Ride Out The Storm (34 page)

He went inside and the scene shocked him. It was packed with Frenchman, turbaned Moroccans, British and Belgians. They seemed to be mostly half-conscious but as he recoiled he saw the haggard eyes of one man fixed on him, feverish and piercingly bright. ‘Got a fag, mate?’ he asked.

The air raids had stopped as Scharroo and Marie-Josephine headed along the beach. Baffled and defeated, Scharroo was aware of Marie-Josephine’s honest young eyes on him, all her courage and determination displayed in them.

‘If you’re so goddam set on going to England,’ he said in desperation, ‘and if they’re only taking the army, then, the hell with it, let’s be part of it.’

They began to search the shoreline and eventually they found a pair of trousers, two damp battledress blouses and two steel helmets. Marie-Josephine slipped out of the cream coat without a word and pulled the trousers up round her waist over the flowered dress. As she did so, Scharroo realised she was laughing. Startled that she could manage to find any humour in the situation, he held the battledress blouse for her, pushing the collar of her dress down while she pulled the army jacket round her. Her neck was soft and warm and feminine under her hair, and as the back of his hand touched her throat, she turned silently, and put her arms round him. He pushed her away roughly and struggled into the second battledress himself.

‘Let’s go see what we can do,’ he said.

As they moved along the beach, they could see the pin-pricks of thousands of cigarettes and the occasional flash of a torch in the blackness, and could hear the putt-putt of engines.

An officer was directing men to the boats and they joined the group around him.

‘Where do we go?’ Scharroo asked.

‘What’s your unit?’

For a moment, Scharroo was at a less. ‘Well, hell,’ he said, trying to remember names he’d heard. ‘Royal Durham Light Infantry.’

A torch flashed in his face immediately.

‘There’s no such bloody regiment,’ the officer snapped. ‘Do you mean the Durham Light Infantry?’

‘Yeah. I guess that’s it?’

The torch remained on Scharroo’s face. ‘Then why did you say “
Royal
Durham Light Infantry”. Who the hell
are
you, anyway?’ The officer stared, then he turned. ‘Sergeant!’

Scharroo grabbed Marie-Josephine’s hand and in a moment they were lost in the darkness. The elation he had felt in the Germans’ victory had turned to disgust at their methods, yet he could find little to admire in the British and French failure. His lips were cracked by the salty breeze and he found swallowing difficult as he peered into the darkness with eyes that were gritty with tiredness.

‘We’d better look for something to eat,’ he said gruffly and, swinging his jacket over his shoulder, he began to walk up the beach.

The town was full now of men from the rear-guard, fighting troops trudging through the Place Jean Bart and down the Boulevard Jeanne d’Arc and past the ruins of the church of St Eloi. They still had excellent discipline but were too tired by this time to do anything more than just put one foot in front of another.

In the rue Gregoire de Tours a baker and the owner of a bar had joined forces, and Scharroo was able to buy a bottle of warm beer and half a loaf of newly baked bread. The charge was monstrous but he didn’t argue and took the food to Marie-Josephine who was sitting on the edge of the pavement alongside a man in a navy blue jersey. He was drunk and, even as he approached, Scharroo could smell the rum on his breath.

‘I had me own boat,’ he was saying loudly. ‘And I worked up and down that bloody beach till I was ready to drop. And then they go and run me down with a bloody destroyer. Just like that.’ He belched loudly and moved restlessly inside his clothes. ‘Ford eight engine she had,’ he went on. ‘Go for days. Not a nut or a bolt or a piece of wire I didn’t know.’

In her prim fashion, Marie-Josephine was embarrassed by the sailor’s drunkenness and she finished the food quickly and brushed off the crumbs. ‘What must we do?’ she asked.

As Scharroo’s weary thoughts churned, they heard aeroplane engines again and everybody started to disappear. ‘We’ve got to find shelter,’ he said.

Somewhere above them they heard the scream of a bomb starting, faint as a whisper, then growing louder until it filled the air. Pulling Marie-Josephine into the shelter of a big square building, Scharroo crouched with his arms about her. The crash flung them together and, as he felt her cheek against his, he realised it was wet with tears, the first real chink he’d found in her hard little armour. As he stood up, he noticed men running and, guessing they were heading for a shelter, he dragged her after him. He was just in time to see a wooden door in a warehouse slam to, but he flung his weight against it and they fell inside to stumble down a flight of stone steps.

The air was warm and stuffy with the smell of hundreds of bodies. There was a dim light in the distance, and as they moved towards it he saw they were in a cellar. There seemed to be dozens of men there, most of them French, and a lot of bottles circulating. A few people were singing but the smell was one of fear. The moving flames from the candles, sucked and whipped by the eddies of blast, caught the faces and the haze of cigarette smoke, and as they cast their shadows on the brick walls, it seemed to Scharroo like the pictures by Doré for Dante’s
Purgatorio.

They stopped dead, and he saw Marie-Josephine’s eyes were large and frightened. The men in front of them were all clearly trying to behave as though they were indifferent, but Scharroo saw their eyes lifting every time the thud of a bomb brought dust from the roof.

‘Let’s get of here,’ he said.

They struggled back towards the door but as Marie-Josephine stumbled along behind him, her helmet fell off. There was a shout and several Frenchmen reached out to grab her. Scharroo swung at them but they came back and one of them seized her round the waist. She started to scream and, as his own arms were held, Scharroo could see her eyes dilated with terror and was certain he was going to see her raped.

Then a small man with a sleek black moustache and side-whiskers brought the butt of his rifle up and Scharroo heard the clop as it caught an unguarded jaw, and a tall white-faced man with dried blood on his face and a bandage under his helmet pushed forward and, plucking the girl aside, shoved the Frenchman away.

‘We’d be best oot o’ here,’ he said.

Scharroo had lost his jacket with his wallet containing his papers, but he didn’t attempt to search for it, and as they reached the steps a bomb hit the other end of the building. There was a flash, then the air seemed to be sucked away and, as it came back with clouds of dust and yells, they saw the end of the cellar cave in.

The bombs were still coming down as they stumbled clear and they had just fallen flat on a patch of open land when they saw the corner of the warehouse come down in a thundering cascade of bricks, slates and splintering wood. Several rats bounded across the road, like symbols of doom. Then there was an explosion that rocked the earth and lumps of brick and masonry were hurled hundreds of feet in all directions, and brilliant flashes like magnesium flares illuminated the black heart of the wreathing smoke. When the rain of debris stopped, Scharroo lifted his head. One of the rats was running round in circles in the roadway, its high squeal quite distinct above the din, but there was no sign of life from the ruins of the warehouse.

‘There must have been ammunition in there,’ Scharroo said.

Marie-Josephine drew a deep breath. ‘I do not believe our friends escape,’ she whispered.

‘I guess not.’

‘We must go to the beach.’ Marie-Josephine’s voice was flat. ‘They take us soon, I think. They take everybody in the end.’

It was beginning to seem they might, but in Dover where they were working out the day’s totals and balancing them against the losses, the admiral stared bleakly at a map of the coastline. ‘There are now only seven and a half miles between the front and the mole,’ he pointed out. ‘Bray Dunes will be under shellfire now and Malo-les-Bains tomorrow.’

‘All the same, sir,’ the SOO said encouragingly. ‘Sixty-eight thousand men. Twenty-three thousand from the beaches alone. And here’s something that’ll warm your heart, sir.’ He read out from a signal flimsy. ‘From captain of
Oriole,
sir. She’s a paddle minesweeper, 12th Flotilla. “Submit ref. KR and AI 1167. Deliberately grounded HMS
Oriole
Belgian coast dawn May 29th on own initiative. Objective speedy evacuation of troops. Refloated dusk same day no apparent damage. Will complete S232 when operations permit meantime am again proceeding Belgian coast and will again run aground if such course seems desirable.”’

‘Who is it?’ the admiral asked. ‘Anyone I know?’

‘Shouldn’t think so, sir. RNVR type. I gather he decided to use his ship as a pier, and three thousand men passed over her before he finally brought her back with seven hundred of his own.’

The admiral allowed himself a small smile. ‘It brightens the day,’ he said.

Vital
had been hit somewhere before noon and had rolled over shortly afterwards. When the badly burned boy died, and because he could think of nothing else to do, Hatton had found a notebook in his saturated pockets and written down his own name and those of a wounded petty officer, a leading seaman and a medical orderly of the 12th Field Regiment who were the only other occupants of the boat. None of them seemed to think it odd and they gave him their names automatically.

How long they bobbed on the oily water Hatton didn’t know because he drifted into sleep and when he finally woke up it was almost dusk and the other three men were silent. The petty officer had died.

It grew darker but he could only guess what time it was because his watch had stopped. To his surprise he found he didn’t feel as ill or shocked as he thought he should; merely tired out because it was days since he’d slept properly. Sometime towards midnight a ship loomed up alongside and he became aware that a light was shining down on him.

‘Anybody alive down there?’ a voice was shouting.

He sat bolt upright, wincing from the pain in his injured ribs. ‘Three,’ he shouted. ‘What ship’s that?’

‘
Eager.
’

The leading seaman, a middle-aged man who looked as though he ought to have been in Portsmouth with his wife, children and grandchildren, grinned. ‘I was in
Eager,
sir,’ he said. ‘In thirty-six. She’s a good ship.’

At that moment to Hatton she was the most wonderful ship in the world.

The destroyer swung, putting one engine astern so that she could make a lee, and they paddled with a broken oar and a plank to her side. Because he felt it was his duty to be last, Hatton insisted on the leading seaman and the medical orderly going first, and as he reached out for the nets he looked back. The petty officer was leaning against the thwarts as though asleep and the boy was lying in the bottom of the boat, grey white now, and quite anonymous. No one had known who he was or what service he’d belonged to, and no one ever would now.

As he was pulled to the deck of
Eager,
Hatton’s eyes were stinging and he wasn’t sure whether it was because of the fuel oil or the tears. His mouth was filled with a bitter taste that might have been from the salt water he’d swallowed or the bile that came with fear and he felt that when he got back –
if
he got back he’d seek out Nora Hart and wheel her off to the altar at once. In his exhausted emotional state, at that moment the only thing he felt he needed out of life was a quiet room and Nora Hart in his bed, and the thought of Dover and peace left him feeling weak.

He turned to the petty officer who’d helped him aboard. ‘When are we going home?’ he asked.

The petty officer’s eyebrows rose. ‘Home, sir?’ he said. ‘We’re not. We’ve only just arrived.’

Moving through the town, Noble and Gow picked their way through the ankle-deep sand of the dunes to the gaunt ruins of the promenade. The whole front was a high wall of fire now, roaring with darting tongues of flame, the smoke pouring up in thick folds to disappear into the black sky. Towards the sea the darkness was thick and velvety but it was just possible to see wrecked ships and the shapes of small boats. Nearby, a pier stretched from the beach into the darkness, its piles silhouetted against the glare. Shells burst about its shore end with monotonous regularity.

Along the promenade small groups of men trudged wearily, and guides called out their names – ‘A Company, Green Howards’ – ‘East Yorks, this way’ – and a few voices were raised as stragglers tried to find lost units. Then they ran into a line of poilus with fixed bayonets who informed them that from that point on the promenade was reserved for the French. They appeared to think they’d been betrayed by the BEF and Gow was on the point of arguing the matter out when Noble dragged him away.

‘You can’t fight the whole sodden French army, you mad Scotch bastard,’ he said.

Gow didn’t appear to agree and seemed, in fact, to feel he might even have a chance of winning, but Noble clung to his arm and dragged him to the beach. The tide was out, and over the wide stretch of sand they could see dark masses which they realised were soldiers. There was no bunching and no pushing, however, and to Noble they seemed much more orderly than many football queues he’d been in.