Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (3 page)

‘Get the boys,’ PT ordered, squelching past with the gasping man’s arm draped around his back.

Rosie was shattered and found it tough to stay upright. She lacked blood in her head and had mud past her ankles, but the boys were only up to her waist and the smallest was stuck fast and bawling for his mum.

‘Come on, mate,’ Rosie said, forcing a friendly tone as she grabbed the youngest. His sodden pyjamas and hopeful blue eyes gave her purpose as slippery fingers locked around her neck.

The older boy spoke in English as she hauled him towards dry land. ‘Have you seen my mummy?’

‘There are lots of beaches,’ Rosie answered, as mud squirted up between her toes. She considered explaining how the currents would make people come ashore in different places, but she was breathless and doubted he’d understand. ‘You’ll find her in the morning,’ she answered finally.

‘She can’t swim though,’ the boy said urgently. ‘She might die.’

Rosie was struggling, but PT had an even harder time with their father, who was much heavier than PT and suffering with asthma. Eventually two men in fishing waders stretchered him across an old door, enabling PT to carry the older boy for the final stretch to the river bank.

Local men snatched the boys and guided them up a slippery ramp used to launch boats when the tide was in. The little three year old squealed and demanded to stay with Rosie, but she hadn’t the energy to comfort him and found herself being pulled up the ramp by the leathery hands of an old fisherman.

People in towns had become numb to refugees and suffering, but the victims were lucky enough to wash up near a community of farmers and fishermen. It was their first taste of war, beyond the rumble of bombs hitting the port several kilometres east.
Cardiff Bay

As a nurse attended the asthmatic father, PT and Rosie followed muddy footprints to a vaulted warehouse where trawlermen stored equipment and gutted their catch before taking it to market in Bordeaux.

The building stank of fish guts trapped in the open drains and the hosed water was bitter cold. Once the worst of the mud was gone, Rosie and PT sat outside by a hurriedly built fire. Local women rushed between their homes and the quayside bringing coffee, towels and blankets.

Rosie sat in the gravel by the fire, with her life jacket as a seat. She was very conscious of everything showing through a wet summer dress. She caught her breath while an enamel mug warmed fingers that stung with numbness. PT squatted alongside and their bodies touched through wet clothes. Circumstances were desperate and Rosie craved this intimacy, even though they were strangers.

‘Can I take your names?’ a man asked from behind. The well-fed priest had pin-prick eyes behind thick glasses. He licked the tip of his pencil before impatiently drumming it on his spiral-bound notebook.

‘That’s my business,’ PT said peevishly.

Priests expected deference, and Rosie was both shocked and impressed by PT’s lack of respect. The priest raised one eyebrow before explaining impatiently.

‘I’m taking all the names and where you come from. People are coming ashore at spots all along the river and on the opposite bank too. We’re listing names and telephoning from the parochial houses so that people can find one another.’

‘There’s nobody gonna be looking for my name,’ PT growled. ‘But thanks all the same.’

Rosie had no idea why PT was keen to hide his identity, but the Gestapo were after Henderson, Paul, Marc and herself so she didn’t want her name on any lists either. The trouble was, she wanted Paul to be able to find her and had to think fast.

‘Valentine Favre,’ Rosie said. ‘Thirteen years old.’

If Paul saw the list he’d surely recognise his sister’s age and late mother’s maiden name and work out what she’d done. The Nazis would be unlikely to make the same connection.

‘Were your parents aboard?’ the priest asked, as he looked down his list for any other Favres.

‘Just my kid brother, Michael,’ she said, giving Paul’s second name. ‘He’s eleven.’

As the priest headed away a stooped Englishwoman queuing for coffee tapped Rosie on the back. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, her voice barely more than a croak. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. I was on a lifeboat and we pulled a boy aboard. Ten or eleven. He looked somewhat like you, but rather slimmer.’

‘That’s him!’ Rosie smiled, bouncing up so fast that she splashed hot coffee over PT. ‘Where was this? Did he seem OK?’

The woman sucked her lips into her mouth, and Rosie near burst with anxiety as she realised it was going to be bad news. ‘He looked poorly,’ the woman said. ‘He was bloody. After coming aboard he vomited and passed out.’

It wasn’t a perfect answer, but not Rosie’s worst fear either.

‘But he’s alive?’ she said hopefully. ‘Do you know where he is?’

‘We landed on the embankment on the other side of the harbour. If you walk back behind the warehouse and past the shop on the corner, there’s a slipway heading down to the water.’

Rosie glanced down at PT, unsure about the depth of their bond. ‘Are you coming with me?’

‘I’ve no idea if he’s still there,’ the elderly woman interrupted, before PT got a chance to answer. ‘They might have taken him to a doctor or something by now.’

Rosie had been re-energised by hope. She stepped around the bodies by the fire and followed directions, belting behind the warehouse and turning by the shop.

She found her bare soles slapping on a stone path, the Garonne on one side and a windswept field on the other. The path led down to an embankment – much smaller than the one where she’d washed up across the harbour – and a jetty used for fishing. Another barefoot runner closed in. She glanced back and was pleased to recognise PT, but didn’t slow down until she reached a group of local women holding candles over a body writhing on the ground.

Rosie feared the worst, but there was a horrific moan that clearly came from a woman. As she closed up Rosie saw that she was pregnant, clutching her swollen belly and with blood streaked down her thighs.

‘Is that the doctor?’ a local woman shouted desperately, as Rosie came to a breathless stop.

She didn’t need to answer, because by this time PT was in plain sight and clearly too young.

‘I can see you’re busy,’ Rosie gasped apologetically. ‘But I think my brother came up here on a lifeboat. Skinny kid, eleven years old. Someone told me he was passed out.’

The pregnant woman screamed again as a bloody finger showed Rosie the way.

‘On the jetty. A man named Gaston is looking after him.’

PT ran on ahead. The stone path ended and he jumped off a ledge into a splash of lapping water, with silt underfoot and two empty lifeboats bobbing a few metres offshore.

‘Mind your step,’ PT warned, as his hand traced the crumbling sea wall leading to the jetty. ‘I don’t know how deep this gets.’

The water stayed below their knees and the only danger came on the slippery steps leading up the side of the fishing jetty.

‘Paul!’ Rosie shouted with joy, as she reached the wooden decking and sighted her brother sat against a rotten post at the base of the jetty.

Gaston was a skinny old man who’d been giving Paul sips of water. Rosie hurried across, but she went stiff when she got close enough to see details.

Paul’s left eye was open, but the right was swollen over. A vortex had sucked him deep underwater as the went down. When his life vest pulled him back to the surface he’d smashed into razor-sharp barnacles on a section of the ship’s hull.
Cardiff Bay

He’d been lucky enough not to get dragged down under the metal, but the barnacles left cuts that started on his right cheek then stopped around his chin. Shallower wounds began in the middle of his chest and ran down to his bellybutton. The lower portion of his right arm was set at a twisted angle and clearly broken.

Shock and a badly swollen cheek left Paul’s face expressionless, but he raised the fingers of his left hand and quietly mouthed, ‘
Rosie
.’

‘Are you the sister?’ Gaston asked.

Rosie nodded. ‘Is anyone on the way? A nurse? A doctor?’

‘There is only me. I worked in an army hospital during the last war,’ Gaston explained. ‘I have a few supplies at my house. I can clean his cuts and set his arm, but my back is bad, I can’t carry him.’

The normal thing would be to telephone for an ambulance or find the local doctor, but with German bombings, millions of refugees and many medical staff having fled further south, Rosie realised that the frail army medic was Paul’s best chance.

‘What about that woman down there?’ PT asked. ‘She’s miscarrying. Judging by the blood, she could die.’

Gaston nodded ruefully. ‘Wounds and broken bones I’ve dealt with. What do I know of a woman’s problems?’

Rosie looked back at PT, slightly irritated. She wanted her brother attended to, even if the woman’s plight more threatening. ‘Can you lift him?’ she asked.
was

Paul made a dull groan as PT scooped him up off the wooden jetty. Gaston moved as fast as old legs allowed, leading the way through an overgrown field to a line of sagging cottages.

Paul was laid out on a dining table while Gaston’s wife boiled water and found an old medic’s pouch filled with yellowing bandages and dried-out creams that apparently dated from the last war. Rosie tucked a cushion under her brother’s head and stroked his hand, calming his nerves and telling him that everything would be OK.

Others in the area knew Gaston had been a medic. Half a dozen injured passengers had reached the village and people began knocking at the front door asking for advice. Near eighty years old and deaf in one ear, the old man quickly grew stressed.

‘I’m just one man,’ Gaston shouted to his wife. ‘Tell them when the boy is done I’ll look at someone else.’

The elderly medic worked methodically. An electric bulb hung over the dining table, but two flickering gas lanterns were brought in to supplement it. Paul had been lifted between the lifeboat and the jetty, so at least his wounds were free of mud, but Gaston swabbed Paul’s cheek with a solution of hot salt water before painting on iodine, which stung even worse.

Rosie tried not to cry as her brother sobbed in pain. Considering that Paul screamed the house down if he got shampoo in his eyes she thought he was being quite brave. But the cuts on his face filled with blood as soon as they were clean.

Gaston scratched his stubbly chin and made a decision. ‘It needs stitching or he’ll bleed to death.’

His wife produced a tumbler of warmed brandy, sweetened with syrup, and helped Paul to swallow it. The alcohol numbed Paul slightly before the retired medic put in five neat stitches with sterilised button thread and a sewing needle. The booze was some help, but PT had to clamp Paul’s knees against the table to stop him from kicking out.

After another sweetened brandy, which left Paul thoroughly drunk, the old man moved in to set his arm. Paul trembled as he sat in a dining chair, gas lamps flickering, the handle of a wooden spoon between his teeth to prevent him biting through his tongue when the pain hit.

The bony old medic made him rest the broken arm flat against the tabletop, then prodded the swelling to feel the direction of the break.

‘Been some years since I last did this,’ Gaston confessed, glugging brandy out of the bottle for courage as Rosie tightened her grip on Paul’s shoulder. PT and Gaston’s wife stood by, fingers tense and brows dripping sweat.

Paul wailed as Gaston thumped his palm downwards. After running his fingers over the arm and satisfying himself that the bone was straight, Gaston wound some bandage around the break. They had no plaster so he improvised, splinting the arm with lengths of garden cane.

The finished tangle of sticks and tightly-wound bandages was unorthodox, but would give Paul’s arm a decent chance of healing. Paul sniffed drunkenly as Rosie took him out of the kitchen and settled him on an armchair in the living room. Gaston’s wife raised his legs on to a foot stool and after a wipe of his brow with a cool flannel Paul seemed content to lean on the arm and fall asleep.

‘You’re so kind,’ Rosie said, appreciating that Paul had been lucky to receive Gaston’s swift attention. By the time Paul had settled, the old man had drained his brandy and gone to the door to see if he could help someone else.

Rosie headed outside to use the toilet and found PT standing by the back door, in a great hurry to disguise something by tucking it back under his shirt. Then PT dropped an object on the ground and the teenagers almost banged heads as they crouched simultaneously to pick it up.

Rosie felt wet paper in her hands and by the time she’d straightened up she’d realised it was currency. There wasn’t much moonlight and only a little lamplight leaked from Gaston’s kitchen, but she recognised the wad of American bills before PT snatched them out of her hands.

‘They’ll dry off, won’t they?’ was all she could think to say, after a brief but awkward silence.

Rosie was nervous because she’d clearly seen something she wasn’t supposed to. Was PT going to run off, swing at her, or what? The one thing she didn’t expect was for PT to lean forwards and kiss her on the lips.

‘You’re beautiful,’ PT said.

Rosie froze like a post. She’d never kissed a boy before and, while she didn’t kiss back, she didn’t shove him away either. When PT gave Rosie space her words came out like a flood.

‘You!’ she gasped. ‘What’s all that money? No wonder you didn’t want to give your name to that priest. What did you do, mug some refugee? Rob a bank? And don’t tell me that I’m beautiful and kiss me like that. Give me some warning or something! And what kind of name is PT? It’s not even a name, it’s just initials. Those were twenty-dollar bills. That’s almost five pounds, each one, and you’ve got stacks and stacks! I mean, who on earth are you and why are you going around kissing me?’

PT smiled. ‘Because you’re beautiful.’

‘keep saying that,’ Rosie said, though PT was tall and a couple of years older than her and probably rather elegant when he didn’t have mud in his hair, so she was actually flattered.
Don’t

‘I tell you who I really am,’ PT smirked, as he drew his finger across his throat and made a choking sound. ‘But then I’d have to kill you.’
could