Then We Take Berlin (12 page)

Wilderness was at least six inches taller than Turpin. Turpin looked up in disbelief, not trusting his own ears.

“Come on, Sandy. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

He led Birch out of line and across the parade ground in the direction of their hut.

Bodell intercepted, positioning himself in front of Wilderness. Downes stood motionless a way off, swagger stick tucked under his arm. Turpin began to yell, so loudly Wilderness could not make out what he was saying.

Bodell was no bigger than Turpin. Five foot six of gutless obedience.

Wilderness said, “Step aside, Corporal. This won’t take long and then we’ll both be back on parade.”

Bodell seemed to have a verbal fit, “Wuuh worra wuuh worra wuuh.”

Wilderness shoved him aside, the palm of his hand flat against his chest.

It was then that Downes’s voice boomed out, “Arrest that man!”

§29

This bloke wasn’t RAF he was Army, a half-colonel in the Guards. As a boy Wilderness had collected the cards that came free inside packets of cigarettes—he’d had a full set of English Automobiles, most of British Butterflies and all but three of HM Forces Uniforms. According to his fag cards, this bloke was in the Coldstream Guards—the buttons on his tunic grouped in pairs.

Wilderness wondered why he was getting a bollocking from the army. Was the RAF not capable of slinging him back in the glasshouse one more time without calling in the troops?

A corporal he’d never met before had barked him in, all the hup-to, left-right, left-right bollocks, slamming down his feet and expecting Wilderness to do the same. Wilderness went through the motions, out of step, out of time and no doubt far too quietly for the barker.

The colonel was bent over papers. Looked up once to say, “Thank you Corporal. You can go now.”

More stomping. Turning on his heel as though powered by clockwork. But then that was their trouble with NCOs. They really were clockwork.

More than a minute passed. The colonel looked up again, pushed his sheaf of papers away from him and pointed at the chair opposite.

“You might as well sit. I’m sure you’re less trouble sitting down.”

It seemed to Wilderness like an invitation. He took it.

“I don’t think I’m ever trouble.”

“Really? You don’t say? Aircraftman Holderness, I’ve just read a dozen pages about you—all but three of them complaints. Complaints from Corporal Turpin, complaints from Corporal Bodell, complaints from Flight Sergeant Mills, complaints from Flight Sergeant Downes—all endorsed by Flight Lieutenant Cooper. Not trouble? Holderness, they think you’re a pain in the arse!”

“That’s ’cos they’re a bunch of fucking twats.”

There was a momentary pause, the merest flinch on the colonel’s part.

“A bunch of fucking twats,
sir
.”

“Of course. Sorry. A bunch of fucking twats,
sir
.”

“Let’s get one thing clear. I’m not a fucking twat, and if you talk to me like a fucking twat I’ve enough authority to bung you back in the glasshouse and throw away the key.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good—now we understand one another, let’s backtrack and get to the introductions. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Burne-Jones. And I can save your bacon if you let me.”

Burne-Jones. A hyphenated Englishman. That went with the rank and the regiment and the pencil-line moustache. If he stood he’d be six two and ramrod straight . . . but then so would Wilderness.

“I’m listening.”

Burne-Jones held up the top three pages of the papers in his right hand.

“You remember this?”

Wilderness didn’t.

“It’s the test you sat in London last August. It’s known as an IQ test. Now, do you know what that stands for?”

Wilderness remembered it now. Word games and pattern recognition. Matching up identical triangles. Juggling rhomboids and trapezoids. The square peg and the round hole. Only an idiot could fail it. He’d thought nothing of it at the time. Just call-up bollocks. It went with the ill-fitting uniform and the beetle-crusher shoes.

“Intelligence Quota?” he ventured.

“Close. Intelligence Quotient. It’s a way of measuring intelligence. Assigning a score to it. Would you be interested to know yours?”

“If I say no I go back to chokey?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m all ears.”

“One hundred and sixty-nine.”

“Big is it?”

“Well, it’s bigger than mine. In fact it’s bigger than most.”

“Bigger than yours? Then maybe I should be the officer?”

“That’s right, Holderness, push your luck. I do hope you like bread and water.”

“Excuse me, sir. Cheek is a way of life where I come from. Almost a language in itself. It has its own rules and syntax. My point is it must mean something, it must change something or you wouldn’t be telling me.”

The shift from cockney lout to articulate individual gave Burne-Jones another little pause. An effect Wilderness relished. It was like swapping masks at the ball.

“Quite. It does. It means I’m not going to let you go on square bashing. It would be a waste of everybody’s time. You’re moving to my operation.”

“What? The Guards?”

“Regiments are meaningless. You’ll be a trainee for a while, in fact for six months at least. If you pass you’ll be in an Intelligence unit, and for the time being that’s all you need to know about it. You’ll still be in the RAF for purposes of pay and uniform, but effectively not. You need never go on parade again, no one will put you through a crack of dawn kit inspection. You’ll answer to me. And I’ll tell you now, you make trouble, you fuck up . . . I’ll just send you back here for the bunch of twats to pick over your bones.”

No was not an option. Technically, in shoving Bodell aside Wilderness had struck an NCO. He’d spent the last four days in the glasshouse. He knew he was looking at six months in a military prison.

“Fine, sir. Where do you want me?”

“Cambridge. Queen’s College. You’ll be learning Russian and German.”

§30

Much to his surprise this transfer—which Wilderness saw as something between being booted out and being rescued—was regarded by the RAF as just another posting. He was paid up to date—an unprincely two pounds and six shillings—and he was allowed forty-eight hours embarkation leave.

He avoided Turpin and Bodell, since it seemed obvious that they would resent his dodging the glasshouse, would therefore have it in for him and be looking for one last way to take a poke—and whilst it was tempting to make up his bed by numbers, lay out his kit to a grid and then unzip and piss all over the lot, it was a temptation readily resisted.

He spent a quiet, sad weekend back in Sidney Street—Merle poised wistfully in front of a cold cup of tea lamenting the downturn in trade since peace broke out—walked the streets of the old manor in search of faces he knew, concluded that everyone he’d ever known, every kid and every scallywag, was now in uniform and elsewhere, and boarded a Cambridge train at Liverpool Street Station two days later, not glad to be there, or anywhere, but feeling that he was nowhere, and hoping this sensation would not last.

Much more to his surprise Burne-Jones met him off the London train at Cambridge Station.

“You thought I wouldn’t show up?” Wilderness asked.

“Nothing of the kind. And don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Or in this case a gift MG in the radiator.”

Wilderness had never thought much about cars. They had always been beyond his reach. He knew no one who owned a car. He’d never even been in a London taxi. He’d not yet learnt to drive. But if he did, when he did, this, a neat little open-topped 1938 MG two-seater, was what he’d like to own.

“Sling your kit bag in the back.”

Driving up Hills Road towards Parker’s Piece, Burne-Jones said, “You’re in digs a couple of streets from here. There’ll be no room in college, what with dozens of chaps returning to pick up the degrees they put on hold during the war. But you’ll be fine. Besides, you get a taste of living in hall and it could spoil you for life.”

“Maybe I’m ready to be spoiled. Very few opportunities to get spoiled have come my way.”

“My point exactly. You’re vulnerable. Seducible by easy living. And if you get seduced . . . you’re no bloody good to me.”

Wilderness handed over his kit bag to his new landlady—an aproned, tiny, floury, cockney woman called Mrs. Wissit, who looked not unlike his great-aunts and who did not look likely to seduce him—and dashed back to the car.

“We’ll go into college. I’ll introduce you to a few people I know.”

“You went to Cambridge yourself?”

“Yes. Magdalene. 1920 to 1923, and again in 1926 for my master’s. Hasn’t changed much. I’ll show you around. There’ll be about a dozen other chaps doing the crash course with you. And if you could try to remember ranks for the rest of the afternoon, mine included, I’m sure we’ll all get along pretty well. Just say sir from time to time, on the basis that everyone you meet today, whether in civvies or in uniform, will probably outrank you.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Just try, Holderness. Just fucking try!”

§31

Wilderness became aware of the phenomenon of town and gown, and equally aware that he was neither. He mixed with undergraduates without being one of them, and while though he wasn’t exactly town, he never wore a gown, he wore his RAF uniform. He was one of twelve students of Russian and German assigned to a short-term course by His Majesty’s Forces. Two RAF, four Royal Navy, two of whom were the same age as Wilderness but not the same class, and were newly-commissioned sub-lieutenants—that is green whilst being blue—and six soldiers, two of whom were NCOs in their midtwenties, far from green, who had seen combat in the war and elected to stay on with Burne-Jones’s unit. They also elected to have nothing but contempt for the “kids,” officers or other ranks, who had not taken part in the war, and that was everyone else on the course. In between the active and the inactive, but receiving no less contempt was a fat artillery bombardier with a broad Birmingham accent, and a demeanour of contained misery, who had been called up in 1942 and had spent the entire war in England as a driver.

“Even rationing doesn’t make me thin. I reckon they did me a favour. Too fat to be fit. Basic training was a total bloody nightmare. Jump this, jump that. I look like Porky Pig and they wanted me to be Road Runner. So I got trained as a driver. Jeeps, staff cars . . . driving officers and nobs. I drove Anthony Eden across London once during a V-1 raid.”

Wilderness wondered if this was Bombardier Clark’s way of saying he had done his bit. He didn’t care if he had or not.

“Could you teach me to drive?”

“O’ course. But we haven’t got a car.”

“You leave that to me.”

However superior the NCOs felt, it was Clark and Wilderness who shone at languages. In weekly tests of what they had learnt, Wilderness came top and Clark invariably second, followed by the two navy sub lieutenants and everyone else an also-ran. It narked the NCOs, but not half as much as Wilderness’s inability to respect them, their rank or their experience.

On one of his occasional, unannounced spot checks—roaring up in his MG, a dozen belt-fed machine-gun questions rattled off—Burne-Jones found Wilderness bruised, scabby, and with an Elastoplast over one eyebrow.

“What happened?”

Wilderness would not tell him that the two infantry corporals had given him a kicking for his cheek, but Burne-Jones was no fool and readily deduced it.

“You want to report this?”

“Of course not. You think I can’t handle a pair of fucking twats?”

“Holderness, is everyone in a uniform a fucking twat to you?”

“No. Just the NCOs, and to prove it you can have a sir at the end of this sentence, sir.”

“I hope I don’t come to regret you Holderness, I really do.”

“I’m good at this, you won’t have any reason to regret it.”

“Quite.”

One of those non-committal toff words that Wilderness was adjusting to—it was less than meaning, more than punctuation.

“I’m not only good. I’m the best you got right now.”

“That I can’t deny. Top of the form. But is there a point to you telling me this?”

“Yeah. The quid quo . . . quid . . .”

“Quid pro quo. Nice try, Holderness.”

“I want something in return.”

“We don’t make deals.”

“It isn’t much. In fact it’ll cost you nothing.”

Burne-Jones could have walked away at any moment. He didn’t. His look said “try me.”

“Birch,” said Wilderness.

“What?”

“Aircraftman Alexander Birch. The kid who pissed himself on parade.”

“Ah, yes I do indeed recall.”

“I want him out.”

“Meaning?”

“He’s still back in Essex doing his basic training, while I’m here leading the life of Riley. I want him out.”