Resistance (36 page)

How somehow the judges had known about Alex, and that was why, when Maggie took the colt back from him, they’d left her circling long after they’d called the others in.

How she’d led Glyndwr around that ring, his head tossing, his hooves stamping, three more times before they’d eventually told her to take her place at the end of the line.

How when they finally left the ring, the crowd had parted about them without a word.

How she’d felt their anger, tense on the air.

How they were wrong.

How what she’d done was not, as they thought, an act of collaboration, but an act of love; her last for the husband of thirty years who’d so suddenly left her life, silently and without warning as she’d slept one night last September.

June 9th

Maggie came back with no news. What does that mean, Tom? It could mean nothing I know. But it doesn’t. To me it means everything. Am I writing to a ghost, Tom? Are you never coming back? After all this time. I don’t know what to do
.

G
eorge lay on his stomach at the edge of the coppice, the morning sun filtering through the leaves above him, warming his back and neck in patches that shifted with the breeze. The rifle case lay beside him. It still smelt of the manure heap, years-old animal shit impacted in the grooves around the two steel latches. He looked through the telescopic sight at the farmhouse below, moving the unsteady crosshairs slowly over its roof, across the yard and back again. He hoped this was the right farm. Watkins had already had a skinful by the time he’d got to him yesterday, celebrating his wins in two different classes. Then George had had to buy him another beer to keep him talking, so when Watkins finally told him where to find Maggie Jones’s place, he’d barely been able to understand him. This farm below, though, it looked like the right one. It was certainly in the right part of the valley and there were no others near it. He just had to wait, that was all.

The show had come as a welcome distraction for George. Over the past months his life had, within the confines of the occupation, reverted almost entirely to its prewar familiarity of farmwork and boredom. He was no longer an active member of the Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section. He was just his father’s son again, a local farm boy, twenty-one years old but looking seventeen. To make it worse he was also increasingly the butt of the odd angry aside or bitter joke. After all, what had he ever done? Wriggled his way out of conscription then never even joined the Home Guard. No girl would look at him. He’d done nothing in the face of the war other than work on the farm, that’s what they thought. Nothing. And yet George knew he would have given everything. He’d followed Atkins’s
orders to the letter. For months after the German troops arrived he’d regularly visited the agreed fallback position of an old barn on a hill two miles from his home. This, Atkins had decided, would be where he and the others would meet should the network of messages be disrupted. George never knew who these others were. He didn’t need to and it was safer not to, that had been Atkins’s line. And he still didn’t. Despite his frequent visits he’d never found anyone or anything at the barn, other than bats in its eaves and, once, a sick ewe sheltering from the rain.

In the meantime he’d had to live and work under the eyes of the occupation troops while also witnessing a general slide towards mass collaboration. It seemed impossible for people not to. They had to eat, after all, and they had to earn money. The Germans, meanwhile, controlled the food supplies, handed out the ration tickets, and were the only ones with cash to spend. George had seen them walking through the streets of Abergavenny, cruising the local shops, jingling the loose change in their pockets. He’d watched the shopkeepers attend to them, eager-eyed and keen. He’d even seen his own sister laugh as she served a group of young recruits, joking with them over their bad English. “They’re no different from you,” she’d said when he’d told her she shouldn’t behave like that. “If we’d won, our boys,” (she didn’t say
him
, he noticed) “would be over there doin’ the same. They’re harmless, George, these ones. Just children really.”

But the Germans were not harmless, everyone knew that. London was a shell of a city. Gutted, starved, shattered, more of a ruin than a capital. St. Paul’s, the Palace of Westminster, the Royal Albert Hall, Westminster Cathedral, even Buckingham Palace. None of London’s landmarks had escaped the bombing and shelling of that long winter siege. Its population had halved, scattered or killed. Elsewhere tens of thousands of men of fighting age had already been deported. The German propaganda machine and William Joyce’s BBC were calling these deportations Britain’s contribution to “the rebuilding of a new United Europe,” but everyone knew it wasn’t as simple as that. And everyone knew about the Jews as well. Many escaped
to Canada in those first chaotic weeks after the invasion, but now, under the veil of order, administration, and bureaucracy, the Nazis were paring the nation of any remaining Jewish families, assigning them for “resettlement” in the occupied Eastern territories.

Closer to home there had been waves of reprisals in response to the insurgency. George had heard of entire villages outside Hereford that now lay empty. Neat rows of pockmark bullet holes in the walls of village halls and churches were the only reminders of what had happened there. No, the Germans were not harmless.

There was, however, also hope. Not within the official channels of proclamations, speeches, and wireless reports, but in the unofficial currents of rumour, in quiet asides in country pubs before closing time; there you could hear the occasional whispers of an alternative future. These might be nothing more than reports of antifascist graffiti in the towns, painted over before most saw it, or old songs overheard in the street given new, antioccupation lyrics. Nothing more than seeds of discontent. But even these, George had to believe, could be enough. Alternative news also filtered in from abroad. American volunteers, many of them Jewish, were flocking over the border into Canada. The Canadian and Free British governments were mobilising an army of liberation. There were plans for an assault along Britain’s western coastline, and even talk of commando landings already here in Scotland and Cumbria. Everyone knew, meanwhile, that the German occupation forces were being weakened by the month. The Russian breakout from behind the Urals was draining the Wehrmacht in Britain of its most experienced and best regiments. Faced with a choice, it was thought Hitler would rather let Britain go than allow the communists to edge any closer from the east. George had even listened to the opinions of some who thought America could be convinced to reenter the war in Europe. They were still fighting with Japan, but if a Canadian and Free British assault could gain a foothold, then a shift in public opinion could well force the U.S. administration’s hand.

Such threads of hope were fragile, however, and the ache for peace, the desire for anything other than war, was growing stronger.
The British administration in Harrogate had given its support to regional commissioners who were now actively assisting the Germans in locating and destroying any remaining insurgency cells. The Herefordshire Gestapo office had, George knew, been receiving a steady trickle of anonymous tip-offs about suspected insurgent activity. And hadn’t he, George Bowen, already reneged on his duties? Not those given to him by Atkins, to whom he felt he’d been nothing but faithful, but the duties he’d accepted from the other man who’d visited him that summer four years ago. The other man from British Intelligence, who had brought him the rifle he held against his shoulder now, lying at the edge of a coppice, the morning sun warming his back and his neck.

The man had never told George his name, never even gave himself a sobriquet like “Tommy Atkins,” so George had always thought of him simply as “the man”; dark hair, short, stocky, with stern, serious features and a neat moustache. He’d first approached George in 1940, two weeks after Atkins had strolled across that field, the fishing flies on his hat winking in the sun. George was driving the new Ministry-issue tractor down the lane, taking a pile of hurdles and pallets from the top field to the yard. The man had been leaning against a gatepost so George had only seen him when he stepped out from the hedge and flagged him down.

The next time they met was in the wood beside the same old barn Atkins had chosen as the fallback position for their communications cell. It was in that wood that the man had told George what he wanted him to do.

“Seems like you’re a sought-after lad,” he’d said, referring to Atkins’s previous visits. “Not surprised really. Wheels within wheels at the moment, and all of them in motion. We’re bound to land on the same chap now and then.”

It was best for George, for everyone, the man explained, if he didn’t tell Atkins anything about this. Nothing at all. “This” was a long, narrow wooden case lying on a tree stump between them with an adapted Enfield Mark IV sniper rifle and telescopic sight inside
it. “Designed up at Coleshill,” the man said as he’d lifted it out and fitted the thick, dark silencer.

Had George ever fired a gun before? Shotguns? Good. The man spoke with the same directness as Atkins, but never broke it with a smile like Atkins did. Everything he said seemed carved from the air. Precise and exact. He’d brought a bag of apples on which he’d asked George to practise, balancing them on fallen trunks and the lower branches of the trees.

“One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, and …” The rifle had bruised George’s shoulder that first time. It was, however, as the man had promised, almost totally silent. Just a sharp rush of air and then an apple bursting in the distance when he hit, or white sparks of wood spinning off a branch when he missed.

“I know this is a heavy duty,” the man had said to George as he’d dismantled the rifle and packed it away in the case. “But I’m convinced you can handle it. It’s vital, after all, that the local population understand. Collaboration is simply not an option.” He’d paused slightly, clicking the lid of the case shut, and looked up at George. “It will not, in any circumstances, be tolerated.”

George never saw the man again, but what he’d said in the wood that day had stayed with him ever since. He’d practised with the rifle regularly, just as the man had told him to, aiming at the pencil dot on his bedroom wall and counting in his head up to the squeeze of the trigger. But then when the invasion finally came, four years later than when Atkins and the man had told him it would, they’d been occupied and it had got too dangerous. After he’d seen his mother sitting on the trough in the yard, weeping, his father’s hand on her shoulder, he’d hidden the rifle under the manure heap and the man’s words under his fear. By the time he’d gained the courage to confront them again, he didn’t know where to begin. There was collaboration of a kind everywhere. Should he shoot his own sister? His father for selling the Germans food? The policeman who’d replaced Constable Evans, who went on his rounds
accompanied by a pair of Wehrmacht privates? The man’s words, however, never left him, and because of them George knew he was “perishing in the common ruin” rather than accepting his duty. He had abandoned the position that had been his to hold. But it was not too late. If the rumours, however fragile, of a Canadian and Free British assault were true, if the occupation might be overthrown, then he could still contribute. He could still play his part, however small. And that’s why, after what he’d seen at the show in Llanthony yesterday, he’d woken before dawn this morning and dug out the rifle from the manure heap. And why he’d then cycled to the edge of the Olchon before walking up to here, a coppice high on the valley’s eastern wall overlooking Maggie’s farm on the opposite slopes below him.

A brief flash of sun from the farmhouse focused George’s attention. Shutting one eye he peered through the sight again. Nothing. A window was open on the upper floor of the house, catching the sun as it swung in the breeze, but nothing else. His eyes were grainy with tiredness. The birds sang in the trees above him. A jay landed on a nearby branch, stripes of electric blue streaking each wing. It looked at him for a moment, then flew on again. The twigs and undergrowth below him dug into his stomach and forearms. He wished he’d had something to eat before he left.

Half an hour later George finally saw someone moving in the yard of the farm. No more than a shifting of shadows, but somebody was certainly down there. He looked through the sight once more and traced Maggie through them as she led the yearling colt out of the yard and through the small orchard of apple and pear trees. It was certainly her, and the horse, which still had one of its hind legs bandaged, was definitely the same yearling he’d seen run at the show ground yesterday.

George had watched Maggie and Alex descend the Hatterall ridge from where he’d been sitting on one of the priory’s ruined walls overlooking the show. It was the yearling’s red bandages that had first caught his eye, as clear as autumn hawthorn berries against the green and beige of the summer hillside. Had it not been for his
encounter with Albrecht when he’d tried to deliver those letters to the Olchon several months earlier, George would have thought little more of it. But those returned letters with those words written across their addresses had been hard to forget; as had the offhand way the officer had told George, “There is no one left in that valley.” And yet now here was a woman and man bringing a horse over the Hatterall, the angle of their arrival suggesting they could have come from nowhere else but the Olchon.

George watched them make their way down through the lower fields, over the stream, and then past him towards the show ground. They stopped before they reached the outer tents, and the woman dismounted, handing the reins of her mare to the man, then leaving him with the horses while she walked on towards the secretary’s tent. By then, however, it had been just the man George was watching. He was certain he’d seen him before. He couldn’t think where exactly, but there was definitely something about him that snagged in his memory. The way he carried his head, his height, the prominent jaw, the impassive expression of his angular face, even his nervous blinking. George dropped off the wall and moved a little closer, walking up the slope behind him so as not to draw attention to himself. Had he seen him at the station, perhaps? Or at the market in Abergavenny or the sheep sale in Longtown? Then he remembered. The staff car with markings he didn’t recognise back last November, shrapnel damage denting its left wheel arch. He’d seen it driving through Pandy, two or three weeks after the first troops arrived. This man had been the driver of that car. His hair was longer now and he wore a farmer’s jacket and cap instead of a soldier’s tunic and helmet, but George was sure of it. This was the same man. He moved nearer again, trying to see his face as he stood between the two horses, looking over the show ground. A steady stream of people were coming through the main entrance, others were milling about the newly erected stalls and tents, but up here beside the priory, there was no one else around.