Five Boys Page 11

  By five past eight the place was heaving, before a single American had even walked through the door, the air so thick with hair lacquer that the Reverend Bentley had trouble breathing and had to stick his head out of the window to clear his lungs. A couple of feet below him two women were taking a slug from a small bottle and, without necessarily intending to, the reverend caught a bit of their conversation. One was saying how she’d been almost beside herself with excitement for the best part of a fortnight, but now that she was here all she wanted was to have some GI walk up and ask her for a dance. He didn’t have to look like Clark Gable or Cary Grant, she said. Someone clean and smart would do. Her friend nodded and said that surely, after all the drudgery of the last few years, there was no shame in getting powdered up and having a little drink and a dance for an hour or two.

  Mrs. Heaney wrestled gamely with the gramophone but most of her audience had their backs to her, smoothing their skirts and chatting to their neighbors, with their eyes all fixed on the door. The minutes flicked by on the clock on the proscenium arch and the conversation slowly ebbed away, until only Lena May’s voice filled the air, singing about the delights of “running out to gather lilies” to a hall filled with women who might as well have been cast in stone.

  At quarter past, Phyllis Massie turned to Sylvia with tears in her eyes. “What if something’s come up?” she said.

  It was a quite reasonable proposition. Things had a habit of coming up. Something had come up in ‘39, just as it had done a generation earlier. Something which had led almost all of the village’s men away. And when they go, thought Sylvia, something goes with them. Some part of life is put on hold. War never fails to get the men’s attention. You’ve only got to rattle a drum and they come running. You only have to peep on a whistle and they fall into line.

  “They’ve had to cancel,” said the woman next to Phyllis.

  And in that second all their hopes were broken. All the hours of bathing and powdering seemed suddenly foolish; the weeks of anticipation went to waste. There was nothing but the prospect of a night spent dancing with a best friend,bickering over who was going to take the lead. And Howard Kent strutting up and down the place, like the cat who got the cream.

  As the word went around, some of the younger girls started crying. Most of them had never been to a dance before. Lena May exhausted the pleasures of lily gathering and Mrs. Heaney had her head tucked under the table, flicking through her box of 78s. The gramophone needle slid into the play-out groove and swept toward the shore of the label. And only then, above that gritty crackle, did the distant rumble of lorries become audible. The women held their breath; listened. Listened as the trucks’ engines became distinct, then steadily grew. And they drew them in, yard by interminable yard, until the walls of the village hall began to shudder. And they could hear the squeak of brakes out in the lane. The clank of tailgates falling open; the clatter of boots landing on the ground. Laughter, conversation. Living, breathing American men.

  When they first walked in the soldiers must have wondered what kind of place they’d tripped over. The women just stood and stared at them, openmouthed. A gramophone needle hissed and clicked repeatedly over the speaker, and for a moment the hall and everyone in it seemed to be caught in its own little loop.

  It would have been hard to say where the applause had its origins. It seemed to spring up spontaneously in several places all at once. But it quickly spread and was accompanied by a cheer of such unbridled lust that the Reverend Bentley could only wonder what primeval urges he had let loose upon the world.

  • • •

  As Miss Pye told her customers the following morning, “They wouldn’t waltz and they wouldn’t foxtrot. All they wanted to do was jitterbug.”

  The GIs had had the foresight to bring along their own box of records and, within minutes, had commandeered the gramophone. The noise which proceeded to pump out of the speaker sounded to the local women like nothing but a mad, chaotic clatter. They hadn’t a clue how they were meant to dance to it and were a little embarrassed by the utter abandonment with which their dance partners began to hurl themselves about. After a life long governed by the dead reckoning of the ration book this expenditure of energy alone seemed rash, extravagant. But as the evening settled into its own tempo it became apparent that whatever was loose in the room, far from dissipating, was positively multiplying itself.

  The women slowly gave in to the push and pull of their partners, began to swing from hand to hand, found the lurch and smack in the music and forgot to worry what they must look like or where their feet should be. To be turned and handled so ably rekindled in them all sorts of warmth and kindnesses. The American men seemed amazingly at home in their bodies. No Englishman, thought Sylvia Crouch, could ever dance like that. There was nothing pinched or sour about them and the longer the night went on the more it seemed that everything about these men—their eyes, their hair, their skin—was shining, as if they had been warmed by a brighter sun.

  In those few moments when one record was replaced with another and the dancers exchanged a word or two, the women first noticed how strangely the soldiers spoke, as well as the strong smell of apples that came rolling out of them. Not a bad thing to smell of, thought Phyllis. Sort of homely. She was dancing with a big bear of a man and thought it must be the smell of all those American apples seeping through the pores of his skin. It wasn’t until the next day that she learned how the soldiers had called in at the Malsters’ and, having been warned against drinking the locals out of their precious beer, had asked the landlord to suggest an alternative and that the cider had tasted just like apple juice.

  Only two people conspicuously failed to share the sense of intoxication. Watching the mass of bodies writhing around the dance floor, the Reverend Bentley had a vision of himself as a whoremaster, herding the village’s womenfolk into the arms of a clearly libidinous gang of men. More profound was the bitterness at work in Howard Kent, whose heart had been the only one to sink among the hundreds soaring when the GIs finally walked through the door. In that instant he was toppled, and any remaining self-esteem was soon jostled out of him. Howard couldn’t jitterbug—had no desire to jitterbug—and when he approached the drunken GI at the gramophone, to first insist that he play a barn dance and, twenty minutes later, demand the same, the soldier took him to one side and told him, in a whisper, how close he was to being taken outside and having his teeth kicked down his throat.

  Howard leaned against a wall and tried to look as if he was overseeing the proceedings, like a contented social secretary, while all his rage and pain gnawed away inside him. He tried clapping his hands in time with the music as the women shrieked and wiggled their backsides, but by half past nine he had had enough, picked up his coat and made his way home.

  From his bed he could hear the music wafting up through the village and when, a couple of hours later, he heard the opening chords of the hokey-pokey he was still wide awake. He imagined the great ring of people holding hands, the mad rush into the middle and the women laughing as they were squeezed in the crush. The singing stopped, a cheer went up and, a few moments later, there was the first of a hundred bursting balloons, and Howard comforted himself by imagining each one as a shell waiting to meet the Americans when they were finally shipped out to France.

  A Pig Memorial

  WHETHER ANY indiscretions on the night of the social amounted to anything quite as sordid as Howard Kent imagined nobody was saying, but by the time the sun rose the following morning the Americans’ brief sortie into the civilizing company of women was over and they were back in the confines of their camp.

  It is just about possible that a romance founded on the village hall dance floor could have secretly been sustained over the weeks which followed, and Howard regularly speculated on the clandestine gropings and couplings this might entail, but as February fell to March and the sound of artillery began to roll in from the commandeered zone, the women could only imagine how their dance partner
s were presently occupied.

  There were rumors of naval exercises out in Start Bay. There was talk of maneuvers between Blackawton and Slapton Ley. A story did the rounds of a dog, left behind in the evacuation, slipping under the barbed wire, tripping every mine on the beach and taking the Royal Sands Hotel up with it. But other animals were said to be loose in the no-go area, aside from the wildlife which had so stubbornly ignored the orders to evacuate and the vermin busy making the place their own. A sizable pig was said to be out and about beyond the roadblocks and its very existence was threatening to push at least one local man beyond the bounds of sanity.

  Fred Raybe, the story goes, had packed every last case and trunk onto his trailer and was about to climb aboard himself when he suddenly remembered the Landrace sow he’d spent the best part of eighteen months fattening up. Some owners of pigs keep them in a pen and feed them leftovers. Others, Mr. Raybe among them, like to let them wander, gather their own sustenance where they find it and pack on a bit of muscle as they go. So in 1943 it was not uncommon to see the Raybe pig trotting up and down the lane, poking its snout into some unlikely corner or lying fast asleep by the gate, except, of course, on that one afternoon in mid-December when Raybe was about to leave.

  If he hadn’t had such an arduous journey ahead of him he might have wasted more time trying to track the animal down, but in the end all he could do was heartily curse it and leave it to its fate. It was Harold Snape who claimed to have spotted the pig in Raybe’s orchard as he and his own sad little retinue went by later that same day, and his friend, Eric Huntley, who happened to mention this to Dexter Fadden in a public house a couple of months later on. Ever since, Dexter had devoted every spare moment to thinking how he might intervene in the pig’s destiny, increasingly fearful that someone else might get there first.

  Dexter considered himself a man of some intelligence and at the very outset resolved that, rather than go sneaking around the place and getting yourself shot at, the thing to do was think of a way of strolling in, bagging the pig, strolling back out again and having the U.S. Army salute you as you go. It took many hours of exhausting brain work before he came up with an idea which met such strict criteria—an idea which would ultimately require the participation of what felt like half the town, and was the reason why such an odd collection of people came to be heading toward the checkpoint on a crisp Saturday morning in early spring.

  Dexter’s lifelong friend, Jackie Taylor, and two of Jackie’s workmates, Will and Cyril, helped Dexter carry the coffin, on the understanding that it would be back in the workshop before bedtime with plenty of chops and bacon to follow, just as soon as the animal was divvied up. Will and Cyril had several decades’ undertaking experience between them and it was their professional gravity as much as their morning suits that merited their inclusion and encouraged Dexter in his belief that he had the remotest chance of pulling off such an audacious stunt. The Captain went ahead of the coffin, with Aldred Crouch beside him, whose ecclesiastical connection was how the Reverend Bentley’s black surplice came to be billowing around the Captain’s shoulders as he led them down the lane. Sylvia Crouch and Maureen Tucker followed the pallbearers, having convinced Dexter only the previous Wednesday, when he was at his lowest ebb, that a gang of men never looked quite so suspicious when they had a couple of women with them, especially when one of them was pushing a pram.

  The only member of the cortège whose attendance took some justification was Howard Kent, the simple fact being that he had a knack for inveigling his way into other people’s conversations and happened to own a spare dark suit, which had belonged to his father, and now hung off Dexter Fadden much like Mr. Mercer’s hung off him.

  The other mourners weren’t used to seeing the Captain out in the open. Like his ships, he tended to be viewed almost exclusively through glass. But Dexter had decided that the Captain’s was the only face with sufficient wrinkles and resignation to belong to a clergyman (except for the Reverend Bentley himself), and once the role had been offered to him the Captain felt some long-forgotten theatrical ambition spark up in him and took to standing before his bedroom mirror like a Shakespearian actor and assuming what he considered to be vicarial attitudes. On this Saturday morning he had his best white collar and black pullover on back to front, but despite the others repeatedly assuring him how very clerical he looked he was halfway down the hill before the collar finally succeeded in throttling a convincing expression of devoutness out of him.

  Sylvia and Maureen had dyed a couple of old doilies and stitched them to the front of their bonnets, creating veils behind which, they reasoned, any number of tears might be being shed, and the pram in which Maureen’s baby slept was so vast and black that the only thing conceivably bigger and blacker would have been a hearse itself. The rest of the party compensated with solemnity what they lacked in suitable attire, but of all his homemade religious regalia only the tablecloth wrapped around Aldred’s shoulders gave Dexter any real cause for concern, along with the pole (normally used to open the vestry windows), which he held out before him, with a Christmas decoration glued to the top.

  The villagers marched down the hill with their minds on the task before them. In the last few days that hapless pig had been cured and butchered by every one of its mourners a hundred times. The demands on the pig were many, but the creature had loomed largest in Dexter’s mind. So, just as the Captain liked to think about Miss Pye sucking on a toffee and Howard Kent chose to torment himself with the thought of local women fornicating with American servicemen, Dexter Fadden closed his eyes to see a Landrace sow, immobilized with obesity, reclining in a dappled light.

  “A pig in an orchard,” he told himself before slipping beneath sleep’s heavy curtain. “No need for applesauce.”

  When they were a quarter of a mile from the checkpoint Dexter turned to issue his final instructions. His cheek squeaked against the coffin’s polished wood.

  “Just remember,” he said. “We’re all very upset.”

  Aldred held his window-opening pole out before him like a fishing rod and watched the star on the end of it sail through a cloudless sky. He had wanted to bring the big Bible along, for extra religion, and might have had the hymn board under the other arm had Dexter not insisted that too much churchy luggage would only tire him out.

  They crossed the boundary road and slowed their pace on the last bend, with Cyril, the senior undertaker, calling out, “Left … left … left, right, left,” in a voice so rich and deep that the coffin acted as its sounding box and soon all four pallbearers were perfectly, sedately in step. The last hundred yards were as straight as an arrow, which gave the soldiers plenty of time to behold the approaching parade, but judging by the look on their faces when the mourners finally reached them it was nowhere near long enough.

  The soldiers and the mourners faced each other through the barbed wire. The only thing to breach the divide was Aldred’s religious pole. The villagers all looked to the Captain. But the theatrical ambition Dexter had recently reawakened in him had been extinguished by a paralyzing dose of stage fright. The same was true for most of his fellow mourners, the only exceptions being Aldred Crouch, who had simply adopted his usual Sunday morning persona,and Maureen Tucker, who had taken to heart Dexter’s earlier instructions and upset herself so successfully with memories of her own grandfather’s funeral that real emotion now shook her by her shoulders and real tears crept beneath her veil.

  The Americans were finding the whole thing deeply disconcerting. None of their briefings had warned them of the possible appearance of a band of locals bearing one of their dead. The way they all just stood and stared was particularly unsettling and, if for no better reason than to try and break the deadlock, one of the soldiers finally opened his mouth.

  “You don’t plan to bring that coffin in here, do you?” he said.

  The Captain stared moronically back at him. Would have stared at him a good deal longer had Dexter not prompted him from behind.

&n
bsp; “Show him the papers,” he hissed.

  The Captain suddenly seemed to find his place in the script.

  “It’s been arranged,” he said and his hand disappeared into his surplice and came out clutching a great wad of folded notes, which he passed through the wire.

  The first soldier began to leaf through them and his comrade shuffled over to take a look. It appeared that they had just been given a batch of very important documents, including a letter of introduction from the Archdeacon of Exeter, a letter of transit from the Bishop of Budleigh Salterton, notes of condolence from the mayors of Totnes and Newton Abbot and a sheet of notepaper headed “PORTER’S UNDERTAKERS LTD,” with the words “Death Certificate” written across it and “PAID IN FULL” stamped below.

  The soldier holding the papers seemed to be straining under the weight of all this information.

  “Am I right in thinking,” he said, looking up from the papers, “that you’re intending to have a burial?”

  “Oh no,” said the Captain. “Just a memorial service.” He smiled, to show how much comfort such a service can bring. “A few hymns … a few words of remembrance … a prayer or two. That sort of thing.”

  “So, you intend to bring the coffin back out again?” the soldier said.

  “Oh yes,” the Captain told him, most insistent. “The coffin’s got to come back out.”

  The soldier looked as if he’d just received a blow to the back of the head. He passed the documents back through the barbed wire. Stood and thought for a moment. Opened his mouth as if he was about to say something. Then shook his head and closed it again.

  He went over to the barrier and began to drag it back across the road. As the lane opened up before them a wave of relief swept through the mourners and they were about to move off when the second soldier, who had been doing some thinking of his own, stepped out in front of them.