The Dearest and the Best Read online

  The train from Gravesend crossed the Thames bridge to Cannon Street Station, a pennant of white steam flying from its funnel. Once more James Lovatt awoke sharply, in alarm, only just stifling the shout that would have thoroughly startled his three fellow passengers in the compartment. Two were men in bowler hats and proper pin-striped suits heading, at ten-thirty, for their offices in the City of London, and the third a sparse, older man with the doubled-up posture of someone with years among filing cabinets. The two city men were concerned with The Times’ financial pages; before he had slept James had quickly noticed how they gave an identical, and cursory, glance at the leading news page within the paper before turning to the business section. They were like twins not on speaking terms, identical in their dress, in their stature and demeanour. As the train shuffled over the river they folded their papers, in unison, apparently at some secret signal, and sat gazing out of their opposite windows at the steady Thames. As the engine oozed white steam under the glass canopy of the big station, one man grunted to the other: ‘The Balalaika one-thirty, then.’ The other nodded. They had spent even less time looking at the fatigued young man who had been fighting in Norway than they had glancing at the news of the defeat he had witnessed. The bowed clerk smiled wanly at him, perhaps a kind of apology. Then he showed a portcullis of china teeth and said what a nice morning it was and how everyone was saying it was going to be a beautiful summer. ‘Mind you,’ he added with coy mischief, ‘it’s probably just another war rumour.’

  At the station there were servicemen squatting amid encampments of equipment, kit bags, packs, suitcases. One had a cricket bat. Others squinted worriedly at the departure indicator as if it were in some sophisticated code.

  But, the uniforms apart, it was difficult to imagine that this was the heart of a nation which had been at war for nine months. Posters at the station proclaimed ‘Holidays in France’; ships had been sunk, there had been some air skirmishing, insignificant Denmark had been overrun in a day, but the Norwegian débâcle was the first real battle the British Army had known in this war, and cold Norway seemed so far away. Government forecasts had calculated a million dead in intensive air raids within a week of war being declared; the papier-mâché coffins and the simplified burial forms were stacked and ready; children ran around trying to frighten each other, and themselves, by wearing the hideous rubber gas masks, and air-raid shelters had been dug, filled in, and dug again in the proper locations, in public parks and gardens. Their construction eased a little the burden of a million and a half unemployed. It was not until March that the first civilian, James Ibister, was killed by enemy action, not in a crowded metropolis, but by a stray aerial bomb in the isolated Orkney Islands. The serious casualties were on the blacked-out roads during the dark and ice of the bad winter.

  The anger which James had felt for days began to stiffen again as he walked through the concourse of the station. All around were the playbills for London theatres and cinemas: The Corn is Green, Dear Octopus, Gone With the Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His mind was still vivid with burning ships and buildings; men frozen in death, their blood pink on the snow; guns without ammunition; soldiers without rations. A military policeman, standing uselessly at the station exit, noted his fierce expression and tried to please him with a banging of boots and a sharp salute. He returned it sourly and strode outside into the London sun.

  Philip Benson, MP, was waiting outside the station. They shook hands and Benson studied him quickly and said: ‘I’m glad you got back all right, James.’ They got into a taxi and James asked: ‘Where’s The Balalaika?’

  Benson shook his head. ‘Never heard of it,’ he said. He was a thin grey man with a slight stoop which pointed his nose at the ground. He was not as old as he looked. ‘Anyway, you’re bound for lunch at the Commons,’ he added; ‘early I’m afraid, but I expect you’re hungry.’

  James realized he was. ‘Did you get anywhere?’ he asked. ‘Or is everybody still asleep?’

  The Member of Parliament, who was his father’s friend, looked straight ahead over the taxi driver’s shoulder. ‘Yes, I’m afraid I did,’ he replied quietly. ‘It’s going to be the most distasteful thing of my life, James, but it has to be done. The country can’t go on in this way. Neville Chamberlain must . . .’ He leaned further forward and ensured that the taxi driver’s window was closed. It apparently was. He sat back. ‘Chamberlain must go.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve arranged for you to see Clem Attlee as soon as we get to the House. You can imagine how that sticks in my throat, but you can’t choose your bedfellows at a time like this.’

  James’s immediate and automatic thought was what would his father say. ‘Attlee,’ he muttered.

  ‘And worse . . . Morrison,’ added Benson. ‘The miserable midget. It was all plotted, anyway. Only the timing is to be decided. Your particular testimony will only be one more nail in this Government’s coffin. Service Members have been seething about what’s been going on. They are going to vote for their men, the men in their units . . .’

  ‘Against the Conservative Government,’ James finished for him.

  Benson nodded: ‘Exactly. They want Churchill as Prime Minister. They want Chamberlain out on his neck. And soon.’

  ‘Churchill?’ repeated James. ‘Good God, Churchill was as much to blame for the mess in Norway as anyone else. Changed orders, woolly thinking, bad equipment. There were moments when I wondered if Churchill – or anyone else – had any idea where Norway actually was. My battery had the guns at Namsos and the damned vehicles to pull them a hundred bloody miles away. Churchill is lucky he doesn’t have another Gallipoli to answer for.’

  Benson seamed his lips. ‘It’s Churchill – Winnie – they want,’ he said heavily. ‘Everybody. They think he’s got what I believe is called “the bullshit” to pull the country together and it’s undoubtedly going to need it soon. The Germans are not going to stop now. Denmark surrendered after she had lost thirteen soldiers. A lot of people are beginning to wonder about the French too. Their general staff seems to think it’s fighting a war a hundred years ago. They’re all too damned ancient – half of them are ga-ga, I think. And the morale of the troops is suspect. There’s a lot of politics in the army. Did you see their men in Norway?’

  ‘Ski troops,’ muttered James. ‘Alpine regiment . . . Came with nearly everything, white battledress, goggles, skis, weapons. Unfortunately in some cases the things that fix the skis to the boots, whatever they’re called, were missing, so they were not a lot of use. I came across about twenty of them keeping warm in a barn studying a book they had been issued – useful Norwegian phrases – how to order in a restaurant. Is the fish grilled or fried? Or, where can I buy razor blades?’

  Benson nodded. ‘What can you expect,’ he observed, ‘when one of our cabinet ministers, Kingsley Wood, tells a Member that we could not possibly bomb the German Krupp armaments factory because it’s private property?’

  James began to laugh, quietly, sadly, and Benson patted his arm. They were almost there, over the bridge at the Westminster side of the Thames Embankment, by the statue of Boudicca on her chariot, its wheels fitted with swords; the British queen who had fought an invader of long ago. Benson had often observed that her line of charge would take her straight on to the Members’ Terrace. Big Ben was showing twelve-fifteen. Builders were working on scaffolding around the tower. It seemed they had been working up there for years. A striped awning was canopying the terrace next to the river, a target marker for a lunchtime bomber. The taxi swung into the yard, the policeman at the gate bending heavily to treat Benson to a smile of recognition and an amiable salute.

  While Benson paid for the taxi, James stood on the dark polished cobbles of the courtyard of the Houses of Parliament. He looked about him. The metropolitan sun was high over the Thames now, yellow on buildings, squares and wide avenues, filtering deftly through the city dust, warming walls and roofs as it had done on summer days for a thousand years. Above the mother of parliaments the Union
Jack, that incongruous banner of bits and patches, lolled in the almost windless air. Visitors were queuing to enter ancient Westminster Hall. Would the Wehrmacht queue to see its lofty roof and to hear the intonations of the guided tour? Would stormtroopers one morning replace the jolly policeman in this yard? Where then would be the Royal Throne of Kings? Canada?

  ‘The Balalaika, sir,’ offered the taxi driver suddenly leaning from his cab window. ‘You was mentioning The Balalaika.’

  Annoyance creased Benson’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What about it?’

  ‘One-thirty, Newmarket, sir. Four to one in this morning’s paper.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Benson brusquely. ‘That’s extremely kind.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir. Anything to help with the war.’

  Two

  BINFORD AND ITS neighbouring, almost adjoining, hamlet of Binford Haven, occupied the western bank of a river which rose in the high chalk of Wiltshire and, broadened by many tributaries, flowed down through Hampshire, through the forest to a wide estuary. The Haven, as the smaller place was locally called, had been sitting modestly at the mouth since the Normans invaded, but Binford, a mile and a half upstream, although it had a few seventeenth-century houses, belonged to Nelson’s age when the great, one-eyed admiral had established a shipbuilding yard at a creek halfway between the two settlements.

  Some of England’s bravest ships had been born there, the timbers being dragged from the forest and down the wide rutted street, still clearly to be seen through the grass of years, to the building cradles at the water’s edge.

  Robert Lovatt loved the past and the present of the place. As he walked along the river edge he often hummed, even sang a line or two, of ‘Rule Britannia’ or ‘Rose of England’. He had retired on the dot of sixty from his solicitor’s office and had settled himself at Binford, resolved to spend his time editing and reshaping his book, published to a certain acclaim in the late nineteen-twenties: The Front Line: Personal Stories from the Trenches. The onset of another conflict had only added impetus to his work; he assessed that because so little had become of the new war, then there would be a greater interest in the old one.

  He belonged to this place, loved its trees, lanes, fords and scalloped moorlands, and its issuing to the open sea. The salt flats of the estuary were the home of wintering birds; in summer the three low, pointed hills behind Binford – called the Three Sails by local mariners and fishermen, because they resembled a ship under canvas – were vivid with gorse.

  Binford was a spread village, its only concentration of habitations being in the single wandering street, but at Binford Haven the intimacy of the little port, the stone quay and the solemn houses, was a contrast to the thrilling view of the English Channel from the tower of its elevated coastguard station. From there the watcher could see far down the bent coast, as far as Dorset, and to the east the cut-out haunch of the Isle of Wight with the toothy rocks called The Needles and its single finger of a lighthouse.

  There were several small towns within a few miles, associated with the trades of the forest, especially the flocking holidaymakers, or with the sea. Lymington, sitting anciently by its own estuary; Lyndhurst, inland among the elms and oaks; Ringwood, where they had lodged the Duke of Monmouth captured at Sedgemoor in 1685, the last battle fought on English soil, and where there was a new picture palace. Christchurch, with its slender arched abbey, swans swimming around its feet, was twenty miles west, and beyond that spread the bathing beaches of Bournemouth. To the east were Southampton docks whence the Pilgrim Fathers had set out for America, a distinction later purloined by Plymouth where they had merely put in to hide from a storm. Beyond that, a few miles more, was Portsmouth, Nelson’s home dockyard where his flagship Victory still lay berthed. It seemed to Robert Lovatt that half the history of England was breathing in this southern county and he loved it.

  He was a tall, heavy-framed, domed man, principled and quite often pompous. His patriotism extended to sniffing the salt air of the estuary over his small oblong moustache, and thanking God he was an Englishman, not British, but English. He had once made a speech at a St George’s Day dinner during which he had persisted in referring to the English Empire; to him – as also to Hitler – the nation was called England.

  He was one of three brothers who had embarked eagerly for France at the outbreak of what he determinedly still called the Great War, and he was the only one who returned. His military connections were now few, a parade with the Old Comrades of his regiment on Remembrance Sunday, when for some reason his mild Flanders limp (a gun carriage had gone over his toe) became accentuated, and an occasional meeting with his war-time commanding officer, Major-General Sound, in his retirement, rankling in Salisbury, thirty miles away. As chairman of the Binford Parish Council Robert was also responsible for the organization of air-raid precautions in the village, a task to which he attended with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, although in his heart he did not believe the Germans were capable of air attacks on a large scale. Together with Mr Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, he believed that Hitler was bluffing or had missed the bus. Or both.

  On this lucid morning in May Robert was striding beside the river, observing the ducks standing on their heads like troops taking cover, tracing the drone of a Gloucester Gladiator fighter plane across the harmless sky, the sun burnishing his pate. Regularly, three times a week, he walked from Binford towards The Haven, stopping halfway at what was still called Nelson’s Yard. Only the blackened piles, standing like rotten tree stumps, now remained of the great shipbuilding cradles; the storehouses had become barns; but the home of the master shipbuilder was still intact, a lovely white house with bowed windows and a noble roof, looking down the last slopes to the water.

  The ritual of visiting his friend John Lampard was always accomplished with the pleasant pretence of surprise. ‘Hello, John. Thought I’d drop along and see you.’ ‘Hello, Robert, wondered when you’d be passing this way.’

  These days Robert rarely went directly to the house but turned down an old path, now recut and reopened among the thistles and buttercups, to a landing in a half-creek of the main river, to where the fine though faded hull of an old Isle of Wight paddle steamer lay. Hammering or sawing sounds always told him when John Lampard was aboard. There was also a gramophone which sometimes played Ivor Novello songs. A retired accountant from London, Lampard had purchased the vessel the previous summer, six weeks before war was declared, and was dedicating himself to restoring it single-handed. ‘It might just be finished in time for a victory sail down the Channel,’ he forecast. ‘If the business lasts that long.’ His paddle ship was called Sirius.

  The spicy scent of grass and weeds filling his nose, Robert made his way down the path. Glimpsed through the vegetation, the water trembled and flashed. Although the bank was steep the arched wooden housing of the starboard paddle stood above the growth like a mullioned doorway. Previously the perky funnel of the vessel had also stood up to be seen, but today it was reclined on the deck and John Lampard was contentedly painting it. ‘Had to get the soot of years off that chap,’ he said when Robert clambered aboard. ‘Been easier to paint it black.’ He straightened up, sweating. He had more hair on his chest than on his head; grey and rough hair, sprouting out of his open tartan shirt. His face was red with sunshine and exertion.

  Robert had no time to reply before a breathless, slightly distressed woman’s voice issued from the summit of the weedy bank. ‘John, John . . . there’s someone to see you. Mrs Spofforth, John . . .’ The words came like a warning.

  The two men exchanged groans and glances. Before they could add words, however, a stringy old woman in a bright print dress and a black straw hat came staggering over the horizon, waving a parasol and accompanied by a spotty boy wearing a bowler hat. Joan Lampard followed behind, a poor and breathless third. ‘Mrs Spofforth, John . . .’ she repeated in weak apology.

  ‘Oh dear!’ exclaimed Mrs Spofforth, but with a sort of exultation. ‘You
’ve knocked the chimney down! What a pity. You’ll need some help to put that straight, John Lampard.’ She paused and regarded Robert with some dislike. ‘Someone young,’ she added pointedly. ‘Like the boy here. You know Willy Cubbins, John, don’t you? The last of the evacuees.’

  The boy was squat and looked squatter under the bowler hat, although it took the glister away from a face that was ripe with acne. He was fifteen now and the sole survivor of the evacuated children who had come in busloads, many accompanied by moaning mothers, from threatened London on the first day of the war. Binford haphazardly took them in, gave the strangers homes, and instructed them not to stone the cows. It was the beginning of an uncomfortable period for both the town-dwellers and their reluctant hosts, but the problems had been solved by the fact that the mass air attacks on the capital had failed to happen. Mothers and children, with the exception of Willy Cubbins and a few others, who had also since returned, went home.

  ‘That’s my bowler,’ pointed out John in a damaged way. ‘He’s wearing my hat.’

  He looked from the youth towards his hapless wife who spread her hands and nodded towards the aggressive Mrs Spofforth. ‘It was on your hall stand,’ insisted the old lady. ‘And you can hardly need it now. You never go near London.’

  ‘But it’s my hat.’ John looked impotently towards Robert who could only nod feeble confirmation.

  Mrs Spofforth prodded Willy with a finger like a jewelled lance. He grimaced and moved quickly aside. ‘He needs it to keep the sun off his spots,’ she announced. ‘They itch in the sun. And if he’s going to be working with you . . .’

  ‘With me!’ bellowed John. ‘Working with me? He’s not working with me.’

  ‘You could do with a strong lad,’ retorted Mrs Spofforth relentlessly, glaring over the words. ‘And now he’s left school he needs a job. And he’s cheap at fifteen shillings a week.’