Their Finest Hour and a Half (19 page)

On the morning that she saw the men, she had just turned back from the minefield and was singing ‘The Keel Row'. A long way ahead of her, a figure stood at the edge of the surf, while another walked into the sea. He was five yards out before the water reached his knees, ten before he halted; Edith was near enough by now to see that he had left his trousers on the beach, and that the sea was still a half-inch or so below the hem of his short underwear. After a shouted exchange with his companion, he walked back towards the sand and Edith averted her eyes and altered her course slightly, so as not to embarrass him. In fact, he was still buttoning his fly when his companion hailed Edith, and she was apparently the only one of the three to find the situation at all awkward.

‘Do you know if the whole beach is like this?' asked the one who'd called over to her.

‘Like what?'

‘On such a shallow rake?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I've certainly never seen a boat come up here, they all go to Badgeham Bay just round the headland.'

The two men looked at each other. ‘Well, that's all right,' said the fly-buttoner. ‘Best we've seen, anyway.' He was in his fifties and dressed, like his companion, in flannel trousers and a shabby tweed jacket, the pockets stretched and sagging.

‘You're not from round here,' he said to Edith, a statement rather than a question.

‘No.'

‘D'you know anything about boarding houses in the area? Or hotels?'

‘Not much, I'm afraid. There's the Crown and Anchor behind the green in Badgeham, and I think that quite a few other people take in boarders for the summer. Cromer's the place where most people stay, though – it's about twenty miles east of here.'

He nodded, and took a camera from his canvas haversack, and Edith felt dismissed, her usefulness over. She left the men taking photographs of the beach, and it wasn't until she was walking back to Badgeham along the twisting path between the dunes that it suddenly occurred to her that she had merrily volunteered information of potential vital military importance to two complete strangers. They had asked her and she had told them, without thought or scruple, and the whole incident was horribly reminiscent of a short film that she'd seen during a recent matinee in Holt, in which a naïve spinster called Miss Moss had handed over a set of local maps to a party of ‘lost' walkers, one of whom had then given away his origins by complimenting his benefactor on her garden full of ‘vallflowers'.
Miss Moss Shows the Way
had been the title, and at the time Edith had thought it rather silly. Now, she felt the back of her neck turn cold.
Miss Beadmore Informs the Invaders. Miss Beadmore and the Beach Landing.
She hurried towards the guard post, a wretched little shack on which the words ‘Teas & Ices' were still visible under a coat of grey paint.

‘Excuse me.'

A boy of about nineteen, with dark red hair and a nose to match, looked out warily.

‘I think I've been rather stupid,' said Edith.

‘Oh yes.' He looked unsurprised.

‘There were two men on the beach. I've never seen them before and they were asking questions about sea levels and local towns, and I'm afraid that I told them about—'

‘S'all right,' said the boy. He blew on his hands and rubbed the knuckles.

‘Is it?'

‘They're official.'

‘Really?'

‘They've got passes. It's ministry business,' he added.

‘Which ministry?'

‘That's er – whatjermacallit – classified,' he said, vaguely, retreating into the shelter of the doorway.

Edith saw the men again, later that day. They were standing on the harbour wall watching the fishing boats through binoculars. The younger one was making notes.

*

The summons to the Ministry of Information came at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning, just as Buckley had started
The Times
crossword.

‘For God's
sake
,' he said, throwing down the newspaper. ‘I thought we'd finished with all that. What do they want now?'

‘They didn't tell me,' repeated Edwin Baker's secretary, patiently. ‘They just said that they would like to see you and Mr Baker and Mr Parfitt at Malet Street at midday on an urgent matter. I'm just about to find a taxi for you.' She closed the door quickly.

Parfitt put his head down on the desk and groaned.

‘Can I do anything while you're gone?' asked Catrin.

‘Yes,' said Buckley. ‘Protect the contents of this office from that ginger bitch downstairs. If she gets hold of a single page without my say-so, then you're sacked.'

‘Anything else?'

‘You can do a bit of tidying.'

‘Title,' said Parfitt, his lips still squashed against the desk.

‘Oh yes,' said Buckley. ‘Draw up a shortlist of titles. That ass Shipton's on our tail about it, as if it's anything to do with him. Bloody accountants.'

‘Tidying the office' was a relative term, since apart from the ashtrays and the crusted cups Catrin was not allowed to touch anything on either man's desk, nor was she allowed to move any pieces of paper that were lying on the floor, since it had been impressed upon her that it was not so much a floor as a two-dimensional filing cabinet. She was not allowed to open the window to release the smoke of a million cigarettes in case a draught disorganized the exquisite arrangement on the floor. She was not even allowed to empty the waste bin, because the waste bin was merely a holding bay for pieces of paper that weren't needed at the moment but which might, at some future point, be frantically searched for, pounced upon with a cry of triumph, smoothed out and declared to be a far, far better version of Scene 27 than the rewrite that they had been slaving over for three days.

What ‘tidying' actually boiled down to was the removal of crumpled cigarette packets and biscuit crumbs, and the revolting ritual of wiping Buckley's typewriter, key by key, in order to remove the daily build-up of brilliantine accumulated from the running of worried fingers through rarely-washed hair.

Her final housewifely task was to renew the spirit gum that attached the various notices to the wall. These ranged from the rules of the room (
1. No bomb stories, 2. No public transport stories, 3. No ITMA catchphrases
) to a selection of articles and cuttings that had caught Buckley's sarcastic fancy, including a lightly charred government leaflet that detailed how to construct a home-made heater for an Anderson shelter out of two large flower pots and a candle.

The longest wall, however, was entirely taken up with row upon row of small cards. On each was written a brief scene description, and if read sequentially they built into the entire storyline of what was still known, for administrative purposes, as
Dunkirk Film
. Three months ago, Catrin had watched its slow construction. ‘Right,' Buckley had said, standing in front of the blank wall, ‘we know what comes in the middle.' He wrote ‘
Boat arrives at French coast
' on a card and stuck it at the centre of the wall. ‘We know what comes towards the end.' ‘
Engine fails. Uncle mends it while under fire
' took its place a foot or so above the skirting board. ‘And we know what happens about half an hour in.' ‘
Boat sets out from England
' joined the other cards. ‘And if' said Buckley, nodding towards the bottom of the wall, ‘the engine packs up there, then we need to prefigure it, don't we?'

He placed ‘
Uncle tells friend in pub that boat has engine problems
' close to the top, and ‘
Engine stutters but the twins are too busy to notice
' on a card halfway down.

‘What's the very first scene?' he asked, turning to Catrin. ‘Come on.'

‘The twins listening to the wireless – learning about the evacuation?'

‘Hear that noise?' asked Buckley, cocking his head. ‘It's your audience muttering that they thought they'd paid to see a war film and instead they're looking at two tarts in armchairs. Parfitt?'

‘France.'

‘France. Set the scene. Who's in France?' he asked Catrin.

‘The fiancé.'

‘Give him a name.'

‘Eric.'

‘Hear that noise? It's your audience sniggering at a hero called Eric. Try something more manly.'

‘John.'

‘Dull.'

‘Johnnie?'

‘Better. Who else do we meet in France?'

‘The dog,' said Parfitt.

‘That's right. Because audiences love dogs more than they love people. So . . .' He thought for a moment and then wrote something on a card, and stuck it at the very top of the wall.

‘
British army unit pinned down in France. Stray dog hanging around.
'

‘What else do we need to do in France?' he asked, looking at Catrin.

She shook her head.

‘Well, who else is in this film?'

‘Rose and Lily.'

‘So we need to set up Rose and Lily, don't we? How can we do that?'

‘Set them up?'

‘Yes.'

‘You mean find out about them before we see them?'

‘Yes.'

There was a long pause. ‘I'm not sure,' said Catrin, blushing.

‘God help us.' Buckley rolled his eyes. ‘Bring back Jeannie, all is forgiven. Parfitt?'

‘Johnnie talks about them.'

Buckley leaned forward and added the words ‘
Johnnie talks to fellow soldier about fiancée and her sister
' to the first scene.

‘Right,' he said, taking another card, ‘what's next?'

Over a week, over two weeks, the scenes had gradually accumulated – had been shuffled, swapped, combined – had acquired detail, and had finally coalesced into a single story. A few more days of tweaks, of meetings with the producer, of transposed cards and scribbled amendments, and then Buckley had sat down, and typed the words

and had begun to write, at immense speed and with an intensity that had rendered him deaf to alerts, a thirty-page prose version of the film that read like a racy novelette. ‘That'll do it,' he'd said, exuding sweat and satisfaction, as he ripped the final page from the machine.

From Baker Productions, the treatment had been forwarded to the Ministry of Information for approval. There had been a meeting and Buckley and Parfitt had stamped back into the office in Soho Square and started snatching cards off the wall.

‘We're not entirely convinced that the portrayal of the rescue efforts present the national case in a sufficiently uplifting way,' said Buckley, doing an impression of someone with an effeminate voice and no chin.

The second draft of the treatment had stalled at the War Office (‘We are concerned that the controlled evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force may be represented as a retreat in disarray') and just after the third version had been grudgingly given the nod by both parties, with the proviso that a special advisor in military matters would be present at every stage of the filming, the Admiralty had taken a gander, reeled back in horror at what it read and dispatched a hysterical memo to the MoI concerning two minor inaccuracies in maritime terminology.

By the time that Buckley and Parfitt actually started to write the script, the cards on the wall had been altered, moved, scrapped and reinstated so many times that they were covered in thumbprints and almost illegible. In her spare moments, Catrin touched-up the fainter words with a black crayon.

Now that the story was locked, the office had acquired a different atmosphere. The vigour of the plotting process had given way to the slow grind of scripting, and Buckley had lost some of his spark and bite and spent the days leaning glumly over the typewriter, pecking out lines of dialogue in a steady rhythm that smacked of the production line. He was not, Catrin was beginning to think, terribly interested in the characters; the dialogue that he wrote was functional, the glue that held the story together and nothing more, and he would invariably pass the first draft of each scene on to Parfitt with a request to ‘add a bit of fizz'.

Parfitt's fizz-addition was selective. If the scene was complex – a three- or four-hander involving action or argument – or if it contained potentially jokey banter or a bit of knockabout humour, he would crunch himself up in his chair, grip the edge of the desk with both hands and fix his eyes on the script with the look of a man planning a particularly grisly murder. Time would pass and he'd mumble occasionally, sway a little.

‘We should rope him off,' Buckley would say, tiptoeing past. ‘Danger UXB.'

Elsewhere in the room, tea would be made and drunk, newspapers read, sandwiches eaten. And then Parfitt would awake suddenly, exhaling like a diver, and would grab a pencil and make his amendments with rapid fluency, not inventing but merely transcribing the lines that were already written inside his head.

If, however, there was nothing in the scene that caught his fancy, then he'd spend twenty minutes sighing and shifting around in his chair before scribbling a few perfunctory changes and then slamming the pencil back on the desk. Catrin came to know her cue.

‘Mine?' she'd ask, keenly, reaching for the pages.

‘Yours.'

In some of the scenes that were passed to her it was simply a matter of changing the odd word or phrase, so that Rose and Lily might sound like two young women as opposed to two middle-aged men. In others, Buckley and Parfitt's imaginations had failed them entirely and a blank had been left in the dialogue, together with a descriptive note. (‘
Twins chatter while preparing an evening meal for their uncle, then Rose turns on the wireless'. ‘The twins discuss what to wear on the boat, and decide to dress as men
.' ) She couldn't, she knew, write the true Lily and Rose, but she could make Rose the bolder of the two, she could make Lily sweet and shy and film-mad. She could make them both brave.