The Tunnel (19 page)

Slowly they restored the room to some sort of order. Saunders, still devastated by the loss of the pin-up girls, grumbled as he worked, full of schemes to get even with Mueller.

The others took it in good spirit; only Loveday failed to respond. He sat on his bunk nursing
A Textbook of Psychology
which he had found with its back torn off among the debris on the floor. He did nothing towards clearing up the mess, but sat brooding, the book held listlessly between his hands.

‘Come on, Loveday,’ Saunders said.

‘Leave him,’ Otto said. ‘He will be all right in a minute.’ He began to sort out Loveday’s things and put them away in his locker.

By the time the New Zealander arrived the room was more or less in order again. He hesitated in the doorway, as though afraid to enter.

‘Come in,’ Peter said. ‘Excuse the chaos, we’ve just had a blitz.’ Then he remembered his own mystification on his first night in the prison camp. ‘The Germans found a tunnel in the washhouse,’ he explained.

‘What are the chances of escape from here?’ the New Zealander asked.

It had been one of Peter’s own first questions, and he shelved it. Now that he was on a scheme himself he guarded it as jealously as the early gold prospectors had guarded their lucky strike. He felt that talking about it would minimise its value. Instead, he introduced the newcomer round the mess, but when he came to Loveday there was no response. The man seemed dead to the world. Peter passed it over as lightly as he could, and began to question the visitor about men he had known in the squadron. But he could find no point of contact. They had all been shot down, or posted to another squadron. Even the doctor and the padre had been changed.

When Hugo brought in the tea they sat down at the table.

Loveday remained obstinately on his bunk.

‘Come on, Loveday – teatime!’ Peter said. He put his hand on Loveday’s shoulder, but there was no response. As he sat down he noticed the visitor glance as if fascinated at Loveday and then quickly look away.

We do look a queer lot I expect, he thought. He looked at the others; Saunders with his vulgar red good-humoured face, his impossible moustache, under his habitual knitted cap; Otto, pale and thin with woollen wrist-warmers showing below the cuffs of his tunic; John, a student from the Latin Quarter; Hugo, a stage Russian émigré, presiding at the head of the table; and Loveday sitting on his bunk like patience on a monument, brooding over the damage to his book.

He looked at the visitor and saw the hungry way in which he wolfed his bread and jam. His stomach will shrink, he thought, it’ll take time, but in the end he won’t be quite so hungry.

‘Any good shows in Town?’ Hugo made the opening gambit.

Peter saw the newcomer frantically searching his mind, and felt for him. ‘I don’t suppose you had much time to go to shows,’ he suggested.

‘No – used to spend most of the evenings with the boys.’

‘What’s the beer like in England?’ Saunders asked.

‘It’s all right. Pretty scarce.’

‘Ah,’ Saunders said. ‘It would be. How long’ve you been shot down?’

‘Five days.’

‘Five days!’ Saunders pushed his woollen cap to the back of his head. ‘Blimey, they aren’t half pushing ’em through now. How long d’you have in the cooler?’

‘The cooler?’

‘Blimey,’ Saunders said, ‘he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ He examined their guest with renewed interest.

‘How many trips had you done?’ Hugo asked.

‘This was my frist trip.’

Poor kid, Peter thought, what an end to your first trip. A year’s training, one flight and now this. It was like the life of a butterfly. ‘You’ll soon settle down,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a bad life. It’ll seem a little odd at first.’ What can I tell him about it, he thought, how can I advise him? ‘Have some more tea,’ he suggested.

‘This is the end.’ Loveday’s voice, deep and full of doom, coming from behind him, made the New Zealander choke into his mug.

‘Hello, Lovey.’ Saunders turned and looked at him. ‘Feeling better now the work’s all done?’

‘I’ve been meditating.’

‘Good thing,’ Saunders said. ‘Nothing like a little meditation when there’s work to be done.’

They’re frightened that I shall succeed now,’ Loveday said.

‘Don’t you worry, chum,’ Saunders told him. ‘Nothing you can’t do if you put your mind to it.’

‘I
shall
succeed!’ Loveday beat with his fist on the side of his bunk. ‘You individuals fail to realize how organized they are. They even try to destroy my work.’

‘You’ll disorganise ’em.’ Saunders winked at the New Zealander. ‘Just keep on the way you’re going.’

Loveday came to the table and glared at them. ‘So we have strangers in the mess.’

Otto poured him a cup of tea and passed his three slices of bread and butter, while Peter began to tell the New Zealander about the events of the afternoon. All the time he was talking he could see the boy stealing furtive glances at Loveday who, eating stolidly through his bread and butter, fixed him with a malevolent stare.

‘Well, I’d better be getting on.’ The guest rose to his feet and moved towards the doorway. ‘Thanks very much for the tea.’

‘Not a bit,’ Peter said. ‘Come and see us again some time.’

‘I will.’ The New Zealander stole one more frightened glance at Loveday and escaped into the corridor.

As spring slowly relaxed into summer the two remaining tunnels were driven painfully inch by inch at right angles to one another towards the wire. The
aboit dienst
was well in the lead, and for the past few weeks Tyson’s team had worked desperately to catch them up. If they could make sufficient headway both tunnels could break on the same night, and a record number of prisoners would get away. If Stewart broke first, the second tunnel would be handicapped by the stringent security measures that would inevitably follow the first escape. It was a back-breaking race against time and, hampered by water seepage, the cookhouse team were unable to maintain the pace. By the middle of May the
aboit
attempt was ready to break. The escapers had prepared their forged papers and their civilian clothes, and now they waited for a suitable night to make their getaway.

Tyson had decided to suspend work on the cookhouse tunnel until after the others had broken out. As he explained to his disappointed team, ‘We could hardly expect them to wait for us and it would be a pity if we made a boob now and gave the other show away. We can’t possibly get ready to break on the same night so we’ll just have to lie low until they’ve gone. As soon as the flap’s lifted we can get cracking again.’

Peter and John, stifling their impatience, used this period of idleness to perfect the plans for their own journey. They had decided to walk down through Poland and attempt to make contact with the partisan forces in Yugoslavia. They would travel as Italians and John, who already had a smattering of the language, was working hard at his Italian grammar. At the same time he was learning the part of Lysander for the new production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
which was to be staged in the early summer. Peter knew that he regarded this as an insurance against their tunnel being discovered.

On the day that the
abort
tunnel broke England played Australia at rugby football. Under cover of the enormous crowds Stewart’s team, their escape clothing hidden by greatcoats, wandered down to the
abort
and, one by one, lowered themselves into the trench and so into the narrow tunnel. In addition to the digging team there were the dispersal squads, some stooges, and one or two of the prisoners who had helped to forge the identity papers or make the civilian clothes. Some of these had never been down the tunnel before and there were long delays while they rearranged their packs and clothing before they could squeeze into the narrow hole. At last there were more than thirty of them, lying head to heels along the suffocating length of the muddy burrow.

Peter had given up football now that his own escape seemed possible. To risk a broken leg at this stage would be foolish. He helped Tyson to get the last man down a few minutes before lock-up time, and went back to the barrack block. Most of the thirty escapers had come from Block 2, but the vacant spaces had been evenly distributed over the entire camp. Several people had gone to spend the night in another block, and in the empty bunks cleverly made dummies lay under the grey blankets, wigs made from human hair and empty boots protruding naturally.

It was a perfect night for escape. Heavy clouds were massing in an angry sky. Gusts of wind went humming through the wire, blowing into the camp, and causing the guards to turn their backs to its source – turn their backs on the potato patch which lay in the path of the bitter wind, and which intricate calculations with line and home-made theodolite had told the tunnellers would cover the exit of their tunnel.

Under the potato patch the working party dug away the last few feet of subsoil and waited for complete darkness.

In Peter’s block all the preparations had been made. Following the discovery of the escape, there would be a search such as they had never had before; a search that would sweep in its ruthless path everything that was in the least suspect. During that afternoon most of them had buried everything of value in the ground outside the barrack. Peter and John had buried their home-made civilian clothes and their store of carefully hoarded food; but Peter could not bear to part with his small brass compass and the maps he had brought with him from
Dulag-Luft.
He had sewn these into the waistband of his trousers.

Now he sat with the others who, trying to appear as usual, were all the time half-listening for the sudden rifle shot or the angry stutter of machine-guns which would tell them that the escapers had been seen by the guards outside the wire.

‘Dinner’s an hour early tonight,’ Saunders warned them.

‘Good show,’ Peter said.

‘They’ve made them all an hour earlier in case … you know,’ Saunders said.

‘What are we having?’ John asked.

‘Salmon pie.’

‘Not again!’

‘Well … I can do it quickly, you see – in case anything happens. By the way’ – defensively – ‘there’s no chocolate this week.’

‘How’s that?’ Hugo liked his chocolate.

‘I gave it to Otto.’

‘Oh, you did, did you?’

‘Well – I didn’t really
give
it to him. After all, we’ve got the rest of his parcel this week.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I gave him the raisins too,’ Saunders said. He seemed to expect censure for this.

‘That’s OK,’ Peter said. ‘You’re the cook. As long as you dish us up a meal each day—’

There’s no sweet,’ Saunders said quickly. ‘I gave him the sugar too.’

Loveday kept to his bunk all evening, speaking to no one, refusing to be drawn into conversation. He had been like this ever since Otto had told him that he was leaving. He had told him alone, out on the circuit, and the others did not know how Loveday had taken it. They only knew that this strange silence, instead of being a blessing, was a curse. His brooding cast a blight upon them all, and they were unable to settle down.

The whole barrack block was quiet, everyone listening with half his mind for the sound of a shot and the whistles of the guards. Everyone, with half his mind, was crawling out through the muddy exit through the rows of growing potatoes, away from the camp. Everyone shared the feeling of naked vulnerability, the ‘crab-without-shell’ feeling of the man with a gun behind him; the feeling they had all known at least once before, when their aircraft had heeled and spiralled down in flame.

‘What about a game of cards?’ Saunders’s suggestion was tentative.

‘Not tonight,’ Hugo said.

‘Where’s Otto making for?’ Saunders asked.

‘Warsaw,’ Peter told him.

‘Rum sort of place to make for.’

‘He was born there.’

‘Oh yes, of course – he’s a Pole.’

There was a silence. Someone in a mess at the far end of the room started the gramophone. They sat listening to it; the first time they had ever listened to it consciously, as anything other than a back-ground to their conversation.

‘Damn stupid lyric,’ Peter said.

‘All dance lyrics are stupid,’ Hugo said.

‘Why don’t you finish that story of yours, Saunders?’ Peter asked.

‘If the lights go out. It’s a bedtime story, only to be told in the dark.’ Half-heartedly Saunders picked up a paintbrush he was making for Peter; rolling sisal string into a hank, cutting the loops with a razor blade, fraying them out and binding the rest to form a handle.

‘A bedroom story, you mean,’ Hugo said.

‘I wonder if they’re all out yet?’ John looked up from his book.

Peter glanced at his watch. ‘Not yet. There are thirty of them. If you allow an interval of three minutes between each, it’s going to take an hour and a half. Better allow another hour for safety. If we hear nothing by nine o’clock we can reckon they’re all away.’

‘Another hour and a half,’ Saunders said.

‘It’s going to be a hell of a day tomorrow.’ Hugo was darning a sock, using a tin of baked beans as a mushroom.

‘What are you doing about your job?’

‘Leave it alone for at least another week,’ Peter told him. ‘Wouldn’t be safe to go near it before then. The goons will tighten up like hell for a bit after this.’

‘That’s the worst of tunnels,’ Hugo said. ‘Everybody suffers. It isn’t only you chaps.’

‘Every tunnel that breaks means one less starting place,’ John said.

‘It must have been wonderful for the chaps who were the first ones here,’ Peter said. ‘Fancy being in a camp from which no one had ever started a tunnel …’

‘It would be very pleasant, I agree,’ Hugo said. ‘But sooner or later chaps would start digging and the goons would start imposing restrictions. It’s a sort of vicious circle, one chasing the other. Far better not to start it.’

‘Far better not to be here at all,’ John said.

‘It makes you think.’ Saunders sat hunched over the table, wearing the woollen cap that seemed so much part of his face, the paintbrush forgotten in his struggle to express himself. ‘It makes you realize that no man has any right to lock a fellow up for any length of time. Look at us. Compared to Dartmoor this place is a holiday camp. We’ve got our friends, and the goons leave us pretty well alone. Yet we think it’s bloody awful here. Fancy going to Dartmoor for twenty or thrity years. A hundred and ninety-nine years they can give you in America. Rather get the chop.’

‘We don’t know how long we’ve got,’ Hugo said.

‘I’d rather not know,’ Peter said.

‘I like to know where I am.’ Hugo bit off an end of the wool and moved the tin round inside the sock, looking for more holes. ‘If we only knew how long we’d got, we’d know how long we had to wait.’

‘We’re not doing so bad,’ Saunders said. ‘Think of those chaps in Dartmoor. For what? Because they stole to feed their wives and kids most likely. And why did they steal? Because no one had ever taught them how to earn their living.’

‘They broke the law, they must face the consequences,’ Hugo said. ‘Our case is different, we’re not criminals.’

‘We all got caught,’ John said.

‘We’re just as guilty as they are, if it comes to that,’ Saunders said. ‘Look at me – I’ve killed thousands of innocent women and children, bombed hospitals and churches—’

‘The Bermondsey Basher, they call him,’ John said. ‘Slit-throat Saunders.’

‘No, but a man who commits bigamy gets seven years in the cooler.’ Saunders was not to be sidetracked. ‘Not seven years of this, but in a grey cell, never seeing grass or trees. And for what? Just because he married two women at the same time and probably made ’em both happy. And did it honourably too. After all, he could have married one and slept with the other, and no one would have had any objection.’

‘Except his wife, perhaps,’ John said.

‘But if you make laws you must enforce them,’ Hugo said. ‘What would happen if there were no punishment for crime – the country would be in chaos.’

‘Yes, but seven years!’ Saunders rose to his feet and crossed to his bunk for a cigarette. ‘Some of us think our lives are ruined, and we’ve only been here two or three. Think of a life sentence – think of it! We’ve only one life, it’s the only one we’ve got, and some old beak in a white wig can make us spend it all in prison. It’s far more humane to shoot people out of hand.’

‘Well, how would you punish a bigamist if you didn’t send him to prison?’ Hugo asked. ‘Shoot him?’

‘Well, the only people he’s done any harm to are the two women.’ Saunders was obviously thinking this out. ‘If the first one still wants him, I’d scrap the second marriage, and let ’im fight it out with the first.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it swirl under the naked electric lamp. ‘If the second one wants him and the first doesn’t, scrap the first marriage. If they both want him, the first one wins. If neither want him, you scrap both marriages,’ he finished triumphantly.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ Hugo said. ‘Besides, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. We don’t send him to prison for living with two women. We send him to prison for false pretences. As you say, he can live with as many women as he likes – as long as he doesn’t marry them. Marriage is a contract, and you must protect both parties to it.’

‘The best way to do that would be to have it stamped on your identity card,’ Saunders said. ‘You’d produce your twelve-fifty when you want to get married, and prove you’re not married already. It would be impossible to commit bigamy then.’

‘Bureaucracy!’ Hugo said, starting on another sock. ‘Bigamy is a felony, and it’s up to the State to prove that you’ve committed it, not up to you to prove that you’re not about to commit it. It works pretty well as it is.’

‘Yes – but seven years!’ Saunders said. ‘Fancy some skinny old beak having the power to lock a chap up for seven years, just because he’s made a mistake. I reckon all judges ought to go to prison for a year, as part of their training – just to show ’em what it’s like. We’ve almost abolished flogging, and we ought to do the same with long-term sentences. What’s the use of it? It’s horrible. It doesn’t do the prisoner any good, it’s just done as a warning to others, like cutting off their hands and noses used to be. It’s time it was stopped.’

‘That’s right, Saunders,’ John said. ‘Let’s start a prison reform.’

‘I mean it,’ Saunders said. ‘I’d never thought about it before. Now I wonder how people can walk about the streets knowing that behind those walls there are hundreds of people locked up for years.’

‘It’s better than having them loose,’ Hugo said.

They sat in silence, in the strangely silent room. The gramophone was still playing, but quietly now, in a mess at the far end of the room; and Peter imagined the sentries stamping up and down outside the wire, swinging their arms to keep warm, fleetingly illuminated by the passing searchlight beams.

‘What about that story?’ Hugo said.

‘I’m not in the mood.’ Saunders was unusually serious tonight.

‘Come on – we’ve got to do something to pass the time.’

John took a tattered piece of paper from his pocket. ‘I’ll read you a poem if you like. That’ll cheer you up.’ He straightened the paper and announced: ‘
NIGHT BOMBERS
‘Monstrous shadows moving in the darkness
In sudden bursts of power in near-dawn darkness;
Huge ungainly lumbering shapes
Wallowing blindly towards dispersal points,
Waved onwards and finally brought to rest
By two dim lights
Wielded commandingly by an airman,
Cold in the exterior darkness
‘From the belly of the nearest shadow
Descends a ladder, down which climb
Seven leather-huge dwarf men.
Michelin-men of uncouth shape;
Helmeted and visored like men from Mars
And, as they stiffly clamber down,
The wind blows freshly; brings the friendly smell
Of earth and meadows in the moonlight.