Ride Out The Storm (27 page)

‘Marry me, Nora.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Don’t be silly. Are you going back?’

‘As soon as we’re shipshape.’

She was silent for a moment, her cheeks still smarting from contact with the stubble on his chin. Then she put her arms round his neck and kissed him.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she said.

She stood by the door as he went down the stairs, and as he stepped into the street, in an excess of stupefied pleasure, he felt he could face anything. Nora was a brick. When he came back next time he’d make it up to her.

In the evening sunshine, Scharroo and Marie-Josephine stood in the dunes. They’d long since abandoned the suitcase they’d carried from Bout-Dassons and Marie-Josephine had stuffed what she needed into the pockets of the stained cream coat.

They’d spent the night in the house in the Rue Isabey. The men inside, with a strange mixture of compassion and awkward gallantry, had even offered to move out.

‘No, no,’ Marie-Josephine had said. ‘You are much tired. If I can perhaps have a little corner. Just to sleep.’

Three men occupying a bed in what had been the maid’s room rose without argument and flopped down on the landing among the other sleeping men lying in inert, exhausted heaps, and that morning they’d shared what rations the soldiers had and had then headed back into the town. The three men had moved like automatons back into the maid’s bedroom as they’d left.

As they pushed through the crowded streets, the remnants of a Moroccan division appeared, black men who were carrying their boots strung round their necks. They had rifles but no ammunition, and they were clearly terrified. Behind them was a British regiment straight from the fighting, in a pitiful state of exhaustion but far from beaten. They moved like drugged bees and looked ready to drop. One soldier was clearly out of his mind and, instead of wearing his equipment, carried it with his rifle across his outstretched arms. Several men flopped to the ground, but the lonely mind-sick man remained standing, as though crucified, his arms still outstretched, his face empty, and the moving figures heading past him opened as though he were an island and they were water flowing past.

They began to walk out of the town. It wasn’t easy because everyone else was walking in and they had to push between the crowding men. Scharroo was hungry now and, though Marie-Josephine didn’t complain, he knew she must be growing hungry, too. Shells were dropping in the vast car parks that had been set up. They could see vehicles burning, and before they’d even left the outskirts a sergeant wearing the red-topped cap of the Military Police stopped them.

‘Where are you off to?’ The sergeant had heard of fifth columnists – indeed he’d been shot at by them more than once – and he was suspicious.

Scharroo explained but the sergeant was unconvinced.

‘You can’t come this way,’ he said.

‘We’re only trying to leave the town,’ Scharroo pointed out.

Probably with the dispositions of the entire BEF, the sergeant thought. ‘Ain’t possible,’ he said.

‘Look, this is no place for a girl to be.’

‘It’s no place for me to be. But I’m here.’

‘For Christ’s sake, man, we didn’t ask to be involved in your bloody defeat–!’

The sergeant bristled immediately and Scharroo realised he’d said the wrong thing to one of the touchy islanders.

‘
Who’s defeated
?’

‘For God’s sake!’ Scharroo said wearily. To someone like himself, standing on the sidelines and able to see the wood without the trees getting in the way, it stuck out a mile.

The sergeant clearly didn’t see things the same way. ‘Go on, ’op it,’ he said.

As they re-entered the town the place was beginning to stink of death. Bodies were along every road and lying everywhere in gardens and houses. In one house, they saw the whole ground floor covered with stretcher cases and nobody looking after them. Marie-Josephine was limping now and they stopped at an abandoned shoe shop where soldiers were changing their worn-out footwear. With their help, Marie-Josephine found a pair of walking shoes and ankle socks.

She was watching Scharroo silently now. Her world had emptied of people who might be able to help her and, just when she’d decided there was nothing left, Scharroo had arrived. He was older than she was – much older, she realised, as old as Monsieur Ambry, whom she’d rejected as a dirty old man – but already in her mind a hundred and one fantasies were taking shape.

‘I think I will remain with you, Walter,’ she said briskly.

He turned his head quickly but her face was calm and unafraid. It worried him because he had a job to do and the only thing in his mind at that moment was to get out of this madhouse.

‘What must we do?’ Marie-Josephine asked, like a sergeant awaiting orders.

‘Find somewhere we can shelter,’ Scharmo said. ‘And wait for the Germans to arrive.’

‘That would be –
défaitiste.
’

‘Who gives a damn?’ Scharroo had reached a point of desperation now. ‘All we have to do is smile and wave.’

Marie-Josephine’s heart tightened with disappointment. She couldn’t imagine that any man she admired as she did Scharroo would be prepared for surrender.

‘I do not smile and wave,’ she said. ‘Perhaps even I pick up a gun and shoot them.’

Scharroo’s head turned quickly but she was quite serious, her small mouth firm, and she went on, her usual business-like manner tempered with a gentle persuasiveness because she wished him to agree with her.

‘There are many French soldiers here,’ she said, gesturing as though to grasp an explanation from the darkening air. ‘They have not
all
been defeated. Some will return and drive away the Germans.’

Scharroo stared at her and she went on earnestly. ‘This is not the end of the war,’ she insisted.

Scharroo didn’t speak. To him it seemed that the war had been over for days. It was just that the defeated wouldn’t lie down.

In a way,
Vital
’s
engine-room crew were an example of this. As Hatton came back on board, while everyone else was conscious of the electrical atmosphere, he was unaware of it. The orders he’d picked up had been very simple. The operations to the south had not even begun to formulate and
Vital
’s
duty was to continue as before. Hatton’s heart had sunk and he was a little subdued, though still in a glow of sentimental nostalgia.

‘Sorry to have been so long, sir,’ he said to Hough. ‘But we nearly got sent to Cherbourg. I suppose they thought we’d got the experience.’

Hough looked at him with loathing as he handed over the orders. He’d been holding on to his patience for so long that by this time the slightest excuse to let off steam was good enough.

‘Oh, you do, do you?’ he said harshly. ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’

Unaware that the outburst was only a safety valve to allow Hough’s anger to release itself, Hatton retired, his feelings hurt.

‘For God’s sake,’ he asked the navigating officer, ‘what’s wrong with the Old Man?’

‘Sangus explosivus, old boy.’ The navigating officer shrugged. ‘Blood pressure. It’s been due to spurt out of his ears all day. It’ll be all right now.’

It was. Because MacGillicuddy was at last coming to the end of his ordeal. ‘Won’t be long now,’ he said. ‘Just the brackets, that’s all.’

The circle of faces lit by the naked hand lamp were strained.

‘After this lot I’m going to get a job running the boiler house in the barracks at Pompey,’ MacGillicuddy said.

Hough’s reaction to the news that they could move was not the fury he’d expended on Hatton. It was simply relief. ‘Thanks, Chief,’ he said.

Hatton had been asleep for just twenty minutes when the steward woke him. He opened his eyes and glared at his torturer. ‘Now what, for God’s sake?’

‘We’re off, sir. You’re wanted on the bridge.’

Hatton forced himself to consciousness, his heart sinking. The break they’d had made the thought of going through it again all the worse.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Sorry I was rude, steward.’

‘That’s all right, sir. We’re all getting a bit tired.’

Sievewright was growing tired, too, by this time. In the darkness Dunkirk was no longer a mass of black and grey, topped with inky cloud, but an angry glowing cinder ahead of him. The cloud of smoke was now a glaring fire, and against the ebony of the sky it shone like a bloodshot eye. To the south, a few miles back, long flashes like summer lightning played along the horizon, orange and green in hue, the explosions of British shells mingling with the flashes of the replying German artillery. Every now and then a rocket soared up, bursting with brilliant white light, to report German successes. Their frequency was depressing.

Between the glare of Dunkirk and the lightning to the south-east, great tongues of flame, two or three yards long, leapt through the blackness from the muzzles of the British batteries of the rear-guard, lighting up the surrounding area with their flashes and shaking the earth with the thunder of their explosions. There was the constant thump of mortar fire, and every now and then from the sea there was a whitish glow against the sky and then a roar overhead as the navy shelled the Germans miles inland.

A blazing lorry lit the dusk as stragglers drifted past. But they were growing fewer now and their absence worried Sievewright. At the next crossroads, there was a sign,
Dunkerque,
and a converging stream of men – British, Belgian and French – and a group of soldiers round a man lying on the ground.

‘Any medical orderlies?’ they kept shouting. ‘Any medical orderlies?’

No one stopped. In the passing faces was only the strained desire to reach the coast. Sievewright halted unwillingly and the dog, which had followed him all day, sat down alongside him.

‘Can I help? Sievewright asked. ‘I know a bit about it.’

‘Thanks, mate. It’s Joe Ferris. His leg’s broke. A lorry cut the corner and went over it.’

Sievewright laid down the French rifle. ‘Anybody got a light?’ Nobody had and he made them stand back so he could see in the flickering glow of the burning lorry.

‘I’ll need splints,’ he said and indicated a broken fence nearby. ‘We’ll need two short planks.’ His fingers were moving over the stained trousers as he talked and as he touched the injured limb the man moaned.

The soldiers looked down at their friend, their expressions curiously tender. ‘Hang on tight, Joe,’ one of them said. ‘This chap’s a medic. He’ll fix you up.’

The man on the ground nodded, his face pale, his lips raw where he’d chewed them, and as Sievewright yanked the leg straight he screamed and fainted.

‘That’s fixed it,’ Sievewright said. He looked round for something to bind the splints in place. ‘Handkerchiefs?’ he asked. Between the lot of them they were able to produce only one red handkerchief.

‘No straps?’

They shook their heads. ‘We left our kit at Arras.’

Sievewright glanced at his own neat pack alongside the black puppy. ‘Take the straps off mine,’ he said.

He finished lashing the two planks in place and indicated the broken fence again. Two long poles were wrenched free and, unrolling his overcoat and buttoning it as he’d learned as a Soout, Sievewright thrust the two poles through it; one of the men added his blouse to make a crude stretcher.

As they picked up the injured man and set off – four squat, drab unlovely figures bent under their load, their eyes full of concern, their heads turned inward and downward towards their friend – Sievewright felt very much alone. He had effectively stripped himself of the kit that had been worrying him so much, however, and what was left suddenly seemed very unimportant. Changing into his best boots, he stuffed a spare pair of socks into his pocket; then, removing from his blouse pocket the Book of Common Prayer that his vicar had given him before he left England, he tossed it away and pushed one of the hard biscuits in its place.

Cocooned in his blind faith that the navy would be at the coast to rescue him, he still felt remarkably little anxiety.

Fortunately for Sievewright, a strange paralysis of indecision had gripped the Germans. Troops of Army Groups A and B had moved up, and Fourth Army had been asked to lay on an attack against Bergues. But little headway had been made against the stubborn resistance of men like Lance-Corporal Gow, and guns were brought up instead of armour. No one knew if the Luftwaffe were about to carry out a full-scale attack on the town or not and an irritable officer at Fourth Army HQ lifted his voice in bitter complaint on the telephone as he tried to stir the rear echelons to life. ‘There’s an impression here,’ he said, ‘that no one’s any longer interested in Dunkirk.’

It was just as well and, as darkness fell, the news that came into Dover showed that though it had been a day of tragedy it had been a day of triumph, too. Confusion, exhaustion and the Germans had done everything possible to destroy the BEF but, by this time, it was clear that over 50,000 men had been lifted in twenty-four hours, almost 30,000 of them from the open beaches alone.

It was at that moment that the message arrived from
Vital
that she was ready for sea.