The brigandshaw chronicl.., p.137
The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set 2, page 137
part #4 of The Brigandshaw Chronicles Series
“Harry! It’s Mrs Coombes. You haven’t eaten lunch again, have you? Here’s a sandwich. Bit of a door stopper.”
“You’re very kind, Sarah.” Harry, woken from his tumbling dreams, took the sandwich. Mrs Coombes always gave him a sandwich. She knew about his wife living in Cape Town but not about his money. The way he spoke made her comfortable, his Rhodesian accent belying his position in the social structure of life. They always asked him to talk about Africa when the bombs were coming down. Harry was their comfort blanket when it got bad.
“Any news from South Africa?”
“The lines are bad and Tina hates writing.”
Harry knew it was better not to tell them the truth if he wanted to sleep at night among the people. The whole class structure in the Air Ministry shelter, despite its comparative comfort, put him off.
The truth from Africa had arrived on his desk by chance soon after Anthony turned eighteen. Squadron Leader Timothy Kent had gone off to fly aeroplanes the week after Dunkirk. The Air Ministry staff were now old. Some were older than Harry. All had had something to do with the Air Force in the last war. Harry was now in charge of keeping track of the sleepers recruited by Henning von Lieberman late in 1937. Potential security risks, like the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley Bart, were locked up for the duration of the war. Fools like Rodney Hirst-Brown were just being watched. Taking photographs of London Docks at ground level was as much use to the Germans as an old map of London. It was what his friend’s cousin had up his sleeve for the ex-employee of Rosenzweig Bank that interested Harry. The ex-bank clerk was more use to British intelligence out in the open. Behind bars, Harry had argued, Rodney Hirst-Brown would lead them to no one.
Vic ‘Ding-a-ling’ Bell had been given the physical task of watching Rodney Hirst-Brown. Ding-a-ling had been adjutant of 33 Squadron when Harry was the commanding officer. Major Harry Brigandshaw Royal Flying Corps in those days. Back then Ding-a-ling’s job had been to keep the flow of whisky and ordnance on schedule, administering the paperwork of a fighting squadron in the field.
Ding-a-ling had been born with a club foot so they wouldn’t let him fly. Being adjutant was the next best thing. Harry had got him the job at the Air Ministry when Timothy Kent was recalled to his squadron. After scouting the field, Ding-a-ling had made a friend of the landlord at the Crown having found out where Rodney spent his evenings. After that it had been a pleasant job listening and drinking beer. Deliberately never speaking to Rodney.
Ding-a-ling clumped his way into Harry’s office at the Air Ministry once a month. Rodney was only one of his jobs. It was in May when the daffodils were out in the small garden outside Harry’s window that Ding-a-ling now remembered.
“I was going through the list of new recruits for pilots, checking them off our list. There’s a Brigandshaw, Harry. Flying Training in Rhodesia. Now is that a coincidence or something?”
“Is his name Anthony?”
“I’m afraid so. You didn’t know?”
“Neither does his mother.”
“They kind of put them in quarantine during pilot training. Not allowed off the station. No phone calls. That kind of thing. I’ll keep you informed of progress. He’ll be posted to England if he gets his wings.”
“He’ll get his wings. I gave him flying lessons with John Woodall as his sixteenth birthday present, six months before Tina took the children to Cape Town. Ostensibly to keep him out of harm’s way. Went up to Rhodesia to look at Elephant Walk. Must have been side-tracked. Children are funny. Not a word. Spent his last year of school at Bishops in Cape Town. Top marks and an entry into medical school at UCT, University of Cape Town. Thanks for telling me. Anything on any of our friends?”
“Bugger all. Real sleepers.”
“Be careful. This is the time to watch carefully with the war overhead. When’s Anthony scheduled back to England?”
“End of September. They fly them from Gwelo to Cape Town and put them on a boat. Can’t afford to lose pilots before they get into combat. Sorry, Harry. I’ll piss off so you can read my monthly report. Is he any good as a pilot?”
“Funny how the law lets them fly a plane in the air but not drive a car on the ground until they are eighteen. They’ll change that law one day. I suppose I could say this is my own bloody fault. Taught Flight Lieutenant Oosthuizen to fly. My nephew. Madge’s son.”
“The chap they just gave a bar to his DFC?”
“The CO put him up for a DSO.”
“Well, I’ll be off.”
For months nothing had come out of Rhodesia. Then Ding-a-ling had put Anthony’s schedule in front of Harry.
“You think you could get me a rail pass to Southampton, Vic? I’ll teach my son to blindside his father.”
“Won’t he phone you from Cape Town?”
“Maybe. Why do I feel so bloody old?”
“We are a bit long in the tooth. Hirst-Brown was flush with money in the pub last night. Offered me a drink with the rest of the bar.”
“Watch him, Vic. I hate people with chips on their shoulders.”
“When he left drunk I asked the landlord, off-hand of course, where the chap got his money from. Henry, the landlord, said the man was probably a spy. We both had a good laugh. Why would the Germans pay a man for doing nothing? What’s the worst a fool like Rodney could do?”
“Why don’t you get into Mrs Leadman’s house and have a look through his drawers? He still hasn’t got a job. Where does he get his money? It’s fools that worry me most. Men with brains are logical. Fools get themselves killed and cause a lot of damage in the process. Fools never make sense. You can’t think in their heads. Why did I ever suggest to Klaus his cousin visit Janet Wakefield to cure his bloody stutter? Enemies then friends then enemies again. Now our families are back trying to kill each other. Klaus spent his honeymoon on Elephant Walk.”
“He’ll come out of it all right, Harry.”
“I hope so.”
Furious with himself and the stupidity of life, Harry began to eat his sandwich. There were always homemade pickled onions in Mrs Coombes’s cheese sandwiches. The onions crunched as he ate as good a meal as any he had enjoyed in the Savoy Grill. Only when he began to eat did he find out how hungry he was. He had missed breakfast as well as lunch.
“It doesn’t do your health any good not eating properly. Have another sandwich.”
“Do you make more for me specially, Sarah?”
“Of course I do. Someone has to look after you. Clerks in the War Office, or wherever you work, have their bit to do for the war effort. That one was close! You mind if I hold your hand, Harry? Start telling us one of your stories. I hate it when the lights go out. Jerry must have hit the powerline. Another bloody bomb!”
“They drop them in sticks.”
“How would you know?”
“Read it somewhere. Where shall I begin, everyone?”
“Tell us again your trip up the Skeleton Coast with your friend Barend looking for diamonds.”
“You remember that one, Fred?”
“You do speak with a funny accent but my missus reckons you read the story in a book.”
Harry settled back in the middle of an air raid to take their minds off the bombs. They were safe deep underground in the tube station.
“Every night we made a fire on the beach. You could hear the hyena scrounging for carcasses washed up on the sand. Sometimes they found a dead seal and went off with it back into the Namib Desert. The sharks get the seals. The seals get the fish. The hyena scavenge the seals. Now that’s nature for you, everyone. Back then Barend and I didn’t need electricity to see. Three layers of stars in the sky were so bright you could read a book by starlight. Moonlight was better but starlight with the waves crashing on the shore was just as good, if a bit hard on my eyes. I was younger then so it didn’t matter. During the day, after the fog from the cold Atlantic Ocean had been eaten up by the hot African sun, we collected mussels off the rocks. You never saw mussels like the mussels in South West Africa. Longer than a man’s hand and nearly as wide. The shells were bigger than the meat inside so you needed ten dozen to get a good meal. We were young and hungry, Barend and I. Sometimes we caught a big fish fishing off the rocks, standing all day. Collecting mussels was quicker. Then we had the time to look for the diamonds.”
“Did you find any, Harry?” asked a voice from the dark, down on the rails. They could all hear the aircraft directly overhead, there was so much noise in the night sky.
“Seven. We found seven diamonds. One the size of a chicken’s egg.”
“Blimey. Must have made you rich.”
“Never sold it. As I said before, my dad had an old house on a farm, if you could call it a farm. Dad was a hunter. The Great Elephant killed my dad. So I built that diamond into the fireplace for a rainy day. It was still there last time I looked, before I came to live in London. My old mother and my sister still live on the farm.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“My wife didn’t like Rhodesia. The bush. Too wild for Tina. Now she’s in South Africa and I’m here with you, dodging bombs. You’ll hear the all clear quite soon. They’re going away. Now, just look at that. The lights are on again. Jerry missed the powerlines. No, I’m wrong. I can hear another wave of Heinkels.”
“How you know them is Heinkels, Harry?”
“By their engines.”
“How you know about engines?”
“By listening, Fred. It’s going to be a long night again.”
“What did you do in the last war, Harry?”
“Not much.”
Everyone fell silent. With the dim light now on it was not so bad. They could all hear the ack-ack battery start up from the grounds of Buckingham Palace. The searchlights would be looking up in the dark for the Germans. Harry had told them once two searchlights found an enemy aircraft, the aircraft was caught. Then the guns could fire at a target. The crump of bombs started again. Mrs Coombes took Harry’s hand, gripping it for all she was worth. The lights stayed on. The man on the far side of Mrs Coombes was praying. Harry picked up the whine of an aircraft coming down.
“We got one,” he said, as a matter of fact.
The aircraft exploding when it hit the ground made a different sound to the bombs. Harry waited for the second, bigger explosion when the bombs went off that the German pilot had not unloaded before he was hit by the ack-ack. Harry hoped the pilot wasn’t Klaus’s son. Soon, very soon, Anthony would be over Germany doing the bombing. German civilians would then be praying for their lives. There was mayhem up above them. Safe in the bowels of the underground rail system, without thinking, he had eaten Mrs Coombes’s second cheese sandwich.
Half an hour later they heard the all clear. Mrs Coombes got up and went to the ladies toilet to make tea. She kept a Primus stove permanently in there. They all had their own tin mugs in the group they had made of themselves when the bombing on London first started. They were now as close as people ever got to each other. Real people without all the show and all the lies. People Harry liked and admired as they tried to convince each other they were not afraid. Only when the lights went out did Harry tell them a story. It seemed to help. Not only the people but Harry himself. Had Harry his choice he would have chosen piloting his aircraft where he had the chance to fight back. Cowering in the dark was not his first choice.
When Mrs Coombes came back with the tea there was only condensed milk in a tin and no sugar. Sugar was rationed. It came from overseas, if it got past the German U-boats. Spending the war down below in the ground was the worst experience of Harry’s life. When he went to Southampton in ten days’ time he hoped the port wasn’t in the line of fire. The chances were small. The ships ran from Cape Town at full speed, too fast for the slower U-boats. It would be good to see one of the children again.
“That diamond, Harry, was it the size of a chicken’s egg?”
“Just a bit bigger. A perfect blue-white.”
“Why didn’t you sell it and live like a rich man?”
“I’d seen rich men, Fred. You can have all the money in the world and still be poor. One day, someone in the family will need that diamond. Sarah, thank you for the tea. After the tea and a bit of a wash I’ll be getting into my sleeping bag.”
“How do you sleep so well on the hard ground?”
“Practice,” said Harry smiling to himself. “One day I’ll tell you about the Tutsi in the Congo. How I was forced to live with them for two years as their captive.”
“That’s got to be a tall story, Harry. How did you get to the Congo from Rhodesia and not get lost on the way? The Congo is darkest Africa.”
“It’s a long story.”
“We’ll bet it is.”
“Next time when the lights go out.”
“Harry sure can sleep sound on the ground. Every bone in my body aches in the mornings.”
In the morning when Harry went out the entrance to the Tube station, the fires started by the night’s bombing were still burning. An ARP warden in a tin hat, his gas mask slung across his chest, told Harry not to go down Northumberland Avenue where the noise of the fire was coming from. Harry could see the water from a fire hose dousing the flames a street away. There was an unwritten rule when they came above ground not to look at each other.
“See you tonight, Harry.”
“Thanks for the tea, Sarah.”
“Thanks for the sandwiches, Sarah. Tonight’s my surprise.”
With the bowler hat back on his head and walking his rolled umbrella, Harry began the short journey to his office. Once in the sleeping bag he had taken off his pinstripe trousers, obligatory for every clerk in London, folded them carefully and put them under his back. His jacket and waistcoat were easier to take off before he went to bed. They were his pillow. Everyone looked rumpled coming out of the public air-raid shelters and no one complained. The fires were half a mile from his office. The early morning was chilly, reminding Harry the winter was on its way. Once October came the weather changed in England and the sun went out.
Back in his office, looking at his desk and the tin tray spilling over with files, Harry asked himself what the hell he was doing.
“You’re too old for this shit, Harry, my boy. Admit it. You should be on the farm tickling behind the dogs’ ears.”
“Good morning, Mr Brigandshaw.”
“Did you hear that, Katherine?”
“Only the bit about the dogs’ ears.”
“How do you arrive a minute after I get in?”
“Practice. Coffee first then take your bath. Mr Bell wants to see you.”
“Everything all right at your flat? I don’t bother to go to mine during the week.”
“They haven’t hit us yet. How do you stop your trousers creasing?”
Harry smiled, said nothing, and drank a gulp of his coffee that tasted as if it had been made from acorns. The Kenyan coffee had stopped coming a year ago when the stocks in London ran out. The acorn coffee revived him. When Katherine was out of the room Harry looked at himself in the small mirror that surrounded the wall clock in its silver case. He looked worse than he felt. Going into the bathroom, his one luxury next to his office, Harry locked the door out of habit, ran the bath and took off his clothes. Katherine would be sending last night’s suit to be ironed. In the bathroom wardrobe were two changes of clothes. The second change was for the weekend when he took the train to Leatherhead before walking the last part home to Hastings Court. The stables and the clock tower were still in ruins. Most weekends he went to the family graveyard to have a word with his Manderville grandfather to buck himself up.
Soaking in the bath at the office was the best ten minutes of Harry’s day. Restored in body if not in spirit, he dressed himself properly and stepped out the bathroom door.
“Tell Mr Bell I’m ready, Katherine.”
Harry sat down at his desk and started to work, mechanically going through his paces. Everything was done with five copies. Everything he did complied with a government rule. There was no point complaining. It was the way it was done in the Civil Service. Rules. Rules. Rules. Quite quickly, Harry was bored out of his mind.
When Harry looked up Ding-a-ling Bell was standing in front of his desk. Mostly, Katherine left the door to his office open. The adjutant looked serious.
“Didn’t you get any sleep last night, Vic? You look terrible.”
“Thank you, Harry. Not much as a matter of fact. If I’d found nothing I was going to take the day off, or at least the morning. During all the nonsense last night I used a key given us by the Yale lock company. Fits most Yale locks for some reason. Mrs Leadman and everyone in the street had gone to the public shelters. Apart from Jerry up above the place was deserted. Having overheard Hirst-Brown in the Crown tell Henry he had two rooms next to each other at the top back of the house I used a torch to go up the stairs. Inside the house there wasn’t a sound. There was nothing of interest to us in the bedroom. In the dark room I found a box full of what looked like small radios. Twelve of them. All exactly the same. Expensive-looking, which made me wonder what our Rodney was doing with them.”
“Did you bring one?”
“Didn’t want to leave a trace of my visit.”
“If they come over again tonight go back to Mrs Leadman’s house and take one. I want an expert to have a look.”
“Is that all, Harry?”
“For the moment. Just don’t get caught.”
“It was bad last night.”
“Yes, it was. We got one of them.”
Vic Bell closed the door when he left, leaving Harry pondering, his mind searching for an answer in different directions.
“What does an ex-bank clerk want with twelve radios?” he asked himself.
That night Harry told them about the Tutsi. When the worst was over, Harry produced his bottle of whisky and shared it around. Mrs Coombes liked her whisky. Then he slept through the rest of the night, dreaming about radios. He was in a Tutsi hut listening to the BBC. In the morning the fires were still burning. The same ARP warden was on duty.
