There’d been a path here, but it had been neglected. Chest-height bracken blocked my way, and woody brambles caught my clothes. It was slow going.
At the top of the slope, chinks of moonlight shone through the trees. There was a clearing. I neared the edge, but lingered far enough back that I wouldn’t be seen.
A white house glowed in the moonlight, surrounded by lawns. The house was an art deco monstrosity, like the bridge of an ocean-going liner. Every window was blacked out apartfrom the one I’d seen from the heath. There was a lingering smell of coal smoke from a damped-down oven, incongruous against the modernity of the building.
There was a car by the front door. Big, black, sleek, like something from a gangster flick.
The car idled. A waste of petrol. This wasn’t a driver who was paying for his own fuel, or even worrying about rationing.
I waited and watched. A fox barked. From behind me, the usual rustles of the woods at night, but nothing from the house.
The car door opened, spilling laughter from a conversation in mid flow. Two people climbed out. A woman and a man. They were both well dressed, as if they’d been out for a night on the town.
The woman laughed. There was a muttered response from the man.
‘You’ll be late,’ the driver said. It wasn’t the tone you’d expect from a servant.
‘Not like they can start without us,’ the man said.
They opened the door to the house and stepped inside. The door closed behind them.
The car engine revved quietly and the car sprang forwards in a tight circle, thin beams of yellow light painting the leaves around me before I was left in darkness.
*
The parachute was still there, a reminder that this war was going to be different. Instead of trenches in France and Belgium, this one was going to be decided on our own soil, and in the air above. We’d known it was coming since the armistice. It had only ever been a temporary pause, a chancefor both sides to draw breath, raise another generation of men, fodder for the machine-gun and the artillery shell.
Vaughn’s house was a distant silhouette on the northern slope. It would have taken him five minutes to get there. If he’d phoned the police straight away, they’d be on their way.
The wireless set was too valuable to leave, so I sat in the heather, a lonely guard duty. I’d wait for the police constables, see it safely in their hands before I let it out of my sight.
The parachute shifted in the breeze, the ghost-like shape billowing. The storm’s coming, it seemed to say, and all that you know and love about this country will be destroyed, turned into the mud of the battlefield.
11
I drove down from the Forest, the road swallowed up by a tunnel of trees. I could have had my lights on full and no German airman would have seen me.
The police constables had arrived, breathless with excitement. Young men, who’d grown up with the tales their fathers told, ready to do their bit. They’d approached the parachute the way I’d approach an angry bull, abundant caution mixed with a sense of awe at being in the presence of something with a power beyond the everyday.
As I drove, I let my mind wander. Vaughn Matheson. A name from the past. A name I hadn’t expected to hear in the Sussex countryside.
When he’d stepped forwards to shake my hand, I’d been curious to see if he’d recognise me. We’d met before. I had a suspicion he wouldn’t remember, and I’d been right. But I remembered.
I remembered very clearly.
It was 1916. I was a new private, my first rotation into the front line. Four weeks of training at Aldershot, drilling on the parade ground, a chaotic few weeks being shuttled around between reserve bases in northern France. All too soon, the orders we’d all been waiting for and dreading. The long, slow train journey in a cattle wagon, the march to the support trenches that had until recently been the enemy’s front line, fragments of bodies still embedded in the mud.The final march as far as the linking trenches would allow, slithering over the top and hugging the ground across an exposed wasteland to get to the front line.
I’d dropped down into the forward trench as an enemy mortar hit our line ten yards to my left. The zigzag of the trench layout protected me from the shockwave, but the cloud of red mist mixed in with the cordite showed me some of my mates hadn’t been so lucky. When my sergeant major slid down into the trench beside me and asked for volunteers to carry shells back from the front line to our artillery positions in the rear, my hand went up as if it had a mind of its own.
I was to be part of a small party of mud-covered Tommies, slipping on duck-boards, plunging waist deep into a soup of mud, oil, and human waste, carrying my armful of brass shells. My first initiation into the fact that most of soldiering is moving heavy things from one place to another and back again.
The artillery position was a mile behind the line. A gunner took my shells, one by one, like a well-rehearsed rugby manoeuvre. Each shell passed from man to man, rammed into the rear of the massive gun, steel door slammed shut and locking mechanism rotated into place, the order given, the gun fired. Each shot, the gun bucked, straining free of its shackles, landing with a crash that shook the ground. Each shell traversed the sky, presumably landing beyond the horizon. Out of sight, out of mind. Then the gun breech was opened, with a cloud of smoke, the empty shell removed, and the process repeated.
I found myself alone, ashamed of myself for being so quick to volunteer to leave the line. I was about to slip away when the gunnery sergeant spotted me and pressed me into another mission. A message to take to the higher-ups, further behind the line. All things considered, not the worst thing.
The officers’ mess was a ruined church, two miles back from the artillery position. Three miles from the front. As close to the fighting as many of the senior officers liked to get, preferring to learn about conditions on the ground from three-day-old copies ofThe Timesthat were shipped over from England along with their freshly laundered shirts.
My message was for Captain Vaughn Matheson. He wasn’t in the officers’ mess, and nobody knew where, or when, he’d turn up. I wrote the whole thing off as a bad job, and left the letter for him, in the care of an aging batman who must have started his military adventure when Victoria was a young woman.
