James Delingpole Read online

  Coward On The Beach

  James Delingpole

  This book is dedicated to the boys of 47 (RM) Commando and also to my dear late mother-in-law, Rosemary, who did her bit at Bletchley.

  Chapter 1

  Twiddling My Thumbs

  Well, bugger me, so I'm finally dead. Must be, or you wouldn't be listening to these tapes. And since, unfortunately, I'm no longer able to answer your questions, I thought, in case you were interested, I'd start by telling you how it all came about.

  It was on the afternoon you introduced me to your Playstation. A game called Medal of Honor, with the 'honor' spelt in the American way, as inevitably it would be these days. You would have been thirteen, fourteen at the time — 15 September 2006, however old that makes you — and if you remember the moment at all, I'm sorry to say, it's probably because I was so damned irritable.

  'Bugger bollocks damnation and arse!' I cried out in frustration, because all those pixelated images on the screen were playing havoc with my eye strain and I couldn't get my arthritic thumbs to coordinate with all those wretched knobs and fire buttons and jump keys and what have you.

  'Daddy, darling, pas deviant les infants, please,' your mother said.

  'Oh for Christ's sake, Tabs, I'm sure Jack uses language a hell of a sight worse than that,' I said.

  'Well if you're going to be difficult,' said your mother.

  'Oh, bugger off, Tabs,' I said, because really, it's one of the worst habits she's picked up from your father, this dreary sanctimoniousness — doesn't get enough of the you know what, that would be my suspicion, and with a husband like hers who could blame her? Off she duly buggered.

  'Would you rather play L'Attaque, Grandpa?' you asked.

  'L'Attaque be damned, I'm going to master this game if it kills me.'

  So, very sensibly, you went off to make me a cup of tea.

  Took you bloody ages. Must have done because by the time you'd got back, I'd taken out the wire with a Bangalore torpedo and was well on my way to clearing the last of the forward trenches.

  'You're a quick learner,' you said.

  'Well, I have done it before,' I said.

  'Really. Where?'

  'Oh, you know. Normandy. June 6th, 1944.'

  'Oh. Yes. Of course.' Your disappointment all too obvious but I wasn't going to push it. Not just yet.

  You showed me how to pause the game and I took a sip. Dunno what you'd done. Brewed it too long, maybe? Used an old tea-bag? Insufficiently boiled water, with a drop of sea salt, cordite, blood, powdered milk and engine oil in it? Quite revolting, but it took me right back.

  'Gunfire,' I murmured, appreciatively. And you gave me a look which said: 'Old bugger's rambling again.'

  It could have been the tea, as I say. Then again, it might just as easily have been the game. Either way, in a rush, it was all starting to come back with a clarity and intensity I hadn't known in over sixty years. Names, faces, smells, sounds, sensa­tions - details I'd never expected for a moment I'd ever recall again were suddenly so clear in my head it was if they'd happened yesterday.

  Well, when a chap needs to get his head straight, there's no better medicine than another strong hot sip of tea, is there?

  On this occasion, though, it only seemed to make things worse.

  There it all was, bouncing round the synapses like a ricocheting bullet. Lt. Frost and his circular swim. The chaplain and his hay box of tea. The Spandau.

  I was aware of you looking curiously at me. Worriedly even.

  'Gunfire on the beach,' I muttered. 'In a spot just like that. Best mug I ever drank.'

  'What was?' you asked.

  'My gunfire,' I said, aware that I was about to breach your father's strict orders. Equally aware that there was nothing I could do to stop myself.

  Why would you want to drink gunfire?' you prompted, as, of course, I'd hoped you would.

  'It's what we used to call tea, usually with a drop of something added. In the commandos.'

  There was a long pause. So long I was beginning to worry you were never going to ask.

  'Were you really in the commandos?'

  'Once or twice, yes.'

  'Lovely eyes, you have. Just like your mother. Your grandmother too A limpid grey-green. Honest. I remember them turning towards me at that moment, begging me not to lie anymore, because it was hurting you, I could see, hearing your old granddad come over all gaga like this.

  'It's just Sweet boy. You were twisting your arms, writhing as you tried to work out a way of saying it without giving me offence. 'Well, when you took me to that air display — at Farnborough — and we saw the Spitfire, I thought you said . . .'

  Then you trailed off, shaking your head, as if in disgust at the unreliability of your memory. Know how you felt.

  I beamed a benign smile of encouragement. One of the joys of being a grandfather, deploying the benign smile.

  'And that thing on the History Channel about the war in North Africa. I definitely remember you saying about how in tanks, in the desert, how - well, you were talking about it as if . . .'

  I nodded a donnish nod, such as one might give to a bright undergraduate making a point so daringly original and baffling he can't quite believe it could possibly make sense, though it does.

  'And it was the same when we saw those programmes about Stalingrad; and Burma; and Sicily. But Grandpa, you can't have been in all those battles. No one was. It just isn't possible.'

  Unfortunately, with her impeccable timing, your mother chose this moment to bustle in, saying: 'Daddy, I'm really sorry but Robin says he needs to take you back right now. We're out for dinner this evening and we need to pick up the babysitter and — I'm so sorry to have to rush you.'

  'No trouble, darling. No trouble.'

  'Jack, could you help your grandpa out of his chair?'

  I put on a show of fumbling in my pockets.

  'Here you are, old chap. One for you and one for your sister.'

  You pretended to be impressed by the two two-pound coins in your palm.

  'And don't spend it all at once,' I said, with a wink. Because, of course, what your mother didn't know, nor your sister, and certainly not your bloody father, is that on the quiet I'd already slipped you a crisp twenty. To be spent, as per my usual condi­tions, on something frivolous.

  'MILLA!' your mother called upstairs. 'Grandpa's leaving. Will you come and say goodbye?'

  From upstairs came some muffled excuse or other.

  'Thanks for the gunfire, Jack,' I said with a wink. 'Quite the most memorable cup I've had since you-know-when.'

  And I don't know whether I was imagining things, but it seemed to me that at that moment, it finally occurred to you that maybe your father had got it wrong. Maybe your old granddad wasn't, after all, such a deranged fantasist. Still, there was only one way I could make sure.

  'Daddy,' your mother asked. 'Is there anything I can get you, before I next see you?'

  'Don't think so, darling, no. No wait. Actually there is, though I don't expect you to pay, just let me know how much. What I should very much like is a tape recorder.'

  'For music?'

  'No. For recording things on. And I should like some tapes. Lots of them. As many as you like.'

  Chapter 2

  Going In

  Now, tell me, Jack, what's the sickest you've ever felt? I don't mean that glorious, cathartic moment after you've brought it all up and, save the odd chunk of diced vegetable lodged half­way up the nostril and a sweet-sour taste turning your tonsils rancid, you're feeling pretty damned good about yourself, because you're over the worst. I mean the bit just before, when your skin has turned such a grisly green you can feel the chloro­phyll leeching through your pores, your s
tomach's swirling like a fairground waltzer and you're on the tip of reaching the very climax of your nausea, where you know that something has to give and if it doesn't give soon then by God you'd almost rather die.

  And when you've fixed on that moment — maybe it was gastric flu or food poisoning; more likely it was in one of those heaving ferry lounges where the stench of vomit is so strong that merely to inhale is to renew your acquaintance with the stale baguette with limp lettuce and slice of reconstituted ham you ate not ten minutes earlier - what I'd like you to do is to imagine yourself tumbling down a scrambling net with rifle, Bangalore torpedo and pack and into a lurching flat- bottomed wooden boat reeking of puke and diesel fumes on a cold grey day, towards eight a.m., off the coast of Normandy, in seas so choppy you'd think it was November, not early

  Moody June. Now, throw in an empty stomach; a spray-soaked body chilled to the bone; and the near-certain knowledge that within the next hour you're going to be emasculated, decapitated, eviscerated, pulverised or otherwise obliterated by any one of the numerous devices the opposition has thoughtfully included in your welcome package.

  That was my D-Day. That was how it felt in those first numbing minutes. And I wouldn't try to claim that my experience was significantly worse than it was for the other100,000 poor fellows who had to go ashore that day - except, perhaps, for two small details.

  The first was that, unlike most of them, I had an idea of what was coming. There was a theory abroad at the time, not wholly unfounded, that a man fights better if he doesn't yet know where it hurts. And though I was by no means the only one in my unit who'd seen action before, we veterans were in the minority. And there were times, I remember, when one did feel a bit like a character from an H. M. Bateman cartoon: 'The Man Who Didn't Think It Was All Going to Be a Breeze'.

  It came up during the final briefing we were given on our mother ship - an ex-Belgian Channel ferry named Princess Josephine Charlotte — sometime in the small hours on the morning on the 6th. We'd had a rough crossing; none of us had been able to hold much down, even if there'd been anything available to eat, which there wasn't - half our supplies having been blacked as per usual by the dockers at Southampton; but quite few of us, invoking naval tradition, had sneaked an illicit drop or two to drink, so the atmosphere was quite light-headed, jovial even, as we crowded round the scale model, perhaps 200 of us, in one of the upper-deck lounges, the light dim, the port­holes all blacked so as not to alert the enemy to our crossing.

  So we're all giving this model the once-over — the houses, the hedgerows, the flooded area just behind the beach, the strongpoints, the wire, even the tiny signs saying 'Achtung Minen!' — when a voice pipes up from a Geordie next to me. He's a tiny fellow, slight build too: you wonder how he ever got past the medical.

  'Sir,' he says. 'I think there's something missing here.'

  'Oh, I'd very much doubt it, Dinning,' says our troop commander, Capt. Dangerfield. 'These maps are accurate in every detail.'

  'I was thinking of the clockwork model of the Flying Scotsman, sir,' says Marine Dinning to much general laughter, because he has hit the nail on the head. It's like looking at one of those elaborate train sets, only with pillboxes and machine-gun nests instead of picturesque stations and jolly bakeries.

  'Hoping for an easy ride, were you, Dinning?' And everyone laughs at that too, not so much because it's funny as because — so I've gathered in the week or so I've known him — he's a very popular fellow, this Capt. Dangerfield.

  Suddenly the laughter dies and with a clatter of boots we're all standing to attention because our CO's just arrived and he's not a man for jokes.

  'At ease,' says Lt. Col. Partridge. But not the subsequent 'Stand easy' we might have hoped for.

  'Now, one thing I'd like to remind you men is that however hard it is for you today - and I believe it will be hard - it's not half as hard as you're going to find it tomorrow. This morning you're lucky. You've got the Dorsets and the Devonshires doing most of your dirty work for you. This evening you're very much on your own. But I know that's what you trained for and I know that's why you volunteered to become commandos. I shall look forward to regrouping with you — most of you — tonight at our, ahem, rendezvous. Otherwise, adieu.'

  And with a snap of his heels he's off.

  'Cheery sod,' murmurs a marine just in front of me.

  What was you expecting: kisses and flowers and a personal message for each and every marine?'

  I thought, just for once, we might have a bit less parade gloss. It being our last day on this mortal coil.'

  'Speak for yourself, Harry. I intend to last the duration.'

  'Oh, me too, me too. But you know what they say about the best laid plans. Suppose we're put in the back of the LCA —'

  Now, listen up, chaps. There's little I can add to the CO's heartening words —' Sarcastic sniggers from the audience, though I don't think Capt. Dangerfield means it as a joke. Far too proper to make fun of the CO in front of the men.

  '—but this may be the last opportunity I have to say how very much I've enjoyed training with you for the last eighteen months —'

  What's wrong with the back of the LCA?'

  '—and how thoroughly bucked I feel to be going ashore now with such a splendid bunch of fellows.'

  Most dangerous place to sit.'

  ‘Keally, if this proves to be the last day of my life —'

  'Bollocks it is.'

  '—as, of course, I have every intention of it not being —'

  'Oh, it is, yeah. Mate of mine was at Salerno. What happens, he says, is that your 88s and your mortars range in as you comes ashore, giving the first few rows just time enough to get off, while for them poor sods waiting their turn at the back —' honestly say the privilege of being among the first to liberate Europe with the boys of 47 will have made it my happiest.'

  'Kaboom!'

  Or perhaps I should say, should my wife have any spies aboard,' continues Capt. Dangerfield, 'my happiest equal.'

  Poor sod. He's only been married a week.'

  'Poor sod? Some of us have been stuck with our missus for seven bloody years!'

  Capt. Dangerfield waits for the affectionate chuckles to die down. Most of us haven't even a girlfriend, let alone a wife, but that's not going to stop us pretending we know what it's like to be henpecked.

  'Still bollocks. What about the Spandaus?'

  'What about them?'

  'Draw a bead on the landing ramp, don't they. Soon as it goes down: Vrrrrrr,' says Harry, his body juddering in a pretty good impression of the front ranks in an LCA being mown down by an MG34.

  'Embarkation in the LCTs is scheduled for 0700 hours,' announces Capt. Dangerfield. 'Till then you all no doubt have plenty to keep you busy. Were there any last questions?'

  The marine called Harry makes to raise his hand. I know what he's going to ask and it strikes me it would be a better idea if he didn't.

  I prod him gently in the back. 'Makes no difference,' I say softly.

  He turns round, looking a bit irritated. 'Eh?'

  I notice dear old Price standing next to me isn't much pleased either. Can't open my mouth without putting my foot in it, he's always telling me.

  'It makes no difference where you sit,' I say. 'It's a lottery.'

  'You there. Marine Coward. Do you have a question?'

  'No sir. I was just - no, nothing, sir.'

  'Coward, you'll find that in this commando if a man has something to say, he'll say it.'

  'I'm sorry, sir, if I was speaking out of turn. I was trying to allay a marine's concerns as to the best place in an LCA to sit during an opposed landing. I was explaining that it doesn't much matter where you sit because, such is the nature of war, the best place to sit in one LCA could be the very worst in another.'

  'The nature of war, indeed,' declares Capt. Dangerfield, his voice heavy with scepticism. 'And just how many opposed landings have you experienced to draw you to this philosophical conclusion?'


  'To be honest, sir, I try not to count,' I say, which is nonsense, I Know exactly. But I don't want to sound immodest. And I certainly don't want to sound like I'm pulling rank on the Captain, who's clearly a decent chap, whatever he now thinks of me.

  There's a dull pain in my right ribs from where Price has just elbowed me. Rather too late, unfortunately, because the damage has been done. Some of the men are tutting or shaking their heads or whispering sneerily to their neighbours. Others are staring at me hard, as if trying to fathom whether I'm a lunatic they should steer well clear of or whether perhaps I might prove some kind of lucky talisman.

  Capt. Dangerfield, very sensibly, decides to spare us all further embarrassment.

  'Does that answer your question, Marine Barwell?'

  'Not really, sir. What I was actually going to ask was about the availability of cabin facilities on the LCAs. Only I've been a little disappointed with the sleeping arrangements on this line so-called ferry, and I had a mind to snatching a bit of sleep, just so I'm fresh for when we meet Jerry, like.'

  Much laughter, now, of course. Manly laughter. Laugh-in- the- face-of-death laughter. Which, thank heavens, rather lets me off the hook. Capt. Dangerfield takes the opportunity to tell us just one more time what splendid chaps we are and, apart from the last dirty look he shoots me just before he tells us to fall out, that's the end of it.

  Well, almost. Our third and final encounter on the Josephine

  Charlotte — I shan't bore you with the first, for the moment — is when we find ourselves standing side by side at the stern, both leaning over the rails as far as we can, looking down into the dark Channel water being churned to a foaming pallor by the screws, both of us heaving our guts out. In my nauseous stupor I scarcely know whether I'm coming or going, and for a sweet moment I've drifted back to the old mill where my brother and I used to play for hours on those days when we were getting on. We'd chuck sticks into the turning blades to see whose, if any, would survive; then we experimented with paper boats; then one day, my brother insisted on trying it with my two pet frogs Mallory and Irvine and I rather lost interest after that.