Troubled Midnight (3 page)

“That’s how it goes.”

Suzie craned up, gazing at King Alfred the Great’s face. “Doesn’t look very Saxon to me.”

“No, more your Saxe-Coberg-Gotha than your Saxon.”

The statue’s face certainly had the features more moulded to Edward VII than a Saxon.

“Fact is,” Tommy continued, “the fellow who sculpted him was a relative of Queen Victoria, had a studio in the grounds of St. James’s Palace so it’s not really surprising.

They diced with death again, returning to the east side of the square and walking up to the silent and closed fish shop on the corner, The Regent Cinema across the way looking oddly out of place:
Suspicion
on Monday to Wednesday and
How Green was my Valley
Thursday to Saturday. B Picture, Gaumont British News and shorts – Full Supporting Programme.

They turned right into Newbury Street, the Post Office across the road, then Clegg the Chemist, The Blue Boar to their right.

They strolled on up Newbury Street and Suzie took his arm.

Old married couple, she thought.

“All this is a very posh girl’s school, run by the Wantage Sisters,” he said.

Not on your life, she thought referring to the old married couple thought.

“Very, very posh school. Posh and spikey.” Tommy grinned.

“What’s spikey?” she asked.

“High Church, heart. Bells and smells, genuflecting, plainsong, vestments of gold thread, more Roman than the Pope himself.”

“I’m High Church,” Suzie gave him a tight little smile and remembered Father Harris, making her confession to Father Gibbs and being caught up in the wonders of the Mass.

They came abreast of The Royal Oak public house on the corner of Portway, across the road stood a little sweet shop –
Readhead
it said above the window.

“Up here we’ll find King Alfred’s School,” Tommy continued.

Like a bloody travelogue, she thought.

“Bit pretentious, King Alfred’s School,” he said. “Like to think it’s a public school, but it ain’t.”

“I wonder if you can get violent creams under the counter at Mr Readhead’s,” she dreamed. “What we used to call them, our favourites, violent creams.”

“I think he’s more your sherbet dabs and gobstoppers. Violent creams are middle class nutty.”

In the Mountford family the joke had been that Suzie adored violet creams that she always spoke of as violent creams. She was surprised that Tommy even recalled the tale because he seemed quite immune to childhood humour.

There was a short row of houses on the same side of the road as Readhead’s shop, then a wide expanse of school playing fields, a gap from the houses, then one house on its own: three stories high, steps up to the front door and a little black and white sign, Portway House.

They came to a pile of grey stone buildings that made up the school on the right and a small stretch of prefabs, temporary classrooms across the road next to a solid grey building that said
King Alfred’s School, OTC
carved in stone above the heavy door.

They crossed the road, Tommy still chuntering on about schools and the like, pausing at a memorial gate for those fallen in 1914-18.

“Going to have to add-in the current squabble,” he grimaced and hurried Suzie along, loitering again outside Portway House where a slim attractive woman was closing the door and coming down the steps, hurrying as though late for church.

“Funny place to build a house, unless it’s got something to do with the school,” Tommy said quietly as the hurrying woman moved out of earshot. She had given them a hard look, as though they were potential troublemakers, as she came into the street and crossed over near The Royal Oak.

They came abreast of Redhead’s shop, headed right, crossed the road and walked on past neat rows of houses, then a black wooden building set back from the road, identified by a sign that told them it was a British Legion Old Comrades Club close to a wide expanse of grass, dotted with swings, a chained maypole and a small round shelter – a recreation ground where young children could play on the swings and older kids could make their own fun in the long grass that ran up to the skyline.

As they approached the entrance, the gates already removed like every other piece of ornamental metal in the town, leaving only two somewhat new looking red brick stanchions, a couple were walking out, the boy no more than sixteen years old, the girl around the same in a thin summer dress, yellow with little blue flowers. They held hands as though trying to save one another from some unseen fate, occasionally glancing at one another with adoring eyes.

After they passed, Suzie glanced back to see that the rear view showed a fine display of grass cuttings and burrs across the youngsters’ backs.

Up to no good in the long grass she thought as she tried to match Tommy’s step head down starting to toil up the long hill.

Half way up they passed a man on his way down – a countryman dressed in tattered trousers a shirt with no collar and a waistcoat.

“This hill got a name at all?” Tommy hailed him with a slightly superior wave and one eyebrow up.

The fellow hardly paused, “Workhouse ’ill, though some’ll call it Red ’ouse ’ill on account of the Workhouse being made of red brick.”

“The Workhouse is still working then?”

“People round ’ere live in fear on it. Segregated it is. Don’t get to stay with your wife if they take you in there. Good day to ’e.”

The spike, the workhouse, the poorhouse, whatever, stood almost at the crest of the hill. They stopped just short of it, standing on the grass verge looking down on the town, Tommy a couple of paces behind Suzie.

“Nowhere like England on a summer afternoon,” Suzie muttered.

“Beautiful.” But he was looking at Suzie as she turned her head, the burning sun catching the highlights in her hair, the natural lighter gold streaks, the handsomeness of her face, sleekness of figure visible under the summer skirt trembling on her hips and buttocks. She was all Tommy wanted, yet, and yet.

“Tommy, you’ve enslaved me,” she said when he took her the first time in her mother’s
pied-à-terre
in Upper St Martin’s Lane where they now lived in secret bliss – Scotland Yard wouldn’t really have held with a marriage though Dandy Tom now said he’d got over that hurdle. No, she corrected in her head, no, it’s not all bliss these days.

Standing almost on the brow of Workhouse Hill, Tommy thought back to that time, three years ago, during the Blitz, when he had tried to shape her, mould her from the inexperienced, naïve young plainclothes girl into a woman with confidence and comprehension. He had so badly wanted her as his wife but recently she seemed to have shied away from him, like an untested colt. He had been unable to capture the great clamp of feelings they had experienced, one for the other and this made him sad.

“Wonderful,” she said now. “Look at that,” as three Wellington bombers flew in a Vic straight over their heads. She turned to look back at him, her light grey-green luminous eyes alight, one small, but workmanlike hand touching her hair, lips parted and creased into a smile. “What a view,” she said, and Tommy followed her gaze towards the grey tower of the church of SS Peter and Paul, rising from among the red brick and grey slate roofs of the houses far below.

On that first night together in ’40s London she had pushed him away, held him at arm’s length and said she now knew why the newspapers called him Dandy Tom, giving his manhood a playful tweak. Suzie Mountford was a quick learner he’d thought at the time.

“Tommy, look. What the heck are they doing…?”

In the distance two Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bombers, twin-engined, slab-sided, twin-tailplanes – flying suitcases as they called them – circled to the south each towing a large snub nosed glider. The aircraft were approaching the airfield almost out of sight, about a mile to the north of Wantage.

“Gliders,” Tommy said watching the first aircraft line up and release the big sailpane – a Horsa, all wood and canvas – that seemed to hesitate for a moment as though it had no forward momentum, then it slewed around and dropped its nose, heading towards the airfield at an angle of forty-five degrees, sushing in, flaps extended, sliding down the unseen wires, straight across Wallingford Street, down, down, down until it slowly pulled up, grazing its way on to the runway.

The other Whitley released its glider, the aircraft, the big cumbersome Whitley bombers turned then came down after each other to overfly the airfield and drop the towing cables.

“Gliders?” Suzie repeated. “What’s that all about?”

“Guess they’re going to give Hitler a taste of his own medicine.” Tommy gave his side-on smile: turning up the corner of his mouth so his teeth showed – what he called his terrible smile.

In 1940, May, when the German army was blitzkrieging its way across the continent, they had used their airborne forces to great effect, taking airfields, catching the Dutch with their clogs off and using glider borne troops to neutralise Belgian strongpoints. Again, in 1941, the battle for Crete, their paratroops –
das fallschirmjaeger
– came out of the skies, by way of hundreds of Ju52s and DSM gliders. Tommy now watched the Airspeed Horsa gliders with their huge wingspan, almost 90 feet, angling down and he thought of the same craft multiplied by hundreds and filled with armed men bumping down in the early morning in occupied France: surprise package for the Nazis one day soon.

As early as June 1940 Churchill sent a memo to the Chiefs of Staff calling for the training of airborne forces. Within the year there were soldiers wearing red berets with parachute wings high on the right arm, while large numbers of Royal Marines Commandos also sported the parachute badge.

As they stood, Tommy and Suzie, looking across the miles of open country lying behind the town of Wantage, a crocodile of sad elderly men and women crossed the road into the Workhouse, the men and women separating and being led to their various segregated quarters. They looked browbeaten, silent with ragged clothes and sullen manners. 1943 and this brutal Victorian social assistance still persisted.

Tommy gave a small sigh. “I don’t know, but I think that’s a Spike that should be blunted.”

*   *   *

LIEUTENANT COLONEL TIM Weaving sat in the right hand seat of the second glider: Colonel Weaving, CO of the Glider Pilot Regiment at the Heavy Glider Conversion Unit, Brize Norton, seeing his pupil, Sergeant Peter Day through another landing and at the same time getting a lift to Grove Aerodrome, a mile out of Wantage, two birds with one stone. As their tug aircraft peeled away from them after the trainee pilot had pulled the handle releasing them from the cables attached inboard on the leading edges of the wings, Colonel Weaving experienced that odd, stomach-rolling, heart-stopping moment as they seemed to be poised, unmoving, still in the air. It was always the same, the sense of being suspended, hanging in the silence, until the pilot put the nose down and turned to the right, lining up with the runway around two miles distant.

The flight deck of the Horsa glider took up almost the entire nose of the aircraft: two sets of controls, basic instruments and the sense of really being in a greenhouse balanced at the sharp end of the glider.

Weaving always felt exhilaration at the start of the descent and now he glanced to his left, checking that Sergeant Day had the lever right down to fully extend the flaps, the big slatted oblongs dropped out from the trailing edges of the wings. “Keep the nose down,” he muttered feeling the aircraft press upwards, reacting to the drag of the flaps.

When it came to the landing technique, the big Horsa had none of the sophistication of powered flight. In simple terms you pointed the nose towards the runway, at an angle of almost 45 degrees, making a dive towards touchdown, using the flaps and elevators to slow the aircraft, lifting the nose into a stall as you got really close to the ground. Around them the air hissed, building in volume so that it sounded like heavy breakers on a shingle beach.

Tim Weaving knew Wantage well: glancing to the left to see that they were crossing Wallingford Street, glimpsing the elegant Queen Anne house that Emily told him had once been a brewery, seeing the road winding up into the Market Square and, for a second, over the roofs just getting a flash of Emily’s house on Portway. She knew he was coming and he wondered if she had managed to get some ham for tonight. They’d have ham and salad, tomatoes and lettuce from her own garden. He felt the saliva turn acidic in his mouth as he thought of the malt vinegar she’d sprinkle on the lettuce and possibly the brown sauce she’d put on the table to bring out a taste of the ham.

“Start your pullback now,” he cautioned the sergeant as they slid over the last houses and into the open country that ran up to the threshold of the runway. The nose rose, for a moment like a fairground ride, the speed bleeding off as they crossed the boundary fence, lifting and stabilizing, sinking in the stall to the runway, then the bump and rumble as they touched down, Sergeant Day braking as they ran on, rumbling and bumping.

“Keep her level Sarn’t Day. Level. Brake. Come on. Harder.” And they slowed to a stop using about two thirds of the landing area, waiting for the team of erks coming out onto the runway and manhandling the machine off and onto the taxi track, beside the other Horsa that had come in from Brize Norton.

Sergeant Long, the instructor who had been sitting in the rear of the machine, now came and stood behind the Colonel, muttering something about it being a shade fast, but an above average landing.

As they climbed out, Tim Weaving walking towards the jeep standing ready for him, so one of the Whitley tugs came roaring down the runway at around fifty minus feet to drop a tow rope onto the concrete for the handling party to drag back and reattach to one of the gliders.

“You’ll be okay now, Sarn’t Long?” Weaving smiled.

“I’ll get him back to Brize in one piece, sir. Yes. See you tomorrow, sir.”

“Bright and early,” said Tim Weaving.

They all knew. The Colonel has his bit on the side waiting in Wantage, lucky bugger. His driver – bodyguard really – from Brize would pick him up in the morning early, bring him back to work.