She hadn’t been happy at this time. Tabby and Monty had just been shuttled out to Betws-y-Coed after a fighter plane had fallen out of the sky, landing in their garden and flattening a wrought-iron bench and a bird feeder. And her husband – well, never mind him. He was currently stationed in Nice, entertaining the troops. A plane could land on him for all she cared. Mid-monologue. His precious brains splattering out onto the audience.
One day a group of women in grey coats had appeared at the orchard hauling machinery in a cart. The rats had been getting to the apples and they were going to gas the little bastards. Bettina watched as the women got to work. One of them, a tall masculine woman with a long scar up her face, told the apple pickers to stand back – they were going to be using some ‘jolly nasty chemicals’.
Soon a bundle of fat rats came out of their den, crawling in slow dizzy circles, most of them collapsing onto their sides, but some of the more resilient ones ran for it. One rat killer started bashing at a rat with a cricket bat. Another, seeing this, took off her gas mask and sprayed vomit into the grass. ‘Not another squeamo!’ the masculine woman said, or at least that’s what it sounded like. Bettina saw a sleek grey rat running in her direction. Calmly and unthinkingly, she lifted her boot and stomped on it. Its tiny skull crunched and crackled.
The masculine woman pulled her gas mask up onto her head and came over. ‘Fancy a new job?’ she said, in a booming Oxfordshire accent.
Bettina said, ‘Yes, why not?’
The woman held out her hand to shake. ‘I’m Maggie but everyone calls me Mags. Welcome aboard.’
Bettina took to the killing of rats quite naturally. She could remember the cook in her childhood home chasing rats around with broomsticks and laying down traps in the larder. Jonathan was always allowed to look at the dead rats – Henry would come to him whenever he found one in the shed, saying, ‘Tell your mother or father and we’ll both be in trouble.’ Bettina would follow along, excited, but Henry always caught her at the last minute. ‘No girls!’ Jonathan always came out of the shed five minutes later, looking pale and withdrawn, his eyes twitching like a – well, like a rat in a trap.
The trick to catching the rats, along with instinct and a strong stomach, was knowledge, and Bettina, being a keen reader, quickly devoured the pamphlets provided by Mags. They were armed with zinc phosphide, gas pumps, Cymag powder and oatmeal, which they used as bait. Every Friday they went around collecting the dead rats, throwing them into a trailer hitched to the back of the dilapidated Morris that only Mags could drive, and once, at an infested stable sixteen miles east of Hathaway Farm, they bagged a total of 287. It became a kind of competition – who could bag the most. The younger girls always won. But – and this was much more important – Bettina and Mags killed the most. Mags having a slim advantage.
Mags was forty but looked fifty. She’d spent the first two years of the war as an ambulance driver, collecting wounded people during the Blitzes. On one shift a car had exploded some yards from her and a twisted chunk of bumper got her in the face, accounting for the scar. She spent six months recuperating in hospital (her ribs had also been shattered) and then came to Hathaway Farm to work, ending up on rat duty because her father and grandfather – all her fathers going back to the 1700s – had owned farms, so she knew all about the havoc these creatures could wreak on fruit and vegetables. Bettina had a strong feeling that Mags was a lesbian – she’d never been married. And Tuna had once told her that all the ambulance drivers were ‘Radclyffes’.
Bettina liked Mags but not in that way. She talked like Monty’s ancient brigadier friends – all ‘what what’ and ‘tally-ho’. And she suffered from hay fever and was constantly wiping her nose. There were other women on the farm who she suspected might swing the same way, but how does one, she thought, go about confirming one’s suspicions? ‘Psst, Mabel – do you enjoy cunnilingus? Giving or receiving? Righto. Sorry I asked.’ She was starving for women – it was a tangible ache. Luckily, she didn’t have enough time to dwell on it. These rats won’t kill themselves, she’d think, laughing to herself at the resulting image – a rat with a little noose around its neck, and a note: ‘This world is too cruel.’
Bart would enjoy a joke like that. But to hell with him.
Chapter 27
June 1943, Egypt
Three things he hated about performing for the troops in Al-Jizah:
The baking heat. His body was perpetually covered in a slick of sweat but the air he breathed was hot and dry and his lips got crusty. And of course he was often covered in greasepaint, so add that to the mix.
The cheapening of himself as an artist. When he’d first joined ENSA he was doing tours of Shakespeare in Nice and Edinburgh, and how marvellous it was to return to Shakespeare, just like slipping your foot into an old slipper – silk-lined, of course. But now he was doing childish skits, his ‘act’ wedged in between old music-hall comedians and has-been singers – he’d reprised the role of Edward Crabbe for his latest sketch, enacting the last scene of the film in which the three reanimated corpses turn on their creator, slowly approaching him with their arms reaching out. In the film version it was Lillian White’s character, Beadie, who saved the day, pouring a vat of nitrogen oxide over them (which was ridiculous – why would an undertaker have nitrogen oxide lying about in his lab?), but here it was Mussolini and Hitler. They walked into the lab together, in full regalia, holding a map and bickering as if lost, and asked for directions to Britain. The corpses turned around and diverted their attack, surrounding the two characters and ripping them to pieces. Red paint and rubber limbs flying out of the screaming fray. A huge cheer from the troops. Cheap.
Missing the children. And worrying about them. But he was surrounded by other people who also missed and worried about their children, and this provided a drop of comfort.
He wasn’t drinking – there was nothing to drink – and he was usually hungry, subsisting on a diet of fatty grey mince and onion, boiled potatoes and stale bread. But he felt – well, like his old self. He’d withdrawn from people these last ten years or so like a sad old lizard. So many nights spent alone in the study, drinking whisky and going over resentments, re-imagining arguments, honing his parting shot – ‘You despise me? That surprises me – hatred requires emotion, which in turn requires a heart. You despise me? Clearly not as much as you despise vegetables and exercise. Cunt.’ He didn’t miss that study.
His best friend on the barracks was Archie Coogan, a gruff stand-up comic from Birmingham. The first time he saw Archie offstage he was sitting in the mess hall slurpily eating a bowl of vegetable stew. Archie was fat, really fat, wearing khaki shorts and a white paisley shirt with vast sweat patches under the arms, and he had pale ginger hair and a pointy ginger beard. His head was small and seemed to perch on top of his round body like a penguin’s, his beard the beak. His bare legs were hairless and pale and womanish, the skin soft-looking, creamy; marred only by mosquito bites.
Bart sat next to him and was surprised to find him effeminate and soft-spoken, his words fluttering out of his mouth like petals caught in a light breeze – onstage he was the very opposite: macho and brusque, a mouth full of artillery. He had a piece of faded newspaper in front of him on which he was writing down jokes and new ideas with a red crayon. They chatted about the other acts and Bart slipped in some Polari he’d learned from a queer navvy while in Nice (‘buvare’, ‘bona’ and ‘khazi’), and Archie did a little nod to acknowledge that he got the message.