Dover Beach Read online

  Everything about Instow’s craft was shabby; he felt shabby too. Shabby and useless. He was a reserve officer and his crew were reservists. The steersman had not been near the sea for years and was as uncertain as the ship he nudged towards the harbour entrance. Instow prayed he would miss the wall.

  Forward, around the base of the pom-pom with its multiple barrels, sprawled some of the convoy’s survivors who had been lifted from the sea. Two of the ships had been set on fire and one of them had exploded. The minesweeper had arrived after the lifeboats from Dover and Folkestone and some fishermen. By now the sky was unoccupied, an innocent early evening, the Germans gone, the long white Dover cliffs gleaming, smiling blandly, and the green of the Kentish countryside rising above the strong, neat town.

  There were six merchant seamen lying, smeared with oil, on the fore deck and another four at the stern, two of them crouching as if ready to run a race. Three canvas-covered bodies were laid on the tarpaulin of the lifeboat. The minesweeper’s crew had handed out mugs of coffee and whisky and brought blankets. There was not much noise and not much movement. Anything said was only a whisper masked by the revolutions of the engines. It was oddly peaceful.

  From the west two aircraft approached. The klaxon warning honked and Instow bellowed: ‘Action stations.’ The sailors attempted to drag the wet and oily injured men away from the guns, but Mancroft, the second officer, shouted from the deck below: ‘They’re ours, sir. RAF Spitfires.’

  ‘Bleeding Spitfires!’ suddenly screeched one of the men on the deck managing to get to his knees and shake his fist. ‘Young bleeders!’ Others, some of those who were able to, followed him, shouting and punching their fists at the planes which mistakenly dipped their wings in salute.

  Instow recognised they were older men. You could tell that even though they were coated with oil. You could tell from their voices. He turned from them and watched the lifeboats trailing him into harbour and beyond them the low and labouring fishing vessels. Altogether they must have pulled thirty men from the sea he thought. How many were alive?

  The helmsman, who he noticed for the first time had a nervous tic, correctly placed the bow between the red port light and the starboard green light at the entrance to Dover. As the view into the harbour widened people could be seen grouped on the quay and along the pier, and there were ambulances waiting against the grey buildings of the town. Instow was deeply conscious that they had already lost a battle. How many more would there be? ‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Sub-Lieutenant Mancroft on the wing of the bridge. He was scarcely twenty, and he was trembling. He surveyed the men on the deck. Two of their crew were rubbing one of the merchant seamen with bare hands. One looked up at Instow and then Mancroft and called: ‘Trying to keep ’im warm, sir.’

  Mancroft glanced towards Instow, then shouted stoutly: ‘Keep rubbing him, boys, we’re nearly there.’ It made him feel better.

  HMS Petrel eased alongside. One of the sitting survivors by the gun coughed and called up. ‘Skipper, sir, ain’t the navy got anything better than this tub?’

  Instow knew. ‘I’ll tell the admiralty,’ he called back.

  ‘You wouldn’t have made any difference,’ the seaman wheezed. ‘Not with these popguns.’ He turned his soaked and blackened back to Instow who knew he was right.

  Now they were against the jetty, lines were thrown and tied. As the gangway rattled down there was a movement, at first hesitant, of medical men, service and civilian, to board the ship. A group of dockers trailed them timidly, almost with embarrassment. The land men stared at the burned sailors on the deck. The Dover and Folkestone lifeboats and the trawlers were coming to the jetty. The ambulances began to move almost timidly on to the pier.

  Stretchers were hoisted aboard, tenderly loaded and carried carefully ashore. The clutch of clergymen hovered uncertainly. Prayers went unsaid. It took an hour before the final casualties were unloaded. The dockers stood afterwards, hapless, unspeaking, until the foreman grunted: ‘That looks like the lot, boys. Go on home to your tea.’

  One of the men said: ‘All old men. They looked so bloody old, didn’t they.’

  ‘You’d look bloody old if you’d got all that muck over you,’ said the foreman. He slung his canvas bag over his back. His lunch was still wrapped in its newspaper. ‘Want a pickle sandwich?’ he asked.

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll have my tea when I get home.’ The docker’s face sagged. ‘I ’ope it ain’t going on like this.’

  A boy with a nosebleed and a woman with a sprained ankle had been hurriedly treated and ushered away. The casualty department was clear. Doctors in white coats, looking uncomfortable in a silent group, waited alongside starched uniformed nurses, some smoking, others drinking coffee, all looking towards the main door. Sister Nancy Cotton had posted herself outside and she saw the first ambulance. ‘They’re coming,’ she said thrusting the double doors wide. They stubbed out their cigarettes, put down their cups and tried to keep calm.

  The injured merchant seamen were almost shoved through the entrance by stark-faced stretcher bearers who had never seen anything like it. Twenty were manoeuvred into the department through the entrance and directed to spaces marked with chalk on the cleared floor. Three of the men had already died.

  Nancy clenched her teeth and her hands. Shadowing the senior surgeon she moved around the stretchers and finally to the side of one of the prone men. He had a beard, sticking out like a tar-brush, his eyes protruding savagely from a riven face. His mouth was like a hole. ‘What you goin’ to do wiv them scissors, nurse?’ he croaked.

  ‘Cut your clothes off,’ replied Nancy primly. ‘And I’m sister.’

  ‘Wouldn’t let my sister cut my togs off,’ cackled the man. ‘But I’m buggered down there somewhere, missus. I can feel all my guts hanging out.’

  She began to scissor his wet, clogged clothes away. It was as if she was taking peel from his body. The blood and oil looked like heavy paint. Around them doctors and nurses bent working, the men groaning and crying or lying silent. A tubby priest came panting through the main door, blinked and made a swift sign of the cross. Muttering to himself, not to God, he cast his eyes about the room. An Anglican vicar, thin but unfit, came in and pulled up. Blood wriggled across the floor. The vicar almost hung on to the priest. ‘We must do what we can,’ said the Catholic trying not to vomit. ‘You can’t tell one from another.’

  ‘Not much point in asking,’ said the vicar.

  A shadow approached the door. ‘Dear Mother of God,’ breathed the priest. ‘A three-card trick. It’s the rabbi.’

  Tentatively the trio of holy men went among the wounded, the dying, and those tending them, stepping carefully. A man died with a stoical grunt and the vicar nudged the priest forward. The rabbi hung back, his hands across his mouth. Then an inner door was flung open like an explosion. Some of the casualties jumped. A man shouted: ‘No!’ Angrily Nancy turned to see a fat woman in a blue bonnet and a red dress splashed with huge white flowers. Her big folded face was convulsed.

  ‘Bertram Bartrip is dead!’ she bawled. ‘Don’t nobody care?’

  The surgeon bending above the man whose clothes Nancy had cut away lifted his head. ‘Bartrip was always an awkward man,’ he said stoically. He glanced at Nancy. ‘Get shot of her.’

  Nancy turned from the casualty area and after a moment the young rabbi followed her. ‘I think I’m a bit surplus here,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘It’s no time to ask religious details.’

  Nancy strode professionally up the corridor after the bouncing woman in the large red frock. The elastic in the short arms dug into the woman’s flesh. ‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ said Nancy tightly as she caught up with her. ‘But we’ve got an emergency.’

  The woman snorted. ‘Oh yes, I can see that! It’s all the glamour, ain’t it. Just like on the pictures. Never mind my father pegging out.’

  Pushing ahead, thrusting doors open, Nancy said: ‘Who said he’s dead anywa
y?’

  The rabbi followed timidly, catching the door as it sprang back.

  ‘’E’s dead all right,’ insisted Mary. ‘I know ’im better than anybody.’

  They reached an unrealistically bright ward, the late sun streaming in on the cheery quilts and flowers. Expectantly upright in their beds were ten men in striped pyjamas. Screens had been placed around the bed at the end. Someone turned off the wireless.

  ‘We put them around, sister,’ said one of the patients. ‘The screens. Once we knew . . .’

  The man in the next bed said: ‘’E’d started to gurgle.’

  Nancy stayed them with a glare. Swiftly she went around the screen, Mary padding after her, now dumbstruck. The rabbi peeped around after them. There was no mistake. Bertram Bartrip was no more. She tested for a pulse and lifted a limp eyelid. ‘The doctor will have to certify he is dead,’ she said. ‘As soon as he’s not so busy.’

  ‘Who,’ demanded Mary swinging a plump arm towards the rabbi, ‘is this bloke?’

  ‘A man of God,’ said Nancy firmly.

  Mary rolled her eyes. ‘Him,’ she scoffed emphasising the aspirate. ‘God! My father wanted nothing to do with God.’

  ‘I’m a rabbi,’ said the young man.

  Mary’s face colour deepened. ‘A Jew!’ she howled. ‘A Jew boy!’

  ‘Most rabbis are,’ he responded evenly. ‘I’m Joseph Bentick. If I can be of any help . . .’

  Suddenly Mary deflated, the dress crumpling like a huge coloured balloon, tears gushing down the channels of her red and rough cheeks. ‘I’m going ’ome,’ she sobbed. ‘To tell them.’ Hugely inhaling she rallied. Nancy patted her.

  Nancy said: ‘Mary, as soon as the emergency is over we’ll arrange things. You come back tomorrow. We could get Mr Palfrey, the undertaker . . . do you know him?’

  ‘I know Mr Palfrey,’ snivelled Mary. ‘He arranged my mother. I’ll come back tomorrow. I’m sorry about those poor blokes in there. ’Onest I am, poor sods.’

  ‘Bertram Bartrip,’ sighed Nancy as she slumped at the table. ‘God knows how many deathbeds he’d had.’

  ‘And he had to pick today,’ grunted Cotton putting two boiled eggs in front of her. With bread and margarine. He poured her another cup of tea. The cottage was touched by a hushed wind from the distant sea. She put her face in her hands. ‘If it’s going to be like this . . .’

  ‘It looks like it is,’ he said. ‘They bombed the lightship, you know. Killed two of the crew.’

  ‘I heard,’ she said. ‘I thought that was out of bounds.’

  ‘I’m not sure there are going to be any bounds.’

  Nancy began to eat tiredly. It was almost midnight. ‘Were you all right, Frank?’ she said.

  ‘Well, that bomb cracked the car windscreen.’

  She sat up. ‘Oh God, oh Frank. I should have asked you.’

  ‘I didn’t have a scratch. I had three kids in the car, three lads. They enjoyed it, terrific fun. I was trying to get them home when that Jerry came right up the street and demolished the Co-op.’

  She leaned across the kitchen table and kissed his cheek. ‘I should have asked you,’ she repeated.

  ‘Apart from that, and trying to get the gawpers away from the dock gates, Christ, those people . . . Otherwise, everything was all right,’ he said. ‘Oh, and the key to the emergency mortuary went missing. It just would, wouldn’t it. In the end I kicked the door down.’

  He stood and went to the wireless set on the sideboard. ‘Might as well get the official story,’ he said. The midnight news had just begun.

  ‘In the English Channel today seven German planes were shot down by the RAF as they unsuccessfully attempted to attack a convoy of merchant ships. One of our aircraft is missing.’

  Cotton glanced at his wife. She seemed to have aged since that morning. ‘Well, well, well,’ he grunted. ‘Fancy that. Seven Germans shot down. And we didn’t notice.’

  Nancy said: ‘There’ll be a lot more lies told before this war is over. It makes you wonder how many lies have been told up to now.’ As she spoke the howl of the air-raid siren came on the placid air, floating up the ridge from Dover.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly looking up from the table and pushing her plate aside.

  ‘Finish your egg,’ he said gently. ‘It’s probably a false alarm. It’s all dark out there.’

  ‘I’m not going into that air-raid shelter,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough of war for one day.’

  Cotton went behind her and rubbed her shoulders. ‘Thanks,’ she sighed. ‘I’m so tired. I want my own bed.’

  ‘That’s where we’re going,’ he said.

  Chapter Two

  DOVER HAD EVER been in the front line. The first aerial bomb ever to drop on Britain fell on the town on Christmas Eve 1914, four months after the start of the First War with Germany, exploding in the garden of a house in Taswell Street and blowing a Mr Terson out of an apple tree which he was pruning. He was unhurt, though shaken. People came from miles to see the hole. It was only five years since the Frenchman Bleriot had been the first to fly the Channel, his cloth-and-wood machine coming to earth at Dover, only a few yards inland, a place that is today marked with the outline of his aeroplane.

  Through history the town had been the cornerstone of England, its famous folding cliffs later afforded even greater fame by a sentimental wartime song composed in America by a man who had never seen them and called ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. In reality they stood like a wide and irritating grin, often visible to the enemy in conquered France.

  Early tribes had colonised and fortified Dover against incomers until the Romans landed. They built Britain’s first lighthouse, and the Normans built a castle, both still standing solidly above the town today.

  Over centuries, fortification was piled on fortification and carved from the chalk of the cliffs, and in the rising country behind them were voluminous caves where guns had awaited the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte. The British then muttered among themselves: ‘Boney is coming,’ just as in the first summer of the Second War they said: ‘Hitler is coming.’ Neither came.

  That summer of 1940 began with forty thousand people in the town; behind it the county of Kent rising to the thick meadows, apple orchards and hop fields. They still call it the Garden of England today but they say the original name was the Guardian of England, because of the cliffs and ramparts that faced the straits.

  It was an early destination for the spreading railways of Victorian times, passengers leaving the trains to board the ferries for France. By the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, there were steam trains five times a day from London taking two and a half hours to three and a half for the journey, depending on where they stopped on the way.

  At eleven on that July morning in 1940 the train from London, trailing its emerald carriages, came into Dover Priory, the town station, two minutes late. A tall man with a clerk’s slightly bent back and briefcase, trilby, umbrella and raincoat, despite the firm promise of a fine day, marched to the trembling engine. ‘Late again!’ he shouted above the steam. ‘Every day now it’s late. It was not like this once.’

  ‘You tell the governors of the Southern Railway, sir,’ responded the driver easing his greasy cap away from his forehead. His face shone, black streaks ran down his cheeks. The furnace roared at his back. ‘Ain’t no use you going on at me.’

  The guard with his polished brasses and pressed uniform, his watch-chain glowing, approached along the platform, manoeuvring between the departing passengers. The driver said: ‘Ask him. He knows more than me.’

  The guard halted, stood straight and touched his cap. The toes of his black boots caught the sun. ‘Two minutes late, I’ll give you that,’ he said. ‘But you see, sir, since this twenty-mile exclusion zone’s come about we have to make sure that nobody is on the train that shouldn’t be on it. Mr Churchill don’t want unnecessary people down here. Any minute Hitler might invade.’

  As if contradicting him a group o
f six women, chattering in American voices, well dressed and excited, trotted towards the station exit. ‘They’ve got passes,’ said the guard defensively. ‘From the American embassy in London.’

  The tall man snorted, performed an irritated turn and strode towards the booking hall where the American women had been met by a confused Royal Engineers officer. ‘This is an exclusion zone, you know,’ the tall man warned waving his umbrella. ‘Hitler may be on his way. At this very moment.’

  The women’s widening eyes followed him as he left. Captain Robin Cartwright grinned and said: ‘I’m afraid he’s right. I was amazed when I heard you were coming.’ Cartwright, in common with many soldiers then, did not look the part. The officer’s uniform sat uncomfortably; he had a good-humoured but studious demeanour. It seemed he might have been more at home in a silent study.

  They were a brightly hued group. A small, pouting woman and another, in large spectacles, wore trousers. Few women in Dover had ever worn trousers. It was not a place of fashion. All the Americans had hats, two with upstanding feathers, and in each lapel was a paper Union Jack.

  The leader of the group, the most conservatively dressed, laughed uncertainly. ‘I’m Sarah,’ she said. ‘Sarah Durrant.’ Cartwright thought she was the youngest. She was neat, even dainty, with fair bobbed hair, calm eyes and an American smile. ‘We all have our passes.’ She shook hands with him, took the passes from her handbag and unnecessarily showed him. ‘We’re just hoping we can keep them for souvenirs.’

  ‘To show our folks that we’ve been at the war front,’ beamed a woman in a red satin coat.

  ‘Only twenty-one miles from those Nazis,’ said another expanding her bosom.

  A porter who had begun to casually sweep the booking hall nodded. ‘They’re not far away, missus.’ He studied their extravagant clothes and said: ‘I should keep out of sight if I was you.’