CHAPTER 53
We ate that night in a pizzeria next door to another cheap chain hotel, just outside Lille. The restaurant offered what I was learning to call wi-fi, and Susie was able to run a real-time conversation with her mother through her computer.

“Sent her pics of lily ponds, Gerald. She’s quite chuffed!”

“Told her about pressie?”

“No, I’ll save that for back home. Make a thing of it, prodigal…daughter comes home, like”

She had splashed out what I thought of as a lot of money on a scarf from the souvenir shop at Giverny, a print of one of Monet’s more colourful paintings of the flowers. I’d shuddered at the cost, but she wouldn’t take my advice.

“Look, love, this is my first ever foreign trip, I’m with friends, I’m going back to a Mam that’s not only accepted me but done it with love, real love. Never thought that could happen, never, so if I splash a bit too much cash, well, you’ll just have to sort me out some overtime, aye?”

There was chocolate mousse for pud, and the beer came in proper-sized glasses, so what else could I do but toast friends again, absent as well as present.

I’d talked through our route with Pete, and so I knew what was on my plate the next day. Sleep was a long time coming that night, and I don’t think it ever really arrived. I felt my age in the morning, and both doctors subjected me to some close stares before they simply nodded at each other. Matthew in his turn was quieter than I had seen him ever be, even after losing his friend that brutal day. Rodney produced some maps and books from his suitcase as we rode into Belgium, Pete at the wheel.

“Ashley, Susie, you two may not be aware of what happened here some years ago, so I have some study materials for your enlightenment. Now, Hitler had a totally unrealistic plan to drive his armies between the Commonwealth and American armies…”

I half-listened as he spoke, watching the posts at the side of the road, every third one seeming to hold a perched buzzard awaiting a road-kill breakfast, then I caught the word ‘Cromwell’. Rodney had a book on tanks open.

“This is the one that Gerald and Ernie were in, and this one…”

Ashley spoke up. “That’s a Tiger. Made a model kit of one when I were a lad”

Ernie roused himself. “Aye, and Ginge there, Gerald, he turned one of those buggers to scrap”

Ashley looked round. “What? In one of our pieces of crap?”

Matthew coughed, with just a hint of his usual humour. “David slew Goliath, dear boy, and Gerald most certainly slew that beast. Gerald?”

“Were luck, really. Can’t, couldn’t get round through armour, so shot up bits I could, so we had to stop him first. Jammed his turret, then broke his tracks”

Charles muttered quietly “Nothing too difficult then…” as he shook his head. Ernie laughed.

“We were a team, lad. I mean, no false modesty, I were quick with breech, but Ginge, well, he rally had an eye for a shot, and…”

He paused, the enthusiasm slowly draining from him. “And we lost a lot of mates to the bastards that day, an all. Bugger. Pete, where we off to?”

Our driver called back “Little village Gerald remembered. Different weather now, though”

Snow. Snow and as wonderful a Christmas dinner as I could ever remember having. Something showed in my face, and Susie’s expression changed, a smile lighting up everything except her eyes.

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘S’!”

It took us ten minutes before she revealed her word—‘shitehawk’.

Julian drawled out “I say! Shitehawks are Indian kites, not Buteo buteo! Unfair, I say!”

“Well, up yours, Doctor! Pete! Time for coffee and cake yet?”

“In a bit, girl. Just going to get off main roads for a bit, so I’ll have to pay a bit more attention”

“OK! I spy with my little eye…”

I realised she was simply trying to break the mood, but it was not really working. I had never been a driver, not for any great distances, but I understood how a map compressed itself to a narrow strip either side of one’s actual route, as if the journey were a straight line divorced from the wider world. It hadn’t been quite like that in the war, as we were a reconnaissance unit, but we had still ended up with a rather parochial view of the land we crossed. Our parish was our unit and the land it occupied, and everything else was just rumour and fear. Yes, I knew where we were headed, not too far from Dinant and Namur, and that was what had kept me awake the night before. The dreams were back, the German lay on his back in snow no longer clean, no longer white.

Susie got her cake stop, and then I tried to doze as Pete wrestled our bus through smaller lanes, and then. And just then.

“That’s the spot there, Pete. See house down towards that little bridge? We were parked… Ernie… where that swing park is?”

He looked down the road, and once again I had to remember how little he had actually been able to see.

“Aye. Happen that’s house with net curtains over there”

“Aye. I can see dead ground behind hedge. They’ve done it up nicely, Ernie!”

Lively words, but my eye was on the road surface, seeking any stains still in the tarmac even though my common sense was telling me it must have been dug up a dozen times since 1944. Ashley was still curious, in an irritating way, until Ernie rounded on him.

“What were special about here? I’ll bloody tell you! Two fucking SS bastards tried to do us over, and tried to kill Bob, and Ginge there, he just shoots one of them, and I pray to God you never have to find out how much blood is in a man’s body, because that was the day we did, and Wilf… Wilf had just done us a great Christmas dinner, roast goose and trimmings, and then we had that to deal with”

Ashley couldn’t take the hint. “Wilf? He not want to come”

I sighed, as Susie took my hand. “We left Wilf in their back garden. Anti-tank gun, we think, or SP. Ashley, son, it’s not like plastic kits. Wilf is reason we’re here”

I led our party down to the garden, pointing out how the ground sloped down from the hedge to a little depression before rising again to the front wall of the house.

“We were hull down, so bottom part of tank is protected by ground. What hit us came from… Rodney, through side, out through floor, what do you think?”

He lifted his hand to shade his eyes. “There, dear boy. Small rise, copse, woods behind. If it were myself, I’d have man-hauled a gun to that point, no noise, wait for a target to show itself firing on their vehicles”

“About right angle, Rodney. Aye. Think you’re spot on. Ashley, we were just here, but we’d found whitewash, and, er, liberated net curtains, shape, shine, shadow, aye? Camouflaged really well, but as soon as we fire it’s like a big flag, here we are!”

“Excuse me…”

There was a middle-aged woman at the gate to the house’s drive. “You are English?”

Ernie nodded. “Aye. Er, I mean yes. English. From Yorkshire”

“Ah. You were here in 1944?”

Some of us nodded, and she smiled. “I was very young, and we were, we had how you say? We had evacuated, then on our way home, before the Boche returned. It was not a St Sylvestre of the best”

Matthew nodded, and said something in French. Her eyes widened. “Oh! That poor young man!”

I started to say something about Germans in stolen uniforms, but Rodney raised his hand.

“No, my friend, she doesn’t mean him. You know of our loss, Madame?”

She smiled, in a very gentle way, crows-feet settling round her eyes. “We returned a few days after the Boche were sent home again. Was that your char in our—just there?”

I nodded, and she tried to laugh. “You stole our curtains, but somehow it is not in our hearts to condemn you! Please, take a meal with us, and then I will take you to see your friend”

She took us into her kitchen, which was certainly in a better state than I remembered, and disappeared to make a telephone call after making sure we had what was very nearly a decent cup of tea each. She returned with a better smile.

“Mademoiselle, Messieurs, please to follow me”

About three hundred yards from her house was a pub, café sort of place, and someone had found a Union flag, and there was a man in a suit with a chain over his shoulders who turned out to be the local mayor. He shook our hands, and then a couple of girls brought out beers, soup, steak and chips, a pile of bits of bread, and Mister Mayor spoke a few words in French to what was quickly becoming a small crowd. Rodney did the translation for me as he spoke.

“They left their homes twice, and the first time they came back the Germans had left it in ruins, but come back they did, and then, well, he’s talking about sacrifice, loss and courage. And debts, dear boy. You should speak. I can interpret for you”

Before I could object, he rose, saying a few things in French before turning to me. “Trooper Gerald Barker, Royal Tank Regiment”

What to say? I cobbled something together, Rodney repeating it in French, and I am sure he said more than I did, and I really suspect he mentioned that German I shot, but I got through it, because with me were so many comrades. Bob was there in spirit, and Harry, and, well, Wilf was still there. The mayor replied, and Matthew did the speaking that time.

“My friends, from England, our friends, our saviours. Not many of us were here during those awful times, but we have parents, we have grandparents, they have told us. We are the lucky generation, for we have not had to see what they did, experience such… such unpleasantness. For that blessing, we owe such men as these. Gentlemen, this village is now your village. This is your home, your place of refuge from any storm, of welcome and amity—friendship. We raise glasses—oh, chaps, a toast. To courage, to steadfast endurance, to our English friends!”

He turned to me with a grin. “They only had about twenty minutes to arrange this, boys, but they’ve got a bed for each of us, and I rather suspect we have a long evening ahead of us! Rather like the Belgian villages I remember—oh, dear boy! You are blushing!”

A plump, enthusiastic, grateful girl. So sorry, Tricia my love.

The woman we had first spoken to, Marie, came over to us. “If you would please to accompany me…”

Another short walk down the lane took us to the local church, a solid little building in grey stone with a slate roof and a low steeple.

“They are all over here, my friends”

The headstones were familiar, far too many of them for such a small community, but we walked the ranks and files to make sure that we gave each old comrade a nod of recognition, a salute of respect, before we found the familiar badge.

“Wilfrid Connor Braithwaite, 14th Royal Tank Regiment. Killed in action…”

My words failed me then, tears flowing too freely to see the rest. Susie was there, and Ernie, all rifles stacked in threes, and they led me from the church yard as Pete brought the poppy wreath we had carried so far.

I got very drunk that night. If the German came to pay a visit, I can’t remember.