Mosquito Squadron (11 page)

They went into the inn and entered a long, low bar, its ceiling blackened by many years of tobacco smoke. Sunbeams like searchlights penetrated through the small windows, forming pools of light among the shadows, and it was some seconds before Yeoman’s eyes accepted the sharp contrast. Then, as he and Julia moved towards the bar, he saw that there were several people in the room, seated around a heavy oak table near one of the windows, engrossed in a game of dominoes. One of them got up and opened a flap in the bar counter, passed through and approached the pilot, smiling. His face was round and red, capped by a tonsure of white hair, and his girth was considerable. He looked for all the world like an ageing Friar Tuck, and Yeoman liked him immediately.

‘Good evening, sir,’ the landlord said. ‘And to you, miss. What can I get you?’

Yeoman smiled back at him. ‘Good evening. A pint of bitter would be very nice.’ He turned to Julia. ‘What about you, love? A small bottle of beer, perhaps?’

She laughed. ‘Not on your life! You drink pints, I drink pints! Bitter, please,’ she told the landlord. He looked at her with considerable respect.

‘It’ll be the first time a woman’s had a pint in this pub,’ he said. ‘You’re American, miss, aren’t you?’

Julia admitted that she was. The landlord nodded, as though that explained everything. ‘Right-o, then,’ he said with a wink. ‘Two pints of bitter it is. I’ll be back in a jiffy.’ He disappeared into a back room and returned half a minute later with a foaming pint mug in each hand. ‘There you are,’ he said, beaming. ‘That’s a drop of the good stuff.’ Yeoman put his hand in his pocket, searching for some money, but the landlord shook his head, eyeing the pilot’s wings and the medal ribbons under them. ‘No, lad,’ he said, ‘the drinks are on the house. My own boy is in the Air Force. An air gunner.’

‘How about one for us then, Joe?’ asked one of the landlord’s table companions, chuckling. The speaker was a wizened, ancient man dressed in waistcoat and corduroy trousers, a peaked cap pulled well down over his eyes. A clay pipe protruded from beneath it, exuding pungent smoke.

‘Get away with you, Henry Boulter,’ said Joe. ‘You’d scrounge anything, you would.’

The old man grunted, peering at Yeoman and Julia. ‘Don’t stand there, you young ’uns,’ he said. ‘You make the room look untidy. Come over and sit yourselves down.’

‘Thanks,’ Yeoman said, ‘but we don’t want to interrupt your game.’

The old man removed his pipe and scratched his nose with the stem.

‘Game’s over, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m not playing with him no more.’ He pointed his pipe stem at Joe, the landlord. ‘Bad loser, he is. Won’t stand a pint for the winner.’ Yeoman laughed. ‘All right, then. Just as long as we’re not intruding.’

They sat down at the table and Yeoman brought out his own pipe and tobacco pouch, nodding to the others in greeting. They were all fairly elderly countrymen, and he guessed that this was their ritual at the end of their day’s labour.

Henry looked from Yeoman to the tobacco pouch, then suddenly stretched out a hand and pushed it aside.

‘Put it away, lad,’ he said. ‘Have some o’ this instead. It’ll do your insides the power of good.’

He produced a battered tin and offered it to Yeoman. The pilot prised off the lid and inspected the contents dubiously. Inside was a dark, rather stringy mixture that looked like chopped-up seaweed. Yeoman sniffed it tentatively and found that its aroma was unlike that of any tobacco he had encountered; it smelled of grass and wild herbs and garden mould.

‘Go on, lad,’ urged Henry. ‘It won’t bite.’

Yeoman realized that there were broad grins on the faces of the other men around the table and sensed that he was being taken for a ride, but he made up his mind to play along and filled his pipe to the brim, raising a rueful eyebrow at Julia. Henry snatched back his tin rather rudely.

‘Hey, steady on there,’ he said, winking at his companions. ‘That stuff doesn’t grow on trees, you know.’

Yeoman lit up and took an experimental puff, exhaling the smoke slowly. Very carefully, he placed his pipe on the table and sat gazing into space for a moment. Then his eyes began to water and beads of perspiration broke out on his brow. He grasped his pint mug with both hands and raised it to his lips, draining it in one long swallow. He set it down on the table with a bang and released his breath in a series of explosive gasps.

‘Great God Almighty,’ he croaked in a strangled voice. ‘What was
that
?’

Beside him, old Henry and his cronies, and Julia too, were convulsed with laughter.

‘Coltsfoot,’ Henry said, spluttering with merriment.

‘Coltsfoot? You mean the bloody
weed
? The yellow stuff that grows by the roadside?’

‘Aye,’ chortled Henry, nodding vigorously. ‘I’ve smoked it since I was a lad your age, and it’s never done me any harm. Go on — have another try at it.’

‘No thanks,’ Yeoman said firmly. ‘I’ll smoke my own, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’ll have that back, then,’ said Henry, eyeing the barely-touched contents of Yeoman’s pipe. The pilot scraped the mixture out of the bowl into Henry’s tin, then ordered another pint.

‘Where are you from, lad?’ asked Henry.

‘Now then, Henry,’ one of the old man’s companions admonished. ‘You should know better than to ask questions like that. Careless talk costs lives, you know.’

‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ Henry snapped. ‘Do I look like a German spy?’

‘How would I know?’ the other retorted. ‘I’ve never seen one.’

‘Oh, they go around dressed in long black cloaks, with floppy hats pulled down over their eyes and a cannonball under an arm with “bomb” written on it,’ Julia said. The others laughed.

‘Or dressed as nuns,’ said one of the men at the table, who had not spoken until now. ‘My lad was at Dunkirk, and he said they used to parachute ’em behind the lines, dressed up as nuns.’

‘Did he actually come across any?’ Yeoman asked, out of curiosity.

‘No,’ the man admitted. ‘He just heard stories, that’s all.’

‘So did I,’ said the pilot. ‘I was in France too, during the retreat, and there were all sorts of wild rumours flying about.’

‘According to my lad, they didn’t see much of the Air Force at Dunkirk,’ the man said cynically.

‘Oh, we were there, all right,’ Yeoman emphasized. He went on to explain how, fighting against enormous odds, the RAF’s depleted fighter and bomber squadrons, together with their French allies, had striven to stem the German advance through Flanders and northern France; how Fighter Command, operating from bases in southern England, had torn great gaps in the ranks of the Luftwaffe over Dunkirk in air battles that were mostly invisible to the battered, weary troops on the bomb-swept beaches.

From time to time Julia added her own comments; for she had seen it all too, as a war correspondent attached to the French Army on the Maginot Line. The men listened intently, although Yeoman thought that he detected a certain scepticism in their attitude. And, he thought, who could blame them? Thousands of soldiers had come back from Dunkirk with a bitter feeling that they had been let down by the RAF, and Fighter Command’s latest victory above England in that tumultuous summer of 1940 had, to some degree, been diminished by subsequent defeats in the Balkans and the Far East. Some day, perhaps, someone would set the record straight, but in the meantime it was galling to have to listen to constant rumblings of criticism.

After a short pause, Joe, the landlord, said: ‘Well, we’re giving it back to the buggers now, and no mistake. Look at this.’ He picked up a copy of a local newspaper from the bar counter and quoted the headlines; ‘“RAF Pound Berlin. Over One Thousand Tons of Bombs Dropped.” We’re knocking hell out of ’em, I reckon, what with Sicily being captured and all.’

‘And the Russians,’ someone said. ‘Don’t forget the Russians. It said on the news this morning that they’d launched a big attack somewhere. I can’t remember where. That’s the trouble with all them funny Russian names, you can never remember ’em.’

‘Just like the French,’ Henry commented. ‘Can’t make head nor tail of ’em. That old Vichy must be a funny bugger, though,’ he added thoughtfully.

The remark brought a roar of laughter from his companions. ‘It’s not a person, you daft old devil,’ said Joe. ‘It’s a town in France, where they have their government.’

Henry gave an unconvinced grunt. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m fed up with all this war talk. Can’t get away from it, not even at home. The missus sits glued to the wireless, listening to every news bulletin. Not that it makes much difference; there’s nowt else on anyway. Bloody BBC’s gone daft. Have you seen what’s on tonight?
Welsh
Half
Hour
. I ask you! And then Tommy bloody Handley again, and after that Russian piano music. I tell you,’ he concluded bitterly, ‘I wish I’d never bought the damned thing.’

The conversation drifted on aimlessly, turning eventually to farming. Yeoman bought a round of drinks, then he and Julia went outside and sat on a bench for a while, enjoying the sun while it lasted. A small boy, wearing outsize boots, a ragged shirt and a pair of short trousers with a gaping hole where the seat should have been, came and stared at them curiously for a while, his eyes unblinking and his thumb firmly inserted into his mouth. Yeoman had seen that same ragged look, that same state, a hundred times before, in France, North Africa and Malta; the colour of the skin and the style of dress might be different, but the stare was the same. It said, ‘This is my territory, and you are strangers, intruding into it. I can be persuaded to go away, but only at a price.’

Julia made an unsuccessful attempt to Find out the little boy’s name, reaching out to take his hand, but he took a quick step backwards, just out of reach, continuing his vigil. By this time, Yeoman was beginning to feel faintly embarrassed. He fished in his pocket and brought out a penny, extending it to the child in the palm of his hand.

The boy seized it, removed his thumb for a fraction of a second, stuck out his tongue to its furthest extent and fled. Yeoman and Julia burst out laughing.

‘That’s what we’re fighting for,’ the pilot grinned. ‘The future of Britain.’

‘Not just of Britain,’ his companion said, more seriously. ‘There are millions of kids like that all over the world, most of them far worse off because of what we’ve done to them, George, our generation and the one before it. What’s going to happen to them? What sort of people are they going to turn out to be?’

Yeoman made no reply for a few seconds. Then he said: ‘People like you and me, I suppose. After all, wars have been happening for thousands of years, and after each one a new generation of children grows up and forgets. It’s a pity that they do forget, because if they remembered what it was really like there wouldn’t be any more wars. My dad used to talk about the last war a lot, when he was in the mood, but I could never grasp what it must really have been like. All I know is that when I was little my pals and I used to play English and Germans, and that nobody liked being the Germans because they were the ones who always got shot. I’d like to bet, too, that thirty years after this lot is over kids will still be playing English and Germans, assuming, that is, that we haven’t fought anybody else in the meantime.’

The sound of singing came to them, breaking off their conversation. The noise swelled and now they could hear that it was a marching song, deep and with a swing to it that was unlike British marching songs.

A company of soldiers came round the corner, marching in column of route in full field kit, the tramp of their boots echoing rhythmically from the walls of the cottages. Children came running out to watch the khaki-clad ranks as they swung past along the village’s solitary street.

The little boy to whom Yeoman had given a penny came running forward, stopped just by the roadside, pointed a finger at one of the soldiers and said, ‘Bang!’ The soldier made as though to unsling his rifle, scowling fiercely, and the child fled as fast as his outsize boots would let him, wailing in terror. A roar of laughter echoed down the marching column, changing to whistles and catcalls as the troops caught sight of Julia. The soldiers were quickly brought to order by an officer, who rapped out a sharp command and then flung up a salute, aimed at Julia rather than at Yeoman. The latter, who had been sitting bareheaded in the sun, waved in acknowledgement and called out ‘
Dobry
wieczor
!’, for he had seen the ‘Poland’ shoulder flashes on the soldiers’ uniforms. The officer, a captain, looked faintly surprised, then grinned hugely and returned the greeting. The column marched on and was soon lost to sight beyond the curve of the road.

‘That was very accomplished of you, darling,’ said Julia. Yeoman grinned and tried to assume a superior expression, examining his fingernails.

‘Just one of my many talents,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, I picked up quite a bit of the language when I was flying with the Polish squadron back in September ‘40.’

‘Just so long as that’s all you picked up,’ she said, laughingly ‘Those Poles have quite a reputation for the fleshpots, or so I’ve been led to believe.’

He looked at her wickedly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I remember spending quite a few fascinating nights with one particular red-headed seductress who told me a pack of lies about being an American war correspondent. I was completely innocent until I met her,’ he laughed, dodging a playful swipe of her hand.