I started forward along the passage-way. I had gone a few paces and was a short distance from the yard when a sentry appeared in the opening, halted, in a stooping, unsoldierly fashion and stood with his back towards me. How he failed to see me, I don’t know. As he turned, he must have looked, even if inadvertently, down the passage-way, and I would not have said that, at that range, the shadows were enough to hide me. I could only freeze, my heart pounding, against the wall. The sentry tugged at his rifle sling, easing it on his shoulder, and then his hands seemed to be busy at his pockets: the unmistakable actions of a man preparing to light a cigarette. It was likely he would choose the concealment of the passage-way in which to smoke: five minutes on tenterhooks.
Experience had taught me that where there is a choice between several possibilities which cannot be calculated exactly, and cold steel, then cold steel is the better choice. At all events, decision is better than hesitation. The sentry might smoke his cigarette and move on, and I might wait for him — though I would still have his presence to contend with. On the other hand, he might turn his head at any moment. If I silenced him, and even if I eventually got out of the factory successfully, our break-in would naturally be discovered, and the Germans, if they had any sense, would switch the schedules of their shipments. But then again, since everything in the office had been left as I found it, there was just a chance they would take the death of the sentry to mean a sabotage attempt on the factory itself, search the premises for explosives, and overlook the information in the patron’s office. Better this chance than my capture and outright failure.
All this must have passed through my brain in seconds. But a simple fact tipped the scales in favour of cold steel. The German was standing, reaching for his cigarette, not inside the passage-way, but just beyond its entrance, in view of the yard. This meant that he must himself be unobserved and that he was presumably confident he would remain so for the length of time it took him to enjoy his illicit cigarette. If I acted at once I could take advantage of the safety he himself had indicated to me.
The stiletto I had acquired at Tarbes was in its sheath inside my trousers against my hip. It could be drawn almost noiselessly, but I took the precaution of waiting for a masking sound — the German striking his match. The match flared. I drew the stiletto. The German’s head bent into his cupped hands, the flame lighting up his helmet and a thin strip of neck above his collar. I moved a step or two forward along the wall. I knew that if the Germans found a dead guard they would take reprisals, and, for want of anyone else, they might shoot one or two of the innocent factory workers. But I could already hear Jules’ and Émile’s laconic response. ‘N’importe’ — my friends would spit — ‘they shouldn’t make parts for the Bodies.’
I took another step forward. If the sentry should turn round now to throw his match into the passage-way, better he should come face to face with me with my drawn stiletto than catch me at a distance. But he tossed the match casually to his right, scarcely moving his head. As his right hand was engaged, returning the match-box to his pocket, I struck — my left hand covering his mouth, fingers pinching the nose, the blade entering left of the spine: a text-book application of my close combat training. The only thing I had forgotten was the cigarette. My hand rammed most of it into the sentry’s mouth, but I was left with an angry burn in the centre of my palm.…
My Dad. Cold steel. A man’s back.
Marian and the kids are walking through the gardens, opposite the ice rink; round the bend where the river stretches away upstream in a long, straight, tree-fringed view; on, along the towpath by Petersham meadows, where there are always some cows or a pony or two; the boys will walk along the top of the little concrete wall by the towpath, as they always do, and Marian will walk below. Then to the ferry point at River Lane, where the trees begin — the tall chestnuts behind the towpath, in new leaf, and, by the river, alders and willows, dipping and stooping over the water, the wash heaving over the branches, scooting mallards … I can see all this almost more vividly than if I were there myself. And suddenly I clutch Dad’s book closer, protectively, to me, as if Marian, likewise, can see me with it, sitting by the french windows, like a man with a secret no one else must see, with a possession no one else must share.
… Reprisals did take place. We heard that two men from the factory were questioned then arbitrarily shot. But the shipment times were not changed. One shipment — the next scheduled that month — was successfully sabotaged, not by our group but by Lucien’s. Following this, we heard that the factory manager was being ‘investigated’ by the Gestapo.
But it was now time for me to bid adieu to Jules and Émile. My period in the Caen region was coming to an end.…
So Dad slips away (end of Chapter 12), terse and brisk as ever, to his next assignment; to be picked up, in a moonlit field, by an R A F Lysander; to be dropped, four weeks later, into France again. And so he slips away from me; into the realms of action and iron nerves; into the silence of a man on a hospital bench. That one moment of reflection, of perplexity. What was it like, Dad? What was it like to be brave and strong?
At the end of River Lane there are usually parked cars; an ice-cream van. Marian will stop here. Will Martin pay? I am saying these things as if somehow the statement of them is something more than the reality. Like Dad’s book — like these jottings of mine, which are fast turning into a book too. The smell of the river: a mixture of mud, oil and sodden timber. Why aren’t I there? Martin and Peter lick their ice-creams. Marian licks hers. Or perhaps she doesn’t have one. She has this thing about keeping her figure — I approve of it — though she isn’t in the least overweight. The kids go down to the river’s edge, where the water laps at the slipway. Some dinghies are pulled up. Marian stays up on the bank, watching them. But she isn’t really thinking of them, I know. As she stands on the bank, her eyes dim and a half-guilty, half-mystified look crosses her face. She is thinking of me.
On, further; along the towpath, bushes and trees now on either side. The sun flickering through the willow stems. The boys walking ahead, looking for large sticks to brandish, Marian walking behind, a little abstractedly. Into the grounds of Ham House. Across the trim lawns; tulips and gravel walks (now there is a similarity I have never thought of — the grounds of Ham House and the grounds of Dad’s mental hospital). They say the first occupant of Ham House — a cabinet minister of Charles II — was half mad. Once we took the boys to look round the inside of the house; they were bored, and afterwards I lectured them on the importance of a sense of history (you see, I am not only cowardly, but pompous too)…. Into the gardens at the back of the house where the tea shop is. And there, while she watches the sparrows peck at crumbs, the same anxious look will cross her face.
All of this touches me more than if I were really there to see it happen.
Four-fifteen. Dad leaps from a Halifax bomber into the Haute-Saône.
Have I mentioned yet how Marian and the kids behave on the subject of Dad? They are quite heartless about him. They forget about him. Marian once skipped half-heartedly through Dad’s book; but the kids have never read it. They don’t visit him; they don’t think of him as my father so much as a peculiar object I go and see on certain Wednesdays and Sundays. (I took the boys to visit Dad once: I said, ‘Martin and Peter, Dad, your grandsons,’ but Dad didn’t move an eyelid and the boys giggled, and afterwards they started to talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’ — as opposed to Grandpa Lenny, who is Marian’s father, and, of course, perfectly compos mentis.) When I come back from visiting Dad, Marian never says, ‘How is he?’ or ‘Any better?’ She blames me for going in the first place. She blames me for repeatedly going on these pointless trips. She blames Dad for being a liability and she blames me for Dad’s being blameworthy. And she communicates this blame to the kids. I have even noticed that she sometimes fails to upbraid them when they talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’. I know what they are all thinking when I go off to see Dad every Wednesday or Sunday: they are thinking I go there just to get away from them.