The Dearest and the Best Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Leslie Thomas

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  About the Book

  It is the spring of 1940 and the spectre of war has turned into grim reality.

  As England is swept into a maelstrom of fear and uncertainty, events abroad lead inexorably from the debacles of Norway and Dunkirk to the horror and glory of the Battle of Britain. Among those whose lives are deeply affected by the looming terror of war are the men, women and children of the New Forest.

  For the Lovatt family – James, dispatched on a secret assignment to work with Churchill, and his brother Harry, a naval officer – and for Bess Spofford, Joanne Schorner and Graham Smith and the other inhabitants of the quaint, historical villages, it is the beginning of the most bizarre, funny and tragic episode of their lives.

  About the Author

  Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1931, Leslie Thomas is the son of a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week, published in 1964. At sixteen, he became a reporter before going on to do his national service. He won worldwide acclaim with his bestselling novel The Virgin Soldiers, which has achieved international sales of over two million copies. His most recent novel, Waiting for the Day, is published in paperback to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.

  Also by Leslie Thomas

  Fiction

  The Virgin Soldiers

  Orange Wednesday

  The Love Beach

  Come to the War

  His Lordship

  Onward Virgin Soldiers

  Arthur McCann And All his Women

  The Man with the Power

  Tropic of Ruislip

  Stand Up Virgin Soldiers

  Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective

  Bare Nell

  Ormerod’s Landing

  That Old Gang of Mine

  The Adventures of Goodnight and Loving

  Dangerous in Love

  Orders for New York

  The Loves and Journeys of Revolving Jones

  Arrivals and Departures

  Dangerous by Moonlight

  Running Away

  The Complete Dangerous Davies

  Kensington Heights

  Chloe’s Song

  Dangerous Davies and the Lonely Heart

  Other Times

  Waiting for the Day

  Dover Beach

  Non Fiction

  This Time Next Week

  Some Lovely Islands

  The Hidden Places of Britain

  My World of Islands

  In My Wildest Dreams

  The Dearest and The Best

  Leslie Thomas

  ‘We have nothing to fear in the part of the inhabitants. They are a dull people who are absolutely ignorant of the use of arms.’

  Intelligence report to the French Government in 1767 on the prospects of an invasion of England.

  ‘I have decided to begin to prepare for, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion of England.’

  Adolf Hitler, 1940.

  One

  AFTER A DEEP and bitter winter, the worst of the century, April of 1940 was chill and rainy in the South of England, but during the first days of May the weather altered and a pale, early summer arrived.

  On the morning of 3 May, at five o’clock, a grey ship was off the estuary of the Thames, passing the Nore Light, moving delicately between minefields, in fragmented mist. Windows ashore caught the first brushes of the sun, flashing the reflections back out to sea like morse lamp signals. A few of the soldiers, weary and crammed on the deck, cheered untidily.

  ‘London,’ announced one of the men to his neighbour. He pointed towards the hazy mouth of the river as he might indicate a vague and distant road. ‘Just up there.’ All night they had sat, propped against each other, exchanging no more than a grunt. Neither knew the other’s name; they simply belonged to the same defeated army. The second man had lost three fingers in Norway, and he now stared at the bandages as though contemplating an ice-cream cone. ‘Can’t say I ever wanted to go to London,’ he answered.

  ‘Where you from then?’ asked the first soldier, surprised. After the night of silence he seemed set now on making conversation.

  ‘Hampshire, I’m from.’ He said it as if it were a far country. ‘In the New Forest. I’m a dairyman.’ He regarded his hand again. ‘I’m going to find it hard milking with these.’

  ‘How many did you lose?’ asked the first soldier. He looked at the other man sharply. ‘Mates, I mean, not fingers.’

  ‘Oh, men. I don’t know, rightly. Everybody got split up. Half the others, I don’t even know where they got to in the end.’

  In the next space along the deck, wedged between depth charges and a lifeboat, was a group of Scottish infantrymen. One of them, his rifle still on his large shoulder, began to play a small squeeze-box concertina, slowly, as if it were an effort. It was a song they had sung on the outward voyage, ‘Norraway O’er the Foam’. No one sang it now. The tune idled while the destroyer slid through the dull silver water. It had become a lament. Odd ones among the crouched and khaki men began to feel the growing sun, undoing the ponderous greatcoats and the thick necks of their battledress blouses. Gratefully they squinted up at the watery warmth. There were the old soldiers, soused in experience, who had fashioned enough room on the hard plates to stretch fully out and lay like dead. The real dead were three decks below. Rifles had been religiously stacked but scattered about were other ragged mounds of equipment; packs, ammunition boxes, and strange salvage for an evacuating army, buckets, footballs and an occasional flag or banner. There were Frenchmen aboard also, Alpine soldiers of the Blue Brigade, their skis piled, and Polish infantry, sharp-cheeked with flat eyes. Purkiss, the man from the New Forest, had wondered, but only vaguely, how the Poles had got to Norway. His knowledge of geography was thin and he thought they might even have walked there when the Germans bombed and occupied their homeland.

  Every man knew that things had gone badly wrong, that they had been mismanaged to the point of betrayal; fools had told them where to go and what to do and they had trusted as soldiers trust. ‘Be glad to see my old woman,’ said the Londoner, still eyeing the horizon as if he expected to spot her waving.

  ‘So will I,’ agreed Purkiss. ‘I don’t know what she’ll say about coming home without these fingers. I know’d men get fingers and toes cut off in the fields, even fishing at sea, but frostbite . . . I never know’d anybody to have frostbite.’

  After half an hour the wide entrance of the Thames lay shining astern, and as the morning expanded, the vessel edged along the low Kent coast and turned into the River Medway. Sly patches of mist loitered on the channel and a flight of herons moved over the ship like silent bombers. Purkiss pointed them out with his bandaged hand and smiled a mute recognition. ‘Geese,’ said the Londoner firmly.

  An order came
eerily over the ship’s loudspeaker but it meant nothing to the soldiers and they cared nothing either. Rumours had spread through the naval stewards during the night that some of the army officers were almost mutinous. Angry, raised voices had been heard from the mess. Some of the young soldiers had eavesdropped like children listening to quarrelling parents. Now, almost as soon as the destroyer had eased into the middle anchorage of the river, a navy tender appeared from the Medway shore and an army officer, at the centre of a group which appeared on deck, prepared to go aboard it. Others shook his hand before he climbed down the ladder.

  ‘That’s Mr Lovatt,’ said Purkiss with slow surprise. ‘He lives where I live. I know’d his family well. Didn’t even see he was here. There’s strange, us both going to Norway.’

  He and the Londoner watched the officer, an artillery captain, climb down to the launch, and then followed it as it feathered away across the sallow water. Standing amidships, James Lovatt regarded the low, slate-coloured shore ahead as he might regard hostile territory.

  The leading seaman in command of the boat knew there was a lot wrong and he said nothing beyond ‘Good morning, sir,’ but in his turn surveyed the land ahead as if approaching it for the first time and vaguely trying to fix a seamark.

  It was not far. They pulled in against a jetty, green with weed, its decrepit timbers bolstered and blocked by oddments of wood and metal, so that it might last at least through the first year of the war. The leading seaman climbed up the rusty-runged ladder first and looked about him at the vacant place; the jetty, a patch of scruffy beach, a single ghostly building.

  ‘Did you order transport, sir?’ he asked Lovatt, peering along the broken road.

  ‘No, I didn’t. I’ll get a taxi. They must have a phone here.’

  The leading hand was surprised. ‘Yes, I see, sir. Well, there’s one in the canteen. Right ahead. They’re open now. I saw the old woman there a bit earlier on. Got the pennies, sir? For the phone?’

  Lovatt could not help a grin. ‘No. As a matter of fact I haven’t,’ he admitted. ‘I left all my small change in Norway.’

  The man grinned back in a relieved way and handed over two pennies. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll charge it to the comforts fund, sir,’ he said. He saluted and returned to his boat. James Lovatt walked above the crevices of the jetty. It creaked beneath his feet. Seaweed smell filled his nostrils. There was such an emptiness about the place, such a neglect, that he once again felt illogically angry. It was as if nobody cared a damn, as if they had all gone home and forgotten about the war. He had never been there before and apart from its location on the map he knew nothing about it. He wondered what it had once been, why the rotting jetty was there at all, so far from any habitation except the single brick and wooden building towards which he was walking.

  As he approached the door a woman in a flowered overall came out carrying with difficulty a wooden ‘Forces Canteen’ sign. She was small, almost dwarfish, and she saw him gratefully. ‘Just in time,’ she squeaked. ‘Will you hang it up? I can’t reach it without the blessed steps.’ James took the board from her and lifted it so that it hooked on an outstretched iron arm. ‘Have to take it in at night,’ she explained. ‘It’s only just been done and if you leave it out around here the paint peels off in no time. It’s the salt. And I reckon the paint’s not much good either.’ Her stockings were grotesquely wrinkled around her square legs. She gave him a second glance and then squeezed her eyes together to make out the shape of the ship in the river. ‘You’re nice and early,’ she said.

  Lovatt went in. There was an atmosphere of damp and disuse about the place, but at the same time a sense of its having once been of some importance. There was a big, ornate fireplace, empty and gaping like a theatre-mouth, with some sort of wooden shield or coat of arms at its centre, but with the embossing rubbed away. The canteen counter with its tea urn, just rousing itself to produce some steam, was carved and corniched wood, apparently part of some special décor. Lovatt did not care enough to ask. The woman said: ‘Tea, is it? Coffee’s not ready yet.’ He said tea and looked around for the phone.

  ‘I want to call for a taxi,’ he told her.

  ‘It’s on the wall, in that funny box,’ she said, pointing to a booth in the far corner. Steam from the tea urn was curiously bearding her heavy face, making her look like one of the Seven Dwarfs. He walked across to the telephone. The frosted windows of the booth were engraved with leaves and long-tailed birds. Inside he found the number of the taxi and used the leading seaman’s two pennies to put into the box.

  ‘He takes his time,’ the woman called across the room. ‘He’s got one of those gas bags now and he makes that the excuse.’

  As she spoke the call was answered and the taxi driver promised to be there as soon as he got the gas bag filled. Lovatt replaced the earpiece and walked back into the canteen. His mug of tea was waiting, a curl of vapour on its edge. She had change for a pound note although the tea was only a penny. For the first time the woman noticed his fatigue. ‘Been far?’ she inquired.

  ‘Far enough,’ he said.

  She pursed her lips. ‘Not supposed to ask, are we,’ she observed. ‘Not that I’d tell. And there’s no German spies around here. Hardly anybody at all around here, let alone German spies. You can see. I don’t know what use this place is, except it’s my war work.’

  He made no attempt to unravel the logic. ‘Norway,’ he said. To hell with it. Why shouldn’t they be told?

  ‘Oh yes,’ she nodded vaguely. ‘Yes, that Norway.’ She wiped the wet ring of his tea mug from the counter. ‘That’s right, Norway. Saw it on the news at the pictures in Gravesend last week. Went to see The Thief of Baghdad, Sabu, that little Indian boy. It looked very pretty, I must say, all that snow and Christmas trees and everything.’

  Why he bothered to continue he did not know. It was as if he had to tell someone. ‘We were fighting there,’ he informed her. And added: ‘The Germans.’

  ‘I saw,’ she reassured him. ‘I saw all about it.’ She put her purple elbows on the counter. Behind her, above a pigmented mirror, a cardboard banner advised: ‘For your throat’s sake smoke CRAVEN “A”.’ She poured herself a cup of tea and had lit a Park Drive. She belatedly offered him one but he refused. ‘They had that Magnet Line on the news, too,’ she said. ‘You know, those French soldiers even sleep there, in proper bedrooms. Very comfy it looked too, and they have everything they want, even a little railway to carry them and their guns and things about. I can’t see Hitler blowing that up. The man what does the news, that one with the voice, you know . . . he said it was imp . . . imp . . .’

  ‘Impregnable?’ suggested Lovatt. He had finished his tea and now backed towards the door smiling stiffly. ‘That’s the word they usually use about the Maginot Line. Impregnable.’

  ‘That’s the very word.’ She saw he was getting out. ‘Going to be a nice day,’ she forecast. ‘They say it’s going to be a beautiful summer.’

  He got out into the thin morning air with a sense of relief. There were millions like her. Millions. The beach was small and unkempt, a handful of gulls hopefully turning over specks of debris. The Medway slid, grey and quiet, up the shingle. He could see the warship and realized it would not be long before the boats would be bringing others ashore. He walked along the weedy road to see at what distance he might spot the taxi and saw to his surprise that, at one side, embedded in deeper weeds, was a section of railway line. For no reason other than that he had time to squander, he followed the rusted, half concealed track and found that it came to an intended end where the foundations and part of the uprights of a railway buffer still remained.

  ‘Queen Victoria and Prince Albert used to come along that line,’ said a voice. Lovatt turned. A spruce man in a stiff white shirt had appeared from the canteen. He looked alert and solid; he might at one time have been a sailor.

  ‘So that’s what it is,’ Lovatt nodded. ‘I was wondering.’

  ‘I came to tell you that the taxi is
on his way, sir,’ said the man. ‘He just rang up to say.’ His eyes moved along the railway line. ‘Called it Port Victoria,’ he said. ‘When Queen Victoria was going off in the royal yacht to visit the German side of the family the royal train would come down from London to here and they’d get on the boat at the jetty. It was built specially. There’s all sorts of bits and pieces, like relics, in there.’ He nodded towards the canteen. ‘That used to be a kind of waiting-room and where all the big nobs would say goodbye or welcome her back if it was raining or the yacht was a bit delayed.’

  They had begun walking back along the broken road. ‘Strange bit of the country this,’ said James. He wondered how a man like that could tolerate such a woman. ‘All a bit mysterious, isn’t it. I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘Marshes and suchlike,’ agreed the man. ‘Miles of river bank and ponds and odd bits of beach, like this. They used to store ammunition along here in the Great War. Just up the river a bit you can see the buildings. They’ve got a notice warning you not to strike lucifers. Lucifers! And there are some stone gun pits built donkey’s years ago when they thought Napoleon was coming.’ They had reached the fringe of the beach now. ‘Well, he won’t be long,’ the man added a little awkwardly. ‘Ten minutes, probably. Do you want another cup of tea, sir? The wife said you’d been in Norway.’ He looked concerned. ‘Not that she’d repeat it.’

  ‘I’ll just wait here,’ said Lovatt. ‘The sun’s coming out properly now. It will be a nice change.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it will. For you,’ agreed the man. He turned to go, then stopped on a thought. Striding to a pile of timber, the prow of a derelict boat, and some corroded machinery, all beneath a tarpaulin, he extracted an old deck chair and brushed down the faded stripes with his hand. ‘Might as well have a seat while you wait,’ he suggested. ‘It’s dry and it’s not dirty.’

  Lovatt grinned gratefully. ‘Good idea,’ he agreed. The man, like a batman, set the chair up and made sure it was safe from collapse. He turned it to face the pale but pleasant sun. Lovatt sat carefully on the chair and laughed. It seemed weeks since he had laughed. ‘Just like old times,’ he told the man. ‘All I need now is a bucket and spade.’