Peacetime (7 page)

He had studied these charts closely and had based his own plan of work upon them. The underlying map was sixty years old – old enough to show everything that existed at Fleet Point long before the necessity for the guns arose. The houses were marked, as was the abandoned Light. Where the airfield now stood there had been only open pasture, and where the road followed the line of the coast only a track was marked.

There had been some earlier construction work there during the previous war, but this had been abandoned before it was completed. Several large, circular platforms had been built, and the track of a small-gauge railway laid outwards from them, but the former had never been complemented by any artillery, and the sleepers and rails of the railway – presumably to supply ammunition to the guns – had never been added to the reinforced line of their base. It was clear to Mercer that these earlier foundations, long since buried and lost, were a considerable distance from where he was currently working, and so he was able to ignore them.

The tower, of course, was not marked on this earlier map, and it was not until he arrived to inspect the site in the company of the Trinity House men that he saw the structure and understood how useful it might be to him. His original intention had been to occupy one of the empty houses, but someone quickly pointed out to him that this would place him too closely among the people living there. The tower, on the other hand,
would afford him both the proximity and the distance he required.

The Army planners had drawn up their blueprints quickly and crudely. The forms and dimensions of their platforms, defences and ancillary buildings were uniform and easily duplicated, using local contractors under military supervision wherever the Ministry of Works men were in short supply. The reinforced concrete beneath the guns had been poured to a depth of six feet, those beneath the other buildings to half that depth. The buttresses, connecting walkways and sea-defences had been constructed less solidly. Someone, Mercer guessed, knew the place well and so knew how short-lived these were likely to be, especially where the walls were built close to the tide line.

The guns themselves had been stripped down and taken away in the autumn of 1944. They had seen little action. A log of their deployment was contained in Mercer's files. They had saved little shipping and sunk no enemy vessels. Every single page of the logs showed up the tedium and emptiness of the lives of the men stationed there.

The block-house built for these crews was the most substantial of the ancillary structures, but the bulk of this had already been demolished prior to Mercer's arrival, the work having been carried out at the same time as the guns were removed. Its sand-filled foundations stood several hundred yards to the landward side of the tower. On the map, a road had been projected between this and the gun platforms, but there was no indication of this on the ground, and again Mercer guessed that it had been omitted from the work by someone who knew the place better than the planners.

In addition to the guns, a number of winch platforms were constructed to the north of the site, from which barrage balloons were once intended to be deployed.

It had been immediately clear to Mercer how much of this earlier work he himself might now completely disregard, turning his attention only to those few structures which lay within the boundary of the new Station and its surrounding yards. The past here was either quickly buried by the sand or drawn away by the sea, and the previous works of man were never mistaken for anything other than the temporary marks and blemishes they were.

Following his first visit to the place, Mercer had returned alone several days later to walk the ground and to assess better what lay ahead of him. The expectations of the Trinity House men were not unreasonable, but everything they now demanded of him was founded upon their preparations for the distant future, rather than any close understanding of the recent past within which the work was about to start.

The men accompanying him on that first occasion had seemed surprised by how many people had gathered to watch their arrival and departure, keeping their distance for the duration of the visit.

In the summer of 1943, a bomber returning to the airfield had crash-landed close to one of the gun emplacements, cracking its revetments and putting the gun out of action for eight weeks, during which time there was no call upon it. The revetment was repaired, but the work seemed a waste to Mercer. Two months later, a distant vessel was fired upon and hit at the mouth of the Freeman Channel. The boat was not sunk, but was driven away and never again seen. It
was referred to in the gun's log as a probable E-boat, but the tone of the accompanying report made it clear to anyone who read it that a great deal of uncertainty surrounded the episode. Too much was made of the isolated incident. The same empty, horizon-scanning days stretched away on either side of it; the arrival of every lorry and every aircraft droning distantly overhead was still meticulously noted.

Approaching the tower, he saw two men waiting there for him. Imagining that they might have been two of the men of the place, his first instinct was to conceal himself from them, but as he came closer he saw that the man standing closest to the tower door was Jacob Haas.

Mercer watched them for a moment.

The man waiting further back seemed anxious. He constantly looked around him as he waited, and he particularly watched in the direction of the houses. He called to Jacob and gestured to him to leave the tower, but Jacob ignored these entreaties and went on knocking and shouting for Mercer.

Mercer eventually called to attract his attention. Jacob saw him and came towards him. The second man followed close behind. He was almost a foot taller than Jacob, and with close-cropped blond hair.

‘We came to see you,' Jacob said simply. He took several of the charts Mercer carried.

The three men turned back towards the tower.

‘This is Mathias Weisz,' Jacob said, introducing the second man, who immediately put out his hand.

Once inside the tower, each man put down what he carried and they climbed to the upper room unencumbered.

Mathias, Jacob told Mercer, was one of the German prisoners of war employed at the airfield. ‘He expressed a desire to remain, and because, before the war, he worked as a horticulturalist, they found him work breaking up concrete.'

‘My father was the true horticulturalist – fruit and roses – I merely copied what he did and then waited far too long to get away from him and his gardens and greenhouses,' Mathias said.

‘Are you still, officially, a prisoner?' Mercer asked him.

Jacob laughed. ‘Tell him.'

‘Until a year ago I lodged with a local farmer, a tenant. He died and the farm went to another man who did not want me working there – he had lost a son in Belgium – and so I went back, voluntarily, to the camp I had been in before the farm.'

‘I told him he should have seduced the farmer's daughter and then applied for the farm himself,' Jacob said.

The remark clearly embarrassed Mathias. ‘And then be forced to explain myself to the tens of thousands of men who were coming home and looking for work? I don't think so.'

‘Tell him the rest,' Jacob said.

‘And then the Authorities came looking for somewhere to house their – your – workers and so once again I found myself homeless. There were fewer than a hundred of us remaining by then, each of us tied up in the bureaucracy that moved us slowly towards our
release. Most of us were sent to Southampton to await our repatriation there. Those of us who expressed an interest in staying and who were prepared to work were again investigated and questioned. There are eighteen of us at the airfield. Most, like myself, were already living with or working for an English family prepared to vouch for them.'

‘He goes twice a week to the police station,' Jacob said.

‘Usually, it's closed. I go to the constable's house. He, too, grows roses.'

‘And will this arrangement continue until whatever verification you're waiting for comes through?' Mercer said.

‘Until I am free of these chains and leg-irons, yes.' Mathias held out his fists and laughed, but Jacob turned away at this. Mathias saw this and immediately lowered his hands.

‘And the work at the airfield?' Mercer said, sensing the sudden tension between the two men.

‘I went to work there when the farm changed hands. Jacob here thought it would be wise to keep myself in useful employment while I waited.'

‘And somewhere, sometime,' Jacob said, ‘a Board of Assessors – good, upstanding, hard-working and decent men and women themselves – will bang a rubber stamp over his name and the war will finally be over.'

Neither Mercer nor Mathias himself were prepared for the bitterness of this remark. Jacob, too, seemed surprised by what he had said, and he waved to signal his apology.

‘Are you making an application for citizenship?' Mercer asked Mathias.

‘Not in the first instance. Merely an application to stay here. Full citizenship might come later.'

‘Is that what you want?'

Mathias shrugged. ‘I think so.'

‘What about your family?'

Mathias and Jacob looked at each other.

‘We are peas in a pod, Mathias and I,' Jacob said. ‘Strangers on an alien shore.'

‘They were killed,' Mathias said. ‘Only my mother and father, and an uncle, with whom my father worked.'

‘Hamburg,' Jacob said to Mercer.

‘I see,' Mercer said, grasping sufficient of what he was being told not to pursue the matter further.

‘He could have been sifting through the ruins a year ago if he hadn't applied to stay,' Jacob said.

Again, Mathias seemed embarrassed by the remark. ‘But that would have meant abandoning you,' he said to Jacob.

‘I would have managed.'

‘Of course you would.' Mathias turned to Mercer. ‘He came to the farm looking for work. The farmer took him on, but it was soon apparent to everyone that he was capable of doing very little. He lasted two days.'

‘During which time I pulled at least three turnips out of the ground,' Jacob said.

‘Small ones. He needed – he still
needs
– to rest, not work.'

‘And so this good Samaritan took it upon himself to feed and clothe me,' Jacob said.

‘I did no such thing,' Mathias said, again directly to Mercer. ‘Most of what I was able to give him, I was forced to steal. Nothing was missed.'

‘Except by the pigs, eh?'

‘Perhaps. He was ill. He suffered many ailments that first winter. I did only what any one man might have done for another.'

‘Not for a Jew,' Jacob said.

‘Yes, for a Jew,' Mathias told him firmly, and Jacob conceded the point in silence.

Mercer left them briefly to retrieve his charts from below.

When he returned with these, Mathias asked to look at them and showed him where he was likely to encounter further unmarked buried concrete; a feeder runway had been laid and then abandoned long before the war's end. It was valuable information to Mercer and the two men sat together at the table so that he might make the necessary corrections to his plans.

‘My father grew roses, too,' Mercer said as the last of the amendments was made. ‘But I myself was never much of a gardener.'

‘Me, neither, if the truth be known,' Mathias said. ‘I was twenty-three when the war started. I saw it as my opportunity to get away from all that. My intentions were always clear to him. He tried to persuade me to stay, but they were not proper arguments and he knew I would not be persuaded by them. His brother wanted them to sell the business to a firm of agricultural chemists who were interested in buying it, but who never offered my father enough to tempt him to sell. When the war came, so the chemists came back and increased their offer. My uncle accepted. The nursery covered six acres in the suburbs of Hamburg. The city had grown around them. In my grandfather's time, they were on the edge of the country. And then the air-raids came and they lost everything. Nothing had been formally agreed. My father, mother and uncle were all killed. The chemists bought the land a year later at a fraction of its original value and everything was paid immediately back out to our creditors.'

‘Was nothing left for you?'

Mathias shook his head. ‘Nothing.'

‘Was that why you decided to stay here?'

‘Partly.'

They left the table and went to where Jacob now sat at the window looking out over the houses. Mercer sensed that he resented having been excluded by the two men while they worked on the charts.

It was early evening and lights already showed in some of the houses. Smoke rose from several chimneys.

Mercer announced that he was hungry and invited the two men to share his meal. Neither refused. Jacob asked him where he kept his food and then insisted that he would do the cooking. He took a bottle from his satchel and put it on his empty seat. ‘Whisky,' he said. ‘English whisky, but whisky.'

Mathias picked this up and waited for Mercer to set out three cups.

Mercer drank his and then coughed as the raw spirit burned his throat.

Both Jacob and Mathias laughed at him.

‘It's made from those three turnips,' Mathias said. ‘They drink it all day at the airfield.' He and Jacob drained their own cups and closed their eyes.

‘And yet you seem to be making good progress there,' Mercer said when his voice returned.

‘Not really,' Mathias said. ‘Like most undervalued workers, they do as little as possible. When I and the other prisoners were first sent there, the local men warned us against doing too much and showing them up for what they were. We were given all the dirty jobs.'

‘Where were you captured?' Mercer asked him.

‘Normandy,' Mathias said, adding immediately that he could see one of the small boats approaching the shingle.