One More River, page 13
Saved from all this by the onset of migraine headaches John found himself grounded, downgraded, regrouped, whatever all that might mean (‘Some clerk in Innsworth’), posted to Transport Command and sent to administrative duties, whatever that … in Germany. He remembered standing clueless in a hangar at Lyneham while a horrible corporal left dirty fingerprints on a mass of paper. Other sufferers had their arse posted to Istres, Fayid, Castel Benito. “Not you, wrong bloody plane, other there then.”
“You for Germany? Arnsburg—where the fuck is that then?”
Nobody had ever heard of it. John would wonder, often, about that clerk at Innsworth who had been told to find a junior officer for administration in Arnsburg and had picked on ‘Charles, J.’ presumably with his eyes shut. He could just as easily have gone to Castelbloodybenito, which was somewhere near Tripoli.
There were a lot of these little ex-Luftwaffe flying fields which had guarded the eastern flank of the Ruhrgebiet. Some were virtually in the city, others crammed into a bit of flat land between hills. Some were closed with a perfunctory bulldozer, bit of barbed wire, or marked ‘Unserviceable’; others held mysterious little units on guard duty over obscure ‘stores’. Several different Commands were involved. The Squadron was up north of Werl but a lot of ancillary junk was scattered about and here in a loop of the Ruhr were we, supposed to be holding it all together. Around here there had always been big houses. Rich industrialists had built, on the hillsides for the view, vied with each other for the length of the bar. Vulgar villas with swimming pools, a few fine old houses. A lot we cared, confiscating anything delectable we wanted.
This one had come with-the-rations, being a former Jewish property; the Mess in a pretty mansion, other ranks in huts in the pretty park, its trees and grass scored and scarred by careless airmen. In the house lived some thirty officers, sometimes more, in transit to somewhere else, and in the huts perhaps sixty ‘erks’; maybe a hundred, and all of it a ramshackle bunch. Lying here in this bed, John found his memories of this world assembling into astonishingly vivid fragments. Minute sketches, which in a writer’s mind will dissolve and reform into minor—absurd—characters. Like Len in the guardroom, probably the most unsuitable candidate for the Military Police ever yet thought of. Tall, very fair, broad, blue-eyed and blank, his snowdrop helmet sacramental on the spotless table, his benevolence could not be hidden by an expression of permanent harassment, and he spent most of the day in his underpants ironing the crease in his trousers, his blancoed belt and gaiters put to dry on the windowsill.
Flight-Sergeant Lafferty—everything that poor Lenny was not. He never seemed to do anything, but knew to a hair’s breadth and at any moment what everybody else was doing. He belonged, one must suppose, in the Orderly Room but was to be found in anyone else’s office and generally the Commanding Officer’s, filing and polishing his very clean fingernails. His battledress was threadbare, with a chestful of improbable medals from Aden or Afghanistan. His looks were saturnine, satanic. Rumour clung to him; that in reality he was high in Field Intelligence; that he was the unquestioned king of the black market; that he held blackmail material over the Air Officer Commanding. His visible power was over all leaves and permissions (of immense complexity, including illicit weekends at ‘Home’). His sad sneering face seemed to keep the worst sarcasms for himself, perhaps while looking at those intolerably knowing eyes in a mirror while brushing his teeth. A quiet, hoarse voice, like a rasp on soft wood, in which to be, one has to say, extremely funny. Veiled contempt was often kept for—
Mr Morley, the Station Warrant Officer, a figure of fun with an astonishing music-hall accent. ‘Old Joe’s on the fiddle, ey? I’ll ‘ave ‘im, I knows all the fiddles, I been ‘ospital cook in ‘Alton, twenty year.’ Joe was the other Warrant rank, the Catering Officer, a bear-like, soft-walking (his feet hurt) man who was of course on the fiddle; everybody in Catering always was. Food (we ate lavishly and well) was distributed to outlying units in a complicated bureaucratic manner from Squadron (Joe went daily, with a three-tonner) which must have helped keep his turpitudes out of the claws of Lafferty. Joe liked to distribute small bribes to the deserving. ‘ ‘Ere’s yer rations, chum,’ producing a banana from the stomach of his blouse. Accompanying, as Orderly Officer, a CO’s inspection, John was charmed when the old gentleman raised his eyes from a well-scrubbed tiled kitchen floor to complain about cobwebs on the ceiling (the hot summer of 1947). ‘Well, sir,’ said Joe, ‘they ‘elps to keep the flies down, that’s undeniable.’
You must recall that HM Forces had too much of everything, while in the early days at least, the German population had nothing. Soap, blankets, cigarettes or shoe polish vanished at a glimpse, and first and foremost food, since one bought a girl for a tin of Carnation Milk. The cooks were a law to themselves; their ‘billet’ gleamed with floor polish and was decorated with flowers lifted from the local cemetery—the Rheinland Catholics do not fail in devotion to their dead. Corporal Boswell, shortly to be Sergeant, i.c. Airmen’s Mess, was one of the splendid old queens frequent in the regular Army who refer to everyone as ‘She’. Catching sight of John one evening when ‘out drinking’ in Arnsburg, in the company of Barbara, Boswell exclaimed audibly, ‘Ow, will you just look at that. Diamond Lil, out with a woman!’
Why have I gone into so much detail? This life of a very green and very junior officer in the Occupying Forces during the immediate post-war years was neither interesting nor exciting. Going this far is to illustrate, and bring in to relief, two essential points. The second, and the real one, is the close and complicated relation of John with Germany, and the Germans. To make this the more understandable, some further light needs to be shed upon the first: the establishment described, while perhaps unusually eccentric, was not untypical either of those odd, forgotten days. To make this clear, just a couple more anecdotes will be brought out.
A Pilot Officer is of course a worm. Tucking in, the first night in a room with Flying Officer Bridgeman, morose soul a year senior to himself, John remarked, “They’ve given me a fellow called Hammond as Batman; d’you know him at all?”
“He isn’t a batman, so you can save your half-crowns. He’s a GD; they all are, here.” The Aircraftman-General-Duties was, I suppose is, the lowest form of RAF life: to this encampment had drifted much of the lees of the wine. A few over-senior bods who knew their job but sought the quiet life; like Boswell (who once a fortnight made the most marvellous yeast-risen currant buns) or LAC Harvey of the Motor Transport, whose promotion had been blocked by a stiff dose of the Syph in India, which lent him much prestige.
The Officer’s Mess was on similar lines, and the little greeny did well to keep quiet there, and never be heard. In the great demobilisation panic a lot of old, very senior, but tarnished wartime heroes, downgraded medically, often burned or crippled, had been held back to form the ‘cadre’ for a new generation. People disappeared, were never seen again, like the officer encountered by the MöhneSee; ‘in transit’ no doubt. John’s own Commander was just such another and as silvered, as DSC’d and DFC’d, the disillusionment less openly spoken. But in the Mess of an evening—hard drinkers, these veterans, a dozen looking older than their years, wearing Pilots, Navigators, Engineers wings and rows of medals, one did not forget that they had flown the furthest, the most dangerous raids, nor that ghosts walked in their company. After much whisky they would remember their boyhood, break into ironic song.
‘We’re marching Against England—England by the Sea’ and a drumming boot and fist chorus of ‘Sieg—Heil—Sieg—Heil’. A drink or two more and one noticed that shame was what they all felt most There were better ways of serving the King than to turn historic towns into heaps of rubble. An evil precedent set by an enemy does not cease to be evil when copied and multiplied. Nor, as we all knew by then, had depriving thousands of food and shelter lessened an industrial capacity to wage war.
Of course there were dissenters, the Do-it-again-Tomorrow ones, prominently a fat squadron-leader who had commanded parachute-folding, some said shoe polish. Voluble one evening in adumbration of spacious days: the CO, morose over his drink, stirred.
“Shut up, Broadbent, we know that all you ever did was fill in bomb craters.” A crushing silence and John saw the barman and the waiter, both hard boys from Glasgow, exchange winks.
“You didn’t talk like that on the apron at Tangmere,” said the fatman, hotly.
John remembered idiotic passages in his training—the R/T procedure, the hunting-horn jargon of Fighter Command in 1940. ‘Flash your Weapon’—’My weapon is bent’—the cheerful obscenities. Momentarily one saw the tired old man, grey-skinned, the fine eyes now red-veined, again the dashing young flier, silk scarf and hair needing cutting.
“About that fifteen-hundredweight which Harvey says is u/s—” said the Adjutant tactfully.
Why, even the Air Officer Commanding—a figure surrounded by myth; it was said that he kept a personal Spitfire for ‘going home in the afternoons’ and that he had swapped it for a Messerschmitt saying ‘it’s the better plane’ … there was even a story of three scruffy airmen ‘skiving off’ in duty hours to an out-of-bounds pub beyond the outer marker, there joined by a polite man in neat civilian clothes who had enquired amicably what they were doing ‘this far from home’.
“Said to be an AOC’s inspection,” rejoined Fitter LAC Burroughs, more generally known as ‘Letch’.
“Funny, that I should know nothing about that. You see, I’m the AOC.” Doubt had been cast upon this tale, but it was agreed to be in character.
John was often reminded of the nervous little man in Dickens, with the straight-backed military wife, saying, ‘Discipline must be Maintained.’ This task devolved mostly upon Corporal Phillips, i.c. Abbalutions, fond of saying, ‘I peg you, mate,’ when putting them on a charge, so that there might be people on jankers, an occasion for Lenny to become Corporal Buttonstick and show zeal.
John remained as unseen as was humanly possible; jankers-wallahs (odd, how much of the old ‘India’ vocabulary persisted: char, and a shufti at the bints) were supposed to be paraded by Len and inspected by the Orderly Officer—not when this was him.
In all circumstances he kept very quiet about the Secret. One should remember that he was only twenty in 1947. Robert, his father, had married a German woman. He was Magda’s son also …
This state of affairs had not lasted long. It was agreed among the family, shocked about ‘the Boche woman’ that this was an eccentricity of Robert’s or perhaps a moment-of-weakness. The child knew very little about it. Things had been hushed up; matters had been arranged, lawyers called into play. Later, at boarding school, one never spoke in any case of family. The boy was sensitive, knew perhaps better than to be curious. By 1939 the German woman had been obliterated for eight years; the boy barely knew who his mother had been, not at all what had become of her: very vaguely, that she’d ‘gone back where she belonged’. During the war, and by then the less said or thought the better, Robert had himself died: there were, scarce seen, trustees. Truthfully, John had never thought about it at all seriously. Finding himself now an English boy, and under orders—one really did not think of oneself as holding the King’s Commission; one was just another dogsbody, shovelled off like hundreds more to do a thoroughly unwanted stint in the Occupation Forces, and what was the point of that? This fucking war is now supposed to be over. We’re getting told a lot of crap about the Russians. John had been sent here, instead of to Istres (down somewhere near Marseille) or that stinking Canal Zone (permanganate in the vegetables; Wogs and Fucking-Fayid) and really one knew nothing about Germans. What senior officers thought and said—but they had a right to say what they pleased; they had fought this people and felt respect for it and they did not talk about ‘Boches’.
But now—one was beginning to find out. One is ‘half-boche’, but it doesn’t show and nobody knows about it, and one isn’t going to mention it, either.
Dogsbody John got dogsbody chores. These were never clearly defined; Flight-Lieutenant Marshall was utterly uninterested. John’s days were spent picking up dropped stitches; motor-transport one moment, censorship the next nothing was explained and he had to learn never to complain. One wasn’t here to do or die but merely to be shat upon. Medically downgraded, too—boy, you could be fucked about much worse, and the essential is to be on good, flexible, humble terms with Flight-Sergeant Lafferty, who holds your weekend pass, the 36, the 48, in the hollow of his hand, not to speak of leave and maybe a place in a plane that will be landing on Hornchurch this afternoon—even squadron-leaders grovelled for that one.
These duties had quite often much to do with Germans. If, unofficially, Germans are there to be shat on or conciliated as the case might be, the official line was to be polite, co-operative, paternal, even rather kindly. Nato began to be talked about, and in broadminded circles the notion began even to be adumbrated that eventually one might find oneself welcoming uh, a bulwark, a sort of buffer, against the dread Bolshies: Transport Command is said to be taking Berlin very seriously. The talk about air-lifting did not much affect these potty little units in the Rhineland, but the name of Adenauer was trickling down. Hereabouts they were Catholic, y’know, not ever very nazi, and getting the Germans back into the way of municipal administration is a Good Thing.
So that meeting Gunther was a great help: here was a thread-of-Ariadne, all right.
He was in the little office he shared with Mr Marshall; shared, that is, when Mr Marshall whose assistant he was termed was there, which wasn’t often. Lafferty came strolling in; he never knocked or anything; hands in his pockets as usual.
“Mr Charles. Top of the morning to you.” If he ever did say Sir it sounded like an insult. “I’ve a Brownie on the telephone, not Brigade I fancy.” Air Force word for the Army, in exchange for ‘Blueboys’. “Asking for your kind master, would you like to take that?”
“Have it put through here if you would, Flight Sergeant.” Clearing his throat, to get his voice deeper. “Admin here, P/O Charles. Mr Marshall’s away just now.”
“Good Morning.” A high voice, not though a twitter. “Maitland at Traffic Control. It’s about that bridge at Wicked.”
“Yes, I know about it. Been marked unsafe for ages.” Our way of saying Wickede; the village of Neheim was always known as Knee-high, but that could be said of almost anywhere.
“Well, I’ve been on at Group for ages. You’re really more concerned than we are.”
“Everybody complains about having to make the détour.” Tactful.
“I told your sergeant—”
“Not mine, thank God,” hoping Lafferty was listening.
“Thing is, Brigade tells me that the REs have agreed to fix it. But as you know the Germans—yes, quite. I was thinking, there’s a German fellow who is helpful in this sort of affair. It’s a Mr Mahback, and he’s to be found over your way, I thought it might be tactful if you had a word, donchaknow.”
“Obliged to you, Mr Maitland, and wilco. I’ll lay that on.”
“Okay old chap, roger and thank you.”
Herr Marbach was indeed to be found, and rarity, where he said, in a patched-up office where paperwork and rubber stamps were beginning to function. Thumb-tacks in evidence, with a lot of German Nomenclature of that complex structure John could make little of; what did ‘Standesamt’ mean? ‘Secrétaire à la Mairie’ probably covered it, but the man had a broad honest face, a good smile, and spoke a slow but clear and grammatical English: plainly a man of education as well as the intelligence and character hinted at.
“Please don’t get up. That’s a good fire you have there and I’m glad to see it.” A stove rigged, and a pile of sawed pine logs; half-dry, but with the damper open … “Charles,” holding his hand out. One had learned that the Germans waited for one to do this.
In quite a few days he came to rely upon Mr Marbach for a remarkably varied number of the knotty little whatnots. John had also learned a good deal about him. And at his request was calling him Gunther. It was something like a friendship, without familiarity or condescension. I was a silly young boy, timid and awkward, standing-on-my-dignity when I didn’t know what to do, which was nearly always. We had little enough to do with Squadron, which was twenty miles off and the whole point of the ‘satellite’ was that we got the chores they didn’t want to be bothered with. They had a flying-field; runways and hangars, a tower, planes to repair and maintain. If I did have occasion to go over there (which was seldom) I acquired some slight reputation for ‘getting on well with the Huns’. ‘Tail-end Charlie knows a bod.’ Gunther was my secret weapon. His thorough knowledge of municipal administration, of what were the beginnings of local government, his experience with bureaucracy, his knowing everyone in the region—and he was always patient, a quiet listener, just paternal enough. He did it well. No doubt my ignorance and naïvete served him, too. I gained in confidence. I even became fairly competent at my work. It was his suggestion that I should learn German.
Less than a year later John had become ‘the local authority’ on all things German. Things had changed. Only a week before—”Nobody ever gets posted out of a dump like this,” said F/O Bridgman resentfully. “I’ve done everything but kiss Lafferty’s behind.” And now he was gone, and Lafferty too. And even Joe, his devious and complex system of peculation impenetrable to the last. The ‘old men’ were long gone: there were few survivors among the veterans. Sergeant Smyth still played the piano in pubs for the ‘demob parties’ when the good-old-days were drunkenly yearned over, and the old songs brimmed with sentiment.
Oh Salome, Oh you should See Salome
Standing there, with her tits all bare
Every little wiggle makes the boys all stare …
