The Tunnel by Eric Williams Page A

docility.
    ‘Come in, boys, come in,’ the padre was saying with practised heartiness. He was lean and wore an RAF tunic with pilot’s wings, khaki breeches and flying boots. He was a squadron leader. ‘You’re just in time for a cup of tea.’
    He led them to the nearest hut, which seemed to be the camp theatre. It had a raised stage at one end, but was now set out as a dining room with forms and long trestle tables. They went through this to a smaller room, also a dining room but with smaller tables and white tablecloths.
    ‘This is the officers’ mess,’ the adjutant told them. ‘The men eat in the larger room.’ He hastily corrected himself: ‘The transit officers’ mess, that is. The permanent staff feed in another hut’ It had a familiar ring to Peter; even here, in the heart of the enemy country, the racket system seemed rife. He half wished himself back in the cell again.
    They each took a thick pottery mug from the table and drew tea from a large enamelled urn. The tea was strong and sweet.
    ‘Good Lord, real tea,’ someone said.
    ‘It comes in the Red Cross parcels,’ the adjutant explained. ‘Helps to keep the cold out. The grub’s not bad really. We don’t get enough of it, but what there is isn’t bad. We have communal messing here’ – he seemed rather on the defensive about this – ‘the food is cooked by orderlies and served in this hut. You’ll be here for about ten days, then you’ll be sent on to a permanent camp. This place is only a transit camp.’
    ‘What are the chances of escape from here?’ It was the young Army officer.
    ‘Not a hope, old boy. Even if you got out of the camp, this snow would give you away. You’d leave tracks wherever you went. No – I shouldn’t think about it from here. Wait till you get to the permanent camp. Wait till summer – you’d not get far in this weather … What are things like in England? Where were you shot down?’
    ‘Libya.’
    ‘What were you flying?’
    There was a gleam of amusement in the dark eyes above the downy beard. ‘A BSA.’
    The adjutant looked nonplussed for a moment. He looked at the slim figure in khaki battledress, and slowly realized. ‘Oh – you’re in the Army!’ There was a world of condescension in the fruity voice. ‘How on earth did you get here?’ The blue eyes stared frostily from above the small nose and bristling moustache.
    The captain shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘Oh, well, you are here now,’ the padre said. He turned to Peter. ‘When were you captured, lad?’
    Peter told him the seventeenth of December.
    ‘So you had Christmas in the cooler, eh?’
    Peter thought over his time in the cell, trying to disentangle one day from another, decide which of them had been Christmas Day. They all ran together, forming a long chain of eventless monotonous days and nights. He could not get them into their proper sequence, and eventually he gave it up. ‘I suppose I did. But it wasn’t any different from any other day.’
    ‘No days are any different here,’ the doctor sighed and sat straddle-legged on one of the benches. ‘I’ve been here for eighteen months. Sometimes it seems like eighteen years, sometimes only eighteen days. It’s amazing how the time flies once you settle down.’
    ‘I thought this was a transit camp.’ It was the Army captain again; his tone was cool.
    ‘We’re the ‘Permanent Staff’. We pass you chaps on to the pukka camp. We were the first to arrive, so we got the job.’
    The captain looked at him over the rim of his cup, but said nothing.
    ‘What are the pukka camps like?’ Peter asked.
    ‘Some good, some bad,’ the adjutant told him. ‘If you go to a good one you’ll get games, theatre shows, decent huts to live in – they’re not at all bad, really.’
    ‘Have you ever been in one?’ the captain asked.
    ‘Er – no, we get reports. Er – have another cup of tea?’
    ‘We had a very good attendance on Christmas Day,’ the padre had Peter by the arm.