Dead and Alive (2 page)

“She wasn’t the person to remain faithful to an absent lover long. I knew that. She wouldn’t agree to an engagement. She said we’d get married as soon as I came back and the war was over. We were young and optimistic in those days. Then Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain—a young R.A.F. pilot officer: I got the news at Derna. I was an A.B. at the time in a destroyer, and we were supporting Wavell’s men on their way west.

“Then we came home for a re-fit and I was up for a commission.
King Alfred
, that’s the shore station for cadets, was quite near my people and I got home quite a bit. I met a girl I’d known since I was a kid—and, I don’t know, she was kind and sweet and we got on well together. It was a dose of freshness and England after the Med. and we got engaged. A man needs something to anchor him when he’s abroad for months on end and the war looks like going on for ever.

“In all I was the better part of a year in England. Then I was given a landing craft and in due course took it out on the North African landing. Then the Sicily show—that was when I heard from Jenny for the first time since that note at Derna telling me she was married. It was a pitiful little note—an airmail letter card telling me that her husband was dead, shot down in flames on a train-busting raid over the Pas de Calais.”

The knitting needles had stopped clicking. “Was that when you realised you didn’t love the other girl?” Sarah asked.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. It was the next letter, which came a month later, I think, that told me that. It was from her mother. Jenny was dead—killed by a stray bomb in a nuisance raid on London. For some
strange reason she had left me all her jewellery. I’ve got it in my suitcase now—little trinkets, some of them that I’d given her, some I didn’t recognise, including a platinum wedding ring, and some old Scotch jewellery, stones set in solid silver, which her grandmother had given her when she was twenty-one.”

“Why didn’t you break off the engagement with the other girl, man, if you knew you didn’t love her?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Because I was a long way from home, I suppose,” I said. “I needed Pat. I was out there three years—Salerno, Anzio, Elba, South of France, Greece. I was thinking of home and how the cherry blossom would look on the old grey stone of the little church down by the river. You’ve never been to Italy, have you? Their churches are all pretentious with stucco and baroque—like the glamorous East, there was nothing sincere about it. I longed for the plain mellow stone of England. And somehow Pat fitted into the picture.”

“Then what in heaven’s name are you doing down here?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Five years is a long time. In five years you form a picture, coloured by imagination. And when I came back I thought it would be like it had been with Jenny. I had told her to fix it so that we got married at a registry office right away, the day I came down, so that we could get away the same day to some quiet little country pub where I could wallow in the beauty of the country and have a wife with me.

“Instead, she meets me with her mother. Things aren’t fixed. She wants a church wedding, bridesmaids and confetti. I’m to stay with my people and we’re to prospect for a house. Oh, God, you’ve no idea! They talked of rationing and domestic affairs. Her mother, a pleasant stupid woman, was with her all the time. A playful brother, who was something on the Urban District Council, twitted me about Signorinas. They talked of the good times we’d had in the Middle East and
Italy and of what I was going to do now—would I, who had no job and no qualifications, be able to support a wife? It was horrible. Pat was even stupid enough to suggest a honeymoon in Italy with my getting a job in U.N.R.R.A. or something. That was the end. I’d had it. I left her a note and wired you. That was yesterday morning.

“You see,” I said. “I’ve nothing in common with them. I’m a foreigner in my own country. I came here because I have memories here—memories of something that was real. And—and somehow I knew you’d be a help. I knew I’d be able to talk to you.”

“I’m glad you came, Mr. David,” she said. “Now if you’ll just open that cabinet over there, you’ll find a decanter and some glasses.”

When I had poured whisky out for both of us, she said, “There’s a man down at Bossiney needs some help, I’m told. He’s trying to get one of your landing craft off the rocks with local labour and he’s finding it difficult. It came ashore in a gale on its way home from the Mediterranean—it must be more than a year ago. Somehow it drove straight up the cove and lodged high and dry on the rocks on the beach. You might stroll over in the morning.”

“Yes,” I said, “it will pass the time.”

I
N THE
morning I climbed the valley side where the short, sheep-cropped grass was thick with rock flowers and watched the long Atlantic rollers march against the grey cliffs and thunder in a roar of surf up the entrance to the valley. The wind was out of the west, about force six. It was cold and the driven spume salted my face. The whole coast beneath the lead-grey sky was surging white, and every now and then a dull boom marked a mounting plume of spray as it climbed a nearby cliff-face.

As I walked across the bluff to Bossiney I could see Barras Head and the jagged ruins of Arthur’s Castle on the headland beyond. Inland, the grey slates of Tintagel sprawled at the foot of the hills.

As I topped the rise above Bossiney, I saw the Elephant Rock that guards the starboard entrance to the cove. I stopped and looked at the angry sea that tossed and fumed against the base of it. I did not see how it was possible for a landing-craft to have got into the cove—unless it were one of the little L.C.V.P.s or A.L.C.s. And Sarah had described it as a biggish craft that practically filled the end of the cove.

I came at length to the path over the cliff top and gazed down into the cove. The tide was high and filled the cove, so that the sandy bottom was a swishing surge of white surf. It looked a wicked enough spot even in that slight sea, all rocks and swirling water. And at the end of the cove, below the sweep of the valley top and the overhanging granite cliffs on the far side, was a landing-craft. It was an L.C.T., one of the Mark Fours. It was wedged sideways on the rocks, clear of the water. And it was intact.

It was quite fantastic. It seemed to fill the tiny cove and its rusty plates and flaking paintwork merged into the dark mass of the cliffs. How it had managed to get there God only knows—it was one of those freaks of the seas that sometimes happen. It must have been swept in, its flat bows aimed at the cliffs, rolling high on the top of a mountainous wave, hit a sloping rock and swung broadside on the breaking wave to lodge where it was. What a terrifying moment it must have been for the man at the helm—or had there been no one but the seas to guide it to that incredible lodgment?

The cove, as I say, was narrow. It was not more than a hundred yards across at the entrance and it narrowed all the way until the confining cliffs swept round, green with water-moss, to meet where the valley stream flowed down a dark crevice. These landing-craft tank are about 180 feet long by 36 feet wide. What had saved it, of course, was the fact that it had been empty when it drove in. The flat bottom would draw little more than 5 feet at the stern and with her double bottom and her air tank sides she would ride the back of a breaking comber like a cork. Nevertheless it was a staggering sight to see her there, propped upon the rocks like a bait to challenge the fury of the sea. Every wave that surged into the cove seemed to gather itself together before it broke, as though to say, “I’ll get it this time.” But though these were spring tides and it was just about at the high, only the driven spume splattered the rusty plates with water.

The sun came out as I went down the steep path and the cove was suddenly full of colour. The earth was fresh after the night mist. The sea drowned the sound of my footsteps. I was in a world of my own—a world that belonged to Jenny and me. And yet I was not sad any more.

Perhaps I sensed the hand of Fate that had brought me back to Trevedra and down to this stranded hulk on the rocks of Bossiney Cove. I like to think so. But I don’t know. Certainly I did not know then as I walked
down that rocky cliff path that my feet were leading me half across the world, back to the Mediterranean, to strange happenings, to danger and a life of adventure. All I knew was that in that moment there was no longer an ache at my breast. I knew nothing of Monique then, of her elfin beauty, her tragic story and the dark rackets of Naples and the bleak life on the hills beyond Tivoli. But I felt an exaltation as I went down into the cove that I had not felt since I returned to England—an interest in life that cut across the jagged edges of my memories.

It was strange. Jenny and I might have chosen any one of a thousand and more farms in which to spend that two weeks of holiday before the war. But only one of those thousand and more farmsteads was in the next valley to the stranded wreck of an L.C.T. when the war was over. And we had chosen Trevedra—and Trevedra was that one. Of such strange things is the thread of destiny woven.

I reached the beach. It was seemingly deserted. The landing craft towered above me, big in the confines of the cove. Its rusty sides broke the force of the wind and shut me off from the noise of the sea. The thick steel door was half down, held by one rusty chain—the other had snapped and the broken end hung dejectedly against the side of the ship. I climbed over the rocks and peered beneath the hull. Sand, piled up by the winter storms, had been dug away. Except for one jagged rent near the stern, the hull seemed intact. It was one of the strangest things I had ever seen. She hadn’t broken her back and she was only holed in one place. She was resting fairly on flat sloping outcrops of rock.

I clambered round to the stern. The rudders were both badly buckled, but the propellers were unharmed. There was no anchor and the girders that supported the bridge and deck housings were badly buckled. The pompoms had gone—presumably the naval authorities had unshipped them—and the mast was snapped off short. The funnel was dented and on the seaward side the bridge
was badly shattered and looked like a twisted heap of old scrap iron.

“Hullo, there!” The call was faint, whipped away in the wind and the roar of the sea.

I looked up. A man was seated on one of the for’ard bollards smoking a pipe.

“Hullo,” I said. “Do you allow visitors?”

He rose from his seat and came aft. He looked a wild figure, bearded and with his long dark hair on end with the wind. He wore a dirty polo sweater that had once been green, and brown corduroy slacks.

He found a rope ladder and tossed it over the side. When I climbed over the broken rail, I found him leaning against the side of the wheel-house. He was tapping his teeth with his empty pipe and his grey eyes, narrowed, searched my face.

“My name is David Cunningham,” I said. “I just came over——” I stopped there for he did not seem to be listening. He made no move to take my hand, but stood, staring into my face.

“My luck is in,” he said suddenly. “I don’t know why you came—we’ll go into that later. It’s like the answer to a prayer.” He took his pipe out of his mouth and stabbed at me with the bitten stem. “The last time I saw you,” he said, “was on the beaches at Salerno.”.

“On the beaches at Salerno?” I echoed in surprise.

He nodded. “I watched you come down from the cliff top. Something about you seemed familiar. And when you looked up at my hail—then I knew who you were.” He started filling his pipe from a coloured silk pouch. “On the beaches at Salerno—you had a battered old battle bowler cocked over one eye and you steered an L.C.T. loaded with tanks straight in to my beach. I was never more glad to see a bloke in my life.”

“I remember you now,” I said.

The cliffs that hung above us blurred and the thunder of the sea merged into the crash of artillery. In my mind’s eye I saw a sandy stretch of beach backed by low cliffs.
The shattered hulk of an L.C.T. lay on its side, half submerged in the surf. An A.L.C. full of shrapnel holes and dead bodies was beached beside the wreckage of two ducks that had gone up on mines. And peering out of the water was the cab of a drowned Bedford truck and the turret of a light tank. The beach was littered with figures, some sprawled taut in the fixity of death, others belly-flat to the scooped-out sand in the desperate hope of life. Bullets chipped at the sea or riccochetted, whining, off our plates. And overhead was the constant muffled crump of airbursts from 88’s high up in the hills.

And in the midst of all that hell a young captain stood knee-deep in the water, waving me in to the one sound berth. I had gone in at emergency full ahead, with the tank engines drowning the sound of the shell bursts. I had dropped the doors as I grounded and he had jumped the first tank as it rolled off into three feet of water.

He gave me a cheery wave and the last I saw of him was riding up the beach to the shelter of the cliffs and signalling the others to follow him and his men to join in behind the shelter of the tanks.

I had hauled off and pulled up my doors by then. And I left that shell-torn beach just as fast as I could, thinking that he was a very brave man who had little chance of life.

And now here he was, shaking me by the hand and saying, “My name is Stuart McCrae.” The beard made a difference and without a tin hat his dark hair showed streaks of grey. He was older than I had thought.

He glanced at his watch. “It’s a bit early for ‘Up Spirits’ by naval reckoning, but I’ve some Scotch, and the weather and the occasion both call for it.”

He led the way into the wheel-house. It was comfortably furnished with a round plain oak table of modern design, three chairs, an easy chair, a small desk table on which was a typewriter, a shelf of books and a big cupboard. Two oils and the photograph of a wide-eyed, fair-haired
girl with a baby in her arms hung on the steel walls.

As he came back from the galley with glasses and a jug of water he caught me staring at the table which was charred. The chair legs also had burns. “Salvage from my London flat,” he explained.