Their Finest Hour and a Half (25 page)

‘Quiet, please,' ordered the first assistant director, through a megaphone. ‘
Quiet
. Going for a take.' There was a cessation of movement behind the camera and an indefinable sharpening of attention. The actresses re-assumed their positions at stern and bow, the clapper-board smacked shut and the boy holding it hurried to one side. The row of spectators on a nearby sand-dune nudged one another and leaned forward. The man with the megaphone shouted ‘Action!' and then for nearly half a minute one actress pretended to steer, while the other pretended to gaze at the horizon. Neither spoke a word and nothing else happened. The spectators stirred uneasily.

The director shouted ‘cut', and the actresses relaxed their poses. There was a moment of consultation behind the camera, and then the man with the megaphone called ‘Going again', and Arthur slowly rubbed out the corners of the triangle and began to turn it into a hexagon.

There were two more ‘goes' at the half-minute-of-nothing-at-all before the director was satisfied, and then Ambrose Hilliard, almost unrecognizable in a stained jersey and oilskins, was rowed out to join the lady actresses. Some mime-play followed, during which, at a shouted cue, the three occupants of the boat looked suddenly upward at an invisible object and then ducked. They were asked to carry out this procedure a further five times, and then lunch was called. Arthur stepped over the elaborate hexagon-within-a-pentagon that now circumscribed his stool and followed the crew around the edge of the sand-dune to where a table had been set with plates of sandwiches and a tea-urn. People were eating as if they had spent the morning breaking rocks instead of standing on a beach, and Arthur waited to one side until a gap might appear in the scrum.

‘Hello there,' said Phyl, glancing up at him. She had bagged a section of breakwater and was making rapid notes in a file. ‘Enjoying yourself?'

‘Yes, thank you,' he said, automatically.

‘If you're wondering if it's always this slow, then it's not. We've fallen behind. Our director wasn't entirely happy with the performance of the waves.'

‘Oh I see.' Though in fact, he'd barely registered the slowness; since joining the army he'd become used to great wedges of time spent simply waiting around, without any clear idea of what one was actually waiting for.

‘We'll have to start catching up,' she said. ‘The first couple of days are fairly straightforward but the end of the week's sheer hell. Over a hundred extras on Thursday, and the RAF's promised to send us a couple of planes.'

‘Have they?'

‘And there's Chick's dog as well, doing a couple of scenes. Did you know it had a part in the film?'

‘No, I didn't.'

‘Though it'll be less trouble than most actors, probably.'

‘Yes.'

‘No costume, no make-up, no drivelling on about the size of dressing-rooms.'

‘I'm sure.'

She looked up at him with apparent amusement. ‘You don't say much, do you?'

‘Well . . . I—' There was, he realized, a large thumbprint on his left lens; he took off his spectacles and started to polish them. He'd come across this sort of thing before in conversations with women – all of a sudden they'd want you to talk as well as listen, and then you'd be stumped.

‘It doesn't matter,' said Phyl, shrugging. ‘Makes a pleasant change around here. Just don't be afraid to speak up if there's something we ought to know.'

‘Oh yes. About that – I was wondering . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘When are you filming the part of the story set at Dunkirk?'

She raised an eyebrow. ‘We already have.'

‘When?'

‘Those two scenes that we shot this morning. They're supposed to be taking place just off the French coast.'

He looked at her carefully to see if she might be joking. It appeared not.

‘When you see it on screen,' she said, ‘there'll be a whole fleet of other ships. It was a glass shot, you see, it's like a magic-lantern slide that sits on a frame in front of the camera lens. And there'll be sound effects put on afterwards, explosions and so on. It'll all be quite different.'

‘I see.'

She was glancing at her notes again, clearly keen to get on with her work, and Arthur gave an awkward sort of nod.

‘Thank you,' he said, and he saw her bite her cheek. Saying ‘thank you', then, was probably too formal for the current situation. He always found the beginnings and ends of conversations rather difficult to negotiate, rather ill-defined; it was a pity there wasn't a clear, impersonal signal of some kind, of the Aldis-lamp variety.
Blink, blinkety, blink: – I wish to stop speaking to you. Please move away.

There were fewer people, now, around the refreshment table, and he took a sandwich and a cup of tea and retraced his steps around the dune. A gust of wind had tumbled the stool a few yards from its previous position, and he cleared a fresh section of sand before setting it down again.

He'd last seen an Aldis lamp on the beach at Bray-Dunes, on the fourth day of the evacuation. A driver from his unit had found one amongst the litter on the sand – though ‘litter' was not really the word for it; there
was
no adequate word for it. For half a week, fifty thousand men had lived and slept among the dunes that stretched from Dunkirk to La Panne, had been shelled and machine-gunned, had nearly gone mad from thirst, had used bomb craters as foxholes and foxholes as latrines, had queued time and time again for a place in a boat, in long patient lines that ran from the land into the sea like human breakwaters, had emptied their rifles at Stukas and played cards and prayed and sworn and waited for rescue, with the German guns edging closer, and the sea that had been like grey glass for the first few days beginning to slap and heave and rock the debris on its margin. And somewhere amongst all the filth and disarray, somewhere above the tide-mark of discarded greatcoats and packs, of smashed planks and crates and smears of oil, driver Tony Pierce had found a signal-lamp.

He brought it back to the cleft in the dunes that the remnants of their unit had adopted as home, and spent the fag-end of the afternoon fiddling with the mechanism. There was nothing else to do, for whether it was down to the deteriorating weather or the German navy, or the arrival of a vast invasion force in East Anglia, or a decision by the British government to cut their losses and simply abandon the BEF (for nobody knew what was going on – rumour was piled on rumour), there were currently no ships near their part of the shore, although a speck or two on the horizon seemed to hint that more were on their way.

Arthur opened a tin of peas he'd been hoarding and counted them into an upturned helmet; it came to seven each and the men ate them as if they were cocktail olives. Darkness fell and the wind dropped a little. There was no moon visible, and the only light was from the glimmer of a thousand cigarettes, and the red-tinged pall of smoke that hung to the west, above the port of Dunkirk. Pierce disappeared for a while, and then returned in triumph, bearing a signals book. ‘Borrowed it,' he said laconically. ‘Shall we give it a try?'

Arthur and Pierce and Madden, and a few others too rattled to sleep, walked down the beach towards the water, where a smear of phosphorescence marked the breaking surf.

‘There's a whole section on “Calls to an Unknown Ship”' said Pierce. ‘What about it, chums?'

‘“Calls to an Unknown U-boat”, more like,' someone muttered, but no one tried to stop Pierce. Arthur thought afterwards that as the only NCO present he should have said something, but at the time the scheme had seemed no more strange than all the other strange and terrible things that had happened over the past week, ever since a motorcyclist had swung past the bakery at Merville where they'd had their billet and had told them to head for the coast ‘on General Gort's orders'. From then on it had been like one of those terrible dreams where a simple task is constantly hampered by the bizarre and the unfathomable. The roads had been clogged with terrified refugees, every yard of the verge strewn with abandoned luggage and clothing and burnt-out cars; half of the unit had gone off to look for firewood one night and had never come back; a Stuka had strafed a herd of cows at a cross-roads, and Arthur had spent most of a morning helping to move bovine corpses so that the trucks could get through. Every mile had been marked by chaos and fear and dead bodies, and then, when they were still half a league from the coast, they had finally run out of petrol. After they'd pushed the trucks into a ditch and spiked the engines, the lieutenant had said, ‘It's every man for himself now, chaps,' and Pierce had nipped into a nearby village and returned minus his watch but wheeling two ancient bicycles. Those last few miles had been the most serene of the journey; Arthur had never ridden a bike, so he'd perched on the back of Madden's and closed his eyes, and the breeze on his face had been almost pleasant, despite the fact that the air reeked of burning petrol.

So to find himself standing beside an invisible sea while Pierce flashed a message into the darkness was merely one more oddity to add to the list, and the fact that an answer came blinking back out of the night was pleasing but not entirely unexpected.

‘They're sending a boat for us,' said Pierce calmly, and started to take off his coat, and Madden volunteered to fetch the rest of the unit, and to find a few others beside who might want a midnight rescue.

They waded out Indian file, Pierce at the front giving the lamp a blink every half-minute or so. The beach shelved so gently that they were ten yards out before the water crept as far as Arthur's groin and he realized, with a gasp, how awfully cold it was. Pierce kept going until he was chest-deep and then stopped and sent a double flash out into the darkness.

‘Oi Pierce, tell Ma I'm coming home,' shouted someone from the back of the line. There was a laugh and somebody else called, ‘Tell my wife to get the kettle on' and before very long the whole of the queue, except Arthur, was shouting requests for Pierce to send a message to their granny, to their dog, to their baby son, to the landlord of the Barley Mow, and Pierce was telling them to pipe down or they wouldn't hear the boat coming, pipe
down
chums, and then there was a sudden sheet of light to the far west and all noise stopped. It was a ship burning, a minesweeper, its silhouette momentarily perfect before another flash of orange broke it in half. The sound of the first explosion rolled across the water, but before the sound of the second reached them, the light had gone.

For a moment there was utter silence and utter darkness, and then Arthur heard the clop of an oar.

‘Oh—' said Pierce, and there was a thud, and the man in front of Arthur cried out and Arthur himself was smacked on the shoulder, knocked sideways and then hit on the back of the head, and then he was upside-down in the water with his nose actually grazing the sand, his pack dragging him down, and he tried to push off the bottom but something hit him on the head again, and then fingers clawed at his face and grabbed him by the hair and pulled him above the surface. He heard the bark of the air leaving his lungs, and then he was being hauled painfully over a wooden ledge before tumbling face first across the thwarts of a rowing-boat. Someone fell on top of him and a boot caught him above the eye, and he wasn't properly awake then, at least not in any consistent way, until he opened his eyes and saw a feathering of pale streaks across the sky, and felt the gentle judder of planking under his shoulders and sat up to find that he was on a Thames paddle steamer, five miles out of Dover. He had a stinking headache and had lost his spectacles and his pack and a clump of hair from one side of his head, and he thought, looking around the solid carpet of sleeping soldiers that covered the upper deck, that he had lost his entire unit – until Madden found him just as they disembarked.

‘Pierce?' asked Arthur.

Madden shook his head. Pierce had never emerged from the inky water, and neither had two others from the front of the line. It was possible, of course, that they'd waded back to shore, but the likelihood was that after weeks of dodging Jerry bullets, they'd been done for by the hull of a British rowing-boat.

In the special troop-train from Dover to God-knows-where, Arthur had dozed and clutched the postcard he'd been given by a lady volunteer at the station. ‘Fill in the address,' she'd said, ‘and we'll post it to your people to let them know you're safe,' and a stub of pencil had been passed from soldier to soldier in Arthur's carriage, and the sheaf of postcards handed back to the platform just as the train moved off. Arthur had kept his, since there was no one in particular to send it to. He still had it, propped on the mantelpiece in Wimbledon.

The afternoon of the first day of filming was very similar to the morning. By three o'clock most of the adult spectators had drifted away, and the schoolchildren who took their place needed only half an hour to realize that anything in the way of entertainment would have to be created by themselves. Shouting ‘Cut' just after the assistant director had shouted ‘Action' kept them amused for a while, and then one of the more enterprising started taking pot-shots at the camera with a potato gun. Chick, his face expressionless, walked over to the foot of the dune and crooked a finger. Chopper flew towards the group like a brindled bullet, and the crest of the dune was suddenly empty.

Tea and rock buns were served at four and then, as Arthur was making his way back to his own particular patch of sand, he was approached by a young man in sergeant's uniform.

‘Hadley Best,' said the other, gripping Arthur's hand and staring into his eyes with disconcerting intensity. ‘I'm playing Johnnie. I gather that you're our military expert.'