Weaver

'Maybe you are a fucking mole, Farjeon,' Stubbs said. 'You're too bloody posh to be here, you should be in an oflag.'

'I've been in oflags. I was in one near Canterbury.'

'So why are you here now?'

'I have the right father. My pop is a senior civil servant in Whitehall, or he was; I imagine he's up in York now. You'll never have heard of him, Stubbs, but he's a big wheel in his own circles.'

'So you're a Prominente,' Gary said.

'And so are you. There are plenty of us around. We're here in this commoners' camp because they like to keep us close to the coast. Even you, I dare say, Stubbs, despite your low brow.'

'My dad's just a farmer.'

'Yes, but he's also a big cheese in the trade union movement, isn't he? A mole, me? What a bore that would be. And besides, Stubbs, hasn't it occurred to you that our Dunkirk Harrier here is much more likely to be a mole than I am? After all, Gary, you're a foreign neutral. You could apply to the Protecting Power and get yourself out of here any time you like.'

'The war isn't done. My war isn't done.'

'Revenge, is that it?'

'You leave him alone,' said Stubbs. 'The Yank's all right. Every man in here keeps Jerry tied down that bit more, and good for him.'

Willis sneered. 'Well, that's what Danny Adams says to keep your dander up.'

Gary leaned on his spade and studied Willis, trying to understand him. 'Like this all the time, are you, Willis?'

'Like what? Camp? Camp in the camp? Well, why not? I do fit in rather well, don't I? After all this is just like public school and we're all faggots there. Or that's what you think of me, isn't it, Gary? That's the cliche you see stamped on my forehead.'

'I couldn't give a fig who or what you are,' Gary said.

'Actually I'm just playing,' Willis said. 'I mean, what else is there to do?'

'You could try and fucking escape,' said Joe Stubbs.

'Oh, what a bore all that is, stooging and planning, stealing and hoarding, digging away at tunnels, mucking about at appells, baiting the goons! No, that's not for me. I'm playing, that's all.'

Gary thought that was possibly the truth of it. There were plenty of 'whackies' in the stalag, as the British called them, men driven slowly mad by their imprisonment. Usually it manifested itself in manias, for excessive exercise maybe, or insane escape attempts, or you would see swings of mood, manic happiness crashing to sullenness and depression. He tentatively labelled Willis as a 'whackie', then. His baiting and cruelty had no end save for Willis's own entertainment; for a prisoner, there were no ends. But still he could be dangerous, if he really had got close to Ben.

Now there were wolf-whistles, and the men paused again. 'Christ,' Stubbs said. 'It's that SS bird.'

The SS officer who had escorted the Jugend was returning to the monument with a woman at his side, tall, also in a black SS uniform, her hair beneath her peaked cap golden. The prisoners saw very few women. Even some of the guards turned to watch her pass.

Stubbs groaned. 'Look at the way she's swinging that arse.'

'Yeah,' a man said, 'she's doing it for you, Stubbsy, she's noticed you.'

'Hey, look at old Matt!'

Henry 'Matt' Black was in the next party, shaping facing stones. He was another private, a kid no older than Stubbs. He had actually pulled his pants down and had his fist around his stiff cock.

'He's always doing that, bloody Matt,' Stubbs said. 'Never got his hand off the thing.'

'Everybody does it,' somebody said.

'Yes, but not bold as you please in broad daylight.'

The guards were already closing in on Black, and the men yelled, urging him to finish himself off before they got there, as if it was a race.

VII

That evening there was a lot of activity in the camp. Staff cars came and went through the gates, delivering staff in SS uniforms, and boxes of equipment marked with swastikas and Gothic script which they carried into the assembly hall. The men were excited by all this activity, and the escaper types speculated on what they could steal.

But underneath the excitement Gary sensed tension. Whenever there was any break in routine you always worried that what was already a bad situation was about to get worse. Especially when the SS showed up. Even the regular Wehrmacht guards seemed nervous.

Gary made his way to Ben's barracks. It was just two old classrooms knocked together. The school gear was long gone to be replaced by the stuff of a POW camp, bunk beds and stoves and light bulbs dangling from the bare ceiling, and little cupboards made by the prisoners out of bits of scrap wood. But you could still see the mark on the wall where the blackboard had once hung, and sometimes, Gary was sure, you could smell the chalk.

Gary found Ben. He'd hoped to get a chance to talk to him. But Ben, 'Hans', was holding court at the centre of a little group of men, banging on about Einstein, general relativity and the life and death of the universe. Even Willis was sitting on a bunk, smoking a skinny cigarette and listening.

It was always like this inside the camp. The kommando system split the prisoners into two groups, two subcultures. In the kommandos you had the work, and a change of scene, and some fresh air, and the comradeship of those you worked with. The housewives, stuck in the camp, had turned it into a kind of talking shop. They painted and sketched; they kept diaries; they put on stage shows and choral concerts; they organised seminars on everything from German military insignia to surrealism to quantum physics. They even paid each other in lagermarkenfor their performances. It was just another sort of escape, Gary supposed.

And then, too, there were the love affairs. There was a lot more of that than Gary had expected; the stalag queens who painted their faces and dyed their lips with beetroot juice were just the surface. This was what you got, Gary thought, when men could only turn to each other for comfort. Now he watched Willis watching Ben, and he wondered what the truth was between the two of them.

He waited a bit, but seeing he wasn't likely to get a chance to talk to Ben before lights-out he cleared off, went for a piss and to brush his teeth, and made for his own barracks.

When lights-out came Gary was lying in his bunk. He listened as the stalag creaked its way into the night, a crowded ship. The twenty or so men in the room with him snored and sighed; you slept badly, no matter how tired you were, and only a few of them were asleep at any moment. Sometimes during the night you would hear soft sobbing. But there was no bunk-hopping tonight.

The school's old sash windows had been wallpapered over for the blackout, but the paste was cracking now and the paper peeling, so that Gary could see something of the night outside. There was an occasional splash of brilliance as a searchlight beam crossed the face of the building. The noises of the camp continued, the sharp clip of a patrolling guard's boot, a cry as some whackie or other failed to find peace. But as the hours wore on his senses seemed to expand to fill the night, and he could hear the call of an owl, a rumble of distant traffic, the drone of a Messerschmitt patrolling somewhere over Kent.

And tonight there was something new, unfamiliar German voices talking softly, the voices of the SS working through the night. He wondered how many other inmates listened to the same conversations, and how fearful they were.

It was no surprise when the call for an appell came in the middle of the night.

VIII

Few of the men still owned watches, but one man, holding his wrist up to the glare of a searchlight, said it was after three a.m.

The men pulled their way out of their bunks, looking for their trousers and coats and socks and clogs – no boots in the camp, to impede the escapers. Then they clattered down the stairs, bumping in the dark.

Lights blazed in the camp offices, and in the assembly hall, dining hall, gymnasium and other large rooms. On the chill dewy grass of the football field the men lined up behind the senior officers of their own nationalities; as well as British there were Poles, French, Belgian, Dutch, and empire troops like Canadians and New Zealanders. Gary was the only American, as far as he knew, and he stood with the British, as indeed did Ben, somewhere in the dark, a fake American.