A Game for Heroes

He moved down out of the sun and close enough for me to see that he was a major by rank which wasn’t surprising when one considered his medals. DSC and Silver Star with Oak Leaf clusters for a second award which could mean everything or nothing. As someone once observed, only the man who holds an award knows what it is really worth and only the people who fought with him in the same battle can guess. On the other hand, when he came a little closer so that I could read the shoulder flash, I saw that he was a Ranger, and I’d always heard that there was little to choose between them and our own Commandos.

‘Have you seen him?’ he demanded patiently.

He was lovely. A sort of turn-of-the century American abroad having difficulty with the peasantry, straight out of the pages of Henry James.

‘Well, now, that would be a difficult question to answer,’ I answered in a fair to middling Cornish accent.

‘You’d better buck your ideas up then, hadn’t you?’

The hard Scots voice came as something of a surprise as did the hand that grabbed me by the shoulder and swung me round. Another Ranger, a master sergeant this time which made the Scots accent all the more intriguing. He had a raw, bony face and hard eyes that were swollen by the scar tissue of the prize fighter. A bad man to cross on a fine April morning.

‘Come on, laddie, start trying a little harder,’ he bellowed and shook me like a rat.

A good, tough soldier, just the man for a foray by night or a bridgehead landing under fire, but I had existed, survived for five years, in a world he had never known. A world where strength was not enough and courage was not enough. Where each new day came as a miracle. One survived, mainly by not caring whether one did or not.

I placed a hand on the hand that held me, twisted exactly as prescribed by a Japanese gentleman at a pleasant old country house in Surrey in the spring of 1940 and dropped to one knee. He rolled twenty feet down the hill into a gorse bush.

I looked up at the major and smiled gently. ‘He made a mistake. Don’t let him make another.’

He stared at me, puzzled, and then something clicked in his eyes. He knew then, I think, but before he could say anything, the master sergeant was coming back up the slope with the speed of a wounded bear. When he was about six feet away, my hand came out of my hip pocket holding the old spring blade gutting knife I’d picked up on that first job back in Brittany in the second year of the war.

There was a nasty click when I pressed the button and the blade jumped into view. He stopped dead in his tracks, then crouched and started to move close.

‘Grant, stay where you are! That’s an order!’ the major cut in crisply.

Grant still crouched, glaring at me, murder in his eyes and then another voice called, high and clear, ‘Owen, for heaven’s sake; what on earth’s going on down there?’

The man who hurried down the track was in his sixties with snow-white hair, a long, rather ugly face and steel-rimmed spectacles. He wore an old Burberry and carried an umbrella and resembled to a remarkable degree the public image of an Oxford don. Which was exactly what he had been when we first met, although his talents had run to darker ends since those golden days.

I put up my knife and groaned. ‘Oh, no, not you, Henry. Anything but that.’

Major Edward Arnold Fitzgerald and his Highland-American bully-boy moved stiffly away after Henry’s formal introduction and I shook my head.

‘The trouble with Fitzgerald’s kind is that they can never take a man as they find him.’

Henry’s eyebrows went up. ‘But my dear Owen, that is precisely what he did do. Have you glanced in the mirror lately? I should have thought it unlikely that there is more than one half-colonel in His Majesty’s service at the moment sporting a gold ring in his left ear.’

‘You always did say I was an individualist,’ I reminded him. ‘How’s the war going?’

‘I understand the 1st Commando Brigade reached Luneburg yesterday.’

‘They’ll be thinking of crossing the Elbe next.’

He nodded. ‘I expect so.’

We sat on an outcrop of rock and he produced a tin of a rather exotic Turkish cigarette he favoured and offered me one.

‘You gave me one of those damned things the first time we met,’ I said. ‘Remember? The rough island boy up to Oxford for an education.’

He smiled faintly and with just a trace of sadness. ‘A long time ago, Owen. A lot of water under the bridge.’

‘And what will you do when it’s all over?’ I asked. ‘Go back to being Henry Brandon, Fellow of All Souls, and everything that goes with it?’

He shrugged. ‘One should never go back to anything, Owen. I don’t think it’s possible.’

‘What you really mean is that you don’t want to.’

‘Do you?’

And as usual, with unfailing accuracy, he had touched the most tender spot of all.

‘Go back to what?’ I replied with some bitterness.

‘Now don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. It doesn’t become you. I read this novel of yours the other day. I understand it’s into its fourth printing in as many weeks. Remarkable.’

‘Which means you didn’t like it.’

‘Does it matter? It must be making you a .great deal of money.’

Which it was and for that I was duly grateful, and yet he had annoyed me, only vaguely perhaps, but enough to unsettle me.

He took a deep breath of good salt air and flung his arms wide.

‘It’s really quite beautiful, Owen. Quite beautiful. I envy you your life here – and I’m glad you and Mary Barton got together. You must have been very good for each other.’

And there was more than a grain of truth in that. During the six weeks in hospital when I couldn’t see at all, I’d dictated my book to her, the one driving passion that had prevented me from going mad.

‘I’m very grateful to Mary,’ I said. ‘I owe her more than I can ever repay.’

‘But you don’t love her?’

Once again he went straight to the heart of things with deadly accuracy and I stood up and flicked what was left of my cigarette over the edge of the cliff.

‘All right, Henry, let’s get down to it. What do you want?’

‘It’s quite simple really,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a job for you.’

I stared at him, thunderstruck, then laughed harshly. ‘You’ve got to be joking. The war’s over. It can’t last more than another couple of months in Europe – you know that as well as I do.’

‘On the mainland – yes, but the Channel Islands could prove to be something else again.’

I frowned and he held up a hand. ‘No, let me explain. For some months now Naval Force 135 has been preparing Operation Nest Egg, the liberation of the Channel Islands, but it’s an operation that is planned to take place only when the German garrison has surrendered. It’s our hope that it will not be necessary for us to fight our way ashore. The results for the civilian population of the islands could be catastrophic.’

‘And you think they might still try to hold out after defeat in Europe?’

‘Let’s put it this way. Vice-Admiral Huffmeier, the Commander in the Channel Islands, seems to show every intention of going down fighting. On the night of March the 8th he mounted a commando raid of his own and attacked Granville with two minesweepers. They destroyed three ships and a hell of a lot of dockside equipment into the bargain. When Doenitz congratulated him, Huffmeier signalled that he had every hope of being able to hang on in the Channel Islands for another year.’

‘Could he be bluffing?’