Hammond Innes - Dead and Alive

‘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 stopped clicking. ‘Was that when you realized 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 recognize, 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 would 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.’

In 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 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 hew 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 tanks 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 up on 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.