Their Finest Hour and a Half (30 page)

‘Change of plan,' shouted Kipper, the first assistant director, clapping his hands. ‘Change of plan, everybody. Blame the weather. The director's decided that we'll be leaving sequence 21 to 27, and moving on to scene 42, exterior French farmhouse with Mr Best and young Master Chopper, camera position
within
the barn, shooting out towards the yard. We can say goodbye to our extras for the afternoon, thank you ladies and gentlemen. You'll find the cashier's office in the back room of the Bull, open until half past six. In the event that we complete scene 42 while we still have some light, we'll be moving on to 87A.'

‘Fat chance,' muttered one of the chippies.

‘And see me if you need the new pages,' called Phyl, waving a sheaf of paper.

There was a gradual movement of bodies within the barn, the leisurely shuffle that passed for violent activity within the film world. Arthur joined the queue and collected a copy of the scene.

‘OFF', Arthur had learned, meant ‘not visible in shot' which, in turn, meant that the actor who spoke the ‘OFF' lines didn't actually have to be present – a gap of the right length could be left in the dialogue, and the words recorded afterwards in a nice quiet sound studio somewhere in London. The scenes on location, he had found, were full of such shifts and short-cuts, all of them attempts (it seemed) to simplify the astonishing complexity of outdoor filming.

Sometimes, during a ‘take', an actor moved at the wrong time, or forgot a word, or picked up his cigarette with the left hand instead of the right, or said, ‘Sorry, everyone, but it's awfully distracting to have all those people standing just in my eyeline, can we go again?' Sometimes the camera needed re-loading, or the microphone dipped into shot, or a cow mooed at an inopportune moment, or the director changed his mind about the framing, or a shadow fell across an actor's face, or there was too much light or not enough light or light of the wrong quality, or a local urchin accepted a dare to run up behind the sound recordist, shout ‘bugger' and then scarper – there were many, many reasons why a scene might need to be re-shot, but it was never the fault of Chopper because Chopper was eerily perfect, every time. People congregated to watch his performance. Arthur was beginning to suspect that the other actors, the human ones, found this rather irritating.

‘So do I wait for the dog to turn his head before I flinch?' asked Hadley Best, plaintively, during the rehearsal. ‘Or do I take my own cue?'

‘I'll cue you where the sniper's shot's supposed to go,' said Kipper. ‘They'll replace it with the real noise at the edit. Settle down, everybody, the director's decided we'll be taking sound for Mr Best on this one.'

‘What sort of cue?' asked Hadley.

‘I'll click my fingers,' said Kipper. ‘That be all right for you, Dick?'

There was an affirmatory grunt from the sound recordist.

‘And settle
down
,' called Kipper, for the sixth time, as if everyone were dancing a conga instead of standing around with their hands in their pockets. ‘Going for a take, everybody. Slate it.'

‘Just a very quiet click, please,' said Hadley. ‘It's hard to explain to a non-actor, but I want to react to the sniper out there, and not the finger-snap in here, do you see what I mean? It's a matter of authenticity. In fact, there's no chance of actually firing a rifle is there?'

‘No,' said Kipper. ‘Quiet click it is. Now, are we all ready?'

They were all ready. The clapper-board clapped. The barn door was pulled shut.

‘And
action
,' shouted Kipper.

Slowly, the door opened. Arthur, from his vantage point two yards behind the camera, could see Chopper sitting in the drizzle. Hadley, crouching, stepped forward and left a long pause before giving a whistle.

‘Come on, boy!' he called, softly. He whistled again; Chopper turned his head.

The fractional silence that followed was broken not by a quiet click but by the most stupendous burst of heavy gunfire coming from immediately behind the barn. Arthur found himself lying on the ground, arms over his head, while all around him people shouted and cannoned into each other, and shrapnel clattered on the roof.

‘Mind the
camera
,' shouted someone. There was a scrape, and a thud, and the muffled smash of glass and then the gunfire stopped, and only the slow drone of an aircraft was audible.

‘What the bloody hell . . . ?' asked someone. ‘Who was that? That wasn't Jerry, was it?'

‘No, that was my bastard lens-box,' said the cameraman, bitterly.

By the time that Arthur got to his feet and dusted himself off, most of the crew had run outside and were staring upward. He followed them. A Wellington was making leisurely progress from north to south, towing, far behind it, a red and yellow target.

‘But where are the guns?' asked Phyl.

‘I bet it's a mobile ack-ack unit from the battery,' said Hadley. ‘They're probably in that field just beyond the spinney.'

The rain was spotting Arthur's spectacles and he took them off to give them a polish, and found himself staring at Chopper. The dog hadn't moved and was sitting as if welded to the spot, its blunt, brindled face turned towards its owner. Chick had been placed by the director against the outside wall of the barn, invisible to the camera.

‘Oh, incidentally, everyone, that's a cut,' shouted Kipper.

As Arthur watched, Chick shook his fist as if about to throw a pair of dice, and Chopper became a normal dog again, trotting off in a busy figure-of-eight, yawning, lifting his leg against the barn door.

‘So when you shake your fist, does that mean “stand easy”?' ventured Arthur.

‘Yer might say that,' said Chick.

‘He's certainly a very good dog.'

‘He's the
best
dog,' corrected the owner. He seemed offended by the slightness of the compliment.

Arthur busied himself with his spectacles, and found that his hands were shaking. He dropped the spectacles once, and then twice; his legs felt unstable, as if they might fold without warning, like those of an army camp-bed.

‘All right, everybody,' said Kipper, ‘settle down. We're sending someone to find out whether that little interruption's likely to happen again. In the meantime, the director's decided that we'll do a mute version of the scene.'

There was an upturned crate in a dark corner of the barn, and Arthur sat on it for a minute or two, and then began to wonder if he might feel better outside, away from other people, because the shaking was getting worse. He could think of nothing in the way of military expertise that he could contribute to the scene; there had been a rescued dog on the same paddle steamer that had picked him up at Dunkirk, and it had been shot dead on the quay at Dover, as a rabies hazard. He didn't think that this piece of information would be welcomed. In any case, he didn't think that he could trust his voice. He waited until Kipper shouted ‘settle down' again, and then he slipped away.

It was a slow, muddy walk back to the edge of Badgeham, along a causeway between salt-marshes. The Wellington circled lazily overhead, and the guns from the field beside the barn alternated with those from the main battery; the noise seemed more bearable in the open air. Arthur breathed deeply and swung his arms in approved parade-ground fashion. He had never minded drill: the concentration required was just enough to empty the mind of nagging worries, and moreover he found the enforced neatness rather satisfying.

His father had been a military man, a career soldier until wounds sustained in France had rendered him barely able to walk, let alone fight. He had often talked about the army – not the army of boggy entrenchment and the sniper's bullet, but the Edwardian army, brutal and thrilling, all glitter and ceremony and the rumble of hooves. He had wanted to be buried in his Lancers' uniform, but he had survived too long – twenty-three years after Ypres – and the cloth had rotted before he had.

When Arthur had enlisted in 1939, a year after his father's death, he had half-expected to find a world where disputes were still settled with bare knuckles, and where tots of neat rum were drunk blindfold to the roll of a drum. He had expected, too, that he'd be seen as an oddity – the oldest, the shyest, the least soldierly, but this was a different army, and his platoon of conscripts had been stuffed with oddities, with men beside whom Arthur could pass for a Berserker. There had been nicknames for all, and his own (‘Dynamite') had been no more sarcastic or cruel than any other. Life had become curiously easy – not comfortable or pleasant or even interesting, but certainly uncomplicated. There had been no empty rooms, no hours to fill, no time to sit and brood over lost years or ungrasped opportunities. Until the Germans had started strafing him, he had almost forgotten the inevitable concomitant of army service. And now he was afraid of going back to war. And now he was dreading going back to peace, if it ever came.

The rain began to fall more heavily as he reached the outskirts of Badgeham, and he took shelter under the awning of a shop.
Furse Quality Dressmaking
was written in fly-blown gold lettering along the window,
Design, Alteration, Repair
.

*

Ambrose arrived back at the Crown and Anchor at a quarter to one in the morning and had to ring the bell four times before he was let in.

‘
Please
don't,' he said, as the landlord began a reiteration of the rules. ‘I have been standing in a train corridor for the past five and a half hours and I can assure you that my temper is dangerously short.'

He felt cold to the marrow, his mind focused solely on the emergency hip-flask in his room and the teaspoon of Bells that he felt sure was still in there. The thought had sustained him throughout the whole appalling journey from Ipswich – the carriages full of rowdy soldiers, the shuttered buffet, the repeated, farcical platform changes at Norwich, the rumbling spectre of the east-bound freight train that had sped unheralded through the station, each of its fifty-odd open trucks piled high with bomb rubble. ‘They use it for making runways,' a fellow on the platform had said, and Ambrose had thought of Sammy's office, minced, flattened and tarmacadamed, a springboard, now, for aeroplanes carrying bombs to drop on to Sammy's relatives. It was almost, in a ghastly way, amusing.

The darkness in the bedroom was absolute, and Ambrose stood just inside the door, waiting for outlines to emerge. ‘I'm still awake,' said Arthur, switching on the bedside light. ‘Oh, have you hurt your hand?' he added, spotting the handkerchief that Cecy had donated as a bandage.

Ambrose was already tugging his suitcase out of the wardrobe and unbuckling the strap. ‘Vicious cat,' he said, extracting the hip-flask, wedging it between his knees and unscrewing the top with his good hand. He sat on the bed and lifted the flask to his lips and – oh joy – there was more than a teaspoon, there was a good swallow, and another sip or two besides, and he thought (not for the first time) what a sad and sorry bunch teetotallers were, depriving themselves of that mouthful that changed the world. There was nothing left in the flask now except fumes. He sighed, and took out a cigarette. ‘You don't mind, do you?'

Arthur shook his head; he looked somehow unprotected without his spectacles, like a welder without the mask. ‘Might I have one, too?'

‘I didn't know that you partook.'

‘I don't usually.' He took the offered cigarette and lit it with predictable clumsiness.

‘Much get done today?' asked Ambrose.

‘No, not much. One scene, I think.'

‘The trouble with these documentary boys is that they're used to spending weeks getting one usable shot of a brawny fisher-lass gutting a hake, but when it comes to a
schedule
, when it comes to—'

‘Could I ask you something?' said Arthur.

‘Something about filming?'

‘Um . . . no, actually.'

There was a long pause during which Arthur's round, inexpressive face gave no hint as to what the ‘something' might be . . .

‘Fire away,' said Ambrose, beginning to get bored.

‘I was wondering . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘If you were a young lady . . .'

God in heaven, thought Ambrose, what
is
this? ‘Yes?' he said, repressively.

‘If you were a young lady, where would you want to go to? If I were to ask you.'

‘To ask me what?'

‘To . . . to meet up with you. I mean, with me.'