Weaver

'And the same to you, Stubbs, you lout.' Willis came to work beside Gary. He was tall, rakish, good-looking in a David Niven sort of way. He wore his black hair slicked back, though where he got the Brylcreem from was a matter of rumour, and he had a fine pencil-thin moustache, black as soot. A fighter pilot shot down over Kent during the invasion, he looked mid-twenties but he might have been younger. He said to Gary, 'And how's our resident member of the Dunkirk Running Club this morning?'

'What Stubbs said.'

'Oh, now, now. I am aware you've been ignoring me, you know.'

Willis Farjeon made Gary squirm. Gary had found he simply couldn't stomach a certain class of Englishmen, the public-school types as he thought of them, who sneered at everybody around them from the goons to their fellow prisoners. 'I've nothing to say to you, Farjeon.'

Willis smiled, working as hard as the rest. 'Ah, but I've things to say to you, or so I hope. We have a mutual friend, after all.'

'We do?'

'Hans Gheldman. The little Austrian?'

Gary frowned. 'Hans Gheldman' was the pseudonym Ben Kamen was using in the camp, hiding his Jewishness, posing as a second-generation emigre with an American mother. In the early days in the stalag Gary had quickly made contact with the escape committee crew and persuaded them to run up a fake set of identification documents for Ben. 'I know Hans,' he said cautiously.

'Funny little chap, isn't he? Always scared of something. Well, so would I be, stuck in a place like this with a German accent.'

'Austrian. Hans is an Austrian-American.'

'Yes, but men like Stubbs here are always going to suspect him of being a mole.'

'Fuck off, Farjeon,' said Stubbs. 'They'd never stick a mole in with a Kraut accent. Even the goons aren't that stupid. You're more likely to be a mole than fucking Gheldman.'

'How peculiarly perceptive he is,' Willis said, speaking of Stubbs rather than to him. 'Well, Hans is nervous. He does speak of you, you know,' he said to Gary. 'Quite often – your experiences before the invasion – how you lost your wife.'

'It's none of your business.'

'Hans thinks it's his business, and so it's mine.'

'Christ,' said another man, leaning on his spade. 'Look at that. Another lot of bloody Jugend.' He said the word Jugend, 'Youth', in a cartoon way, as the English pronounced most German words they had borrowed during the occupation: Joog-end.

A party of boys, aged perhaps thirteen or fourteen, was being led by an SS officer across the site. They were all in uniforms, and wore swastika armbands. The officer waved his hands in the air, evidently describing the monument as it would one day appear. The Reich was reproducing an arch set up by the Romans to commemorate their own successful invasion of Britain two thousand years ago. It would be embellished with sculptures of the conquering German forces and their vanquished foes; there would be amphibious tanks and barges, Spitfires and Messerschmitts. The SS man had the boys line up before the stub of the arch, while a photographer snapped pictures, and a newsreel cameraman set up his tripod and panned across their smiling faces and up to the monument's mighty legs.

'Look at them,' Willis said. 'Aren't they sweet with their little knees and their polished shoes?'

'I had a uniform like that,' Stubbs said. 'Before the war. I was a Boy Scout.' The scout movement, regarded as propagating anti-Nazi values, had been incorporated into the Hitler Jugend.

'I bet you looked just as pretty as those darlings.' Willis called, 'Hello, little boys. Would you like some sweets?'

That made the boys look around, their smiles faltering, nervous. Some of the prisoners laughed. The SS man glared, and began to shepherd the boys away.

A Landwacht thug came by Gary's group. 'Back to work, you arseholes.'

Willis snapped him a Party salute, and picked up his shovel.

'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.