouth at that time was stiff with officers, mostly young naval officers who came into town each evening from trawlers and M.L.s. The Royal Sovereign on the quay was the hotel they favoured most, and Simon was usually to be found in a remote corner of the bar, sipping a pint of heavy English beer, watching, and learning. He did not very often talk to anybody.
He was there after dinner one warm summer night, sitting in his usual corner. The bar was nearly empty and a little group of R.N.V.R. officers near him were chatting about their work. One of them came from a destroyer, fresh from a sweep over to the other side.
“Never saw a Jerry plane the whole time,” he said. “I don’t know what’s become of them.”
“Got them all over in the East,” somebody said. “He’s going to go for Russia.”
“Wouldn’t be such a fool.”
The first speaker said: “We went right close in shore, east of the Île Vierge. You could see the people working in the fields and everything. Broad daylight, it was.”
“See any Jerries?”
“Not a sausage.”
Somebody said: “Did the people you saw look downtrodden and oppressed beneath the Nazi heel, like it says in the Times?”
The first speaker took a drink of beer. “They looked just like any other people in the fields. I don’t believe the occupation means a thing to them. Not to the ordinary run of people in France.”
The Army captain in the corner stirred a little, but he did not speak.
“I don’t suppose it does,” another said. “I don’t suppose they know there’s a war on — any more than our farm labourers over here do.”
“Ours know it all right,” said another. “And how! Three quid a week I see they’re going to get.”
Somebody said: “It’ll be just the same over on the other side. Farm labourers always do well in a war. Win, lose, or draw — they get their cut all right.”
“So does everybody else. Look at the chaps in the aeroplane factories. They’re the ones that make this shortage of beer.”
The barmaid pushed half a dozen brimming tankards to them across the bar. One of the naval officers threw down a ten-shilling note, and harked back to the subject.
“I wish one knew what it was really like over there,” he said thoughtfully. “Tantalizing, just seeing it and coming away.”
Probably it was the beer; he had already had two pints. Charles Simon stood up suddenly. “I’ll tell you what it’s like upon the other side,” he said vehemently. “It is terrible, and horrible. You cannot know how terrible it is.”
They all turned to stare at him, a little startled at the queer choice of words and at the foreign accent, always more noticeable in moments of excitement.
One said: “I suppose it must be pretty bloody for them.” He thought the Army chap had had quite sufficient beer, and wanted to conciliate him.
Simon said: “Even so, you fellows do not understand. It is...simply foul. I will tell you.” He stood there before them, the dark hair falling down over his forehead, deadly serious and rather embarrassing to them. “In Douarnenez, in January of this year, only four months ago. Only just across the sea from here — a hundred and thirty miles, no more. There was a little boy of nine called Jules that used to pick up — what you call it? — droppings of the horse, and throw them at the German sentry in the night.” There were faint smiles all round, and somebody said: “Red hot!” Simon went on: “And they ran him through the body with a bayonet, but he did not die, and the priest who came by told them to fetch a doctor, but they would not. And in the night, in prison, the little boy, he died. And three days later they shot the priest also, because he would not keep quiet.”
In the bar, dim with cigarette smoke, the impact of this story left a silence. Somebody said: “Who told you that?”
“It is true,” said Charles. “I tell you — cross my heart. I was there only a month after. I heard everything.”
Another said curiously: “Are you French, sir?”
Charles said: “I am a British subject. But I have worked in France for many, many years — oh, the hell of a time. I was at school at Shrewsbury. And I tell you chaps, if you think that things go easily there, over on the other side in Brittany, you are making the hell of a mistake. It is not Vichy, that.”
They clustered round him. “Will you have a drink, sir?”
“Did you say that you were over there in February?”
He said: “Oh, thank you. Half a pint of beer.”
“Did you mean February of this year?”
Charles said: “My French tongue slipped away with me. What I said was true, you chaps, but we will now forget it. Excuse me, please....”
He stayed with them for half an hour, but resolutely refused to talk about the other side. He talked to them about the war in France, and about the French Army and the French Fleet, and enjoyed their evident pleasure in him as a mystery man. And then, feeling that he had drunk as much beer as he could carry satisfactorily, he left them and went out on to the quay.
There was still an hour and a half before dark, in the long daylight hours of war-time England. He strolled on idly beside the river, and presently turned to a step behind him. It was a lieutenant in the R.N.V.R., one of the officers who had listened to him in the bar.
This was a tall young man, not more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old, with red hair and the pale skin that goes with it, and a strained, puckered look about his face.
He said: “Look, sir. I want to have a word with you. I was in the pub just now, and I heard what you said about the other side. Do you mind if we have a chat some time?”
There was an urgency in his manner that compelled attention. Charles said: “Right-oh. I do not think that I can talk very much myself, you understand. But if you wish to talk to me, I am entirely at your service.”
They turned and strolled along together. “I want to say first that I know what you said is true,” said the young man. “The Germans do that sort of thing. They do it for a policy, because they think it makes people afraid. And if we mean to win this war we must do horrible, beastly things to them. Torturing things, like they have done to us.”
Charles glanced at the strained face of the young man beside him, interested. He had not heard that sort of talk since he had come from France.
“So...” he said quietly.
“There’s a thing going on down here,” the young man said in a low tone, “that one or two of us are trying to work up. But we’ve never been able to find anyone who could tell us what things are like on the other side. If we let you in on what we want to do, will you keep it under your hat?”
“Of course. And I will give what help I can. But there are matters that I cannot talk about, you understand.”
The naval officer hesitated. “Look,” he said. “It won’t take more than half an hour. I want you to come across the river with me and see a boat. Would you do that? And then we can talk over there, where it’s quiet.”
They went down to the ferry close at hand. As they were crossing the young man said: “My name is Boden, sir — Oliver Boden. I’m in a trawler here.”
3
OLIVER BODEN WAS the son of a wool-spinner in Bradford. George Boden, his father, was well known in the West Riding as a very warm man and the firm that he founded in his youth, Boden and Chalmers, as a very warm firm. Henry Chalmers was, of course, the young man’s godfather.
The two partners, in fact, exchanged the function of godfather fairly frequently; George Boden having two girls and three boys and Henry Chalmers having three girls and one boy. The Chalmers lived in a large greystone house in Ilkley and the Bodens lived in a large greystone house in Burley-in-Wharfedale. The Chalmers, having mostly girls, had a hard tennis-court and the Bodens, having mostly boys, had a river running through their garden. Each of the partners took five thousand a year out of the business as a matter of course, and each lamented the disastrous state of the wool trade.
They were very happy people.
The partners used to stop on the way home sometimes, and drink a couple of pints of beer at a roadside pub, while their expensive motor-cars grew cold outside. It was at these times of relaxation that they swapped stories about newly-married couples, did their football pools, and talked about the education of their children. They were quite agreed about the boys. Boys had to work; there must be no nonsense about educating them. None of the Eton and Harrow stuff for the young Bodens or the young Chalmers. The boys would have to work in Bradford all their lives; it would only unsettle them to put ideas into their heads. Chalmers favoured Leeds High School for his sons and Boden favoured Bradford Grammar School, but they agreed that there was not much in it.
About the girls they were completely at sea. Each of them felt, inarticulately, that only the very best was good enough for the girls, but what the best was they were not quite sure. Henry Chalmers, turning in his perplexity to the guidance that had never failed him, came to the conclusion that since the best goods cost most money, Crowdean School near Lympne, on the south coast of England, must be the best school in the country for girls. He sent all three of them there. They came out four years later polished till they shone, but thanks to the sturdy simplicity of their parents, quite unspoilt.
Boden, yielding in his perplexity to the opinions of his wife, sent his two to an academy for young ladies in Harrogate. Then, at the age of sixteen, he sent them to a finishing school at Lausanne in Switzerland, for two years. He spent the next ten years kicking himself for a mug.
Oliver Boden, the second son, was born in 1916. He started working in the business in the autumn of 1934 when he was eighteen years old; to console him for the loss of liberty he was given a Norton motor-bicycle, capable of an incredible speed. The first day he had it he rushed round on it to show it to Marjorie Chalmers, then fifteen years old and home on holiday from Crowdean. He always wanted to show things to Marjorie. She went off on the back of it with him far up into the hills, to Malham Tarn among the bleak crags and the moorlands. It was a fine, exciting day. They were late home for tea.
During the years that followed he showed Marjorie a twelve-bore shot-gun, a Harley Davidson motor-bicycle, a trout fly-rod, a Jantzen swimming-suit, a Brough Superior motor-bicycle, the inside of the Piccadilly Hotel in London, a Morgan three-wheeler, most of the dance-halls in Yorkshire, and how not to fly an aeroplane. He showed her everything he got as soon as he got it, and she was always interested. The parents looked on with amused resignation. It was quite obvious to everybody what was going to happen, and most satisfactory. The wool trade was built up on unions like that.
It was in 1936, I imagine, that he took to racing outboard motor-boats. He had a little thing more like a tea-tray than a boat that the two of them could just squeeze into, with a very large racing engine pivoted on the stern. To get it moving Boden used to open out the engine full and then stand up and rock it up on to the step, while Marjorie lay out upon the curved deck of the bow to bring the weight forward. Then it got going and they grabbed the steering-wheel, slipped back on to the thwart, and went flying down the river to the first turning-point. They raced a good deal, that summer. Frequently they upset at a turn and had to swim ashore; each time that happened the engine took a long drink of cold water at six thousand revs and had to be rebuilt. They thought it was tremendous fun.
Islanders have curious traits in them that break out in the oddest places. Neither the Bodens nor the Chalmers ever had much truck with the sea; for generations they had lived and worked in the West Riding. But presently it came to Oliver and Marjorie that there were more amusing ways of playing with the water than just flying over it upon a skimming-dish before a racing engine. Somewhere or other they saw a fourteen-foot International sailing dinghy, a beautiful, neat, delicate little thing, and longed for it with all their souls. The skimming-dish went on to the scrap-heap; in 1937 Boden got his dinghy and learned to sail it, more or less, before Marjorie came home for the holidays. It was another thing for him to show her, that, and a new electric razor.
Racing the dinghy took them to the tideway, and they began to learn something about mud and moorings and gum-boots. And presently, one day in September, they were staring thoughtfully at a two-and-a-half-ton sloop, a little yacht in miniature. She was Bermudian-rigged and had a little engine and a little cabin with a little galley, and berths for two. She was not much bigger than the dinghy, really.
“You could go anywhere in her,” Oliver said thoughtfully. “I mean, you could sail her round to Bridlington or Scarborough.”
Marjorie said: “Do you think one’d be sick?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind trying. You’d have to have charts and things.”
“And a sextant,” said Marjorie. “That’s what they have in books.”
They crawled all over it, opening all the lockers, examining the warp and anchor, enormous to their eyes. They were enchanted with the little boat. “It would be good fun to have a thing like this,” said Oliver. “Fancy anchoring off somewhere for the night, and getting up and cooking breakfast in the morning!”
“All very well for you to talk like that,” said his young woman. “I’d never hear the last of it from Mummy.”
They stared at each other in consternation. Both of them realized that they were up against a major difficulty. They always had done things together in the holidays, ever since they could remember. One day, they both knew, it was extremely probable that they would marry, but that time was not yet. It seemed such a soft, unenterprising thing to do to go and marry the kid next door, just because you’d known each other all your lives.
“We could get over that one somehow,” said Boden unconvincingly. “Anyway, there’s an awful lot of day sailing we could do.”
The International dinghy went, and by the Christmas holidays he had his little yacht. She was all new and shining, with stiff white sheets and halliards, and tanned sails. She was laid up that holiday, but they had fun with her all the same. They called her Sea Breeze, a name which they considered was original, and were only slightly dashed when someone showed them seven others in Lloyd’s Register. They bought charts of the Humber and the Yorkshire coast, and binnacles, and patent logs, and signal flags, and a foghorn, and distress flares, and all the books that they could find in Yorkshire dealing with yacht cruising. They had a fine time that holiday, quite as good as if they had been sailing.
Sea Breeze was laid up at Hornsea, rather more than eighty miles from Ilkley. If anything, that made her more attractive still. Two or three days each week — the firm was generous to young Oliver Boden during the school holidays — he would get up at half-past six and drive over to Ilkley. A sleepy maid would let him into the big greystone house, and Marjorie would come down and they would drink a cup of tea. And then they would start off. He had a little Aston Martin at that time, a two-seater very low upon the ground and capable of a high speed, pretty with French blue paint and chromium plate. In the half-light they would set off with a thunderous exhaust and step on it to York, where they used to stop for breakfast at the Station Hotel. Then on to Hornsea, to paddle about in gum-boots all the day, painting and varnishing and doing minor carpentry. They would have tea in Hornsea and be back in Ilkley by seven o’clock, in time to change their clothes and join a party to go dancing at the Majestic in Leeds. They were never tired.
The Easter holidays came round, and the fitting-out season, and the spring. They got Sea Breeze afloat before Easter, and for a week the firm saw nothing of young Oliver. He was over at Hornsea every day, ecstatic at his new possession, and every day Marjorie went with him, because there was always something new that he wanted to show her. And if he wanted to show her something, she just had to go. It always had been like that, ever since they could remember.
But there were complications now.
It occurred to Oliver Boden that his Marjorie had changed, disturbingly. All his life he had taken her for granted: she was just Marjorie, somebody that he might marry one day if he couldn’t find anybody more exciting and if she didn’t marry someone else. He could hardly have described her, unless to say that she had short brown hair and danced quite well. He knew she smoked De Reszke minor cigarettes, because that was what he paid her when he lost bets with her, and he knew that she liked ices, but that was all he really knew about her tastes.
