The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield

Author:R. F. Delderfield [Delderfield, R. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781444719116
Google: QGE4AgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2011-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

II

The gull, being no fisherman, did not venture across the tidal lagoon to the sandbars where the one landing craft the Americans had left behind lay wrecked and rusting, holed by a 1940 obstruction and now the haunt of gulls who lined its weed-covered sides to watch for fish trapped in the hull. Evie Craddock saw them standing there as she tied up to the barnacled poles, slipped out of her skirt and singlet, and lowered herself into eight feet of slack water. There were no prohibitions about bathing now and in fine weather she came here every day. It brought Simon much closer and today she was in need of some kind of reassurance.

He had said nothing about the part he expected to play in the invasion but his extreme reticence had only increased her uneasiness. Before releasing her hold on the gunwale she looked across the ruffled water towards France, picturing what might be happening there, her guesses based on the scrappy content of the radio bulletins. They did not tell her much. To listen to the genteel voice of the announcer one would imagine the invasion was a kind of cross-Channel excursion, the picnic to end all picnics, with men wading ashore in shallows shouting like boys sent to play on a beach. She was aware, of course, that it was not like that at all, that over there, almost within sight it seemed, men were bleeding to death in the shallows and all was the wildest confusion. Simon, if he was there at all, would have been ashore since first light, and she wondered, distractedly, whether there had been a second mention of glider troops in later bulletins. The thought made her push off and swim rapidly round the dinghy, as though ashamed of enjoying herself when Simon and hundreds of thousands of others were drenched in sweat and numbed by explosions. Then her commonsense caught up with her and she thought, ‘If he could see me he’d laugh—out here making a pilgrimage round the mermaid beat in his honour. I’ll write and tell him what I did on D-Day.’ She lay flat on her back and let herself wash to and fro in the tidal wavelets. ‘He’ll make it somehow,’ she told herself. ‘It’s like Paul told me on the phone—Simon will make it in the long run or he wouldn’t have got this far.’

Simon had, in a manner of speaking, already made it. The Orne bridge was now as secure as the most optimistic of them could have hoped for ten hours previously when they cast off and came gliding in from the north-west to crash within fifty yards of the bridges over the little river and the Caen Canal.

The first twenty minutes had been the liveliest and, in some ways the most rewarding of Simon’s military career and that career went back a long time now—to the day when he emerged from the hold of the Dutch collier to join the raggle-tailed Basques in a war that was already history.

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