The leeward side of the hut lay open to the grey rain-filled daylight of water and low cloud. The aerial wires generated a ghostly morse of their own, soon dominated by a message from the approaching aircraft asking for a weather report. He spun the phone handle to get the met office — once, twice, three times — but the wire was dead. Must have been chewed through by water. “None available,” he told the plane, but the operator came back fast, saying they had to have one.
He stood in the doorway to observe the weather: cloud base two thousand feet, visibility a mile, wind westerly at forty knots, raining; went back and tapped it out. Not very accurate, but the operator in the plane seemed happy. He then wanted a bearing to bring him in, but the aerials must have shorted because they wouldn’t give a reliable reading. Third class, Brian sent back, so don’t rely on it. “I won’t,” said the ironic operator.
Christ, what rain. It came with frightening elemental force, as if it had an animal mentality and imagined it would win its battle against the land after one final effort. The paddy field was a lake as far as the trees, and ripples appeared, as if the DF hut were a boat on the open sea but approaching the coast. Water dripped through the roof, some splashing on to the Sten gun and ammunition. Maybe it don’t work any more: he took it outside, stood with legs apart and fired off a magazine, aiming level across the paddy field. The sharp fireworks-sound of bullets was muffled by the storm and taken harmlessly into its belly.
Soaked, he went back in the hut, stripped to the waist, and sat at the set. What a life! He’d a date with Mimi tonight, hadn’t expected to do a watch, but the corporal who was to have taken a turn had reported sick, and looked like being in dock for a couple of weeks. He called up the French operator at Saigon, using a mixture of Q signals and pidgin French: “Any planes flying around your way tonight?” Maybe he was reading a book and didn’t want to be disturbed, but he sent fast and nervous through the interference: “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” he tapped, and waited a few minutes.
Saigon came back: “My name is Henri. What’s yours?”
“Jean Valjean.”
Brian felt his mystification, repeated the name.
“How old are you?” Henri tapped out, making several mistakes. “Thirty-five,” Brian said, enjoying his game. “And you?”
“Twenty-seven.” Brian asked if he liked Saigon, and back came the wireless operator’s laugh: dah-dah-di-di-di-di-dah-dah. “Where were you born?”
Brian told him: “Nottingham.”
“Give me the address of a hot girl then.”
It was forbidden to send plain language, but Brian had never known any conscript operator that didn’t. What can you do, O what can you do, But ride to your death on a kangaroo? was a rhyme he had made up, and it came into his head now. He sent out a fictitious name and address to Saigon, and they gave the wireless operator’s handshake by simultaneously pressing down on their keys.
He watched the Dakota landing: it hovered low over the palm-trees, came bouncing on to the tarmac, and hurled itself like a cannonball in the direction of the control tower. He sent out his closing-down message — good night, good night, good night — and switched off the set, leaving the ether free for the confused legions of atmospherics. Darkness closed over the water, and he fastened the doors to stop insects getting at the lights and feeding on his cold sweat. The primus flared when he tried to light it for tea, so he kicked it away and drank water with his bread and cheese.
The thought of eleven hours still to go was appalling. Lightning winked at him under the slit of door, as if mocking him because he could have been in bed with Mimi. I’m not lucky enough for this world, though it’s better to laugh than curse your luck. The wind brawled with the hut like a hooligan. God knows how I got here, I don’t. I don’t mind being cut off, but this is like clink: not even a bleddy telephone to call the control tower.
“Look,” the old man said that night when I told him I’d be eighteen in the morning, “if I catch you joining up I’ll punch your bleddy ’ead in. Mark my word.” I’d come back late after a session with Pauline on the sofa, and felt marvellous. “You don’t join up,” I told him. “In case you don’t know, they’ve been calling people up for six years.”
“Don’t be so bleddy cheeky,” he said, scowling as black as thunder, as if he’d bosh the teapot over my head, though instead he poured me a cup. “I don’t care whether or not they call you up: they didn’t get me, did they?”
“Well,” I said, “thanks for the tea, but that was because you di’n’t pass your medical, though, worn’t it?”
“’Appen so. But I swung the lead a bit as well. After all them years on the dole I swore I’d never fayt for ’em, the bleddy bastards. Not after all me and yer mam and yo’ lot ’ad ter put up wi’.” He cut me a slice of meat, all fussy in a rare bout of letting himself go in talk.
“But don’t you see, dad, they’ll call me up, because I’m fit. I wain’t be able to get out of it.”
“Dave and Colin got out on it all through the war. They beat the bleddy redcaps.” He looked vacantly towards the curtained window. “They was boggers, our Dave and Colin was.”
“They got ’em, though, di’n’t they?” I said, remembering the time with regret.
“Ah,” Seaton said, laughing, “but the war was over by then.” He took a fat swig at his tea. “So stay out on it.”
But he hadn’t wanted to keep out on it, because that would mean staying in Nottingham when he wasn’t sure he wanted to any more. Not that he was afraid to desert either, but he felt he would be more of a deserter in letting himself be called up than roaming like an outlaw around the night streets, and in fact might miss something if he didn’t let himself go for once where the wind took him. The old man went on and on:
“Our Eddie deserted in 1917, got on a bike and rode to his sister’s at Coventry. The crafty bogger didn’t go by the road for fear the coppers ’ud stop ’im; he went along the canal bank and didn’t meet a soul. It was twice as far, but it paid him in the end. She hid him for six weeks, but the loony sod missed Nottingham and came back one day, so mother and dad had to look after him. A pal saw the coppers coming to the house and towd us, so he skipped off and stayed out in Wollaton Roughs. The poor bogger nearly froze to death. I used to ride out on my bike every day with snap my mother had packed up for ’im. But one day I worn’t clever enough: the bleddy coppers follered me, right to where Eddie was hiding — and got ’im. Three months later he was in France, and a week after that he was a prisoner with the Jerries till the end of the war. We had to laugh: our Eddie was fawce bogger.” Another round of hot tea was poured in the lighted kitchen.
After a drink of water Brian groped a way to the charpoy bed and spread sheets across it. Baker had let the accumulators run too low before phoning the transmitter compound for renewals, and there wasn’t enough light left to see a shadow by. He lay on the bed, listened to rain hitting the hut like thousands of grains of rice, the water harvest of South-East Asia. What would Colin and Dave have done in my place? Packed up and gone. But they wouldn’t have got this far, and I’ve seen things they’ll never see: “Did I tell you about that time I saw a python, our Dave, when I was in Malaya? In a paddy field it wor. Must a bin twenty feet long, as thick as my thin raps and splashing about like boggery. Di’n’t waste my time watching it, though.” “Better yo’ than me,” Dave would say. “I’d rather see Tarzan at the pictures.”