Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

IT’S COMING ON for evening, the day’s heat lifting, the sinking sun tingeing the tents pink. At the end of the row of them, he sees men filing onto the makeshift parade ground at the center of the encampment. As he watches, a barking sergeant puts them through their paces.

The drilling began three nights ago, led by a handful of NCOs, the self-appointed camp leaders. The men had rolled their eyes at first, called them zealots, 150-percenters. Why drill if you didn’t have to, if there were no officers to make you? It had started with a group of U-boat men. They’d been sucked to the surface in a bubble of air, their sub’s last gasp, when it had been split in two by a depth charge in the Channel, and pulled aboard a British minesweeper. They were men who’d been at sea for years, men who’d won victories. And they left the rest in no doubt that, had they been on the western front, the invasion would have been beaten back, or they’d have died trying. Only a couple of them were NCOs, but even the seamen among them acted as if they outranked the other men. They looked at Karsten and the rest — healthy, whole — and flashed them their scars, their burns, and laughed when the others looked away. They made Karsten think of old whores showing their wares to choirboys, and indeed, among the least offensive names they called them was virgins.

Not that they stopped at name-calling.

Several fellows had fallen foul of them, for criticizing the high command mostly. One mechanic had been beaten unconscious with a tin mess tray by a thick-necked ensign for having the temerity to blame the Leader. Karsten remembers the streaks of blood and gravy on the man’s face, and the tray, rocking gratingly on the floor, as warped and twisted as a piece of shrapnel.

To think that Karsten had hoped to be a submariner like his father before him, had once, for the price of a round of drinks, bribed his way on board one of the long, dark vessels in port just to get a feel for it.

During the day, the 150-percenters can be seen polishing their boots, brushing their uniforms, and for each of the past three nights they’ve led the drill. There’d been only a dozen men that first night, but now, as Karsten watches the formation wheel and turn, he sees rank after rank of men, perhaps a company’s strength. They look smart enough from where he stands, although it’s strange to see them come to attention, their feet stamping down in silence on the turf, no ringing parade-ground echo.

“Enjoying the show?” It’s Schiller. “Looks like you want to fall in.”

Karsten shakes his head. The camp leaders have called for all noncoms to assemble their men for drill, but he’s kept silent about his stripe. Now, he realizes, he’s tapping his foot in time to the cadence. Yet he can’t quite see himself falling in when he should be leading. He looks down at his scuffed, scarred boots and wonders when he last polished them.

“Maybe you should,” Schiller says softly.

“I suppose Heino has.”

“Him? Haven’t you heard? Shipped him off to a youth camp, the Britishers did. For the underaged.”

“How did they know his age?” Karsten begins, and then he sees the other’s wolfish grin.

Schiller starts to saunter on, down the alley of tents, but turns back, fishes in his tunic pocket. “Almost forgot. They were issuing these outside the mess.” He holds out a bright square of paper, and after a second Karsten takes it. It’s a Red Cross postcard.

He watches Schiller amble off, then turns the card over in his hands. It’s already preprinted with a curt message:

Dear _________:

This is to inform you that I am a prisoner of the British / American / Soviet forces.

My health is poor / fair / good.

Sincerely / Love, _________

He’s furious at these words, thrust in his mouth like a gag. But then, he realizes, he’s hardly been able to think of much more to say for himself, despite his agonizing. He’s reminded again of those postcards of his mother’s guests— delightful, lovely, charming —their repetitious, interchangeable sentiments, and he’s suddenly relieved by the anonymity of the card before him, the impersonality.

He looks down the row of tents, over their yellowing peaks and ridges, in the direction Schiller has gone, towards the drilling men, still going through their paces. He does want to join them, feels the pull, like gravity, yet he’s not sure he belongs. Too ashamed? he wonders. Perhaps also too proud, in his own stiff-necked way. Not ready to be forgiven.

And it comes to him then that he had noticed a change in the guests’ postcards as the years went by. The views were no longer lovely or charming, but awesome, imposing, majestic. The Brocken was an “indomitable peak,” according to one guest, a comment that puzzled Karsten mightily since he’d led the fellow up it not two days earlier. More baldly, one young man, who’d appeared at breakfast on his first morning in shining, squeaking lederhosen, wrote that it was “a truly Aryan landscape.” Karsten had actually held that one up, studying it’s glossy picture, then staring at the familiar slopes above him, straining to see it.

ESTHER STEERS CLEAR of Arthur as much as possible in the days following the invasion. It’s not so hard. June is a busy time on the farm, between the dipping and the shearing, and during the days he’s mostly on the hillside with the flock. As for the evenings, she keeps out of his way by spending more time with Jim, helping him with his homework — he’s slogging his way through Great Expectations —chatting with him at supper in the quick slangy English her father has trouble following.

The boy’s generally impatient with her concern, but he tolerates her checking his wound each evening with preening stoicism. When, after a couple of days, she tells him he’s healed and doesn’t need the dressing anymore, he tugs it back down firmly. Arthur says he looks a proper fool, but Esther indulges him, studies the small scab carefully, and says, well, yes, maybe they better keep it covered for one more day. “In case of gangrene,” she says, po-faced. And so it goes for a week. Somehow the shared fantasy has brought them together. She knows Jim reckons his bandage a badge of honor, a reminder of his bravery, but to her it’s a token of her care for him, however frayed and dirty. It slips off when he’s sleeping, but she smiles watching him fiddle with it in the mornings, settling it at a rakish angle over one eyebrow.

“Who are you supposed to be,” Arthur asks, “the Mummy?” And for a moment Esther blushes, not sure whom he’s talking to, until he raises his arms before him and does the stiff-legged walk.

Arthur’s always thought her a fool for bringing Jim home, but she knows why she did it. She’d been late to the station that time, reluctant to go, as if she were somehow being asked to replace Eric. When she arrived other families were already leaving with their evacuees, the children’s faces bright as new toys.

“You missed all the good ’uns,” Jim said later with a grimace.

He’d hated all the picking and choosing, he told her, the pointing fingers, and “I’ll take that one.” He took one look at the purse-lipped women lined up to receive them and pulled his gas mask over his head. “All the pretty girls went first, then the plain ones, then the boys who combed their hair, who stood up straight and answered ‘sir’ or ‘missus.’” When Esther got there, all that was left were what Jim called the “licorice allsorts”—the spotty kids, the snotty kids, the fat ones who looked like they ate too much, the ones who scratched, the ones who smelled of piss or sweat or, in Jim’s case, fags and booze.