One Fight at a Time (3 page)

Chapter Three

Swindon railway station was dismal. Overnight April showers had segued into steady morning rain and an aggressive easterly wind was blowing straight along the westbound platform. The temperature was ignoring the calendar. It may officially have been spring, but less than forty degrees Fahrenheit was all the day was offering.

Zoe Easton managed to squeeze into the Waiting Room. She had tried the Ladies Waiting Room, but it was just as cold as the great outdoors. Most of the passengers heading to Bristol were packed into this tiny space, where a coal fire was hurling out three or four kilowatts of heat. The Station Master had used up his last ration coupons on behalf of his customers. Zoe stood next to a tall man reading the
Daily
Sketch
and tried to breathe.

*

Ed Grover was due to board the transport for Reykjavik in five days’ time. Meanwhile, he had his seventy-two hour pass.
Salome
had developed an oil leak, so Whelan ferried him the twelve miles to Swindon railway station in another jeep.

Grover wasn’t too great in small spaces with people packed shoulder to shoulder. He had discovered this while pitching and rolling in a landing craft in the Channel. So he sat down on the bench in a shelter along the platform, pulled up his greatcoat collar, crossed his arms and banged his hands against his shoulders in an effort to keep warm. He looked across the line towards the railway yard. Swindon had always been a railway town and since the end of the war had returned to the business of producing steam locomotives. But it was not the sleek new monsters standing outside the building sheds that caught Grover’s attention. Directly in his line of sight, behind the eastbound platform, were four battered landing craft, stacked one upon the other. There was a message on the sides in white paint, reading from the top LCP down to the bottom one –
2
,
400
produced
here
for
D
Day
. He began to wonder if he had crossed the channel in one of them...

*

In January 1944, sick of watching men he admired take off into the blue, not knowing if they would return, Grover got himself transferred to the 21st US Armoured Division. He celebrated his twenty-third birthday on the evening of June 4th. Just a small gathering of buddies around a couple of tables in the bar. Only three glasses of beer allowed to each man. They were all on standby for an operation that would see them make history, providing the weather cleared. So they toasted Ed in the stuff that made Milwaukee famous and tried not to think about what was coming. An inch short of six feet tall and a comfortable eleven stones in weight, Grover was fit and tough and respected. The savage army haircut had not succeeded entirely in disguising his dark brown curls. The steady and uncompromising look in his blue eyes, lent a solid re-assurance to those around him, in the nervous dawn of June 6.

The 21st battled every yard from Omaha Beach to the River Elbe.

Grover began D Day as a private. He survived the Battle of the Bulge winter because he came from Tomah Wisconsin, which had the coldest sonovabitch winters on the planet. While his compatriots from South Carolina and Georgia shivered in soaked battledress and boots, he thumped on through the Ardennes snow, guiding the way like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.

He got his first stripe after the 21st broke out of Bastogne. They gave him his second, after Baker Company led the charge over the Saar River, blowing up both German machine gun posts.

While he was somewhere between Remagen Bridge and Betzdorf, slogging eastwards, his mother died of liver cancer. His brother Arnold, who was building Sherman tanks in Detroit, sent him a wire he never got. Div Coms was busy trying to direct the frenzied advance and lost it somehow. A subsequent letter reached him two weeks after the funeral. At that stage, there seemed no point in going home. So he stitched on his third chevron and kept moving.

In the course of ten months, Grover morphed from scared rookie into experienced killer. Advance at whatever cost was the order, blasting onwards and trying not to die was the method, and home was a world away. He began to wonder who he had been before all this. What sort of person was the Ed Grover he had left behind in Tomah Wisconsin? He hoped to Christ he hadn’t been the person he was now. Because now, the only thing that mattered was this day in history and how many of the men in his company were still alive as it dawned.

Finally, on the west bank of the Elbe, the soldiers of Baker Company stood still and silent, waiting for the end. Grover watched through binoculars, as soldiers of the Ukraine 1st Army gathered in a massive swarm across the river. Fleeing Germans, refugee Poles and Slavs were rounded up and bundled into makeshift compounds.

Now, Europe belonged to the Allies, and the hammer and sickle flew over the Reichstag.

*

In the station Waiting Room, the tall man finished reading his newspaper, folded it and offered it to Zoe. She read the front page headline.
BRITAIN’S
WOMEN
ENJOY
BEING
HOME
-
MAKERS
AGAIN
. This was the conclusion arrived at, following a survey conducted by the recently created
Home
Plans
for
Britain
Committee
– a group of prominent civil servants, set up to review how Britain was coping, five years on. Marvellously well apparently. Zoe wondered how comprehensive that survey had been. Which, in turn, led to considering how life had moved on in the West Country.

The war effort in Swindon’s railway yards had been immense. Millions of fighter cannon shells, thousands of bombs, field generators, bailey bridges and landing craft. Most of them built by women who had learned overnight how to be fitters and riveters. Now, the men had returned from Europe to take their old jobs back. The women who had kept Britain in the war and made a huge contribution to the winning of it, were once again housewives and home makers. But almost five years on, sweets and chocolate, tea, sugar, eggs, tinned fruit, jam, cheese, soap and petrol were still on ration. Even if the new
age
of
austerity
housewife could make three pounds ten shillings a week housekeeping seem like a fortune, she still struggled to put a decent family meal on the table.

The tannoy crackled into life. Announced that the 9.05 to Bristol Temple Meads was approaching platform 2. Bodies spilled out of the Waiting Room.

Zoe walked towards the front of the train. Ahead of her, a soldier rose from the bench in the shelter, crossed the platform and opened the rear door of the front carriage. He saw her approaching, held the door open and waved her into the carriage ahead of him. She nodded her thanks. He climbed in behind her and closed the door.

The compartments had spare seats, here and there. Zoe walked the length of the corridor, towards the engine. In the foremost compartment, two workmen in heavy woollen jackets and wearing GWR badges, were sitting facing each other on opposite sides of the door. One of them nodded a greeting to her as she stepped in from the corridor and squeezed between their knees. She sat down in a corner by the window. The soldier followed her into the compartment and sat down on the seat opposite.

There was a roar of steam from the engine ahead. The carriage jolted and began to move. The train pulled out of Swindon, got up to speed and began to chug rhythmically on.

In his seat, Grover leaned his head into the corner cushions and allowed himself a few moments to look at the woman in front of him. She was pretty. Dark, shoulder length hair, brown eyes and dimples in her cheeks. About five feet six he estimated. Probably older than he was. She was wearing a dark coat, which she had unbuttoned because the compartment was warm. Underneath she wore a high-necked navy blue sweater and matching skirt, the hem of which rested on her knees. She had long legs.

Then conscious that she must be aware of the inspection he had just made, he leaned forwards and offered the woman his right hand.

“My name’s Ed Grover.”

She took his hand. “Zoe,” she said. “Zoe Easton.”

“Pleasure to meet you Zoe.”

“You’re a long way from home.”

He leaned back into the seat again. “I came over here in the summer of 1940.”

“And you’re still here.”

“Minor miracle I guess.”

“And home…?”

Grover had been over this ground many times. And he had slipped into an uncomfortable rationalisation about home.

“The land of the free and the home of the brave, looks very different from this distance. We Americans are an acquired taste. We were late pitching up for the war. Again. And we brought with us burgers and Hershey Bars. The US is as big as Europeans imagine. With big motor cars and shopping malls and freeways that run for hundreds of miles. Where some very frightening people are working around the clock building atomic bombs. All the prices end in ninety-nine cents and mortuary plots are sold on billboards next to the freeway.”

Zoe looked straight into Grover’s eyes, surprised by the assessment of his homeland. He looked out of the window.

“In any case, there’s not much to go back for.”

“Have you no family?”

“My father was killed by a drunk driver when I was six. My mother died while I was in Germany. My brother and I get on well enough, but I guess that’s because we rarely meet up. He’s in Detroit. Married, with two kids. He builds Chrysler gearboxes.”

“And you’re a soldier.”

“Only for another five days.”

“So... What will you do next?”

“I don’t know. Go with the flow I guess. That’s what I’ve always done. My brother went off to Motor City, I stayed at home. Joined the Tomah PD when I was seventeen. Did a couple of years as a beat cop. Then I got interested in the practice of the law – how it was supposed to work, not just enforcing it. I was about to do a law degree in Chicago, when the war arrived and got in the way.”

He paused and leaned back in his seat. Zoe waited for him to go on.

“I should go back home and do it now,” he said. “But... Hell, I was nineteen then. And that seems a lifetime ago.”

He drifted back to the present. Zoe smiled at him. It was infectious. He smiled back. The train slowed and slid into Chippenham. The GWR men got to their feet and left the compartment. Zoe re-arranged herself against the seat cushions. Grover studied her once more.

“Now you,” he said.

She looked at him.

“What about me?”

“Your turn. Tell me about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Oh er... Age, marital status.”

“Always the first two questions.”

Grover raised his hands, palms outwards. “Sorry.”

Zoe took a couple of beats pause. Then a deep breath.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m thirty-eight. I was married. My husband flew Lancasters. His plane was shot down over the Ruhr in September 1944. Our son Christopher, was killed in the Luftwaffe raid in January ’41. I was in London, so he was spending the night with his aunt, my sister. A direct hit on the garden smashed the Anderson shelter to pieces.”

Grover shifted in his seat. Uncomfortable, for the first time since the conversation had begun. Zoe helped him out.

“Don’t worry Ed. Talking with a stranger on a train is good. No baggage, and no explanations necessary.”

“I lost count of the number of people I watched die,” he said. “I kept the score for a while. I didn’t want the deaths to go un-recalled. But I stopped when I realised it was a senseless activity. There were just too many.”

There was a long pause. Both of them waiting for the other to offer the last words on the subject. Zoe broke the silence.

“I think you should go home, Ed Grover.”

He looked at her. They lapsed into silence again. The train rumbled on. Grover stared out of the window again, thinking about what he had left behind.

*

In the summer of 1945, now promoted to Master Sergeant, Grover was posted to Wiesbaden. And back on the banks of the Rhine, he found himself having to cultivate a new bunch of skills.

Only three months earlier, he and Baker Company had stormed the town, guns blazing, adrenalin levels off the scale. Now the war was over and the killing done, but Grover discovered the peace was no cakewalk. Building life after death was an eerie and complicated business. While struggling across Europe, through the fighting and the dying, there had been times when Grover had prayed for the war to end. Not that he was much of a church goer, but there are no atheists in foxholes. He soon came to realise however, that ending the war wasn’t in God’s hands, but in his and in the hands of his buddies. Baker Company had a greater purpose than anyone at any time in history. And now, with that purpose achieved, they had to help win the peace.

Grover had got used to the killing. Even close up. He had seen the whites of his enemy’s eyes. Now, in Wiesbaden, he was looking into the faces of bewildered mothers and children, traumatised and helpless. Charged with distributing food and medicines, and waging a different kind of war, against chancers, exploiters and black marketeers.