When Beggars Dye Read online

  WHEN

  BEGGARS

  DYE

  Peter Hey

  When Beggars dye, there are no Comets seen,

  The Heav’ns themselves blaze forth the Death of Princes.

  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies or events is entirely coincidental.

  © Peter Hey 2018 1.1.1E

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For Gunner Frank Dye. Sorry, Frank. And sorry, Frances Ellen and both Mabels. I should have tried harder.

  I’d also like to mention the boxer George Foreman, if only because he doesn’t get hung up on names. Nor should you.

  ‘I named all my sons George Edward Foreman. And I tell people, “If you're going to get hit as many times as I've been hit by Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Evander Holyfield – you're not going to remember many names.”’

  I wouldn’t stress too much about dates either.

  Contents

  Prologue

  The lychgate

  North Atlantic 1941

  Leicester Square underground

  Pittsburgh proposal

  Beneath the Heights of Abraham

  A Derbyshire mining family

  First encounter

  There were two weasels in a bar...

  The wedding album

  The bell and the biro

  Forensic genealogy

  Old memories

  Norfolk 1943

  Documentation and confirmation

  Revelation and reconsideration

  Limehouse 1936

  American presidents

  A favour

  Chris Aimson

  Inspiration and adulation

  Another encounter

  Nottingham

  No longer East

  The twisted spire

  Solution

  Dismissal

  Double Cross

  The shoe box

  Adders’ nest

  Another phone call

  Three threads

  Case closed

  Heroes and myths

  Jean Paul

  Answers

  Contractor/client relationship

  Artificial light

  An end and a new beginning

  Laid to rest

  Film star looks

  The ferry

  The lychgate

  Prologue

  It’s not the first thing I remember, not quite. But if not my oldest memory, it is my oldest companion. It visits me daily. It whispers without words; it reminds me who I am, why I am. It defines me as it defines him: pirate princess and buccaneering pirate king. His giant frame towers above me on the dockside. He is strong and fearless, my protector. And he climbs aboard his tall, grey ship and he leaves me.

  Forever.

  Yet as the years have passed, the original colours have been lost to the primary hues of a child’s painting. All I see now is the representation of memory: lapping green waves and cloudless blue sky pierced by a flaming yellow sun that silhouettes the black outline of his head, wild haired in the wind. Two simple arcs of white suggest the swooping seagull, screaming in prescience of a lifetime’s hurt.

  And as I watch, the image melts and moulds, as I change and grow into a gangling teenager, wide eyed amongst the treasures of a Parisian gallery. Infantile shapes become a delicately detailed Orthodox icon: John the Baptist haloed by beaten gold. Am I Salome, my mother’s daughter? Do I share the blame?

  The lychgate

  The two men laid the crudely rolled sheet of lead on the bed of the battered white van. A tatty scrap of carpet helped deaden the sound, but it was largely unnecessary. Those living within earshot knew better than to look out of their windows when their sleep was disturbed by unusual noises in the early hours.

  ‘I’m having that old plaque too,' whispered the man in the darker jacket.

  ‘Can’t we leave that, Deano? It don’t seem right,' said the other. Despite the quietness of the reply, anxiety was evident in his voice.

  ‘Don’t tell me what’s right and what’s not,' rasped Dean. ‘What do you care? Your family’s not from round here. My great-uncle’s on the thing and you know what? I don’t give a damn. Everyone who ever cared is dead. Or so old they’re gaga. It’s ancient history, and that’s a nice lump of bronze that’ll melt down easy. No questions asked.’

  Dean looked for compliance in his accomplice’s face. Seeing only doubt, he gave up on argument. ‘Just do as you’re told! Pass me that bar.’

  Meekly, Steve reached down into the van and slid out the heavy steel crowbar. Dean grabbed it off him and then gestured that he follow. ‘I’ll need you to hold the bugger when it starts to come loose. If it hits the floor it’ll be enough to wake the dead.’

  ‘That’s what worries me,' muttered Steve.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, Deano.’

  There had once been the name of a builder across the side of the van, but the lettering had been stripped off years ago and any ghostly trace was indistinguishable in the half-light. The streetlamp directly in front of the church had been out for days and its partner 30 yards away seemed only to deepen the shadows, particularly beneath the pitched roof of the lychgate that led into the churchyard. To aid the darkness, the van was parked so as to mask the two men’s movements from the homes on the far side of what some locals insisted on calling the village green. But this was no picture-postcard idyll of rose-clad thatched cottages and duck pond. Dowley’s more prosaic history was betrayed by terraces of cheaply built Victorian houses that seemed to have been transported from the backstreets of an industrial northern city. One half of the ‘green’ had been tarmacked over for a car park; the other was home to a monument to the village’s past, a large pit winding wheel sunk vertically up to its axle. The spoked semi-circle of steel was the last trace of a coal industry whose demise had removed any remnants of pride from this small settlement in the Derbyshire countryside. Long before the local pit went the railway, its only memorial a Station Road with no station. Dowley was now an isolated, run-down dormitory, whose few working inhabitants left each morning in their cars and dreamt of moving up the housing ladder and away.

  Had someone twitched their bedroom curtains that night and been able to see past the van, they would have witnessed two men of almost identical build and appearance, scurrying around like rodents in the night. Indeed, there was something distinctly rat-like in their thin, pointed faces and closely cropped hair. A student of body language might have sensed a clear hierarchy, one man slightly more stooped and deferential to the other: dark jacket, the alpha male, albeit in a pack of two.

  The crowbar made short work of the ancient brass screws as they were wrenched clean out of the wooden frame of the lychgate. Whoever fixed them could never have imagined a time when their security would be challenged.

  ‘It’s heavier than I thought,' grinned Dean as the two men carefully lowered it to the ground.

  Steve began to gabble. ‘It feels like grave robbing. I don’t like this, I really don’t. My mum says you shouldn’t mess with the dead. She says there are things we don’t understand. Things that come back and haunt you. We shouldn’t—'

  ‘Oh shut up! Your mother’s as mental as you are.’

  ‘I’m not mental. I told you, that assessment thing said I had very mild learning difficulties, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, Steve. So you said.’ Dean took a breath and switched from derision to reassurance. ‘Look, this isn’t a grave. N
o-one named on this thing is buried anywhere near here. Not that I know of. It’s just a war memorial. The bodies were all left in France or Germany or God knows where. My gran’s brother isn’t buried anywhere. He was on a ship that was blown up at sea. He’s down at the bottom of the Atlantic and has been for, what, 70-plus years?’

  Steve’s only reply was a sullen look and Dean continued his justification. ‘It’s all so long ago no-one cares. A troop of boy scouts marches up here every Remembrance Sunday, but no-one comes now who actually knew any of these blokes. When I was a kid, my gran would drag me up here and go on about her poor brother and how young he was...’

  Dean paused and pulled a small penlight from his pocket. He glanced around and then twisted the end to shine a feeble cone of light onto the oxidised green lettering. ‘Here he is. Bottom left corner. K R Dye.’

  Steve scanned the names. They were laid out in four columns and divided into two main sections. Some 30 men were listed under 1914-1918, but only eight under 1939-1945. Steve tilted his head and looked puzzled. ‘So that’s World War I and World War II, I guess. I thought from school that World War II was, like, huge. So why are there more names under World War I?’

  Dean found himself fumbling in his memory for the answer he’d received when asking the same question as a child. Something came to him, but it was largely derived from different conversations that had moulded his young mind.

  ‘Lots of men were slaughtered in the trenches in the First World War, a whole generation they reckoned. Every family lost someone. By the time of World War II, no-one, I mean no-one, wanted another fight with Germany. The smart ones actually admired Hitler and what he was doing to rebuild his country. It was no skin of our nose if he had a go at them commie-bastard Poles and Russians. That’s what strong men do. We had this guy in our country, Oswald Mosley, who thought we should be on the same side as Hitler, but then… It’s a long story, but along comes Sir Winston bloody Churchill. He starts a war that bankrupts the country. We only win because we get bailed out by the Yanks. Sixty odd years later, Germany is running Europe and we’re the ones swamped with Poles and the Russian mafia.’

  Steve wordlessly nodded his head despite struggling to follow. A knowing smile had crept onto Dean’s face as he continued the history lecture.

  ‘But here’s the thing – a very wise man once said, “It’s the victors what write the histories.” Churchill and his mates wrote the history of the Second World War. Oswald Mosley was painted as the bad guy and the whole country had hated him and wanted to take on Hitler. But if that’s the case, why are they so few names listed under World War II? Answer me that, Steve?’

  Dean had no intention of waiting for a response. He was enjoying the way his logic constructed such a compelling argument. His hobbyhorse was breaking into a gallop.

  ‘But you and I know things are changing again, don’t we Steve? All over the world, people have had enough. They’ve lost faith in voting and democracy because we always get the same bastards in charge. What do they call them? The liberal elite. Lording it over us, getting rich while we get poorer. Destroying our industries, our communities. Calling us racists...’

  Dean stopped himself as he suddenly remembered where he was. He switched off the torch and adopted a more urgent tone.

  ‘Don’t get me going. Look, I told you, this plaque is just ancient history. Dodgy history at that. Now let’s get this thing in the back and get our arses out of here.’

  Silent now, the two men lugged the bronze sheet into the van. They closed the doors as gently as they could and then climbed in the front. Dean used his sleeve to wipe the condensation from the windscreen and his eyes swept the scene for signs of life. Reassured, he turned the key. Like a heavy smoker responding to an early morning alarm, the worn-out diesel engine reluctantly coughed into life. Releasing the handbrake, Dean shifted into gear and steered the van towards the sanctuary of the unlit country lane that led out into the night.

  Dean allowed himself a brief smile of relief and satisfaction. He glanced over at Steve and winked. ‘A good night’s work, that. And don’t lose any sleep about that plaque. It’s one of them victimless crimes, mate. Nothing’s going to come back to haunt you.’

  North Atlantic 1941

  The petty officer in the recruiting office had decided the young miner would make an ideal stoker. The Royal Navy had adopted oil power a generation before, but the old sea dog from Tiger Bay had a long memory and had always been a proponent of returning to an abundant, native source of fuel. And, he reasoned, there was still room for a fit and healthy coal shoveller on some of the senior service’s lesser or more ancient vessels.

  ‘And it’ll be finest Welsh steam coal, laddo. None of that Derbyshire rubbish.’

  And even if the laddo found himself on an oil burner, a life below decks in the bowels of the ship would suit someone used to a subterranean world.

  Ken wanted to say he’d had his fill of dirt, dust and dark confinement, but was intimidated by the older man, and besides, he was relieved to be accepted into the navy. His father had warned him off a life in khaki, the muddy hell of the trenches having claimed several family members a short two decades earlier.

  Ken made the train journey home with a huge grin on his face. As the song said, all the nice girls love a sailor, and wearing a beard and bell-bottom trousers, he was going to see the world. His parents and sisters would be proud. He decided not to relay the petty officer’s opinion of the black rock his father had spent a life of toil and sweat bringing to the surface.

  12 months later, Stoker 2nd Class Dye had the bell-bottoms but not the beard. The sparse whiskers on his youthful, fresh face had not convinced the chief stoker that they were capable of growing into something that the captain would accept as a ‘full set’ in line with King’s Regulations. Dye had at least two consolations. Despite her age, his ship drew her power from tanks of fuel oil. His job was in one of the four cavernous boiler rooms deep below decks, directly below her twin funnels. He got his hands dirty, but it was oil and grease that smeared his face, not coal dust. The second consolation, and what a consolation, was the identity of that ship. She was the pride of the Royal Navy, for 20 years the largest and most powerful warship afloat, arguably the most beautiful, with 30 knots of speed and armed with eight formidable 15-inch guns. She was HMS Hood.

  A total of 24 boilers generated steam for the four massive turbines that each drove a huge manganese bronze propeller, 15 feet in diameter. In her sea trials, her engines had generated the power equivalent to over 150,000 horses and it took some 300 officers and men just to keep the shafts turning.

  Ken was on the mess deck when the captain gave the call to action stations. The young rating took one last look at the photograph fixed to his locker door. Stoker 1st Class Jock Brown leaned over his shoulder as he did so.

  ‘Kenny’s blowing kisses at his girlfriends again, lads,’ said the Scotsman, with a bravado meant to distract from the anxiety he knew they were all feeling in their stomachs.

  ‘As you well know, Jock, they’re my sisters,’ replied Ken, instinctively playing the game.

  ‘Well if they’re not your girlfriends, maybe you could introduce them to Sid, Taff, Tommo and me.’

  ‘Apart from Mary, they’re way too young for you lot. And whilst I might introduce my big sister to Sid or Taff, or maybe even Tommo, there’s no way on earth I’d let you go anyway near her, Jock.’

  ‘I think you’ve got me wrong, Kenny. I’m a—'

  ‘Stop squawking like shitehawks and get to your posts!’ bawled an officer. ‘The ship’s got a job to do. The job she was built for. And she needs every one of you to be where you’re bloody well supposed to be!’

  It was hot in the boiler room, and not for the first time, Ken was glad he wasn’t above decks exposed to the bitter cold of a North Atlantic dawn. But at least he might know what was going on up there. Here, below the waterline, amongst a confusion of pipes, taps and valves in a sealed and windowless steel
chamber, you read the state of battle through the sounds echoing around you. For nearly three hours, there’d been a constant background din as the throbbing turbines pushed the ship at full speed and every rivet and bolt seemed to be humming with vibration.

  Suddenly, there was a colossal blast from the front of the ship and she shuddered from stem to stern.

  ‘Don’t worry, son,’ said Chief Petty Officer Knox above the noise. ‘Those are our guns. We’ve fired off a salvo from the forward turrets. I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of that lot.’

  The guns roared again, and high-explosive shells weighing nearly a ton were sent arcing at over twice the speed of sound towards their target, some 13 miles distant.

  ‘Why aren’t they using the aft turrets as well, Chief?’ said Ken, trying to hide the quiver in his voice.

  ‘We must be going pretty much straight towards the bastards. Taking the fight to them.’

  Within two or three minutes there was a different sounding loud crash that seemed to come from directly above.

  ‘They’ve hit us,’ said Knox, nervously looking up at the ceiling. ‘Don’t worry, son. The old girl can take it. But there’ll be dead sailors up there. It’s at times like this I’m glad we’re down here.’

  ‘Do you think we’d get out, Chief? You know, if they did get us?’ Ken’s mind was racing through the labyrinth of bulkhead doors and ladders that stood between them and the possibility of escape.

  ‘We’re on the Hood, son. The Invincible Hood. It’s them poor sods on the Bismarck and the Prince Eugen that need to be scared.’

  They felt the ship begin swinging to port.

  ‘Here we go, son. The captain’s bringing her about so we can train everything on the bastards. They’re going to be sorry.’

  HMS Hood had been designed in World War I. She was fast and had the guns of a battleship, but her armour protection was flawed. She was ageing and had been in near constant service for over 20 years. She retained her beauty but desperately needed the major rebuild that had been postponed because of the start of a second great war. The Admiralty knew she was now outclassed by modern capital ships such as Bismarck, but few available big gun vessels could match her speed, and Hood was despatched to hunt the German down before she could wreak havoc on the Atlantic convoys.