The Doomsday Testament

VII

The British Expeditionary Force which landed in France lost thirty thousand men defending Dunkirk. Lieutenant Matthew Sinclair had come close to losing his sanity. Matthew recorded his landing on British soil in a flat, laconic single sentence that was followed by one of the now familiar gaps. The next entry revealed that, while Winston Churchill was exhorting his countrymen to fight on the beaches and the landing grounds, the journal’s author had been lying in a hospital bed not dissimilar to the one presently occupied by his grandson.

After a short leave spent with his parents in Kidderminster, in the summer of 1940 Matthew was posted back to his battalion at a bleak training camp somewhere in the Midlands. The 1st Royal Berkshires had ceased to exist as a fighting unit and all Lieutenant Sinclair’s energy was devoted to reforging it. It was exhausting work, with few opportunities for relaxation, but during that time something wonderful happened. Matthew Sinclair fell in love.

Now the journal transformed from a record of military life to the diary of a love affair. The girl’s name was never mentioned, but Matthew’s heart soared and his prose soared with it as he attempted to articulate the strength of first his attraction, then his affection and finally — and when he read some of the entries Jamie found himself blushing — their mutual passion.

The intensity of Matthew’s love grew so powerful that it was painful for Jamie to relive, and he had to skip over the next few entries. Then, at some point in the late spring of 1941, it vanished. What was more, it vanished in a flurry of violence, the ferocity of which was still evident in the ragged edges of pages torn from the spine of the journal. Jamie found himself mirroring the pain Matthew must have felt in that moment when his fingers had brutally removed the evidence of the final months of the affair. The next entry might have provided some kind of explanation, but it had been written by a man either drunk to the brink of insensibility or distressed beyond despair. Words had not been written, they had been smashed into the page, only to be scored out with enough force to tear through the three following pages, or smudged by some liquid whose origin Jamie could only guess at. But if the words were unreadable, the emotion Matthew Sinclair was expressing in his savage frenzy was clear. Hatred. A murderous unquenchable, all-consuming hunger for revenge.

Two days later he had requested a transfer to the Commandos.

The Commando special service brigades were born out of Churchill’s impatience at being unable to retaliate at the Nazis poised on France’s Channel coast. Thousands of men from the remnant saved at Dunkirk volunteered for the chance to get their own back and by 1941 the unfit and the unsuitable had been weeded out at secret camps in the Highlands by the toughest training regime in the British army. Now they were an élite service, ready to fulfil the prime minister’s vow to ‘set Europe ablaze’ and the perfect haven for a man bent on bloody murder or getting himself killed. Yet Matthew’s time with the Commandos was short-lived and characterized by frustration, self-pity and heavy drinking that was evident in the number of pages stained by the bottom of a glass. Whilst Matthew fretted to get at the enemy, Churchill limited Commando incursions to pinprick operations for which he was never chosen. By August his patience had run out and he volunteered for a new and untried outfit called the Special Air Service, then operating in North Africa. Jamie had the impression Matthew’s superiors were glad to see him go. You had to be even crazier to volunteer for the SAS than the Commandos.

Disappointingly, it rapidly became clear that his secretive new employers were a great deal more stringent about diary keeping than the regulars. Between August 1941 and October 1944 the journal contained a single entry — a cryptic reminder, at the end of 1943, for an appointment:

The war ground towards its inevitable end, with the Nazis squeezed between the twin jaws of the Allied forces and the Red Army. Now the regular entries resumed. Lieutenant Sinclair had been promoted to captain and placed on light duties as a liaison officer in northern Holland, and then in Germany where his fluency in the language would have been invaluable. No mention of Stan, but Jamie had an image of him looming in the background, a permanent reminder that war was no laughing matter. He flicked over the following pages until he reached the entry for 1 May 1945.

Jamie lay back and closed his eyes. Reading the journal had affected him like no other book had. When he’d started, it had been in the hope that it would bring him closer to the grandfather he’d never truly known. Yet he found he still had more questions than answers. There was anger, too, real anger, at the true scale of their deceit. He knew it was selfish, but he felt that Matthew and his mother had not only robbed him of a hero, but of a father figure who might have shaped his identity in a different way, perhaps even changed the course of his life. Each individual is unique, but they are as much the products of their upbringing and childhood influences as they are of their DNA. What type of man would he have become if he’d known his grandfather had won the Military Cross? It would have given him something to look up to, perhaps made him strive harder. He would have approached challenges in a different way. He knew now he could have beaten the South African who had given him a battering in the boxing ring if only he’d known how much aggression he was truly capable of. His rejection of Sandhurst had been partly, maybe mostly, because he didn’t think it was his kind of thing. But it was his kind of thing. Soldiering was in his blood. If they had only shown him the journal when he was eighteen he wouldn’t have become the frustrated failure he feared, deep down, he really was.

Just as maddening were the questions that remained unanswered. The gaps that persisted in his knowledge were as wide as those in the entries in the book. Was it only fatigue that caused the breakdown at Dunkirk? What had happened during the three years of silence in the SAS? What had ended the love affair that promised so much? And what was the significance of the Baker Street entry? He knew those questions would continue to haunt him. In some ways, he wished he’d never found the journal. Life had been simpler before he’d opened the blue leather covers. Lost in thought, he flicked over the next page.