Five Boys (13 page)

As he walked on, something about all the deserted houses began to arouse him. He imagined himself going
silently from room to room in another man’s property, free to do whatever he liked. To relieve himself against the stone sink where the owner’s wife stood to do her washing. To kick in the door to where their precious children slept.

His thoughts blossomed and bloomed and carried him along with them, until he could hear his heart thumping in his ears and had to stop at the side of the road and unbutton his trousers. And the moment he got hold of himself he went back to prowling around the houses and kicking down the doors.

Half an hour later he was walking down Duncannon’s steep high street, with all the front doors locked and every window stripped of its curtains. There was no lamplight, no fires burning. There was a deadliness at work, as if the breath had been sucked right out of the place.

He quickened his step and hurried on between the rows of dumb houses, but when he got to the bottom of the hill he turned, to try to establish what had been bothering him. A large gray rat sat in the middle of the street, washing its whiskers. It looked as happy as a king. Howard had seen plenty of rats in his time, but this one was especially repellent. When it finished cleaning itself it just sat there looking at him—seemed to be waiting for him to go.

The first GI steered his jeep around the war memorial soon after eight o’clock the following morning and raised an almost apologetic hand to Mrs. Heaney, but within the hour the trucks were rolling by, bumper to bumper, and the soldiers were waving and throwing sweets to the children as if they were liberating the place.

By midmorning the lanes brimmed with the sweet blue mist of diesel exhaust. It seeped through the hedgerows
and spilled across the winter fields. The villagers lined the streets and covered their mouths with their handkerchiefs. They were accustomed to recognizing every person who came down the high street, and as Miss Pye leaned against her windowsill and rattled a humbug around her mouth she couldn’t help but look at each face as if it might suddenly become familiar—which made her first giddy, then a little sick.

The lanes around the village had barely changed in centuries—the same sluggish circulation sustaining the same cottages and farms. At half past seven there was hardly a soul out on them. Then the whole world seemed to come crashing in.

The Boys were the village’s first ambassadors. Reports had reached them that the soldiers at the checkpoint on the bridge down by Miss Minter’s were brandishing rifles and had a windup telephone and that there were jeeps sweeping up and down the lanes, so on the last Saturday before Christmas they formed a delegation and set off down the hill.

They got as far as the crossroads, with the soldiers clearly visible a few hundred yards away, before their nerve suddenly failed them. Harvey Noyce had been working himself up into a lather. The soldiers would be jumpy, he said. They were in a foreign country. Five strange boys suddenly turning up could easily startle them and who was to say they wouldn’t open fire?

It was hard to tell how nervous a soldier was from such a distance. Aldred suggested sneaking down the ditch and having a closer look, but Harvey was insisting that they should give them a couple of days to settle in and come
back later, when a jeep came speeding around the corner of the boundary road. The Five Boys scattered, convinced that they were about to be gunned down. Heck and Finn ran back up the lane. Harvey and Aldred clambered through a hedge. Lewis leaped into the ditch—had high hopes of vaulting the fence on the other side but the ditch was so deep and its contents so thick that it gripped him by the ankles. The other Boys could hear his cries for help echoing across the fields but kept on running and when they eventually stopped and looked back, fully expected to see him being handcuffed and bundled into the jeep but instead saw the jeep’s driver and Lewis engaged in apparently amiable conversation and, after hastily reviewing the situation, began to creep back down the hill.

It was their first opportunity to look at an American jeep at close quarters. It had a white five-pronged star stenciled on the bonnet and a complicated sequence of numbers over the arch of each wheel. The driver was in the wrong seat, along with his steering wheel. By the time Aldred climbed back through the hedge and joined the others the conversation was well under way, and as the soldier talked he noticed that one of his front teeth was solid gold. It glittered in the sunlight and Aldred wondered what it must taste like. He was, frankly, impressed that someone with such an obvious physical shortcoming could have risen through the ranks to the point where he had his own jeep. The soldier scratched his neck between the rim of his helmet and the collar of his jacket and seemed about as relaxed as a grown man could be. He looked like the kind of fellow, Aldred thought, who, if he was your father, might still have enough spirit in him to have a little wrestle with you at the end of the day.

The Boys did their best to keep the conversation going and give themselves more time to take in the great tread of the jeep’s tires and all the dashboard’s buttons and dials, but after a couple of minutes the driver sat himself up, revved the engine and began winding the steering wheel and seemed ready to go when he paused, turned back to the Boys and flashed that gold tooth of his. He gave them a wink and his eyes dropped down their bodies. The Boys had no idea what he was going to do and it wasn’t until he leaned over and placed his hand on theirs that they realized what a tight hold they had on the side of his jeep.

They stepped back, the soldier revved the engine again and saluted them. The wheels ripped at the dirt and the jeep sped off down the lane. The Boys stood and watched it disappear. Then stood there a little while longer. If they waited long enough, Aldred thought, the jeep would come around again.

Lewis hopped back to the ditch where he’d left one of his boots and the others watched as he retrieved it, then they headed back toward the village, and as they hiked up the hill Hector asked if anyone had noticed the jeep’s windshield and how it was hinged so that it could fold down onto the bonnet, and somebody else mentioned the soldier’s gold tooth. And first one, then all the others admitted that they hadn’t understood a single word the soldier had said.

T
HE VILLAGE
would frequently wake, confounded. Would find itself steeped in a meteorological condition somewhere between mist and drizzle, capable of lasting days, sometimes weeks at a time. No rain ever fell, no mist materialized. But each cottage was cast adrift. Lamps were extinguished late in the morning and relit early in the afternoon and anyone stepping out, even to fill the coal scuttle, stepped back in to find their hair and coat shrouded with dew.

One such stupor descended soon after the Americans and hung about for the best part of a month. Christmas ‘43 was muted by it; 1944 crept blindly in. All the lanes into the evacuated area now had a checkpoint on them and every request to enter, whether it was old Raybe wanting to pick up a bedstead or Steere wanting to check on his roof, was politely refused. Patrols drove up and down the perimeter road, like druids in their hooded waterproofs, and a motorcycle messenger would sometimes blunder through the village, but there was no sign of all the lorries that had roared by a few weeks earlier, as if the land had simply opened up and swallowed them.

It was assumed that the Americans were busy preparing for, or already participating in, maneuvers too distant or too clandestine to be heard. The locals liked to talk about
the ease with which a fellow could slip through a hedge and stroll straight into the commandeered area, but the fact that none of them knew what sort of reception would be waiting for them was enough to keep them out.

There were occasional sightings of Americans beyond the area’s boundaries. In early January a retired butcher bumped into a couple of GIs having a stroll down by the old paper mill and was asked how many more days of such deadly weather they might have to endure. The ex-butcher peered into the murk and sniffed the air with great authority before informing them that he hadn’t the faintest idea. The three of them sheltered under a tree and smoked a cigarette and when they parted one of the GIs gave the ex-butcher a full pack of Lucky Strikes, which he placed on the bar beside his pint in the Malsters’ Arms that evening and which kept him in conversation until closing time.

A week or two later a young mother returned from the shops in Dartmouth to find her daughter perched on the wall beside a large black man. The girl had been showing the off-duty soldier her embroidery and the soldier had shown her a cross-stitch of his own. When he saw the young girl’s mother approaching he rose and introduced himself—said his name was William Johnson but that his friends all called him BJ. He was invited in and in the time it took the kettle to boil he drew a map of America on a paper bag to show where he came from, but all the woman saw was a crumpled rug of a country and the soldier’s home somewhere lonely in the middle which, by his own admission, was nowhere near New York or Hollywood.

In late January the Reverend Bentley stepped off the train at Totnes, having spent the day with a colleague in Dawlish, to be greeted by the stationmaster, who informed
him that the town’s only taxi had come off the road at Boreston Foot, flattened an outhouse and ended up in the poultry pen. This came as a mighty blow to the reverend and even as the news was being relayed to him he could feel twinges of anticipatory pain in his hips and knees, and the only thing to distract him from them was trying to gauge how much of the stationmaster’s evident pleasure was due to the taxi’s accident and how much came from the inconvenience it was causing the likes of him.

There were no buses and no prospect of them. They rarely ventured out much after noon and when they did, steered a course around some of the villages as if they were the last strongholds of the bubonic plague. The reverend felt a rueful attitude come upon him. He set his case down. It was getting dark and he pictured his warm coat hanging up in the hallway of the vicarage and was chewing over the stationmaster’s lack of humanity when a lorry pulled up, the driver wound down the window and, in a thick American drawl, asked if he might offer him a lift.

It took a couple of attempts for the reverend to get up the steps, but soon the lorry was grinding up the Kingsbridge Road, with him up in the cab beside the driver, feeling as though he was being carried home, triumphant, on a tank. The two men talked until they were halfway up the hill and turned off into the wooded lanes, then they both hunched forward and focused on the few yards of illuminated road ahead of them.

It may have been his own personal counterblast against the stationmaster or a simple act of gratitude, but as they crawled through the darkness toward the village it occurred to the reverend that he should arrange a social for his good
Samaritan and his fellow servicemen and give them the welcome they deserved.

The next day, straight after breakfast, he checked the village hall diary, which was completely blank apart from Ladies’ Keep Fit every Tuesday and the bring-and-buy on the Easter weekend. He dictated a letter to Mrs. Heaney for the attention of the soldier’s commanding officer and was on the phone to him the following day, arranging a date and how many servicemen might practically be invited. He put it in the diary, but when he asked Mrs. Heaney to knock up a couple of posters for some of the neighboring villages on the Tuesday she seemed to drag her heels. What the reverend didn’t know was that by then every able-bodied woman in a ten-mile radius knew all about it and was already wondering what clothes to wear.

With half an hour before the doors were due to open the queue stretched right back down past the post office and on toward Piatt’s farm. The women who had made their way in from nearby villages leaned against the wall and slipped their feet from their boots into their best shoes. The rest tucked their chins into their coat collars and stamped their feet, as if trying to jog in them some memory of dance steps from years before. Sylvia Crouch had her arm linked through Phyllis Massie’s. The other mothers were in the queue not far behind. Two hundred women stood out in the cold, waiting for the door to open. Howard Kent was about the only man among them. As he’d told Miss Pye the day before, he thought he’d better go along, “just to keep an eye on the girls.”

In the hall, the older ladies were still furiously inflating
balloons and passing them up to the reverend, who stood on his stepladder and stuffed them into the net suspended beneath the ceiling. And by quarter to eight Mrs. Heaney was still putting out the cups and saucers when Miss Pye, seeing no sense in half the women in the county catching cold, told the reverend to get down off his ladder as she was about to open the doors.

The queue lurched forward and a wave of excitement surged back into the darkness. The conversation quickened and as the women shuffled toward the light in the doorway they felt that the evening was finally getting under way. As soon as they were inside Sylvia and Phyllis squeezed into the Ladies to check their grips and curls and apply another coat of lipstick. Women pressed in from all sides to get a look in the mirror. Sylvia was inclined to wonder where the hell they had all sprung from, and when she and Phyllis were finally out on the dance floor she saw just how young some of them were. She remembered one or two when they were babies—girls who only a couple of years earlier had seemed cripplingly self-conscious, but were now straightening their stockings and smoking cigarettes.
If I were a soldier,
thought Sylvia,
who would I go for? Some eighteen-year-old who’d never had her tits touched or some sad old hag like me?

By five past eight the place was heaving, before a single American had even walked through the door, the air so thick with hair lacquer that the Reverend Bentley had trouble breathing and had to stick his head out of the window to clear his lungs. A couple of feet below him two women were taking a slug from a small bottle and, without necessarily intending to, the reverend caught a bit of their conversation. One was saying how she’d been almost beside
herself with excitement for the best part of a fortnight, but now that she was here all she wanted was to have some GI walk up and ask her for a dance. He didn’t have to look like Clark Gable or Cary Grant, she said. Someone clean and smart would do. Her friend nodded and said that surely, after all the drudgery of the last few years, there was no shame in getting powdered up and having a little drink and a dance for an hour or two.