‘Hang on! Hang on tight!’ Popsicle called out, and the engines roared to full throttle. The boat surged forward underneath me. I clutched at Big Bethany and hung on to her. I saw Mary fall and go rolling over and over across the deck. Mac went after her, caught her and held her. Mary clung to him, sobbing. We didn’t see it, until the last moment, a vast wall of a giant tanker, or a ferry perhaps, that passed astern of us by barely fifty metres and then vanished into the fog. I thought the danger was over, but it wasn’t.
‘Look out for the wash!’ Popsicle stood now like the lifeboatman on the model he’d made me, his feet apart, braced, fighting the wheel as the wash hit us broadside on and tossed us like a cork. It was as if we’d been suddenly thrown into the path of a raging typhoon.
I know I screamed – and I wasn’t the only one. I could not stop myself. The sea crashed over the gunwales, smacking me in the chest and chilling me to the bone. Big Bethany clung on to me tight, and then we were suddenly out of it and into calmer water. I looked around me again. Popsicle was still at his wheel, and he was laughing out loud, wiping the water from his face.
‘Look, you beggars, look what I see!’ he cried. The fog ahead was wispy. It was thinning, it was quite definitely thinning. Moments later we saw a flashing light and the emerging shape of a lighthouse, and then a harbour wall. Popsicle throttled back. ‘Dunkirk dead ahead,’ he said. ‘Dunkirk or I’m a Dutchman.’
I went over to be near him. ‘Do you recognise it?’ I asked. In the grey gloom of the dawn I could just make out a strand of beach stretching away into the murky distance.
‘Not a thing,’ Popsicle replied. ‘I wouldn’t, would I? It was a long time ago and, besides, the place was in ruins last time I saw it. But it’s Dunkirk all right. If I plotted it right, Cessie, and I think I did – hope I did – then what you’re looking at is Dunkirk town.’
As we entered the shelter of the harbour we left the last vestiges of the fog behind us. There was a solitary angler fishing from the harbour wall. He waved at us and we waved back. There didn’t seem to be much happening in the harbour except for a couple of fishing boats unloading at the quayside. The fishermen stopped what they were doing and watched us come in. They were still watching us as we tied up behind them.
‘Magnifique,’ one of them called out. ‘Le bateau, il est superbe, magnifique.’
‘Bonjour,’ Harry shouted in reply, as Mac and Mary between them settled him in his wheelchair on the quayside. ‘Allez la France!’ And the fishermen laughed and echoed it back at us.
‘Allez la France! Allez la France!’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘It’s what they always shout at rugby matches,’ said Harry. ‘It’s all the French I know – and bonjour of course.’
Once everyone was off the boat – and that took some while – Popsicle gathered us all together. ‘If anyone asks,’ he was saying, ‘just remember we got lost, lost in the fog. We had to put in somewhere for safety. Blame it on the skipper if you like.’ I looked out across the harbour towards the town. The streetlights were going off everywhere. It was almost daylight. But hardly a car was moving. There was still scarcely anyone about.
‘Popsicle,’ said Harry. ‘That street where Lucie Alice lived, do you know where to find it?’
‘There was a church just up the road from their house, I know that much. I used to hear the bells. That’s all I remember. I’ll ask. Someone’ll be bound to know. I’ll ask.’
So we all set off into town, Popsicle leading us, his photo of Lucie Alice in his hand. He asked and he asked. He asked everyone he met – a couple of dustbinmen, a postman, a motorist who had stopped at a red light. The response was always the same – first, a look of utter disbelief when they saw us coming, and then, when they’d had a look at Popsicle’s photograph, a shrug and a shake of the head. No one seemed to recognise Lucie Alice – that didn’t surprise me, it was obvious they were all too young to have known her – but none of them had heard of the Rue de la Paix either, and that did seem strange.
Mac shepherded us along the pavements, taking particular charge of Tweedledum and Tweedledee who seemed intent on stopping to look in every shop window. Whenever we had to cross a road, Mac was there to marshall us – at one point even holding up his hand to stop an approaching lorry, so that we could all cross over safely. But the further we walked the more exhausted we were all becoming, except Popsicle. Big Bethany had to sit down to catch her breath whenever she could. She had a wheezing cough that she kept apologising for. Now that a few of the shops were opening, Popsicle would dart in and show his photograph at every possible opportunity. We would stand and wait for him outside. It was hopeless. Every shake of the head, every shrug of the shoulders, told us so. But Popsicle never once lost heart.
He was walking on ahead up a narrow cobbled sidestreet, when he called for me to catch him up. He took my hand in his and squeezed it. ‘The street where she lived, Cessie, it was like this, just like this. Little houses. Grey shutters. If I could find the church . . . I could hear church bells, Cessie, in my cupboard. And they were close, very close.’ He wasn’t looking at me at all as he spoke. ‘The trouble is, Cessie, I’m beginning to wish I’d never started out on this whole caper. I’m thinking that maybe there’s some things it’s better not to know.’
I squeezed his hand back because it was all I could think to do. ‘Popsicle!’ It was Mac, calling from behind us. ‘How about some breakfast? There’s some of us could do with it. Warm us up. Army marches on its stomach, y’know.’
There was a café across the street. The lights were on inside. The door was open. A lady in a headscarf and a coat was sweeping the pavement outside vigorously. She saw us coming and stopped her sweeping. Like everyone else we’d met, I think she thought we were a bit strange at first, but as soon as she realised what we were after, she ushered us inside only too gladly.
With her coat and scarf off, she turned out to be a lot older than I had imagined. Not that she behaved old. She bustled about the place like a beaver, putting three tables together, arranging the chairs and talking nineteen to the dozen as she did so – all in French, so I didn’t understand a word. When we had all finally sat down, she turned to Mac and said: ‘English? Anglais?’
‘Scots,’ said Mac firmly, and she seemed puzzled by that.
‘Café ? Coffee? Thé ? Breakfast?’ she asked.
‘Breakfast,’ said Harry, patting his belly. ‘Famished, we are.’
And so we found ourselves for the next hour or so thawing out in the warmth of the café, with baskets of freshly baked croissants and endless glasses of tea. No one wanted coffee. And Popsicle, I noticed, didn’t want anything at all. He just sat there beside me staring down at the table, at the photograph of Lucie Alice, smoothing out the corners and saying nothing.
The old lady brought over yet more glasses of tea. ‘You don’t like it? The breakfast, it is not good?’ she asked Popsicle. That was when Popsicle suddenly broke into French. It took us all by surprise, the old lady too. For a while it was difficult for me to understand what it was that they were talking about. Then Popsicle gave her the photograph and she looked at it closely. I began to recognise some of the words they were saying: ‘Rue de la Paix’ and ‘Lucie Alice’. But that was all. After a while she spoke in English again – perhaps she hadn’t entirely understood Popsicle’s French. Perhaps it wasn’t so good after all. ‘You were here, in Dunkirk?’ she said. ‘In 1940?’
Popsicle nodded and turned the photo over in her hands. A long look passed between them.
‘I have come to find her,’ said Popsicle, speaking very slowly. ‘Vous la connaissez? You know Lucie Alice? Maillol, her last name was Maillol. You know where she is?’ The old lady was studying the photograph closely, frowning at it. She took it to the door where the light was better. ‘I can show my husband?’ she said.
‘Of course,’ said Popsicle, and she hurried away out through the door at the back of the bar. We watched her go. It was H
arry that broke the silence. ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to pay for this little lot? We haven’t got any francs, have we? Didn’t think of that, did you, Popsicle?’
But Popsicle wasn’t listening to him. His eyes were fixed on the door behind the bar.
‘She’ll take pounds, won’t she?’ said Chalky. ‘And if she won’t, then we’ll just have to get Benny to do the washing-up, won’t we, Benny?’ We were still laughing at that when she came back into the café. With her was an old man in a collarless shirt and braces. He was scrawny round the neck and unshaven. He had the photograph in his hand. He looked at us over the top of his glasses, suspicious, hostile almost. Popsicle got to his feet.
‘You are the one who is looking for Lucie Alice Maillol?’ the old man asked.
‘Yes,’ said Popsicle.
‘Why?Pourquoi?’
‘She’s a friend. She saved my life. Elle m’a aidé pendant la guerre. Elle m’a sauvé la vie.’
I wasn’t sure the old man understood. He came closer and looked up into Popsicle’s face. ‘She hid me,’ Popsicle went on. ‘She hid me in her cupboard, in her house, in the Rue de la Paix.’
‘But it is no longer there, monsieur. La Rue de la Paix, the old street, it is gone. How you say it? Bombardée. Destroyed. And Lucie Alice . . .’
‘You know her?’ Popsicle breathed.
‘Elle était dans la même école, in the same school, monsieur, the same class. My wife, myself, Lucie Alice. We were friends, all of us. Mais . . . nous sommes désolés, monsieur. We are very sorry, but Lucie Alice, we have not seen her since 1940, since the war. No one has. One day, we go to see her, and she is gone. Disparue. Sa mère aussi. Elles sont disparues toutes les deux. Disappeared. They take them away. We never see them again.’
13 MESSAGE TO MY FATHER
POPSICLE FELT FOR THE CHAIR BEHIND HIM TO steady himself.
‘You are sure?’ he asked. ‘You are quite sure?’ The old man nodded as he handed back the photograph.
‘Rue de la Paix, it is still there,’ he said. ‘They built it again after the war, like many other streets in Dunkirk. But Lucie Alice and her mother, we hear nothing of them ever again, nothing.’
Popsicle took a deep breath before he spoke again. ‘I’ll go for a walk, I think,’ he said, more to himself than anyone else. ‘Yes, I think I’ll go for a little walk.’ He tried to smile at us, but he couldn’t do it. ‘I won’t be long. Why don’t I meet you all back at the boat in a couple of hours? You’ll see they’re all there, won’t you, Mac? Then we’ll all go home.’ And he was gone out of the door.
Harry put a hand on my arm. ‘Best not leave him on his own, eh Princessie?’ So I went after Popsicle and caught him up in the street.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Don’t rightly know,’ said Popsicle. ‘Maybe we’ll sit on the beach for a while, just for old time’s sake. We can hardly come all this way for nothing, can we?’ He took my hand and held on to it tight as if he needed me to be with him. I wanted to say something about Lucie Alice, something to comfort him, but I couldn’t find the words. We walked on together in silence.
There were more people about in the streets now. We passed by the open door of a large baker’s shop where they were busy stacking loaves and baguettes. The smell of them seemed to follow us down the street. ‘Lovely,’ I said, breathing it in. Popsicle hadn’t heard me.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I suppose I got what I came looking for, didn’t I? I wanted the truth and I got it. I wanted to know, and now I do. All I want now is to unknow it, if you see what I mean. But that’s one thing you can never do, can you, Cessie?’
A bell rang out, loud and close by, a church bell. I stood there on the pavement and waited for it to finish. ‘Eight o’clock,’ I said. Popsicle was hurrying on without me. I ran after him.
‘The bells, Cessie.’ He grabbed my arm as I came alongside him. ‘I know them. I know those bells.’
We turned into a small square with a fountain in the middle, and beyond it a huge, grey, stone church with gulls ranged along its rooftop.
We gazed up at the tower. ‘They were the same bells,’ said Popsicle, ‘I’m sure of it. This is the church, it must be. Every Sunday she’d go to church, her and her mother. They’d leave me back in the house, shut up in my cupboard. I’d sit there in the dark and listen to those bells. I’d say a prayer or two for them, and for me too. Never been much of a churchgoing sort, not before, not since; but I prayed hard in that cupboard, Cessie, so hard. It doesn’t seem like anyone was listening very much, does it?’
Popsicle was still trying to work out where the old Rue de la Paix might have been, when we saw a lady come into the square walking her dog. The dog looked just like Shirley Watson’s dog back home – pop-eyed and snuffly and yappy. When he asked her for directions, the lady led us across the square and pointed to a narrow street that led down towards the sea. She was a lot more friendly than her dog. So at last we found the Rue de la Paix, and stood across the street from where Popsicle thought the house might have been.
‘Nothing’s the same. Different street, different house – except the shutters,’ said Popsicle. ‘The shutters were grey then too, grey and peeling. God, what a silly little beggar I was. I had to do it, didn’t I? I had to open those shutters. I had to have a look out. The soldier who saw me, he must’ve been standing just about where we are now. Then they hauled me off that way, down towards the beaches. And that’s the corner, that’s where I saw Lucie Alice coming home with her bread. Oh, Cessie, what I’d give to see her come walking round that corner right now.’
We crossed the wide road that ran along the seafront, and walked along the beach. There was a chill breeze off the sea, so we went to sit down in the shelter of the dunes, where I discovered that French sand-hoppers were just the same as English ones, only there seemed to be more of them. The sea was murky grey and limpid. Each wave seemed so tired it barely had the strength to curl itself over and run up the sand. There were miles of beach, and miles of dunes, as far as the eye could see, all completely deserted, except for a couple of walkers out with their gambolling dogs.
Popsicle was looking out to sea. ‘That young soldier,’ he said, ‘the one who pulled me out of the sea. I never even knew his name. I’ve still got that poetry book of his, The Golden Treasury, always kept it. Sitting here like this, Cessie, it’s all so peaceful. You can hardly believe it happened, all those ships out there, and the planes screaming down on us, and the bombs, and the bodies. I remember walking away from him. He was a body, like the others, and I never even knew his name.’
‘Names don’t matter,’ I said.
Popsicle seemed suddenly cheered by that. He put his arm round me and hugged me to him. ‘That’s a true fact, Cessie,’ he said. ‘That’s a powerful fact. I may not know his name, but I have the memory of him, of what he did. Same with Lucie Alice. I’ll never see her again, I know that now, but I have the memory of her, haven’t I? And that’s a whole lot better than nothing. If anyone should know that, then I should.’
He talked on and on, but I really didn’t hear much of what he was saying. I was too cold, too tired to follow his thinking. After a while he seemed to sense it. ‘Come on, Cessie,’ he said, at last, helping me to my feet and brushing the sand off me. ‘I’d better be getting you home. I’d better be getting us all home.’
We must have walked further than we thought – it seemed a very long way back to the harbour and the Lucie Alice. They were all on board and waiting for us, and so were the harbourmaster and the customs men. Popsicle explained, in French and in English, how we’d got lost in the fog, that we had no passports, and that we were on our way home anyway. They complained a bit, and shrugged a lot, and then complained some more, but that was the end of it.
As we cast off there was a sense of deep sadness about the boat. They were clearly not at all the same cheery crew they had been. Even Harry had lost his sparkle and sat hunched and deje
cted in his wheelchair. I told him we’d been to the beaches. I told him about the sandhoppers, but he didn’t seem to want to know. Big Bethany stood on her own, gazing back at Dunkirk. She had her handkerchief out and, because I knew why, I left her alone. Benny grumbled down in his galley, about all the washing-up he had to do. He didn’t seem to want any help. Some of them had that vacant look on their faces, the same look I’d seen through the window up at Shangri-La.
I thought at first that it might be a kind of solidarity for Popsicle in his disappointment, but in that case you’d have thought they’d have been all over him with consideration and kindness, and they weren’t. Then I thought they might be blaming him for bringing them on what had turned out to be a fool’s errand, but that wasn’t how they were, any of them. It wasn’t only fatigue either, although that was evident on every face around me as we steamed out of Dunkirk harbour and into the swell of the open sea. As I was sitting on my own under the red ensign at the stern of the boat, I finally worked out what it was that must be making them all feel so wretched. It could be one of two things, or maybe both: an unspoken dread in each of them, the dread of going back to Shangri-La, or an aching sadness that their grand adventure, our grand adventure, would soon be over.
There had been an hour or so of this all-pervading gloom, when Popsicle called everyone together up on deck. He handed each of us a tin of condensed milk. ‘To sweeten you up, you miserable beggars. Come on, it’s not that bad. Do you think it’s the last time we’ll be doing this? Of course it’s not. Don’t you worry, I’ll see to it.’ He patted his wheel. ‘We’ll go out in the old girl whenever you want to. She’s my boat, isn’t she? I’ll take her out whenever I want to. They can’t stop us. Promise.’
They seemed to brighten a little at that. Popsicle hadn’t finished. ‘All right, so we didn’t find what we came for. It didn’t work out like I wanted. But we’ve had the time of our lives, haven’t we? We may be a lot of old crocks, but I’m telling you, this old girl never had a finer crew, not even in her heyday. So let’s not mope, eh? We’ll scoff down our condensed milk, warm ourselves up with Benny’s tea, and we’ll all come home smiling. I want them to see us smiling. And they’ll be waiting, you can be sure of that. There’ll be quite a kerfuffle when we get back, I shouldn’t wonder. And the Dragonwoman’ll be there too, bound to be. So let’s just show the old crow what a time we’ve had. Let’s show her what we’re made of. How about it?’