Unexploded (7 page)

Philip looked up from his sketchpad on the floor. His mother was peering over her Mrs Woolf. She didn’t like Lord Haw-Haw. She didn’t like him hearing Lord Haw-Haw. Children weren’t supposed to. That’s what she’d said before. But his father only raised two fin-gers, which meant
quiet, please
, and the tip of his cigarette burned red.

‘The last week has been supremely eventful in the history of the world. It has witnessed the first great climax of the German campaign, and, as to the result, there is now no doubt whatsoever. In disorder and despair, the British Expeditionary Force has sought to save itself by withdrawing from the Continent, but the very attempt has produced British casualties of a shocking magnitude.’

Philip leaped up from the floor, his eyes bright. ‘I saw them! I did! They’re up at the Grammar!’

His mother raised a finger to her lips.

He settled on the carpet once more. He considered his Spitfire and sighed. Why couldn’t he draw better? To trace was to fail.

Evelyn closed her book and leaned her head back. Geoffrey stared at the ceiling, blowing smoke as high as the picture rail.

‘Along a strip of land six miles deep, the British are still trying to cover the retreat of their forces across the Channel. On Wednesday, sixty British ships were hit by bombs and thirty-one were sunk, and today comes the news of still further British losses. The number of British and French prisoners taken is at present beyond computation.’

Evelyn crossed and recrossed her ankles. On the street outside, a woman’s heels clicked past, and somewhere on the Crescent, a door slammed heavily shut.

‘As you listened to the British radio a week ago, did you get the impression that there was going to be any withdrawal at all? Did you think that the necessity for a rearguard action was being contemplated by the dictator of Britain? Is it not a slightly novel experience to see the British people being treated as congenital imbeciles? And now, as the bloody and battered fragments of what was once the British Expeditionary Force drift back to the shores of England, the likelihood of invasion grows by the hour.’

Evelyn turned sharply. ‘Geoffrey, I think we’ve heard enough.’ But she knew her words were pointless. Who could turn off Lord Haw-Haw? Who in the country did not feel compelled to listen for the facts the BBC would not report?

‘Is it not a little amusing to think of the trumpetings with which Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain.
He
was the man to frighten Hitler!
He
was the providential leader who was going to lead Britain to victory. Look at him today, unclean and miserable figure that he is. When Germany threw off the shackles of Jewish gold, this darling of Jewish finance resolved upon her destruction. But thanks to
God
and the
Führer
, it is not Germany that is confronted with destruction today!’

Another voice spoke: ‘That is the end of our talk. Our next regular transmission of news will take place at 11:15.’

‘Philip, my love, it’s late …’ His mother’s hand was ruffling his hair. He hauled himself to his feet, clutching his pencil and sketchpad. Then he approached his father’s chair and waited for him to bend so he could offer his hug goodnight. Sometimes his father reciprocated with a whisker-rub. Not tonight. ‘Father?’

Geoffrey looked up and blinked himself back into the moment.

‘Doesn’t Mr Churchill wash?’

‘Of course he washes, Philip.’

‘Lord Haw-Haw said he was unclean.’

‘Lord Haw-Haw made a mistake.’

‘Is Mr Churchill a Jew?’

His mother started to lead him up the stairs. ‘See, Geoffrey. He really should have been in bed long ago.’

‘He’s not an infant, Evvie.’ The hinge in his jaw flexed. ‘No, Philip. Mr Churchill is not a Jew.’

‘Mr Feldman our baker is a Jew.’

‘Yes …’ Geoffrey nodded gravely. ‘Mr Feldman our baker is a Jew.’

‘Does
he
have much gold?’

‘Not much, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it?’

Geoffrey motioned him on his way. ‘Yes, nothing to worry about there, old bean.’

7

That spring, the news spread like Spanish flu through the Grammar: Hitler had chosen the Royal Pavilion for his English HQ.

Although no boy could say which boy had actually heard the broadcast, word had it that Lord Haw-Haw had made the announcement himself. It was the most thrilling news of the war so far.

Like its neighbour Park Crescent, Hanover Crescent was an elegant anomaly in the jumble of Brighton housing. Its Georgian townhouses were compositions of pilasters, pediments, arches, bow-fronts and balconies. Its position overlooking The Level declared it a place of privilege and privacy, and Orson’s house, Philip discovered, was even quieter than his own because Orson’s brother, Hal, was off being a hero in the war, and Ivy the housekeeper never seemed to speak, and Orson’s parents were old and so rarely seen in his house that Orson sometimes seemed like an orphan.

That day after school, he asked Philip if he wanted to know a secret.

Orson was nearly two years older than Philip. While most boys from the Grammar walked home every afternoon to Hove, these two both descended the hill to Brighton, and Orson seemed not to mind if they walked together, with Philip pushing his bicycle, even though he was only eight. But that spring day, out of the blue, something happened. Orson said, ‘Come over to mine.’

*

Upstairs in Orson’s room, Orson was on the rug on all fours with his head under the bed where even Ivy wasn’t allowed to look, he said. As he eased the secret out from under the bed, Philip’s jaw went slack.

Orson said he’d made it himself from a second-hand inductor, a crystal detector, and plates he’d stolen from his deaf grandmother’s set. ‘It even picks up Radio Bremen.’

‘Lord Haw-Haw …’ said Philip.

Orson nodded. ‘Lord Haw-Haw.’

An oatmeal box held the inductor in place. A bit of gauge wire made the connection. In metalwork class, he’d soldered earphone connections to the base. Then he’d strung aerial wire along the picture rail in his bedroom and down the outside wall, where he fixed it to a pipe he’d found at the bottom of Hal’s wardrobe. He’d dug a hole in the ground, packed it with soot, as the science master advised, then plunged the pipe in, earthing his connection. The case was plywood and parcel string. A semicircle of paper marked the positions of the stations. The tuner was a knob from the dead-specimens cabinet.

Orson had defied the quiet of his house.

Sometimes Philip wished he was also two years older and ten years smarter, but that afternoon, he felt only grateful that Orson had entrusted his secret to him. Besides, Orson could always be counted on to have something no one else had: a pen that wrote in invisible ink, a stink bomb for Assembly, a code-cracking book, tin cans on a long string, and now, best of all, a home-made secret wireless through which Lord Haw-Haw would speak.

‘With rare honesty, the English Prime Minister revealed his true goals to the world when he declared a war of destruction on Germany.
Even neutral observers were surprised at how brutally he rejected the Führer’s peace offer. No one in the past months, years and decades has worked harder at unleashing a European war, with the goal of destroying Germany, than England!’

Philip sighed and slipped out from beneath the headset they shared, an earphone apiece. They’d already listened for almost two hours but Lord Haw-Haw had said nothing, not a single word more, about Brighton.

‘I have to go now, Orson …’ Outside, the sky above The Level had bunched into a fist of dark cloud. Lightning flashed like faulty electrics.

‘Not yet.’ Orson reached for Philip’s satchel and pulled out the cornet of sweets. ‘Because today our subject is “Hitler at the Royal Pavilion”.’ He popped a bull’s-eye into his mouth.

The air was sticky. It needed to rain. ‘No, really. I’m off.’

‘I’ll begin.’ On a shelf above the bed, a German helmet gleamed. Hal had brought it home for him, Orson said; his trophy of war. Now, he lowered it on to his head and seemed to meditate on the line of his school tie against the roll of his belly. In the corridor outside, Orson’s mother crept past. The thought of her out there made Philip nervous and he sat down again.

Orson adjusted the helmet’s chinstrap. ‘After Hitler does all his work at his Pavilion HQ, he likes to take a break and paint outdoors. He carries an easel into the garden and sticks his thumb in the air and makes his eyes into slits. Sometimes he puts on a smock and a beret.’

Philip reached for a humbug in the cornet and sucked ruefully. ‘What does he paint? Flowers?’

‘Not
flowers
.’

‘People?’

‘He never paints people, you donkey. He’s not interested in
people
.
He paints the Pavilion because that’s what he can see, and because he has liked it ever since he saw it on a postcard.’

‘Who in Brighton sent him a postcard?’

‘Oswald Mosley, of course.’

‘Who?’

‘Hitler’s friend in England, and Lord Haw-Haw’s too. Hal has a phonograph of his speeches. On the postcard, it says: “Heil-o Hitler, Fine rally. Good turnout. Brighton is the business.” ’ He passed Philip the helmet. ‘Your turn.’

Philip excavated a clot of humbug from his back tooth and put the helmet on. ‘Hitler likes to go to the Pavilion Tea Room on sunny days. He likes England better than anywhere now because he has discovered warm scones with clotted cream and jam. Except he has to be careful to wipe his moustache when he’s finished or people will laugh and he will have to lose his temper and kill a few to set an example. As he eats, he smiles to himself because the other people at the tables have no idea that they’re sitting next to Hitler.’

‘Why not? He’s on all the newsreels. You have to at least make it believable, Beaumont.’

Beyond the room, the wind took hold of the elms.

8

The weekly Camp inspection, Geoffrey now understood, would never fail to be anything other than grim. Each Monday, he signed off the misery of men bewildered by circumstance and imprisoned out of view on top of a coastal cliff. The Camp had opened in early May, claiming the town’s racecourse, and although it was already his fifth inspection, he’d never grow accustomed.

In the old stables, new arrivals were housed like livestock, while those who had arrived in the early weeks were crammed into hot, airless barracks, the windows of which were painted over and covered in grilles. Buckets served for toilets, and standpipes for the ablutions of hundreds. The mission was cement. Day in, day out, under the tireless eyes of their guards, the prisoners produced cement. The dust of smashed limestone got everywhere – in their hair, their nostrils, their teeth, their food. No one was exempt from labour, except those ill enough to be confined to the flimsy hut that passed for an infirmary.

The Army ran the show, but the Home Department had required someone well regarded in the area to put his name to it all, to turn a blind eye, and Geoffrey had won the dubious honour. He could hardly speak of it, not to his colleagues at the Bank, not to Evelyn – least of all to Evelyn once he discovered the newest arrival.

‘Mr Beaumont!’

That afternoon, he’d flinched at the sight of his old tailor hunched on a metal bed in the regulation boiler suit. He’d wanted to turn, to run, to pretend he hadn’t heard his own name. His brain was reeling, but the old man had smiled, and he had no choice but to pause in his progress through the barracks. ‘Now, tell me, how is
Mrs B
eaumont?’

To hear him, Geoffrey could almost imagine they were simply passing the time at the bottom of Trafalgar Street. He couldn’t meet Mr Pirazzini’s eye. He felt too tall, too … well. Blood pounded in his ears and, as if from a distance, he heard himself reply. ‘Yes, she’s very well … Thank you.’ What a sickening charade.

After the first arrests, most of the German and Austrian tailors’ shops on Trafalgar Street had been looted, but Pirazzini and his wife endured in their premises until that morning, when Mussolini declared war on Britain, and the police arrived.

The tailor’s advanced age had guaranteed him a bed in the barracks at least, a bed no wider than he was, a bed that was screwed to the floor.

‘Please. Give her my best, will you?’

Geoffrey nodded.
Impossible
, he thought.

The old man had never failed to ask after Evelyn, not since the day nearly nine years ago when he’d spotted her, six months pregnant, carrying too many boxes and bags home from town. She had been a stranger to him then, but he’d insisted she come into the shop and take a seat with his wife before he went out again to find her a cab. He’d paid the driver before she realized, and the next day, through a mouthful of pins, he had refused Geoffrey’s efforts at repayment. ‘No, no,’ he’d muttered impatiently. ‘The wheel goes round. The wheel goes round.’ His mottled hands had sketched circles on the air,
his left ring finger lost, presumably, to an accident with the shears or a sewing machine.

Stooped behind the Singer, his wife had smiled, lifted her foot from the pedal and said, with an accent that was still heavily Italian, ‘Please, Mr Beaumont. My husband is he-goat, and life is short, no?’ Behind his back, she imitated Mr Pirazzini’s circling finger, but in a punning motion, beside her ear.
Loco
, that finger said, but her eyes were tender.

She was probably on the Isle of Wight. In the women’s camp. No letters between spouses.

He’d laughed that day all those years ago and had put away his wallet. ‘Well then, will I at least be able to persuade you to accept my custom?’

Mrs Pirazzini returned to the sleeve beneath her needle. Mr Pirazzini spat the pins into his four-fingered hand. ‘Mr Beaumont, do you not know? A tailor, like an undertaker, always accepts the custom of a tall man.’

So he invented something about a pair of new flannel trousers that needed cuffs. Mr Pirazzini shrugged obligingly. He’d had no idea then that the old man was booked weeks, even months, ahead; that he had clients who drove down from London.

The wheel goes round, the wheel goes round. Now, in the barracks, the old man waved the shiny stump of his finger over the endless row of beds. ‘Mr Beaumont, shall we agree on one thing? You will not pity me my accommodation, and I will not pity you the drape of that jacket.’