The Fourth Estate (17 page)

I do hope so,”
said Keith, only too aware that the following day the Sydney Morning Herald was
going to publish his “Dawn of a New Republic.” But that would also be the
morning he began his exams, so Keith just hoped that his father and mother
would keep their counsel for at least the next ten days, and by then perhaps...

“Well, if it’s a
close-run thing,” said his father, interrupting his thoughts, “I’m sure you’ll
be helped by the headmaster’s strong endorsement after your amazing success
with the pavilion appeal. By the way, I forgot to mention that your grandmother
was so impressed by your efforts that she donated another E 100 to the appeal,
in your name.

It was the first
time Keith’s mother had ever heard him swear.

By the Monday
morning Keith felt as ready to face the examiners as he believed he would ever
be, and by the time he had completed the final paper ten days later, he was
impressed by how many of the questions Miss Steadman had anticipated. He knew
he’d done well in History and Geography, and only hoped that the Oxford board
didn’t place too much weight on the Classics.

He phoned his
mother to assure her that he thought he had performed as well as he could have
hoped, and that if he wasn’t offered a place at Oxford he wouldn’t be able to
complain that he’d been unlucky with the questions.

“Neither will I
complain,” came back his mother’s immediate reply. “But I do have one piece of
advice for you, Keith. Keep out of your father’s way for a few more days.”

The anticlimax
that followed the ending of the exams was inevitable. While Keith waited to
learn the results, he spent some of his time trying to raise the final few
hundred pounds for the pavilion appeal, some of it at the racecourse placing
small bets with his own money, and a night with the wife of a banker who ended
up donating [50.

On the last
Monday of term, Mr. Jessop informed his staff at their weekly meeting that St.
Andrew’s would be continuing the great tradition of sending its finest students
to Oxford and Cambridge, thus maintaining the link with those two great
universities. He read out the names of those who had won places:

Alexander, DTL.

Tomkins, C.

Townsend, K-R.

“A shit, a swot,
and a star, but not necessarily in that order,” said the headmaster under his
breath.

DAILY MIRROR

7 JUNE 1944

N
ormandy Landings
Are Successful WHIEN LUBJI HOCH had finished telling the tribunal his story,
they just looked at him with incredulous stares. He was either some sort of
superman, or a pathological liar they couldn’t decide which.

The Czech translator
shrugged his shoulders. “Some of it adds up,” he told the investigating
officer. “But a lot of it sounds a little far-fetched to me.”

The chairman of
the tribunal considered the case of Lubji Hoch for a few moments, and then
decided on the easy way out. “Send him back to the internment compound we’ll
see him again in six months’ time. He can then tell us his story again, and
we’ll just have to see how much of it has changed.”

Lubji had sat
through the tribunal unable to understand a word the chairman was saying, but
at least this time they 143 had supplied him with an interpreter so he was able
to follow the proceedings. On the journey back to the internment camp he made
one decision. When they reviewed his case in six months’ time, he wouldn’t need
his words translated.

That didn’t turn
out to be quite as easy as Lubji had anticipated, because once he was back in
the camp among his countrymen they showed little interest in speaking anything
but Czech. In fact the only thing they ever taught him was how to play poker,
and it wasn’t long before he was beating every one of them at their own game.
Most of them assumed they would be returning home as soon as the war was over.

Lubji was the
first internee to rise every morning, and he persistently annoyed his fellow
inmates by always wanting to outrun, outwork and outstrip every one of them.
Most of the Czechs looked upon him as nothing more than a Ruthenian ruffian,
but as he was now over six feet in height and still growing, none of them
voiced this opinion to his face.

Lubji had been
back at the camp for about a week when he first noticed her.

He was returning
to his hut after breakfast when he saw an old woman pushing a bicycle laden
with newspapers up the hill. As she passed through the camp gates he couldn’t
make out her face clearly, because she wore a scarf over her head as a token
defense against the bitter wind. She began to deliver papers, first to the
officers’ mess and then, one by one, to the little houses occupied by the non
-commissioned officers. Lubji walked around the side of the parade ground and
began to follow her, hoping she might turn out to be the person to help him.
When the bag on the front of her bicycle was empty, she turned back toward the
camp gates. As she passed Lubji, he shouted, “Hello.”

“Good morning,”
she replied, mounted her bicycle and rode through the gates and off down the
hill without another word.

The following
morning Lubji didn’t bother with breakfast but stood by the camp gates, staring
down the hill. When he saw her pushing her laden bicycle up the slope, he ran
out to join her before the guard could stop him. “Good morning,” he said,
taking the bicycle from her.

“Good morning,”
she replied. “I’m Mrs. Sweetman. And how are you today?”

Lubji would have
told her, if he’d had the slightest idea what she had said.

As she did her
rounds he eagerly carried each bundle for her. One of the first words he
learned in English was “newspaper.” After that he set himself the task of
learning ten new words every day.

By the end of
the month, the guard on the camp gate didn’t even blink when Lubji slipped past
him each morning to join the old lady at the bottom of the hill.

By the second
month, he was sitting on the doorstep of Mrs. Sweetman’s shop at six o’clock
every morning so that he could stack all the papers in the right order, before
pushing the laden bicycle up the hill. When she requested a meeting with the
camp commander at the beginning of the third month, the major told her that he
could see no objection to Hoch’s working a few hours each day in the village
shop, as long as he was always back before roll-call.

Mrs. Sweetman
quickly discovered that this was not the first news-agent’s shop the young man
had worked in, and she made no attempt to stop him when he rearranged the
shelves, reorganized the delivery schedule, and a month later took over the
accounts. She was not surprised to discover, after a few weeks of Lubji’s
suggestions, that her turnover was up for the first time since 1939.

Whenever the
shop was empty Mrs. Sweetman would help Lubji with his English by reading out
loud one of the stories from the front page of the Citizen. Lubji would then
try to read it back to her. She often burst out laughing with what she called
his “howlers.” Just another word Lubji added to his vocabulary.

By the time
winter had turned into spring there was only the occasional howler, and it was
not much longer before Lubji was able to sit down quietly in the corner and
read to himself, stopping to consult Mrs.

Sweetman only
when he came to a word he hadn’t come across. Long before he was due to
reappear in front of the tribunal, he had moved on to studying the leader
column in the Manchester Guardian, and one morning, when Mrs. Sweetman stared
at the word “insouciant” without attempting to offer an explanation, Lubji
decided to save her embarrassment by referring in future to the unthumbed
Oxford Pocket Dictionary which had been left to gather dust under the counter.

“Do you require
an interpreter?” the chairman of the panel asked.

“No, thank you,
sir,” came back Lubji’s immediate reply.

The chairman
raised an eyebrow. He was sure that when he had last interviewed this giant of
a man only six months before he hadn’t been able to understand a word of
English. Wasn’t he the one who had held them all spellbound with an unlikely
tale of what he had been through before he ended up in Liverpool? Now he was
repeating exactly the same story and, apart from a few grammatical errors and a
dreadful Liverpudlian accent, it was having an even greater effect on the panel
than when they had first interviewed him.

“So, what would
you like to do next, Hoch?” he asked, once the young Czech had come to the end
of his story.

I wish to join
old regiment and play my part in winning war,” came Lubji’s well-rehearsed
reply.

“That may not
prove quite so easy, Hoch,” said the chairman, smiling benignly down at him.

“if you will not
give me rifle I will kill Germans with bare hands,” said Lubji defiantly. “Just
give me chance to prove myself.”

The chairman
smiled at him again before nodding at the duty sergeant, who came to attention
and marched Lubji briskly out of the room.

Lubji didn’t
learn the result of the tribunal’s deliberations for several days. He was
delivering the morning papers to the officers’ quarters when a corporal marched
up to him and said without explanation, -0ch, the CO wants to see you~

“When?” asked
Lubji.

“Now,” said the
corporal, and without another word he turned and began marching away. Lubji dropped
the remaining papers on the ground, and chased after him as he disappeared
through the morning mist across the parade ground in the direction of the
office block. They both came to a halt in front of a door marked “Commanding
Officer.”

The corporal
knocked, and the moment he had heard the word “Come,” opened the door, marched
in, stood to attention in front of the colonel’s desk and saluted.

“‘Och reporting
as ordered, sir,” he bellowed as if he were still outside on the parade ground.
Lubji stopped directly behind the corporal, and was nearly knocked over by him
when he took a pace backward.

Lubji stared at
the smartly-dressed officer behind the desk. He had seen him once or twice
before, but only at a distance. He stood to attention and threw the palm of his
hand up to his forehead, trying to mimic the corporal. The commanding officer
looked up at him for a moment, and then back down at the single sheet of paper
on his desk.

“Hoch,” he
began. “You are to be transferred from this camp to a training depot in
Staffordshire, where you will join the Pioneer Corps as a private soldier.”

“Yes, sir,”
shouted Lubji happily.

The colonel’s
eyes remained on the piece of paper in front of him. “You will embus from the
camp at 0700 hours tomorrow morning ...”

“Yes, sir.”

“Before then you
will report to the duty clerk who will supply you with all the necessary
documentation, including a rail warrant.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have any
questions, Hoch?”

“Yes, sir,” said
Lubji. “Do the Pioneer Corps kill Germans?”

“No, Hoch, they
do not,” replied the colonel, laughing, ‘but you will be expected to give
invaluable assistance to those who do.”

Lubji knew what
the word “valuable” meant, but wasn’t quite sure about “invaluable.” He made a
note of it the moment he returned to his hut.

That afternoon
he reported, as instructed, to the duty clerk, and was issued with a rail
warrant and ten shillings. After he had packed his few possessions, he walked
down the hill for the last time to thank Mrs.

Sweetman for all
she had done during the past seven months to help him learn English. He looked
up the new word in the dictionary Linder the counter, and told Mrs. Sweetman
that her help had been invaluable. She didn’t care to admit to the tall young
foreigner that he now spoke her language better than she did.

The following
morning Lubji took a bus to the station in time to catch the 7:20 to Stafford.
By the time he arrived, after three changes and several delays, he had read The
Times from cover to cover.

There was a jeep
waiting for him at Stafford. Behind the wheel sat a corporal of the North
Staffordshire Regiment, who looked so smart that Lubji called him “sir.” On the
journey to the barracks the corporal left Lubji in no doubt that the “coolies”
Lubji was still finding it hard to pick up slang - were the lowest form of
life. “They’re nothing more than a bunch of skivers who’ll do anything to avoid
taking part in real action.”

I want to take
part in real action,” Lubji told him firmly, and I am not a skiver.” He
hesitated. “Am l?”

“it takes one to
know one,” the corporal said, as the jeep came to a halt outside the
quartermaster’s stores.

Once Lubji had
been issued with a private’s uniform, trousers a couple of inches too short,
two khaki shirts, two pairs of gray socks, a brown tie (cotton), a billycan,
knife, fork and spoon, two blankets, one sheet and one pillowcase, he was
escorted to his new barracks. He found himself billeted with twenty recruits
from the Staffordshire area who, before they had been called up, had worked
mostly as potters or coalminers. It took him some time to realize that they
were talking the same language he had been taught by Mrs. Sweetman.