One Good Turn (2 page)

John Stubbs saw the Chinese sailor weaving his way down Tooley Street and smiled to himself. Funny the things that you saw these days: women making bombs in factories all day, and drunk Chinamen in the middle of London on a Saturday morning when all God-fearing men and women should be serving King and Country – or taking it easy.

Not that anyone seemed to take it easy in the Great Port of London. For mile upon mile, the riverbanks were lined with great cranes and towering warehouses, deep docks and busy wharfs. From Tower Bridge to Greenwich, from Wapping to the Isle of Dogs, the Port of London was a vast throat that swallowed everything that came its way: food, timber, cloth, coal, iron – anything that the capital of the British Empire needed. And now the Empire was at war, and had been for two years, it was incredible what passed through the Port of London. And what opportunities there were for natural crooks like John Stubbs, native of Whitechapel, prize conman and thief.

Stubbs looked up and down the street. It was early and not yet busy. A potboy was sweeping the sawdust out of a pub down the road. A market trader had just come from Borough Market, his two-handed cart piled high with cabbages. Two clerks, neatly dressed in suits and bowler hats, walked into Hay's Wharf, where, they said, all the tea in China was stored.

Stubbs wondered why they weren't in the army. Whatever the papers said, the war in France was going badly. When it had started two years ago, the papers had boasted that one knockout blow would stop the Hun in his tracks. The second blow would send him reeling back out of Belgium, back out of France, all the way to Germany.

As far as Stubbs could see, they had got it all wrong. The war wasn't like a boxing match fought according to the Queensberry Rules. This was a street fight with two punch-drunk idiots going at it in the mud: both too stubborn to give up, neither strong enough to win.

Sign up now, people had said. If you delay, the war will all be over and you'll miss the fun.

Men had signed up in their thousands, queuing in some places to make sure they were on a troopship to France and Belgium as soon as possible.

Where were they now?

Dead. Blown to bits by shells, hung up on barbed wire, cut in half by machine guns or drowned in the sodden trenches.

Stubbs knew this. He talked to the soldiers on leave as they spilled out of the stations at Waterloo and London Bridge, their pockets full of back pay, desperate for drink or a girl, or both. If the poor idiots met John Stubbs first, they'd find themselves drink-less, girl-less and money-less in double-quick time. He had more tricks up his sleeve than a conjuror and no one to please but himself.

The Chinese sailor was almost level with the doorway Stubbs was now leaning against. He stepped out in front of him and put a friendly hand on his shoulder

'Hello, chum,' he said. 'Been looking all over for you.'

The sailor looked at Stubbs drunkenly. Stubbs guessed he had been wandering around all night.

'You look for me? Why you look for me?' he said.

Stubbs winked. 'I told you I'd find you a girl and I have,' he whispered. 'She's young, she's beautiful, she's all yours and –' he pulled out a broken pocket watch and pretended to read it – 'she's waiting. She's been waiting a long time for you and if you don't hurry, she'll go home, mate.'

The sailor looked confused. 'Girl for me?'

'Last night we had a drink. You said what you wanted and I said I'd help,' Stubbs said. 'I promised and I'm a man of honour. She is beautiful. So young. So . . .' He gestured with his hands and winked. 'You know what I mean. There's not much I can teach you.'

He pointed to a top-floor window in a small house crammed between two warehouses.

'She's up there!'

The window he was pointing at belonged to a small accountancy firm, but that didn't matter. The important thing was that its front door was hidden down an alleyway to the side of the building. Out of sight.

'You got money? Don't show me out here.' Stubbs winked again. He had seen the sailor's hand move to his purse. Now Stubbs knew it was on a string tied to his waistband, inside his trousers. 'Quick,' he said. 'Police coming. Quick!'

He pushed the sailor down the alley ahead of him. Then he whipped out his cosh and tapped the sailor on the back of his head, knocking him out. The purse was exactly where he thought it would be, and he cut it free with his clasp knife.

He walked away, tossing the purse in his hands: a bit of rent money, a bit of beer money and a bit of fun money. It was a good morning's work.

An angry shout from behind him made him stop and turn. A crowd of Chinese sailors had gathered around the mouth of the alleyway. Stubbs swore.

He should have made sure that the man was on his own. It looked like he had been part of a gang, and now half of China was on Stubbs's tail.

He started to run as fast as he could towards the brick tunnels under the station. On the other side lay a maze of narrow streets and yards that he knew like the back of his hand. He could hide out there all day, if he wanted, but he had to get there first! From the sound of the voices echoing down the tunnel behind him, they were gaining on him and he was getting tired. He'd had too much beer and too many fags.

Stubbs reached the end of the tunnel, skidded round the corner and ran straight into the biggest man he had ever seen. He bounced off him and fell into the gutter, knocking his knee.

'WHOA THERE!'

Stubbs felt a large hand grab his collar, lift him in the air as if he were a child and put him down. The man was dressed in khaki, had three stripes on his arm and a large moustache.

'Let me go, let me go! They're after me!'

'All right, son. The army's here.'

'I can't move!' Stubbs shouted. 'You've crippled me, you great ox!'

'Crippled you, have I?' the giant said. 'We'll just have to see about that. Your luck is in because just across the road are some of the most skilled doctors in all the land. Let's just pop in there and get you sorted out, young man. Don't worry. We'll look after you.'

Stubbs felt himself pushed across the street and into a dark office where a man in khaki uniform was sitting at a low table.

He looked around. There were posters on the wall – YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU.

'I'm not signing up,' Stubbs squeaked.

The huge sergeant stood back from the doorway he had been blocking. Outside, half a dozen Chinese sailors were standing in a group, pointing and shouting. A couple of them were waving long knives with wicked blades.

'Your choice, sonny,' he said. 'You can sign up or you can go out there and take your chances.'

'But they'll slice me up,' Stubbs said.

'They do seem rather angry. I'm afraid I don't speak their lingo so I can't reason with them. As I said, it's your choice: go out there or stay with us. Remember, the army looks after its own. If you volunteer, I'll see to it that you end up doing something that suits your particular skills. Let's see now. What would you think about a nice job in supplies? Maybe we could get you sorting out the rum ration. That's an important job. You might never even have to leave England. You might even stay here in London. What do you say, chum? A soft life for the next few years – or a Chinese knife in your guts?'

So Stubbs signed.

The first lesson Stubbs learned was that the army was as full of liars as Civvy Street – and the biggest liar of them all was the sergeant who had recruited him.

Three months training in a hellhole in the Welsh countryside taught him the ropes. He learned how to drill on a parade ground, shoot a rifle, bayonet a scarecrow. But most of all, he learned that that whatever people said about teamwork, in the army it was every man for himself.

He started a little boot- and buckle-shining business which went quite well until the military police found out about it and kicked the living daylights out of him. After that, he made sure they were cut in on all his scams – which grew to include the illegal sale of tobacco, whisky and pornographic postcards brought back from France.

All that came to an end when he was sent to war. He spent two days on a train, half a day on a boat and then another day on a train. If he'd paid any attention at all, he would have known that he was going to the Bullring: the huge training camp at Etaples where the recruits were knocked into shape by the Canaries – a staff of sadists and bullies.

John Stubbs got off the train and took stock. Even at six in the morning, the place was a sea of khaki. Men were being herded into lines ready to be marched off to the camp which was a mass of tents that stretched as far as the eye could see.

He sidled up to one of the guards who were there to stop the soldiers legging it down the railway lines.

'Busy day?' he asked.

The guard spat. 'Not really. Bit quiet actually.'

'Like this all the time, is it?'

'More or less.'

So, Stubbs thought, hundreds of men are arriving every hour. They've got to be going somewhere.

It didn't take a great deal of intelligence to work out where.

They were going to the front, where they were replacing the men who were being killed at the rate of hundreds an hour.

So Stubbs decided to stay put.

He quickly learned that the Bullring was in fact a series of training grounds. Each one was surrounded by a city of sleeping tents, mess halls, kitchens, storehouses and depot tents. Each one used hand-painted road signs like those on the streets at home.

For the first week, Stubbs thought he would never find his way around. He was moved from one regiment to another, then back to his original one without anyone noticing that he had gone in the first place. No one cared. They just concentrated on making sure that within six weeks soldiers left the camp, ready to kill or be killed.

They did this by making the place as hellish as possible. Exercises took place with live ammunition and real hand grenades. After each exercise, stretcher-bearers took the injured away to the many field hospitals and casualty clearing stations that lay behind the lines.

By day ten at the Bullring, Stubbs had already seen one man put his bayonet through his best friend's thigh. Another blow his hand off while assembling a Mills bomb, one of the pineapple-shaped hand grenades that had just been developed.

He knew it was time to take action.

The only way to get out of the grinding, punishing routine was to go sick. People devised the most ingenious methods, such as stuffing their boots with blotting paper to make themselves faint on parade, or eating sour milk or old meat to mess up their guts. Some men even shot themselves, though this was dangerous. First, if the wound got infected, you might lose a limb or die. Secondly, if the military police suspected you had shot yourself, you would be court martialled for cowardice.

Stubbs knew that hundreds of thousands of tons of food, weapons, ammunition, clothing and machinery passed through the French countryside right under his nose.

Controlling the movement of all this stuff were the quartermasters, or Q Division. They were a section of the British Army whose job was to make sure the wheels of war kept rolling. Stubbs also knew that Q Division did not have access to medical supplies. And that was the chance he needed.

One morning he made sure he was first in line to see the medical orderly or MO. The MO sat behind a wooden trestle table, while a nurse stood at a table nearby, checking pills in a medicine cabinet.

Stubbs stood in front of the table and came straight to the point. 'I need some time to myself,' he said quietly. 'What's the best you can do for me?'

'I beg your pardon. What do you mean . . .?'

Stubbs leaned across the table and, putting venom in his voice, he whispered: 'I know what you've got hidden at the bottom of your kitbag in your quarters, sir, and it's not postcards of the royal family.'

A few days ago he had been on cleaning duties in the officers' quarters and had taken the trouble to do some snooping. When he found the pictures of naked boys sunning themselves by the sea, he knew they would come in useful.

'That'll be all, nurse!' the doctor blurted out. He was a young man with serious eyes behind his round, horn-rimmed glasses.

'Sir?' the nurse said.

'Embarrassing problem with this one, nurse. Won't let me look at him with a lady in the room.'

'But sir, I've –'

'I know, I know, but just to make things move along.' As soon as she'd gone, he said: 'What do you mean?'

Stubbs smiled. 'I don't care if you like looking at pictures of little foreign boys sir, but I think I know what the brigadier calls it. Beastliness. Tut, tut. They shoot people for less.'

'But they're art!' the doctor said. 'They're beautiful!'

'They're illegal, sir. I know because I used to deal in them. Now, here's what I want.'

Two minutes later Stubbs had been bought off with the promise of a supply of morphine and a note, which said he had a broken rib and needed time off for it to heal.

Then he started work in earnest.

For two days, he waited. On the third he had got his man: a corporal working in the quartermasters' HQ. The corporal visited certain shops and officers' messes once in the morning on foot, and once in the afternoon with a supply wagon and a team of two horses.

He was taking orders in the morning and filling them in the afternoon, Stubbs thought. And from the way cash changed hands, he was sure that he was seeing stolen goods being sold through the black market.

On the fourth day, Stubbs waited for the wagon to slow down on a muddy slope and hopped onto it.

'Who the bloody hell are you?' the corporal said. He looked well fed and soft, to Stubbs. His yellow armband showed he was on the staff.

'I'm Private Desperate, that's who I am,' Stubbs said.

'Well, go and be desperate somewhere else,' the corporal replied, 'or you'll get a visit from my mates and then you really will be sorry.'

'I don't think so,' Stubbs said. 'Because I've got something you want.'

'What's that?'

'Morphine.'

'Why do you think I want morphine?' the man asked.