The '44 Vintage (4 page)

Yet in the last second before he turned away, the major’s medal ribbons had again caught his eye. Blue-red-blue, white-blue-white, and then faded red-white-blue—he knew them all, and they did leave him wiser, and not a little confused.

The major was a proven soldier, they told him that, the first two of them—a fighting soldier for sure with that white-blue-white to prove it. But the faded red-white-blue, faded and fading off into each other, that also made him an
old
soldier, older even than he looked. For though Butler was no judge of age, and the older the more inaccurate, he knew a 1914-18 Victory Medal when he saw one. Both his father and the general had that one in their collections.

It was strange how he could never think of either of them now without the other intruding almost immediately.

No, “intruding” was the wrong word, he decided. They had become inseparable antagonists inside his head, just as they were in real life, but he could never make them act out of character there.

Sometimes he had tried hard to imagine them arguing over him, about what he was resolved to do with his life. He had done—or tried to do—this not because he wanted it to happen (the very thought of it doing so was painful to him), but because it seemed to him that if he could eavesdrop into such a fantasy he might be able to understand better why he felt the way he did.

But not even in his imagination could he make them say anything more to one another than he had heard them do in reality.

The general would always speak first: “Good morning, Mr. Butler,” he would say politely, with just a touch of briskness, raising his bowler hat as he did so.

“Good morning, sir,” his father would reply, just as politely, touching his cap in a gesture of recognition to the raised bowler.

Other people would say “Sir Henry,” or occasionally “General,” but his father would never say more than “sir” and the general would never say less than “Mr.” which he rarely did for anyone else.

For a long time this exchange of greetings had baffled young Butler. When the owner of Chesney and Rawle’s met the secretary of the Graphical Association union branch (and father of the Union Chapel at C & R) there should have been a certain wariness; when the president of the local Conservative Association met the chairman of the local Labour Party there ought to have been a clear antagonism; and when the man whose influence and organising ability had helped to break the General Strike in the town met the man who had been one of the strike’s leaders, there could only be bitterness. Butler himself had been not two years old then, and this December he would be twenty; but there were still men who wouldn’t talk to those they felt had betrayed them then, or at the most not a word more than was needed to get the job done.

Yet when the General and his father met, there was neither wariness, nor antagonism, and not a hint of bitterness.

It had been in Coronation Year—the year after he had won the scholarship—that he had caught a glimpse of the explanation.

The year he had gone to work for the general.

He had known without a word being said that his father expected him to take the paper round which had become vacant and which was his for the asking. And he had also known that although this was required of him as his proper contribution to the family income, they had in fact managed perfectly well since his mother’s death and its real purpose was “to keep his feet on the ground” (as Uncle Fred put it) now that he was a scholarship boy at the Grammar.

But he had also known, above all, that he had not the slightest intention of taking the paper round. He didn’t like papers (or printing, for that matter), and he would sooner go kitting milk than delivering them. So when Mr. Harris the maths master had let slip that the general’s head gardener was in the market for a part-time boy, the nod was as good as a wink and he was off like a hare after the last lesson to the big house in Lynwood Road.

It never occurred to him that he might not get the job. Rather, he regarded his successful application as already assured. For the general and he had already met, and the general would certainly remember the boy to whom he had last year awarded the Scholarship prize (E. Wilmot Buxton’s
The Story of the Crusades
, a splendid, gold-embossed book which Butler treasured) in the final term at North Mill Street Elementary.

It had simply not dawned on him that it would not be the general, but the head gardener, who didn’t know him from E. Wilmot Buxton, who would be conducting the interviews for the part-time boy; nor had it occurred to him that others might have learnt of the vacancy, and that one in particular, a large boy with a BSA bicycle, would easily outdistance him to Lynwood Road.

All this became apparent in quick succession, first the bike propped outside the back entrance, then the large boy with a smug look on his face, and finally the head gardener himself, who obviously could not know of his special relationship with the general.

He had been in front of the head gardener, out of breath and near to weeping for this lost certainty, when there had come a shadow and a sound behind him in the doorway of the greenhouse. The head gardener had looked over his shoulder and stood up deferentially, and Butler had known instantly who was there and had heard the tap of the general’s stick sound as sweet inside his head as the distant trumpets of the relieving force to the last survivor of a beleaguered outpost.

But at first the general didn’t seem to recognise him in the cool green light of the potting shed; he had looked questioningly at the head gardener.

“The part-time boy, General,” the head gardener had reminded him. “Ah, yes.” The general had nodded and had turned to consider Butler properly.

But then, to Butler’s surprise, he had not said “Of course—you are the Scholarship boy from North Mill Street Elementary to whom I presented E. Wilmot Buxton’s
The Story of the Crusades
last year.”

“You are Mr. Butler’s son,” the general had said.

“Yes—“ Butler had floundered for a moment, unable to decide how to address the general. The head gardener had said “General,” but outside St. Michael’s Church on Sundays and in front of the War Memorial on November 11 his father had never used that rank. “Yes—sir.”

“You remember RSM Butler, Sands,” said the general to the head gardener. “At Messines with the 1st/4th—and he was also with me at Beaumont Hamel the year before … before you joined the battalion … he was one of my platoon sergeants then.” He pointed at Butler’s head. “The same red hair, man—and the same look in the eye, too by God!”

The head gardener stared at Butler. “Aye, you’re right, General,” he agreed finally, in a voice which suggested that maybe not all his dealings with RSM Butler had been happy.

The general had chuckled. “D’you know anything about gardening, boy?”

Butler thought of his father’s allotment, but the easy lie choked in his throat. “No, sir.”

“What about your father’s allotment?” The general seemed to have a way of reading his thoughts. “Don’t you help him with that?”

Butler felt committed to the whole truth now. With that sharp eye on him nothing else would be of any use anyway, he suspected. “He likes to do it himself, sir.”

“I see. And of course you’ve been busy studying, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how are you going to continue studying and work for me at the same time now?”

“I can make the time, sir.”

Nod. “See that you do, boy.” The general’s eyes lifted away from him to the head gardener. He knew that he’d got the job, but there was no longer any particular triumph in the knowledge now that he was aware his father had more to do with his success than E. Wilmot Buxton.

He thought irrelevantly how very blue the general’s eyes were for such an old man. Snow-white hair—and bushy white moustache in the middle of a brick-red face. But bright blue eyes. Except that red, white, and blue were proper colours for a general.

And that red, white, and blue ribbon.

“Here we are,” said Major O’Conor.

How Colonel Sykes lost his rugby team

THE MAJOR
was right: this Norman Switzerland wasn’t at all like the real thing, or not like the full-page colour photographs of it in the Q to Z volume of his father’s Illustrated Encyclopaedia of World Geography; if anything, it reminded Butler of the foothills of the Lake District at home, where he had camped with the school scout troop in the last year before the war.

There were cliffs, certainly—he could see them rising out of the thick woods across the valley into which they were descending. But there were no snow-capped peaks and the trees weren’t Swiss firs. The Orne (presumably it was the Orne, anyway) rippled over its rocky bed just below him now, with a group of Frenchmen fishing in it, quite unconcerned by the jeep’s noisy approach. There were even a couple further down watering their horses in the shallows, in the shadow of a high-arched stone bridge which joined the tree-lined road embankment—

A high-arched stone bridge—

The incongruity of the scene suddenly hit Butler. The trees shouldn’t have been nodding gently in the breeze, they should have been lying in a tangle across the road ahead, blocking the approach to the gaping ruins of that bridge, the demolished stonework of which should be choking the river twenty feet below; or, at best, the shattered trees should have been bulldozed over the embankment to make way for the Bailey bridge across the ruins.

Instead it was all as peaceful as a picture postcard—as peaceful as Switzerland or the Lake District—with the picturesque bridge, and the fishermen—there were more of them fishing happily from the bridge itself—and the horsemen watering their horses. For a moment the war was a million miles away and it was hard to imagine that this same river flowed through the stinking ruins of Caen to the invasion beaches.

There was a tank under the trees just across the river. And another just beyond it. And another—

The jeep squealed to a halt in the middle of the bridge, beside the first fisherman.

“Second South Wessex Dragoons?” barked the sergeant-major.

The fisherman turned, took in the front-seat occupants of the jeep, and straightened up, one hand still grasping his home-made rod. He wasn’t likely to catch anything from the bridge, thought Butler—and certainly not with that apology for a fishing rod.

“That’s right, sir,” said the fisherman.

“Colonel Sykes, we’re looking for,” said the major.

“Sir.” The fisherman turned away to scan the riverbank below him. Suddenly he pointed. “Down there, sir—just getting off his horse, sir—besides Major Dobson and Mr. Pickles.”

His
horse
? Butler craned his neck to follow the pointing finger. The two horsemen who had been watering their horses had been joined by a third, who was in the act of dismounting. All three were wearing riding breeches, booted and spurred. Butler goggled at them.

“I see—thank you,” said the major politely. Then he smiled. “The regiment’s getting horsed again, then.”

The fisherman regarded him stolidly. “Be an improvement if it was, sir,” he observed, unsmiling.

Butler frowned and looked away, back down the river. Beyond the horsemen and the anglers on the bank there was a group of naked soldiers skylarking in the water with a makeshift ball. The Wessex Dragoons evidently weren’t taking their war very seriously, so far as he could see.

“Ah—it would that!, sir,” murmured one of the other anglers.

“And where did you acquire the—ah—the remounts?” inquired the major.

“German Army, sir.”

The major nodded approvingly. “Jolly good. Drive on, Sergeant-major. We’ll park down the road there, just after the end of the parapet.”

The sergeant-major crashed the gears brutally, but managed to coax the jeep another twenty yards without mishap.

“Fine … Now if you’d guard our other possessions, Sergeant-major … and the corporal would help me …” the major trailed off. .

Butler looked at the sergeant-major, bewildered.

“Get those cases out of the vehicle, man,” snapped the sergeant-major. “And don’t you dare drop them.”

His eyes dropped from Butler to the boxes with the champagne, and then lifted back to Butler. All was at last revealed in that look, and Butler’s faith in both men was restored:
trade goods
and a
tra
ding mission
, the major had said,
not for us
. So if the bottles were plunder they were at least not to be used improperly, but in the line of duty to obtain some necessary item from the dragoons in exchange; and it did look as though they were the right sort of trade goods for such a unit—the major and the sergeant-major might disapprove, but they knew what they were about.

What
the old merchandise, the perishable goods
were, was not yet clear, but would no doubt be revealed soon enough. What was obvious was that protocol would not permit the sergeant-major to carry the trade goods when there was a junior NCO present to do that work, which meant that the sergeant-major must stay and protect the jeep from the thieving hands of soldiery and civilians, who would strip anything left unattended.

He balanced the cases carefully on top of one another and set out after the major, peering round them as best he could to see where he was going. It was going to be tricky though, getting down the embankment to the water-meadow below.

The major came to his rescue, thoughtful as ever.

“Here, Corporal … there’s a bit of a path just here … mind how you go … left a bit—that’s right … steady, steady … you can rest up against that tree if you like.”

Butler was sweating. “I’m all right, sir.”

“Just this last bit, then … well done!”

At last the ground was flat again under his boots, though they were still under the canopy of the trees which grew thickly all the way down the embankment. Butler stopped to get his breath.

Suddenly there was a thud—or a cross between a thud and a thump—away to his left somewhere. To Butler’s ears it sounded suspiciously and horribly like a two-inch mortar going off, and a moment later he was aware of something descending through the leaves and branches above him to confirm his horrible suspicion.