Resistance (3 page)

F
ourteen days.

“Fourteen days of activity. You can expect around fourteen days from the invasion date. Still up for it?”

That’s what Tommy Atkins had said. He’d made it clear what he meant too; what would happen after the “activity” ended. Fourteen days before you’re caught, tortured, and shot, that’s what he was saying. George Bowen shifted in his narrow bed. He came out in a cold sweat every time he thought of it. According to the papers the first landing craft beached at Dover eight days ago. Just six days then, was that it? He counted them off on his hand under the bedclothes, opening a finger from his fist for each day of the week. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Next Monday then. Or maybe Tuesday if he was lucky. His turn to “perish in the common ruin.” That’s how Churchill had put it on the wireless last week: “perish in the common ruin rather than fail or falter in your duty.” But what if he did fail or falter? What if he didn’t do his duty? What would happen then?

He turned over again. He was still wearing his clothes and his boots lay beside the bed where he’d kicked them off just hours before. He’d taken to sleeping like this ever since it started again, so he could be up quickly when his father shouted for him from the bottom of the stairs. He was often too tired to get undressed anyway.

Fourteen days. Two weeks. But Atkins had said that four years ago. He was planning for a different invasion altogether then. So perhaps it wouldn’t be the same this time. Things were different now, weren’t they? Perhaps it would be sooner. Or maybe later. After all he hadn’t seen a thing yet, other than some of their own troop
movements and the activities of the Home Guard. But there had been lots of messages. For the last four nights in a row he’d been to all three drop points. The loose stone at the church; the plank in the barn door; the split tennis ball in the yew bole. Every night he’d been all over his patch and he knew others had too. The wireless operators had been at their stations day in, day out. So it was close, no doubt about it.

According to one message he’d taken last night the operational patrols had already left. He tried to imagine them slipping from under the covers, their wives’ sleep-breathing, warm and slow in the dark bedrooms. The men creeping down the stairs, pulling on their regulation dungarees and picking up their rucksacks from the hiding places. Then turning their backs on their homes and walking up into the hills, ink black against the stars. So yes, it was close now. They’d be here soon. At last, after four years, it was happening.

For George this had all begun eight months after his seventeenth birthday. Like every boy in the area he’d received a call-up for a services medical in Newport. It was July, the long hot summer of 1940. The beaches were packed with sunbathers. The contrails of dog-fighting planes etched smoke patterns against the blue skies of the southern coast. George’s mother had made him wear a suit to the medical, and when he’d arrived at the building opposite County Hall he was sweating heavily after the walk from the station. He registered at the entrance and then a sergeant led him and seventy other boys into a large room with desks where he told them to take a seat. In front of them, an officer informed them, was a short educational test. “You have twenty minutes, gentlemen. Begin.”

The sun was glaring through the windows high in the wall and at first George found it hard to concentrate in the flat heat of the room. Once he’d removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, however, he’d started to enjoy the test, unlike most of the boys around him who crouched over their papers, frowning into their desks. He finished the test before the twenty minutes were up. After checking
over his answers he sat back and looked over the bent heads of his companions, patches of pink sunburnt skin showing through the close-cropped hair on the back of their necks. Seeing them like that, sitting in regimented lines, he couldn’t help wondering what lay ahead for all of them. He thought of the casualty lists he’d seen, the reports from Dunkirk and other news from France. Some of these boys would join the army, some the RAF, others the navy. Some would be sent down the mines, others into the factories. One thing was for sure, by this time next year, if things carried on as they were, some of them would be dead. All of them perhaps, including himself.

After the test had come the medical, a surly army doctor who’d told him to undress and examined him as his father might a ram or a horse he was buying at the market. Then, along with a few other boys, he’d been sent to wait outside a room in a windowless corridor deeper in the building. A fan thrummed on the ceiling and the sound of faraway doors opening and closing echoed along the exposed pipes running the length of the walls. It was much cooler here than in the testing room, and as he waited George leant his head against the painted stone to feel the relief of its touch against his neck. Eventually a clerk called his name and directed him into a small office. An older man with grey hair and heavy eyelids stood from behind a desk, shook George’s hand, and introduced himself as Colonel Hughes. The colonel told him he’d done well in the educational test—very well. He asked him a few basic questions, about his schooling, where he lived. Then, licking his thumb, he looked back down at his papers for a moment, holding the corner of one page off the table, before telling him that was all. Someone would visit him in a few days’ time, but that was all for now. “Thank you, Mr. Bowen,” he said without looking up. It was the first time anyone had ever called him Mr. Bowen, and when George boarded the train for Abergavenny an hour later, he felt significantly older than when he’d stepped off it that morning.

He’d seen the fishing flies first, flashing in the sun. There were so many of them George thought the man was wearing some kind of polished steel helmet. But as he got closer, he saw they were fishing flies pinned tightly together on a flat tweed cap, their bright yellow and red feathers trembling in the breeze.

“Mr. Bowen?” the man called out as he walked across the field.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah, good.” He held out his hand as he approached. “Tommy Atkins.” He smiled, raising his eyebrows as if to acknowledge the sobriquet. George leant his scythe against the hedge and, wiping his fingers against his trousers, shook the man’s hand. He was taller than George, in his early forties with a taut angular face. The kind of man who’d look comfortable with a shotgun broken over one arm and a brace of pheasants over the other.

“Hot work,” Atkins said, nodding towards the scythe.

“Yes, sir. All this bracken has to be cleared. And in the next field. We’ll be ploughing it up soon. Ministry orders.”

“Yes, of course, of course. Need every scrap we can get, don’t we?”

He spoke casually but George was unnerved by the way he looked him straight in the eye, as if his voice and his vision were unconnected.

A skylark ascended from the field behind them, drilling its song through the heavy summer air. Atkins broke his stare to watch it rise, shielding his eyes with his hand. George followed his gaze, trying to locate the tiny bird against the sky, but it was already too high.

“You were expecting me, Mr. Bowen, weren’t you?” Atkins said, taking off his jacket and sitting on a tree stump beside the hedge. “Colonel Hughes said someone would come and visit you?”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

“Well, that’s me.” He paused and folded his jacket across his knee. “I’ll get straight to the point, Mr. Bowen. I’m a British Intelligence officer. I’ve come to see you because you scored very highly on your test the other day. You’re a clever lad. We think you could be of great service to your country.”

George opened his mouth to speak, but Atkins held up his hand to stop him.

“What I’m going to propose to you may sound unusual, but I assure you I’m serious. Before I go any further, however, I’ll need a promise of your complete discretion. As I’m sure you understand, everything I tell you is strictly confidential.”

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and drew out a small black Bible.

“We can’t have any signing of papers with this business, I’m afraid, so I’m going to have to ask you to swear on this instead.” He held out the Bible. George looked at it, both his hands dug deep in his pockets.

“If you have no objection, Mr. Bowen?”

George looked down at him, this man who called himself Tommy Atkins. He thought of the Ministry of Information posters he’d seen at the railway station. “Vigilance at all times.” “Loose talk costs lives.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but how do I know who you are? That you are who you say you are? Shouldn’t you show me some identification?”

Atkins looked down at his feet for a moment, then back up at George, nodding his head. “I suppose I should, Mr. Bowen, I suppose I should. But really, what’s the use of me showing you some papers? Easiest thing in the world to forge, you know that. Never trust someone’s identification, Mr. Bowen, never. Please, sit down.” He gestured to the ground in front of him as if showing George to a chair in his office. George remained standing by his scythe. Atkins’s smile tightened. He looked out over the patchwork of summer fields and sighed. In the distance a horse and cart were making halting progress between a pattern of haystacks in the field opposite them. A team of men followed, pitching the loose hay up into the cart, their voices caught in snatches on the light breeze. A darker expression passed over his face, the brief shadow of a thought. He took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet smell of the freshly cut bracken at his feet.

“You have a scar on your left shin approximately two inches long,” he said, still looking out over the fields. “You fell out of a tree when you were six years old and broke your arm. You have some scarring on your right lung, the result of a bout of pleurisy when you were twelve. You’re slightly deaf in your left ear, possibly also as a result of the fall from the tree.” He turned to look at George. “Incidentally, this is what they’ll cite if you accept my proposal. Unfit for duty due to deafness.” A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth again. “You see, George, I know more about you than you do about yourself.”

He held out the Bible. “Are you sure you don’t want to hear what I’ve got to say? I’ll be honest, I think you’re making a mistake if you don’t.”

George looked back at Atkins, meeting his stare. He bit his lower lip. Atkins kept the Bible held out towards him but said nothing further. George took his right hand out of his pocket and laid it on the leather cover.

“Good lad,” Atkins said, “now repeat after me …”

And that was how it began. In a field four years ago, Atkins reciting by rote, in a tone that reminded George of when they said the Lord’s Prayer at school, the Oath of Allegiance, the Defence Act, and the Official Secrets Act. At the end of each sentence he paused for George to repeat his words. When they’d finished Atkins put the Bible back in his jacket pocket, asked George to sit down, and told him everything. He told him about Operation Sea Lion, Hitler’s directive for the invasion of Britain. About the government’s plan for a resistance movement to be activated in the event of such an invasion. He explained to George how this organisation, the Auxiliary Units, would live or die not just on its weapons and its training but also on its information, on its eyes and ears. How, if George was willing, he could be part of that listening and watching machine, running messages, observing enemy troop movements. Atkins talked like this for over half an hour, explaining everything in the fullest detail. He
wanted George to understand completely, to leave no part of this possible future he was describing unexamined. He returned again and again to the need for absolute secrecy. “No one must know we’ve had this conversation, George; no one. Not your mother or father, your sister, your friends. It’s the same for everyone. Even the men in the operational patrols will only know the other men in their patrol. You won’t know who they are and they certainly won’t know about you. Understand?”

The resistance wouldn’t try to halt the German advance, Atkins explained. That was the job of the army and the Home Guard (George thought of his uncle and his grandfather doing drills in the school yard last week, their uniforms sagging at the knees, broom handles over their shoulders). No, the resistance would retreat to underground bunkers that were, as they spoke, already being constructed by the army. Once the Germans had passed, they’d attack them from behind, sabotaging supply lines, planting roadside bombs, ambushing isolated military posts. The units would not give up, he assured George. “They’ll be well supplied and they’ll be well trained. They’ll give Jerry a bloody hard time, believe me they will.” The reprisals would be severe. Hostages executed. Whole villages wiped out in revenge. The resistance, Atkins told him, would not survive. And neither would he. If the invasion was successful, in the end they would all die. “Fourteen days, that’s what you can expect. Around fourteen days of activity from the date of the invasion.” He looked at George from under his tweed cap, the multicoloured feathers of the fishing flies quivering in the breeze. “Still up for it?”