Winston’s War (57 page)

Sue knew Jerry was in Norway. He'd been training for weeks on the freezing moors, so they weren't about to send him to the Sahara. She hadn't heard from him, not since a final note from Yorkshire saying they were “on their way,” but it had to be Norway. Yet she was reassured. According to the British press, the landings in Norway were akin to the march on Waterloo. “Brilliant work,”
The Times
crowed, “British troops have made a rapid thrust into the heart of Southern Norway. Germans retreating!” The Phoney War was over, and a historic British victory seemed as imminent as it was inevitable.

Still she worried. That, too, was inevitable. After all that's what women in war were supposed to do. Wait at home and worry, while the men sorted things out. And Mr. Chamberlain said he was sorting it out. During the day she kept the post office open, putting up posters which proclaimed “Walls Have Ears!” and which denounced the dangers of gossip. People did gossip, of
course—you might as well tell them not to breathe—and with so many husbands away for long periods in the armed forces there was so much to gossip about. She had also been instructed to make preparations for handing out things like war widows' pensions, which somehow sounded less confident than the official communiqués. Perhaps things weren't so certain after all. So in the evenings, just to be on the safe side, she made plans for the “stay-behind” group. Maybe it wouldn't be necessary any longer, if what the press and the Prime Minister said was true—but on the other hand, if what they said had been true, there wouldn't have been a war in the first place. She visited a farmer. His wife had been in the post office explaining how one of their calves had been lost, suddenly disappeared, all they could hear were her moans of complaint coming from beneath the ground. Eventually they discovered the beast had fallen into an all-but-invisible hole beneath the field, remarkably dry and surprisingly expansive. A network of natural tunnels. And Sue suggested that if it could hide a cow then it might hide—well, almost anything. Or anyone. The farmer agreed not to fill in the hole. Just in case.

It was exhausting, working and worrying that way. Then, the very last thing at night, she would lift her box from the top of her wardrobe and lay it gently on her bed, smoothing the counterpane, placing the lid to one side, turning back the tissue paper, running the tips of her fingers across the transparent white lace of her wedding veil, as though brushing snow, being with him. She would say a little prayer, and place the dried red rose to her lips. It became something of a ritual, to keep her in touch.

Jerry assumed that his first night in Norway had to be the worst. He'd made an inauspicious entrance well after midnight, disembarking from his destroyer on his backside as his hobnails hit ice on the gangway and threatened to dump him and the crate he was carrying into the oil-black waters below. It would
have been almost welcome—he'd been so violently seasick on the passage from Scotland—but in the end he lost nothing more than his dignity. The quartermaster stood screaming at the bottom of the gangplank, issuing Jerry with specific instructions as to what he could do with his sodding crate and sodden arse. Didn't seem to matter what was in the various crates being manhandled ashore, for the moment the priority seemed to be to get the stores offloaded. Other vessels were waiting and by daylight in a couple of hours' time they'd be transformed into nothing better than targets on a turkey shoot. Jerry and his crate staggered uncertain into the night. He found the tiny dock at Namsos enveloped in a biting snowstorm and lit only by the headlamps of a couple of jeeps, and no one knew where they were going. In the end he stacked his crate on top of the hundreds of others that were being dumped outside a foul-smelling fish-gutting shed. The stench was so powerful it made him want to heave once more. There was no food, no mess facilities had yet been set up, but for the moment he couldn't give a damn.

The arrival of an insipid, washed-out dawn sent them scrabbling in the snow looking for their supplies. Soon crates lay strewn along the dockside, their sides ripped open as increasingly anxious soldiers prayed that the contents had been mislabeled and inside were the snowshoes, maps, searchlights, mortars, medical supplies, and rangefinders they so desperately needed. Jerry kicked open one crate marked “Signals Support” to discover it was crammed with typewriters. The one next to it contained nothing but bicycles.

“They forgot the picnic hampers,” someone muttered.

Back in Britain, the operation was declared to be a triumph. While Jerry stood with frozen slush slopping over the ankles of his boots, almost every editor in Fleet Street seemed to be stepping out to the sound of beating drums.

Carol had read the newspapers, as many of them as she could borrow, even if they were days old, and as she read she remembered Mac. Stubborn, considerate, vulnerable, mysterious Mac. She couldn't read a thing without being reminded of him, and that morning Peter had looked up from his toast and asked once again where Mac was. She couldn't tell him, she didn't know. Bloody man. But learning to read had changed her life—one of the many ways Mac had changed things. She read reports of the heroic battle for Norway, how to make the Anderson shelter more comfortable, and how she and the other women left at home should be “doing their bit” to help win the war. It led her to the door of Mrs. Marjorie Braithwaite.

Marjorie Braithwaite was what they appropriately termed a pillar of the community. Early fifties, stout, with a considerable voice that she used to dominate most proceedings in which she was involved. These proceedings were many, since her husband was a magistrate and she was chairman of the local WI and Red Cross. Marjorie Braithwaite was a public figure, at least in her own mind. She was also a regular worshipper at the local church, and it was at church that Carol had on occasion exchanged a few passing words with her. They could scarcely claim to know each other well, yet Mrs. Braithwaite, Carol thought, would be just the woman to help.

She walked up the short gravel path that lay behind the Braithwaites' front hedge. She was nervous. She had learned to deal with most types, but the likes of Marjorie Braithwaite went considerably beyond her experience. As she approached the door of the large Victorian semi, the gravel made a sharp scrunching sound beneath her feet, as if complaining that she was trespassing. After some hesitation, she knocked.

Mrs. Braithwaite answered. “Yes?” She was breathing heavily as stout women do. A second woman peered over her shoulder. Carol had interrupted them at tea.

“Mrs. Braithwaite, my name is Carol Bell. From the church,” the visitor began.

“We know who you are, don't we, Agnes?”

The woman at her shoulder nodded. Mrs. Braithwaite was examining Carol intently, as though searching for freckles, until Carol realized she was looking for signs of the bruises left by her beating. The scar at the top of her cheek caused by the smashed earring still hadn't fully healed, and perhaps it would never heal completely. She'd tried to hide the marks, of course, would have stayed at home for a week by choice, but she couldn't, not with two kids. She hadn't been to church while her face was cut and certainly hadn't seen Mrs. Braithwaite, but clearly the word had got round. She was a woman with a black eye and no husband. Enough said.

“What do you want, Mrs. Bell? It is
Mrs
. Bell, isn't it?”

“I was wondering…” Carol faltered, flinching beneath the intensity of the other woman's gaze, “I read this article in the newspaper, you see. 'Knitting for Norway.' You know, gloves, balaclavas, socks, that sort of thing. For our soldiers over there. I … I wanted to help, but I don't have no wool.”

“You don't have no wool?” Mrs. Braithwaite repeated solidly, while Agnes tittered.

“So I was wondering…d'you know anyone who might be able to spare some wool? Old wool? Anything I could…”

“Mrs. Bell"—the title was stretched out as though Mrs. Braithwaite was projecting from the back of the Old Vic—"this is a respectable neighborhood. We don't encourage begging at the door.”

“I'm not begging, Mrs. Braithwaite. I'm only trying to do something for the boys.”

“Ah, yes, the boys.” The pillar of the community inflated and drew herself up to her full five foot two, causing her shoes to squeak. “I want to tell you, Mrs. Bell, that we have standards in our little community. Don't we, Agnes?”

“Most certainly we do,” the other pillar simpered.

“Sickens us, doesn't it, Agnes? The way some people try to take advantage while the rest of the country is fighting for its life.”

“Take advantage? I was only asking for a little wool.”

“I understand you're a busy woman, Mrs. Bell—yes, a Very Busy Woman. So let me not beat about the bush. We are fighting this war for the survival of common decency and family values. Regular families, where the husband goes out to war and the wife stays home to cook. That's why Mr. Chamberlain has told us to fight the Germans, because the Germans are degenerates. So this war is a war against all forms of degeneracy. God's war, if you like. Do I make myself clear?”

“What's that got to do with a bit of wool?” Carol asked, perplexed.

“I have no wool for you. Nor do I know anybody who is likely to have wool for you. And I would recommend you give some thought to why we are fighting this war before you come disturbing respectable people in their own homes. Come, Agnes, we mustn't waste any more time. We have tea to attend to!” And with that, the door was closed firmly in her face.

Carol stood at the doorstep for some while, struggling to control her grief. She had always known it would come at some point—as it had come in every place she had ever lived—where the gossip started and spread and eventually forced her from her home. Risk of the job. But here she had hoped it would be different, with Peter settled at school, with little Lindy growing so fast, and with Mac…She had been so careful, until the beating gave her away. The scar on her cheek was throbbing and she wanted very much to burst into tears, but she refused. She wouldn't give Mrs. Braithwaite the satisfaction. She would wait until she got home.

Brussels, the capital of neutral Belgium, emerged beneath a sprawling mat of cloud as Boothby's plane flew in. Soon the
war that had erupted in the skies and seas around Norway would stretch even to this part of Europe, but for the moment all was quiet and Brussels lay oblivious to the arrows of reality that already had been set aside for it.

Immediately upon his arrival Boothby sought out the head of British military intelligence in the city. He had expected to find him at the center of a hub of frenetic endeavor, but instead found him eating lunch with another officer who, it turned out, was the only member of his staff. Yet they were as helpful as they could be in the circumstances. They advised him to travel to Liège. From the top of the cathedral spire there, he was told, you could see clean over the German border and into the Ruhr, if the exhaust fumes from the panzers cleared for long enough. But don't stay there long, they warned him, in fact don't stay anywhere in this part of the world too long. All these exhaust fumes were enough to give a man a cough that was likely to end up killing him.

They made two phone calls on his behalf and that afternoon Boothby caught a train to Liège. A man clasping a bunch of daffodils met him beneath the station clock, and by teatime Boothby had been told what they could supply. Nine thousand rifles, more than a hundred machine guns, and a thousand light automatics.

Boothby remained unconvinced. Daffodils? Beneath the clock at the railway station? Could it be that easy? Boothby peppered them with questions. Were all the arms new? He was assured they would be delivered still in their factory wrappings. What form of payment did they require? Why, a banker's draft, made out in U.S. dollars, of course—what did he think they were running, a fruit stall? And delivery, could they arrange immediate delivery, Boothby demanded? At this point his contacts sucked their teeth. Immediate delivery would not be possible, they apologized—the guns had to come all the way from Cologne, which was a drive of seventy miles, and
there were customs officials to be bribed. Could he wait until breakfast?

But still he was not satisfied. Nine thousand rifles were nowhere near enough, he had instructions to purchase many, many more. They explained that this would be difficult, even in exchange for U.S. dollars, but if he could persuade his masters to deal in uncut diamonds then anything might be possible.

They directed him to Amsterdam.

He left the following morning, nursing a slight hangover and unaware that he was being followed every mile of the way.

“There is some treachery here, I think.”

“Hard words, Horace.”

“For hard times, Neville.”

“There must be an innocent explanation. Has to be.”

“Negotiating for thousands of rifles and wanting hundreds of thousands more?”

“We are desperately short of rifles.”

“German rifles, Neville? They're German. There can be no innocence in that.”

“For the Home Guard—why not for the Home Guard?”

“They would then be Winston's Guards.”

“A Fifth Column?”

“A Quisling Column. Armed. Worse than Norway. To do Winston's bidding.”

“It seems utterly incredible.”

“So was leaking the date of the invasion. Yet it happened.”

“And then there's the money, Neville.”

“You've found out where he gets it from, Joe?”

“A blind trust. The tracks extraordinarily well hidden.”

“
Secret
money?”

“And a lot of it.”

“Can there be an innocent explanation?”

“As innocent as a Mauser pointing at your chest.”

“We must find out where the money comes from.”

“Spare no effort, Joe,” Wilson encouraged. “Break a few bankers' legs.”

“It'll be a pleasure.”

“Rifles? Hidden gold? Invasion secrets?” The Prime Minister's voice grew tight. “Perhaps I should have him arrested.”

“Not yet, Neville. Let's dig over the ground a little first. Discover more about the money. We'll go through his diaries. Find out who he's been meeting. See how many worms we turn up.”