The Moon Tunnel

9

Out on Hasse Fen, nearly fifteen miles from the cathedral, the mist was knee-deep and pillow-white. By the river cattle stood, dropping dung into the snow-like blanket. The Capri sailed on, its tyres turning in the fog, its faded 1970s sky-blue roof cutting a swathe, leaving a ship’s wake across the fen. The city lay behind them, wrapped in its daytime shroud of purple-cream smog. Ahead, along the arrow’s flight of the drove road, lay the hamlet of Buskeybay and a return to Dryden’s childhood.

The fate of the man found in the PoW tunnel had awakened Dryden’s sense of injustice, and he was impatient to learn more. The police were indifferent, Valgimigli seemed keen to get the bones buried so that he could get back to the dig, and no one appeared to care that the victim had no name. Who had ended this man’s life so brutally? Dryden wanted to know more about California, and the lives of those who had spent the war behind its barbed-wire fences, and more about their lives out in the wide-open Fen fields: prisons without walls. And he wanted to know more about anyone brave enough to crawl down that escape tunnel: to bury themselves, willingly, alive.

Which is why he was going back to Buskeybay, revisiting a single remembered image from a lonely childhood.

He kicked out his feet, his leg joints complaining at the first hints of winter rheumatism. ‘Here,’ he said redundantly, a second after Humph had already begun to slow the cab, pulling off the drove into a lay-by where cattle hoofs had created a mudbath by a five-bar gate. The sign said ‘Buskeybay Im’ and the track led off on a zigzag route towards the distant River Lark. His uncle’s house, or more precisely its upper storey, stood above the mist, a pre-war farmhouse which had begun to sink into the peat, forcing the door and window frames into agonized parallelograms. It looked like the kind of house a child draws, but never lives in.

As Dryden closed the Capri’s door he heard the cab’s tape deck thud on, the sound of a Polish wedding filling the air. He noticed for the first time that the Capri’s paintwork had become oddly mottled and he ran a finger across the blemish on the bonnet.

Humph wound the window down. ‘It’s the smog. I heard it on the short-wave. Pollution. The rank’s talking about compensation.’

‘Terrific,’ said Dryden. ‘More good news for Ma Trunch.’

He took the path and quickly reached a narrow drain, ten feet wide and brimful of snow-white mist. A railway sleeper bridge crossed it in a single span and Dryden knew that if he’d waded below and examined its underside he would have found his own name laboriously carved into the wood with the date 1977. He’d been eleven, and on one of a countless number of childhood visits the tiny Fen hamlet of four houses, the uncle’s cottage being an outlier about half a mile from the other three.

Roger Stutton, his mother’s only brother had been the family’s sole significant relative; his father was an only child. For Dryden his uncle had always been a painful reminder of his mother: the same tall, slightly forward-angled frame, the soft green eyes and the same brittle grey hair, white at the edge of the forehead.

Dryden saw him now, footless through the ground mist, coming home from the fields down by the river. Overhead the sky was clearing, revealing that particular shade of Fabergé blue only possible after a mist has been burnt off by the sun. A crow called from the poplars by the house and the figure stopped, shouting Dryden’s Christian name just once, but the echo came once, twice, and a third time.

A minute later they were closer. ‘Philip,’ he shouted again, raising a hand, hiding a smile, and Dryden knew it had been too long. Another debt he’d left unpaid. They were together quickly, fumbling a handshake.

‘Mum’s stuff,’ said Dryden. ‘I should have called…’

Stutton swept the apology aside. ‘You’re busy. It’s not going anywhere, is it? The barn – the old barn,’ he added, walking off towards the house.

Stutton was in his mid sixties now, and ran a car-breaking business out of the farmyard, having sold the land beyond to one of the big salad-crop companies in the eighties. The eviscerated bodies of wrecked cars littered half an acre beyond the garden. An industrial crusher stood idle in the middle, over which scurried a large water rat. Dryden could smell petrol and rotting upholstery, and he felt a pang of loss for the summers at Buskeybay.

Beyond the house stood a half-brick barn, black with creosote.

‘Business?’ asked Dryden, trying to be interested in the answer as Stutton searched for the key.

‘Better’n farming,’ said Stutton, freeing the padlock. ‘I’ll sell up one day.’

Inside the mist had crept under the doors and hung in the half-light, a thin layer of cloud a foot above the dung-caked floor. Dryden shivered, feeling a needle shot of pain between his shoulders. The barn’s layout was simple. Two haylofts, one at either end, with a two-storey storage space in the middle. A single dormer window, covered by moss, radiated a thin green light. Dryden climbed a metal safety ladder into the far loft, followed by Stutton, who threw a switch to light a neon strip in the timber roof above. Between them they lifted aside a green tarpaulin and several dust sheets, revealing what looked like the entire contents of a cheap antiques and bric-à-brac shop. Dryden threaded his way amongst the tea-crates, crammed with nicotine-brown newspaper. He picked at the rotted paper revealing dusty crockery, rusted kitchen scales, a sickly glazed Victorian vase, some candlesticks, pewterware, a large brass wall plate. Lifting a cheap gilt picture frame he studied the scene by the flickering neon: Constable’s haywain trundled towards Flatford Mill.

‘Worth a fortune, this,’ he said.

‘And these,’ said Stutton, lifting a wooden mangle in one hand, an old Singer sewing machine in the other.

‘Is it all Mum’s? I’m sorry – I should have done something sooner. It’s been years,’ said Dryden. Four years since the funeral. He had left it too long, reluctant to sever too brutally the few physical ties which remained with his own past.

Stutton shook his head. ‘It’s not just your mum’s. All the family, really – it’s just sort of collected here.’ He cleaned the dust from the brittle glass mantel of a gas lamp. ‘Dad must have chucked this out in ’49 when we got the electric. And that’s Grandad’s,’ he said, pointing at a porcelain washbowl set in a cabinet.

They stood in silence, the dust drifting across the harsh beams of neon.

‘Are you really going to sell up?’ asked Dryden.

His uncle nodded. ‘There’s an offer. Two. Why not?’

‘We should get rid of it all,’ said Dryden. ‘I know someone who does clearances. They can auction the best. Anything you want, just take. I’m done with it,’ he added, kicking a crate, but unable to stop himself stroking the mane of a threadbare rocking horse. ‘Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll get things moving,’ he added, fingering Thomas Alder’s business card in his shirt pocket.

They climbed down and stood below in the gloom, Dryden caressing his creaking knees. He stood, feeling along a wooden post in the half-light, knowing he’d find the right switch. A single bulb flickered on, startling a dove which clattered up into the rafters.

They stood together, united in the memory. The theatre, his theatre, the perfect childhood playground: the painted cherubs, the carved pale-purple grapes, the silver-paper trumpets and the gilded vine leaves that decorated the wings, and above the crudely constructed proscenium arch, the letters picked out in wartime standard-issue whitewash: La Scala. A rustic Italianate scene was now the only backdrop, etched out in pastels on the damp-plastered wall. A temple stood in a grove of Cypress trees, a patch of damp partly obscuring a dancing girl. A rusted oil lantern hung from the rafters above, its forward-facing glass painted lime green.

‘You knew them. The Italians?’ said Dryden, thinking that once an audience had sat where they now stood, listening on dark winter nights to songs of home as the bombers droned overhead for Germany. He had played here alone, preparing the plays he would later inflict on his parents, pacing the rickety rough-planked stage. A child then, he had accepted the wonder of the theatre with hardly a question about the people who had created it. But now he had the questions, and a reason to ask them.

Stutton was silent, lost in the memory too.

‘I forget. Did you ever see them perform?’ said Dryden.

‘The Italians? Course. And your mum. Not really plays as such; revues, I guess – songs and that. They was good, damn good.’

Dryden nodded. ‘The Italians. That’s all I ever knew.’

‘It’s about that PoW’yer – isn’t it?’ said Stutton, stepping up on to the stage and moving into the shadows by the paper-thin wings. ‘Always read your stuff, Philip.’

Dryden shook his head. ‘Yes. Sorry – I would have come anyway. But I just wanted to know more. When did they arrive at Buskeybay?’

Stutton stepped into the light, an actor whose lines had arrived. He took a tobacco pouch out of his heavy-duty overcoat and rolled a cigarette expertly with one hand. ‘That was ’44. Summertime. Most of ’em were conscripts and they’d had a coupla years in the desert. Scared, I don’t blame ’em. Not much interested in getting back at all. Once the news come through they’d surrendered back home I guess they was officially non-combatants. So they moved ’em out, billeted them on farms. Couldn’t send ’em home, I guess – Germans were still fighting. Monte Cassino, places like that.’

‘How old were you?’ asked Dryden, straining across the years to hear the songs they’d sung.

‘Five when the war ended but your mum was older by the year. Used to play with ’em, both of us. Dad put ’em in the barn here to sleep and that, worked ’em in the fields. Not always our fields, mind, they bussed them out to where they were short of labour. They did this of an evening,’ he said, laying a hand on a painted cherub. ‘We had about two dozen here, but others came in when they put on a show. But most Saturday nights they went into town, mind, all slicked up. The Ritz had seats – for the newsreel and that. They was no trouble at all. Good workers as well, better’n the lot we had after.’

‘They moved them all out of the camp, out of California?’

‘Just about. A couple had jobs there after the Germans were put in. Orderlies, that kinda thing. The Germans were a different type – officers mostly, captured after the landings – D-Day. We kept well away from the wire then.’

‘You mean you didn’t keep well away when the Italians were inside?’

‘Nah. Even then they was popular. Sundays they had a choir and they sang by the wire and we chucked pennies through. Honest,’ he shook his head, unable to believe his own story. ‘And there were some girls that were keen. Even before ’43 they let the boys out in the day to work. The woods up by California was a courting spot. In fact they used to say only reason there was a wire was to keep the girls out.’

They both laughed and Dryden looked up, trying to pick out the details painted into the high arch.

‘Did any of the Germans get out?’

‘Doubt it. They really clamped down on ’em. They had camps up-country as well – Peterborough, I think. They lost a couple there – reckoned they slipped out through the docks at Lynn. And one got away from Norwich I’m sure, a pilot, he bashed some poor sod’s brains out at the aerodrome there and took a trainer to Ireland. Big stink about that. Scared us kids, that did.’

‘But the Italians were no trouble?’

‘Didn’t say that. Most just wanted a quiet life.’

‘Most? But not all?’

Stutton lit up again, his face theatrically illuminated by the match and then lost in a plume of white smoke. ‘There was something – that was after the Germans had arrived, must have been late in ’44. The police rounded up the Italians for questions. Came here one day with an open truck and took the lot. They woz back in twenty-four hours, nothing said.’

‘But there was gossip?’

‘Yeah. Oh yeah. Always in the war. They never told you anything so it was all there was. A burglary is what was said. A big house on the Fen edge, something classy. That’s why they came here – the police – coz our boys had been working out there. Anyway, it was artwork they got away with. You hear people now, you’d think there was no crime in the war, but there was plenty, what with all the men away and the police all over the shop expecting invasions and finding spies everywhere. A burglary, like I said, and they got most of it back that time, but they never got anyone for it. I think they found most of the stuff over at Friday Bridge – a turnip store or something. There was a big clampdown on the Italians, though – checks and stuff, ID rings, a proper curfew. No more Saturday nights in town. A lot got moved to internment camps. All ours were gone within a month.’

‘The house? Can you remember which house?’

Stutton shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago – it might have been Osmington.’ Dryden knew it, a Tudor fortified hall surrounded by a wide moat in a village to the north. It was National Trust now and The Crow had covered a small fire there last winter which had burnt out the visitors’ café.

‘And someone died,’ said Stutton, his face in shadow. ‘I remember Mum talking about it. That was it – one of the servants found ’em lifting the stuff so they clumped the bloke, split his head open. Bled to death down the stairs, that was the story. They found him in the morning, at the top, bled dry.’