Other Times Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Leslie Thomas

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Copyright

  About the Book

  At the start of the war in 1939 James Bevan is a junior officer approaching middle-age, attached to a small anti-aircraft unit on the south coast.

  Abandoned by his wife, the soldiers he command are his family: Bairnsfather, whose sexual encounters with his girl friend Muriel take place in an air-raid shelter; Cartwright, trying to keep two women on his gunner’s pay of a shilling a day; Hignet, cosily educating himself in the orderly room. It is a rude awakening when they are called upon for the real war.

  Hugely absorbing, rich and rewarding, Other Times brims with history and experience, love, sorrow and humour.

  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 Last 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. In 2005, Leslie Thomas was awarded an OBE for Services to Literature.

  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 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

  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

  LESLIE THOMAS

  Other Times

  Dedicated to Jean Ratcliff and the Lady Taverners

  in recognition of the work they do with needy

  children

  Author’s Note

  My thanks to David Penn and Chris McCarthy of the Imperial War Museum, and Major Denis Rollo of the Royal Artillery Historical Trust, for their help; to Tony Richards, City Librarian, Southampton, and his staff. Also to the many people, particularly in the Southampton and New Forest areas, who so willingly shared their memories with me.

  There are those who will think of this story as a tale from history; to others it will seem that it happened only yesterday.

  1

  It seemed somehow unfitting that everything should be so docile along that coast; a washed-out autumn sky reflecting in an uncaring sea, birds flying much as usual, offshore a minesweeper rocking as if asleep. Not a foot trod on the shingle. There were small chuffs of wind. It was an empty morning.

  At seven o’clock the men stumbled from the two huts. Not for the first time Captain Bevan thought how difficult it was to make a parade from only sixteen soldiers, two excused boots.

  They formed up in two blank-faced ranks, not particularly straight, in front of the sandbag rampart around a solitary Bofors gun, its feet spread out on last summer’s seaside rose garden, its camouflage netting like an old woman’s skirt. Bugles, even if militarily appropriate, were not allowed. Under the Defence Regulations, no one, on pain of arrest, was permitted to sound a siren, hooter, whistle, bell, horn, gong or bugle. The silence irked Sergeant Runciman; an army should be noisy, at least have a certain amount of din. Whoever heard of a hushed army? He had unearthed an old bird-scaring rattle in a barn; it still worked when he privately swung it and he had suggested its use for rousing the men in the morning but a check on regulations by Bombardier Hignet, the sage of the orderly room, revealed that doing so would signify a gas attack. So Runciman had to shout at the door of each of the huts. Gunfire, as morning tea was traditionally called, was brought in an aluminium bucket by the NCO of the overnight guard. If the hot water had failed in the wash-house, which sometimes happened, the tea was also used for shaving, giving some men brown chins.

  Although they were designated a troop of the Royal Artillery it was not easy to think of these men as troops; so few and so disarranged were they. They now paraded in front of the slim-barrelled, lily-snouted gun, on the oblong of asphalt once a playground but with the swings and seesaw banished and only the metal stumps remaining. In wartime children, like everyone else, were expected to make sacrifices.

  The men’s shadows were longer than the men for it was October and the sun was becoming later and lower. When Runciman, a regular soldier, gave orders his short, sturdy body tensed and then trembled as he shouted, as if it vibrated with the effort even though it was only an everyday drill. Now he ordered the small parade to attention for Bevan’s inspection which the officer carried out without fuss. There was little point in making any. Eight men were missing; three on leave, one on compassionate leave because his wife had gone off, and four still in Aldershot Military Hospital following the intense sickness that had decimated the unit and others in the area, two weeks before, when a Maltese civilian cook had reached his limit and dropped senna in the midday stew. It took longer to train a cook than a gunner and army cooks were in short supply. There were insistent queues at the latrines and some who had not eaten the stew pretended to have done so for the sake of going sick. ‘Men are crapping everywhere, sir,’ reported Runciman soberly.

  ‘It’s just as well the Boche didn’t attack,’ Bevan had said. ‘The country would have been left defenceless.’

  There seemed not the remotest chance of the Germans attacking, by air or any other means. The war had been on, if not actually being waged, for almost two months. Since the initial official fears had diminished and then disappeared – Southampton, whose six jovial barrage balloons they could see from the gun site, had confidently expected six hundred deaths from bombing in the first twenty-four hours – a deathless quiet, oddly near to a disappointment, had fallen across Britain. Air-raid wardens and fire-fighters had searched empty skies; cardboard coffins had remained unopened. People began to ask what had gone wrong.

  Gulls were squawking above the parade and Runciman needed to out-shout them. The men’s movements, like their eyes, were dull for there had been a dance in Lyndhurst public hall the night before. They left-turned, right-turned and about-turned, and the sergeant marched them up and down a bit on the asphalt and then silently on the grass, more to get them moving than anything else. Captain Bevan returned Runciman’s salute and said: ‘Carry on, sergeant’ before striding off towards his office. His pace diminished to a walk.

  He sat at his adjutant’s des
k wondering where Eve was, what her baby was like. He expected to get a letter from a divorce solicitor before long. That is what she wanted. They had been oddly grateful to the Prime Minister, Mr Chamberlain, when he announced the Declaration of War on Sunday 3 September, because it meant that they could part more easily, logically and, oddly, with less pain. Eve had been in the rocking chair, her belly swollen, her face washed out. He sat upright, facing her and the situation; they had studied each other with a mix of sorrow and relief. Those vivid moments after 11.15 that morning had meant many things to many people, fear, sadness, deep uncertainty; for them it was a convenient excuse.

  Eve had been his second wife; Margaret, his first, had died five years after their marriage. Eve was still at school when he first went to work on her father’s estate on the border of Hampshire and Sussex in the late 1920s. Bevan had only been aware of her in the holidays, a tubby tomboy who somehow, almost miraculously, became a slender young woman.

  ‘Everyone still calls me Lumpy,’ she laughed to him.

  ‘It doesn’t apply any more,’ he said.

  She had offered him a lift home from the county ball, a night for long-dressed ladies and uniforms. She wore a silver gown. It made her eyes seem grey.

  ‘I know my father got you to join his silly soldiers,’ she said as her Ford bumped over the estate roads in the dark. ‘Territorials seem a little ridiculous, don’t you think?’

  ‘He doesn’t think so. He’s still keeping a watchful eye on Germany.’

  ‘The uniform suits you though. White tunic and all that.’ Her tone softened. ‘Uniforms suit tall men. All soldiers should be tall.’ He grinned in the dark of the car. ‘And your medals. They don’t look so cumbersome on you. My father loves his medals.’

  ‘He loves the army.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘In peacetime it’s interesting.’

  ‘And war?’

  ‘Necessary.’

  She pulled up outside the stone cottage where he had lived with Margaret and where he still lived. ‘Can I come in and see?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes … yes, of course.’

  When they were in the ordered sitting-room she picked up a wedding-day photograph of himself and Margaret. ‘What was she like?’ she asked. ‘I did see her once or twice.’

  He was pouring drinks. ‘Quiet,’ he said.

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘I suppose so. Some people say quietness is the ultimate intimacy.’

  ‘She died in an accident, didn’t she.’

  ‘Yes, one night on the road from the village.’

  She took the glass and sat on the arm of the one big chair, her silver dress folding in columns down her legs, her eyes deep and her smile elfish. ‘I’ve been in here before, you know,’ she said. ‘Several times.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘I’ve even spied through the window.’

  He sat down opposite her. ‘Why?’

  ‘My friend Clara and I,’ she said, revolving her drink in the glass. ‘I had a big crush on you. So did she. We used to call you Valentino, handsome but silent.’

  Bevan laughed outright. She extended a hand and he touched it with his. ‘My apologies,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t. I’m very flattered.’

  ‘We saw you through the window once while you were trying to teach yourself to dance. We heard the gram playing and we thought you had a woman in here. But there you were, book in hand, trying out the steps. It made me feel odd, very sad.’

  She dropped her eyes but when she looked up he was smiling at her. ‘I never did learn properly.’

  ‘You danced very well tonight,’ she said. ‘Even if I had to ask you. Thank God for the Ladies’ Invitation Waltz.’

  She handed him her glass and he refilled it. ‘You know I am sailing to America at the end of the week,’ she said. ‘On the Aquitania.’

  ‘Yes, I heard. How long will you be away?’

  She shrugged. ‘A couple of years, I don’t know. It’s my father’s idea. It’s to make me into a well-rounded woman, as he says. As if being known as Lumpy were not enough.’

  He handed the drink to her.

  ‘Do you want to hear about my secret visits?’ she asked.

  ‘If you want to tell me.’

  ‘I had such a pash on you. Silly, I suppose, but there it is. I was only fourteen. You hardly ever locked your door and when you weren’t here I came in and just played at being here with you – you know, making your meals and getting your slippers, games like that.’ She hesitated, then finished her drink. ‘I must go,’ she said as if it were a sudden decision. He took her to the door. ‘I even got into your bed once,’ she said. She leaned forward and kissed him and he returned the kiss.

  ‘Have a good time in America.’

  ‘I wish I weren’t going.’ He saw she meant it then. ‘When I come back,’ she said, ‘I expect you to ask me to marry you.’

  When she had gone Bevan finished his drink thoughtfully. He took off his white mess jacket and, with a wry smile, jingled the medals. He left them attached to the jacket and put it over the back of a chair.

  It was raining on the cottage window now, splattering the small panes. There came a timid knock at the door. She was on the step, her hair and her silvery dress getting wet.

  ‘That silly car ran itself into a hole,’ she said, avoiding looking at him. ‘And I’m soaked.’

  ‘I can see,’ he said. She fell into his arms. He folded them about her. ‘It will be ages,’ she sniffed. Her face powder had streaked, her rouge was smudged. ‘I’ll be away years.’ She walked into the room and he closed the door. Without looking at him she began to take her dress off. ‘It’s sopping,’ she said.

  In later times whenever he thought about her he always saw again how, pale and young and naked, she had put on his white mess jacket and, with the undistinguished medals bouncing over her breast, had marched laughing up and down the room. Then she sat on the bed, rolled sideways across the cover and said: ‘We’d better not do anything while I’m wearing all these bits of tin.’

  Later she said: ‘I wouldn’t dare tell you what I imagined when I crept into this bed that time. Things you would never dream for a fourteen-year-old called Lumpy.’

  ‘You’re not Lumpy now,’ he said holding her.

  She giggled. ‘Only where I am supposed to be.’ She eased her breasts towards his face. ‘Kiss them, please. I always wanted you to give them a kiss.’

  They lay together until morning. In the first light they made love again. ‘Have you had many girlfriends, James?’ she enquired. ‘I mean serious girlfriends, you did this sort of thing with.’

  He laughed. Soon she would be gone. ‘I was married for five years, remember. After that I decided to concentrate on my work here.’

  ‘My father is going to make you his land agent, you know. When Roberts retires.’

  He knew. ‘That should see me through for life,’ he said.

  ‘There is the matter of marrying me,’ said Eve. ‘You promised.’

  ‘I promised to ask you,’ he corrected. ‘When you get back. By then you will probably have changed your mind.’

  ‘Oh, I hope not,’ she said.

  Bevan left the office door open to the October mild air. Bombardier Hignet would soon be released from gun drill, and would make the first cup of coffee. There were some important-looking papers on the desk, none of them important. One concerned a new issue of waste-paper baskets and filing trays marked ‘In’ and ‘Out’, and another the looming visit of a military chiropodist. The door faced east and if he stood he could see the Needles, the toothy end of the Isle of Wight. A fresh, sunny wind came in the door ruffling the wall calendar. The Daily Express lay folded on Hignet’s desk. Bevan walked over and casually opened it. On the front was a propaganda photograph of George Formby, with his lemon grin and ukulele, entertaining troops – amused British and bemused Frenchmen – in France. The RAF had dropped leaflets over Germany advising the enemy to surrender. There w
as an advertisement for the benefits of Bovril and another for Cherry Blossom boot polish.

  Runciman, always the professional, was giving sharp orders to the seven men of the gun crew, so sharp there was scarcely an echo, and Bevan went to stand at the door to witness the soldiers go through the pantomime around the Bofors. The two gun layers, Purcell and Brown, wound the handles for elevation and for line from bucket seats on each side. Bairnsfather, the loader, said they reminded him of his mother and the woman next door both swinging their mangles on opposite sides of the back fence. It was Bairnsfather who loaded the ammunition, clips of four shells, into a hopper and operated the firing pedal. Cartwright and Ugson were the ammunition carriers, Ugson being relieved of his duty of observer once they were in action. Then Sergeant Runciman watched the sky and controlled the gun from his position to the right of it. Hignet’s task, to his intense embarrassment, was to sweep up imaginary empty shell cases. They had another similar gun but it had gone to be mended. The remaining weapon could not be fired even for practice because they were surrounded by a retirement area and residents had complained to the War Office that it shook their beds and bungalows. When they needed to rehearse with loud ammunition, alive or dud, they had to take the weapon to the slopes of Salisbury Plain, several miles to the north. Many people hardly knew there was a war going on.

  Now the sergeant was snapping through the action drill. Bevan watched the coned barrel of the forty-millimetre quick-firing weapon elevate and then traverse, it seemed to him, almost eagerly as if the gun itself felt that this might be the real thing. It nosed around the sky apparently sniffing for enemy aircraft. Gunner Ugson, the observer, knew there was sod all up there. It was an excellent gun and had been in use with the British Army only since 1937. They were lucky to have it for Bofors were in short supply. There were less than a hundred in the country and this pair had happened to be unloaded at Southampton at the start of the war. It was a Swedish invention and the Swedes were neutral, had preserved their private peace, while selling the weapon to the Germans, the British, the French and anyone else who would buy. Bevan knew what was coming next in the drill and he half turned away, grateful that no outsider could see. It was so diminishing. He heard Runciman snap through the final sequence of orders and then bawl: ‘Fire!’