Waiting For the Day Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Leslie Thomas

  Title Page

  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

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  What Happened to …

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Midwinter, 1943. Britain is gripped by intense cold and in the darkest days of the war. It is six months before D-Day and the battle to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe.

  RAF officer Paget is heading home for Christmas, back to the resurrection of a passion he thought was long over.

  In a freezing hut on Salisbury Plain, Sergeant Harris is training his troops for landing on the shores of Normandy, but his mind is occupied by thoughts of just how his young wife is coping with his absence.

  Lieutenant Miller has arrived at an all-but-derelict mansion in Somerset where his American division has set up its headquarters. His affair with an Englishwoman is both bittersweet and potentially dangerous.

  Cook Sergeant Fred Weber is enjoying fishing off the coast of occupied Jersey. His calm is soon to be shattered as his war takes on a violent twist.

  Each man is heading inexorably towards the beaches of France, where the great battle will commence . . .

  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 four million copies.

  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 Magic Army

  The Dearest and the Best

  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

  Dover Beach

  Non Fiction

  This Time Next Week

  Some Lovely Islands

  The Hidden Places of Britain

  My World of Islands

  In My Wildest Dreams

  WAITING FOR

  THE DAY

  Leslie Thomas

  ‘The hour of our greatest efforts and actions is approaching … The flashing eyes of all our soldiers, sailors and airmen must be fixed upon the enemy …’

  Winston Churchill

  Broadcast, March 1944

  ‘Actors waiting in the wings of Europe

  we already watch the lights on the stage

  and listen to the colossal overture begin’

  Keith Douglas

  Collected Poems, 1943

  ‘Flasks of hot tea and jam sandwiches were collected for use on the flight …’

  Private Ron Gregory, paratrooper

  who dropped over France on D-Day

  Sixty years have gone by since the D-Day invasion of northern France by Allied forces in the Second World War.

  This story is for everyone who remembers those times and everyone who may want to know about them.

  Chapter One

  Nearly six hours late the wartime train dragged west, the night bone cold, the land black; its windows were masked and inside each compartment a weak blue light lent an eerie shape to the lumped passengers. Some stirred but, from the old, labouring steam engine to the slowly rocking guard’s van at the back, men, mostly soldiers, and a few women, lolled and lay as though they were already dead in battle.

  It was two nights before Christmas 1943 and in the shapeless country through which the train crawled there were more than a million men, sleeping with their tanks, guns, planes and ships, waiting for the day to invade, to liberate, German-occupied Europe. It was still almost six months away.

  Paget was in the window corner of what was still called a first-class compartment, its seats threadbare, its woodwork rattling. It was reserved for officers but at that bleak hour the shadows surrounding him were anonymous. He looked at the luminous dial of his air force watch, its small glow just enough, as he stood, to reflect in the glass of one of the framed seaside photographs fixed to the wall in front of him. He looked more closely; there was a beach and a pier but he could not read where it was. All in the past now, anyway, over four years ago.

  In the opposite seat was a sweating major who had earlier been taking measured swigs from a big silver whisky flask, burping on each one, but who now sat, head hung back, mouth open, with the flask in his lap like an empty trophy. There were two other army men, strangers perhaps, but leaning against each other as if for assurance; a khaki chaplain was snuggled against an officer of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. Both the padre and the fat-legged female were snoring, she boisterously, drowning his refined wheezings.

  Paget opened the door carefully. There was a small aperture like a sniper’s slit in the blacked-out windows of the corridor and he put his eye to it. The glass was cold on his cheek and outside was dark as an unending tunnel.

  There were two civilians in the lavatory, ministry men judging by their bulging briefcases, slumped one each side of the pan, the blue light spectral on their faces. He tried not to disturb them, but they had become accustomed to intrusions and rose, hardly opening their eyes, and stumbled into the corridor dragging their briefcases with them. When he had finished and pulled the chain they went back.

  He saw how congested the train was. Men wrapped in greatcoats were lying in the smoke-choked corridor, heads to boots, their kit piled on their bellies or pushed as pillows below their heads. Between them beer bottles were scattered like expended shell cases, one rolling hollowly with the movement of the train. There were fragments of food, a shattered meat pie, half a sandwich, and cigarette stubs and packets: Players, Capstan, Craven ‘A’. Each compartment was occupied by many more passengers than intended, crammed on the seats, sprawled between them and stretched out in the luggage racks. A female leg in a thick service stocking dangled over the side of one rack. In another compartment one of the racks had just partially collapsed on to the sleepers and they were cursing and spitting, trying to disentangle themselves.
A soldier with a shoulder flash reading ‘Norway’ had his face plunged into his hands, laughing or crying.

  As Paget neared the guard’s van the train jolted and the engine, not for the first time, wheezed to a stop. A window was lowered and someone put his head out. It seemed the steam from the locomotive froze white on the midwinter air. A voice shouted: ‘Shut the bleeding thing!’ The man who had opened the window closed it forcefully and grunted: ‘Christ only knows.’ Paget wondered if Christ did.

  There was a layer of human beings in the guard’s van. Behind them he could make out packages and some piled newspapers pushed into one section segregated by a rope and a net. In the central dim light he could see the guard bent face forward on his swivel chair against a shelf, his cap like a bowl, his face in it. Paget climbed over to him.

  ‘Could the driver be persuaded to stop at Crockbourne?’ he asked. The guard roused, blinked, and put on his cap. His Great Western Railway badge glimmered. In wartime everybody had some sort of badge. ‘GWR,’ said the guard, seeing Paget’s glance. He tapped it. ‘God’s Wonderful Railway. Was once. Will be again when the war’s over.’ He looked at Paget’s squadron leader’s rings. ‘I had a boy in the air force,’ he said.

  He pushed his cap away from his forehead. ‘Crockbourne? I don’t see why not. We’ve stopped everywhere else.’

  Paget said: ‘If we go on to Taunton I’ll have to hang around two hours to take the local train back.’

  ‘You will, sir.’ The man opened the timetable but did not refer to it. ‘Crockbourne in about …’ He took a turnip watch from his waistcoat. ‘… well, say half an hour. If we’re lucky.’

  He sniffed. ‘It’s all that heavy stuff, tanks and that, going down to Devon. They’ve even got Yankee locomotives in Newton Abbot yards. Gurt great things. Cow catchers on the front. Never thought I’d see that, not in England.’

  ‘Half an hour then,’ said Paget turning and stepping across the nearest sleeping men.

  ‘Thereabouts, sir. I’ll come back and give you a call.’ There was only one first-class coach.

  ‘Second compartment,’ said Paget. ‘There’s a vicar and an ATS woman jammed in the corner.’ The train began to move.

  One of the soldiers in the guard’s van had helped himself to the Daily Mirror from the pile behind the net. He pushed his face close to the page in the poor light. He was small and grained although he was only thirty.

  ‘Those are private property,’ the guard pointed out. He moved to retrieve the paper which the man put behind his back. ‘’Ang on now,’ the soldier said. ‘Oi can’t see proper to read the bloody thing anyway. Not in ’ere.’

  A tall and bulky soldier hunched next to him, head protruding from his greatcoat like a dopey tortoise, lifted his black-ringed eyes and said: ‘’Ow much has that Jane got on or off?’

  ‘’Ardly a stitch,’ said the first man, opening the paper to the cartoon. The big soldier gave a grunt. ‘Still not showing everything.’

  The guard peered over the top edge of the paper. ‘She’s not allowed to show all she’s got till the war’s over,’ he said. ‘I ’eard it’s a Government order. Stops the fighting man getting overexcited.’

  The undersized soldier closed the page. ‘We’re allowed to get a bit excited,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s a free country, they can’t stop us. There’s nothing in King’s fucking Regulations about not getting excited, is there?’

  ‘It’s dirty women, that’s what Churchill’s afraid of us doin’,’ said the second soldier wisely. ‘Getting weakened. Under the Emergency Powers, Defence of the Realm, and all that stuff you ain’t allowed to do.’

  ‘Like blowing whistles,’ sniffed the guard as if it were a personal affront.

  Somebody groaned for them to shut up and the guard wandered back to his ledge. The smaller soldier called after him: ‘Who did he think he was then, when he’s ’ome? That blue job.’

  The guard responded cautiously: ‘He’s a squadron leader.’

  ‘So ’e can stop the train where ’e likes, can he?’

  ‘He’s an officer.’

  ‘Got some cushy desk job, I bet. Be the same after the war.’

  The guard went out of his van, timing his steps to the roll of the train. ‘Bleedin’ squadron leader,’ said the small soldier. ‘He’s all right. Never mind us.’ The big man next to him said: ‘You’m from Coombebury, ain’t you? Your name’s Blackie. I went to school with you.’

  ‘Ron Blackie,’ nodded the small man. He manoeuvred himself to stare into the other’s face. ‘Miss Billips’s class,’ he said.

  ‘Big Lips we called ’er, di’n we.’ A smile of memory, probably the first smile on the train that night, broke on his rough face. ‘Or big tits more like.’

  The smaller man concentrated on the indistinct features. ‘Oi ’member you,’ he said. ‘But Oi don’ ’member your name.’

  ‘Warren. Called Bunny.’

  Blackie gave a nod. ‘Course. Got you now. We took your trucks off in the playground one day, di’n we. And all the maids in the school was there. All laughing at your dick.’

  Warren sniffed. ‘I don’t forget that.’

  Blackie said: ‘And you was wearing your mother’s knicks.’

  Warren sounded ashamed: ‘It were cold, bloody cold, that winter, and my old girl didn’t ’ave the money to buy me no underpants, so I wore her bloomers. She tried putting newspapers in but they kept falling out. After the maids and all you others laughed, I put up with freezing my balls off.’

  ‘None of us ’ad anything then,’ remembered Blackie. ‘Bugger all. No money.’

  ‘No underpants,’ said Warren, still sadly. ‘Things’ll never be as bad as that again. So they tell us.’

  Blackie sniffed. ‘We’ll see. Not the first time the working class been told lies. There’s money around now, ’cos of war work and that. There’s blokes in Plymouth clearing the bombing, patching up, and that, taking ’ome six quid a week.’

  Warren nodded. ‘And we’re in this mob, likely gettin’ our ’eads blown to bits, for seven bob.’

  Blackie said: ‘You up on Salisbury Plain?’

  ‘Aye, right up on it. You as well?’

  ‘Like you, right up on the bastard. We went to Portsmouth last week, one of these embarkation drills, ’orrible and wet, but it weren’t bad when we got off duty.’

  ‘We’re close on Salisbury,’ said Warren. ‘There’s a bus. You can go to the pictures and watch them Yanks climbing all over the girls in the back seats.’

  Blackie said reflectively: ‘Oi ’ad quite a nice shag, Wednesday down Portsmouth. Five bob. Outdoors, mind.’

  Warren mused: ‘Five shillings. That’s a lot for a bunk-up, open air. Not that I’d know. I never got anything left, ’ardly enough for a pint of old and mild.’

  ‘Pompey was full of soddin’ Yanks as well, and the navy. You could scarce get into a pub. But she was all right, nearly young, if you know what I mean. We went at the back of a shop, stood up in some sawdust.’ He leaned forward confidingly although none of the men around them stirred. The guard was in the corridor. ‘I put my greatcoat round us both and … and she weren’t wearing nothing underneath.’

  Warren leaned. ‘Not a stitch?’

  ‘Not even a bit of ’lastic. And d’you know what she said for me to do?’

  ‘No. What?’

  Blackie’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘She had these stockings on, from some Yank, I ’spect, and she got me to put the money in the tops of her stockings. Half a crown one side and half a crown the other.’

  ‘That’s … like, romantic,’ said Warren wistfully. Then he said: ‘You goin’ home to the wife?’

  Blackie knew what he meant. ‘Aye, but she blows hot and cold, mostly cold. I got her a nice Christmas present, though. When that tart went off she left ’er scarf and it’s a good ’un. Suit my missus.’

  Paget was fitfully dozing when the guard slid open the door. The ATS officer raised one large eye and regarded the intruder bellig
erently: ‘Are we never going to get there?’

  ‘One day, lady,’ responded the guard. ‘Or one night. Soon, I ’spect.’

  He said to Paget: ‘Crockbourne next stop, sir. Five minutes.’

  Paget took his case and overcoat down from the rack and put on a pair of knitted gloves. The artillery major woke and made to drink from his empty flask. He peered down the neck and then glanced suspiciously about him. Since Paddington scarcely a word had been exchanged in the compartment but now, as he left, the woman wished him a Merry Christmas and the padre, keeping his eyes closed, added: ‘And a holy one.’

  The engine steamed into the dark and freezing Crockbourne station at five in the morning. As Paget climbed down to the platform some of the servicemen who had woken were attempting to sing, defiantly, tunelessly:

  ‘She’s a big, fat cow,

  Twice the size of me.

  She’s got hairs on her belly

  Like the branches on a tree.’

  He shut off their song as he slammed the door. The engine eased away with a melancholy toot and for some reason, like a boy, he gave a single wave. He could scarcely see the station name board, restored now after being taken down during the time when a German invasion was feared. It had been kept in the waiting-room.

  As he walked the frost made each footstep sound like a gunshot. He knew the door through the vestibule by the ticket office would be locked but he tried it anyway. It was. He felt stiff and chilled even in his RAF topcoat. Taking it off he flung it over the station fence and threw his case after it.

  In the dark he tripped over a bucket on the platform and it clanged as it rolled. He picked it up and placed it upside down on a bench next to the fence and, with the bucket rocking under his feet, awkwardly clambered over.

  ‘’Alt! Oo be that?’ It was more like a squeak than a challenge. ‘Oo goes there?’

  The bucket had tipped as Paget climbed and now it clattered noisily along the platform beyond the fence. He stared into the gloom and down the barrels of a shotgun pointed at him from twenty yards by a thin and shadowy man.