The Iron Stallions (18 page)

‘My farver carried fings on ’is ’ead,’ she said.

‘What was he, Rosie? A porter?’

‘Fink so. Covent Garden. Is this Buckin’am Palace?’

‘No. It’s Braxby Manor.’

‘What’s a manor?’

‘A sort of house.’

When Kitty developed a temperature – from what Jocelyn assumed at once was a disease caused by fleas but which Josh more realistically assumed was sheer excitement – it was Josh not Jocelyn who stuck a thermometer in her mouth.

‘Can I ’ave a suck when she’s finished?’ Rosanna asked.

They knew no songs but ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ and ‘Once in Royal David’s City,’ they were terrified of water, particularly in the form of a bath, called caterpillars ‘worms on legs’ and referred to rooks, thrushes, tomtits and everything else as ‘dicky birds.’

‘I didn’t know they was all different colours,’ Rosanna said. ‘All the dicky birds I’ve ever seen looked black. Muck, I suppose.’ She indicated the bowl of fruit by her sister’s bed. ‘C’ave apple?’

‘Help yourself.’

‘You won’t slosh me?’

‘Did people slosh you, Rosie?’

‘My farver did when ’e’d ’ad one or two. Are there fairies round ’ere, sir?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s kind of magic bein’ ’ere. Where’ll you get my pony?’

‘There are plenty around. They belonged to little girls who’ve grown too big for them. I expect we can pick one up cheap.’

It wasn’t hard. Ellis Ackroyd knew of a Welsh Mountain belonging to a neighbouring farmer who’d bought it originally for his daughter who was now in the Waafs. Rosanna was ecstatic when she saw it, but Kitty immediately went into a decline.

‘She wants one now,’ Jocelyn said.

Because he was due to leave, that night Josh suggested they should fix the date of the wedding, but Jocelyn shook her head.

‘Let’s leave it as it is,’ she said.

He put his arms round her. ‘But, don’t you see, old thing, if anything happened to me, Braxby would be yours.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’ She shook her head as if trying to avoid thinking about it. ‘It won’t happen.’

He was puzzled by her attitude and wondered if she were getting cold feet because of the children.

‘It might not work out, Josh,’ she explained. ‘People need to know each other.’

Nothing he said could persuade her and two weeks later he disappeared to a tank depot for a refresher course on new weapons and equipment. The colonel in command had been a captain before Dunkirk and couldn’t understand why Josh was in such a hurry to get back to the fray.

There was a technical period at Bovington where Josh heard a new paraphrasing of the talk he’d been in the habit of giving to new recruits in the days when they’d had horses.

‘You’ll probably hear a lot of arguments,’ they were told, ‘about who’s the most important member of a tank crew. The best advice is to forget them. A crew’s only as good as its combined skills. Some will tell you the driver’s most important, some the gunner, some the wireless operator. When you have one, some would even say the co-driver, because without him you’d have nobody to make the tea–’

He took part in exercises with a troop, then with a squadron, and finally with three squadrons as a regiment. He learned to get at the more inaccessible parts of the engine and adjust jets on carburettors. Sitting on the tea-plate seat of a tank commander, watching the twin horns of the machine and the cascades of muddy water they threw up, when the track caught a tree stump and threw them about inside the tank like shot inside a rattle, he realised that his injured backside had recovered enough to get by.

He learned to live inside the tanks, to cope with the thunder of engines and the noise of the tracks; and to deal with the bundles of bedding, spare lengths of track, camouflage nets, pressure stoves and the other odds and ends with which the vehicles were festooned. It was easy, he learned, to look smart but be short of tanks because of bad maintenance, or fail through carelessness on the range where an iron trolley carrying a target trundled across their front so they could blaze away at it.

By the time retraining was over, the situation in the Mediterranean was changing again. The Germans had gone into Greece, and the army that had been landed from North Africa had its hands full. The following week he was given orders to rejoin the Regiment in Egypt and sent home on embarkation leave. Almost the first thing he did was to find Eddie Orne, who said he was now mobile and would be moving into the cottage at Braxby within a few weeks.

On the last night Rosanna was allowed to stay up as a special treat.

‘You going off to the war?’ she asked.

‘Afraid so,’ Josh said. ‘Mind?’

‘Yes. We’ll be all right, though. We’ll look after Our Lady. I can do the washin’ up.’

In bed, Jocelyn clung to Josh. ‘I wish I were your wife,’ she whispered.

‘You’ve left it a bit late,’ Josh said.

‘No. I know what I’m doing. It’s just that I’m lost and I’m not sure where I’m heading.’

Their love-making was fierce and passionate and she kissed him ardently.

‘If it all goes wrong, Josh,’ she asked, ‘you’ll forgive me, won’t you?’

‘What could go wrong? You know the house and my family and me.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ she said quietly. ‘I was thinking of me.’

By the time Josh disembarked in Egypt, the situation in the Middle East had changed again. Hitler’s reaction to a British foothold on the Continent of Europe had been fierce. As his troops had attacked southwards, the British army in Greece, assembled from the already sparse formations in North Africa was flung back in retreat. Instead of a successful termination to the campaign in Libya, they were not only flung out of Greece, but Crete fell, too, while in the evacuations the Navy lost a battleship, three cruisers, thirteen destroyers and dozens of smaller ships, either sunk or damaged. It had all taken place while Josh and his group had been making their roundabout way in convoy to the Red Sea, and the depleted army in North Africa was now hanging on by the skin of its teeth, no longer facing Italians who created no dread in their hearts, but a new outfit called the Afrika Korps, led by Rommel, who had spearheaded the thrust through France.

With Josh was a squad of replacements and four new officers – three mere boys called Packer, Neill and Greatorex, and an older man called Flood who’d transferred from the infantry. They travelled out of Cairo past ornate ugly villas, gardens and mango groves and up the long slope leading to the desert. For six hours they drove along a thin strip of tarmacadam, stopping only occasionally to stretch their legs. At Amiriya, they turned west towards Mersa Matruh.

‘It’s like Salisbury Plain with knobs on,’ Packer observed. ‘If the desert’s all like this it’s going to be a long war.’

The land rose and fell in ridges, hillocks and valleys that were full of stones and rocks. The lack of rain was clear in the absence of trees, woods, crops, villages, or towns. It was as if a giant hand had wiped the place clean. Then they began to notice boards showing where in the empty landscape the army was hidden. At this stage they mostly indicated lines of communications troops, ordnance depots, workshops, supply columns, engineers’ stores and dumps, but as they turned south, at the edge of a plateau where the coastal road swung west to Sidi Barrani, they began to reach the 7th Armoured Division, to which the 19th Lancers were attached, and finally found the regiment itself.

They were in a shallow valley that seemed about as near as you could get to hell without getting burned. Under the strident sun, the scenery was as stark as if it were on the moon, the sand stretching to the horizon to make the mind ache with its uncompromising harshness.

‘You’ve arrived just in time.’ Aubrey spat out grit and wrinkled his eyes against the blowing sand. ‘They’ve just changed the name of the Desert Force to the Eighth Army and given us a new general called Cunningham. It’s bound to mean something.’

‘The regiment was equipped with American-built Stuart tanks, known to everybody as Honeys.

‘At least they’re better than those half-baked A10s we had in Greece,’ Aubrey said. ‘Only about half a dozen were lost through enemy action. All the rest were abandoned with broken tracks or mechanical breakdowns. We didn’t bother to destroy them because they’ll be no good to the Germans either. Perhaps the Greeks use them to keep chickens in. They’d make good chicken houses.’

Aubrey had changed in the few months since Josh had seen him. His smile was the same easy-going, good-natured greeting Josh knew so well, but he was leaner, browner, even a little more alert. The mess was in a marquee and at once Josh saw a familiar face peering at him out of the past.

‘Syd Dodgin!’

Dodgin beamed. ‘Not only me,’ he said, jabbing at another figure alongside. ‘Jack Winder, too.’

‘We got commissioned a couple of months back,’ Winder explained. ‘We get to drink whisky these days.’

They hadn’t changed much and they both wore ribbons, won as NCOs, and fitted well into the mess, one day calling everybody ‘sir’, the next using their Christian names, to make nonsense of the doubts in blimp circles about promoting men from the ranks.

While they were talking Reeves appeared. He was brown and his hair and eyebrows were bleached white by the sun. He was in command of B Squadron and he looked tired and strained.

‘The bloody dust fills your nose, eyes, ears and mouth,’ he explained. ‘My body will get quite a surprise when it gets introduced to a bath. I expect you’ll get C Squadron because Ormonde’s just been sent to Gezira with jaundice. Young Ackroyd, your old driver’s there, too, with a septic knee. We’ve all got something. Sores or sandfly fever which I suppose comes from getting sand in your flies.’

The Stuart tank was a strange-looking vehicle, tall and light-looking, with track links mounted in solid rubber blocks. It weighed only twelve tons but it had a 250 horsepower engine, carried a crew of four and, with its 38 mm. armour, could travel fast under good conditions.

‘Unfortunately,’ Reeves said, ‘it’s only got a 37-millimetre peashooter and two machine guns.’

As the engine covers came off, Josh stared. ‘It looks like an aeroplane engine,’ he said.

‘That’s what it is. The fan looks like a propeller. If you go fast enough, you might even be able to take off and drop bombs. It runs on high-octane fuel which is not so easy to come by, but it gives us a fast take-off and, with that gun, we might need one from time to time.’

‘How does it handle?’

‘They say a chap from 3rd Tanks took one out in the desert and tried to shed one of the tracks. He said it handled like a well-trained cow pony. For my money it’s the best example of Anglo-American co-operation I’ve come across.’

Now that he was well in the saddle, Rydderch had got over his feeling that Josh might snatch the Regiment from under him and was friendly and welcoming.

‘I’m giving you C Squadron,’ he said. ‘And, for God’s sake, take care of it. We’re not short of tanks but we have a suspicion that a lot of people at headquarters don’t have the slightest idea how to use them.’

Running a squadron was no problem to Josh, though he considered himself an amateur when it came to knowing about tanks. Aubrey, Pallovicini and Winder were in his squadron, and he was also given Packer, Neill and Flood on the understanding that he was the man best able to bring them up to scratch. When Tyas Edgar Ackroyd turned up, cured, from hospital, the thing was complete. The Goffs’ lucky charm was back on the job and by means of a little exchange among the crews, he soon also had two of Ackoyd’s friends, Privates Cyril Harbottle and George Robinson, as gunner and radio operator.

Troop by troop they went to the firing area west of the Fayoum Road, everybody’s mind occupied with the new German 88 mm anti-tank gun which was said to be able to knock out a Honey at three thousand yards. The only answer seemed to lie in the Honey’s speed and mobility and, between them, Josh and his crew began working out a system whereby Ackroyd advanced flat out while Harbottle kept the telescopic sight of his gun on the target. As soon as they were within range, the tank halted, Harbottle fired without any further orders, and the sound of the shot was the signal for Ackroyd to let in his clutch and set off again. The operation took about four seconds and it was Josh’s view that a troop of tanks thundering down on a German gunner in this way would be enough to put him off his target.

‘Probably put him off his food, too,’ Aubrey suggested.

Towards the end of the year they moved out to The Wire, Mussolini’s rusty entanglement that ran along the Libyan border to the Great Sand Sea in the south. It was supposed to keep out camels and wandering Arabs, but it didn’t appear to keep out the British patrols. It was clear there was something in the wind and they began to get rumours of a big new push westwards to gain control of the northern seaboard to help besieged Malta and provide a springboard back into Europe.

Arriving before dark, they lit their fires at once so they wouldn’t be seen and fried up their bully beef and biscuits, before getting down to work on the engines, radios, guns and power traverses. The sun sank, the desert became yellow, then bronze and finally red. Washing in the dregs of their scanty water allowance, as darkness came they pulled the flaps round the bivouacs they had constructed against the sides of the tanks and sat smoking. The following morning, Ackroyd woke them. ‘There’s not much water, so what do you prefer? A shave or a mug of tea?’

Josh stood up and stretched. At this point of the day the desert was beautiful and it was good to be alive.

‘It’d be perfect,’ Ackroyd said. ‘If it had running water.’

But then the sky began to pale and the desert became brittle in the brilliant glare of the sunshine. As the heat increased, every object was affected by it, the burnished sands reflecting and magnifying it until the air burned in a haze which shimmered and drifted like a fog. Lorries appeared with tubing and hessian, the tanks were camouflaged to look like trucks and they moved quietly to a position south of Sollum.

Mail arrived and Toby Reeves waved a blue-tinted envelope in front of Josh’s nose.