Remembrance Day

By Clive Hopkins

Cadet Fredrick Barnes stands to attention as the notes of the bugle remind all present of the reason for their attendance; the string from the draped flag masking the new memorial is wound round his hand to ensure no possibility of slipping. The final note of The Last Post drifts into the silence, and young Barnes pulls the string.

The explosion that follows kills all those standing in front of the new memorial and injures many behind them.

As the senior policeman present, DI Dibs Beacon tries to find out what sort of monster bombs a Remembrance Day service.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524594367

Clive Hopkins

Clive Hopkins joined the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen and served for ten years. Upon leaving the Royal Navy, he emigrated to Toronto, Canada, where he served as an auxiliary police officer. Returning to the United Kingdom, he joined the International Publishing Company’s industrial division as a staff writer, subsequently becoming editor and then group editor of three titles in the scientific/technical list. Since then he has published a naval trilogy about the Korean War, well received by the cognoscenti, and the first book in the ongoing Detective Inspector Dibs Beacon series of crime novels, An Appropriate Death.

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Copyright © 2016 by Clive Hopkins.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016915457

ISBN:   Hardcover            978-1-5245-9438-1

              Softcover              978-1-5245-9437-4

              eBook                   978-1-5245-9436-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/15/2016

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CONTENTS

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1

H e didn’t know that he was going to die but he was angry anyway.

Sunday’s Remembrance Day, it’s important to maintain the tradition. Be there, its special. Ten thirty.

Dave Clark deleted the text. He was angry. It was a special day. Whilst there were none of the old soldiers of the first war still alive locally, it was nevertheless an important reminder to the youngsters that their great grandfathers, and later, their grand fathers and even more recently, their fathers had been prepared to die to ensure the next generation’s freedom. He doubted whether any of those old soldiers would recognise the so-called freedom enjoyed today, what with cctv everywhere, English laws being made in Brussels, etc. but the alternatives on offer in 1914, 1939 and since had been worse.

He’d read about the simultaneous grand opening of the new museum in the local rag The present Council were like that, always prepared to steal someone else’s thunder. Keep the public’s attention on their activities and what a good job they were doing; not like the other lot that had lost control after three of them had been caught with their trousers down and been forced to resign, they at least had known that Remembrance Day was still important to a lot of people.

Dave was not pleased to be called in to carry the British Legion banner at what he regarded this year as a political show. He had served his country in Korea, and then he had been somebody. Now, a pensioner, he was regarded by young, ungrateful politicians as a drag on the economy; a cost to the working population who would have enough trouble providing pensions for themselves without carrying all these old buggers into an apparently endless future of idleness and comfort. It wasn’t his fault that medical science had ensured that he had already exceeded the biblical three score years and ten but he sure as hell wasn’t going to die any time soon just to save those ungrateful bastards money.

Still, with the recent hundredth anniversary of the start of World War One, now fading, the previous leadership had decided to refurbish the old memorial and now they were going to rededicate the repaired, improved and much-added-to edifice; at least that was something. He supposed he should be grateful that his name wasn’t on it! Three of his friends were on it and at least they were remembered once a year. It had been a near thing on a couple of occasions but luck, or the Chink’s inability to aim straight, had saved him from joining them and being sent home in a box. Ah well!

In Flower Street, deep within one of the oldest of the post-war council estates and even then misnamed if not intended as a sick joke, Bob Akers had received a similar call last week. Please could he attend the rededication ceremony as standard bearer for the RNA? His friend Arthur was in hospital and there was nobody else left who knew how to do it with dignity. He suspected that the real reason that he had been asked was that he was one of the few members still able to stand to attention for more than five minutes without falling over in a dead faint. We’re all getting too bloody old, and none of the younger ex-servicemen wanted to join the Association. Pity but what could you do? The Admiralty, or the Ministry of Defence as it was now called, had done what it could; they had agreed that all serving sailors, of whatever rate or rank, would automatically be enrolled as a member of the RNA but it was too late, the Association was dying on its feet. There were only seven members left in Hockley.

There were many more ex-sailors but they didn’t want to join; even the Sea Cadets didn’t want to be too obviously associated with them. The Sea Cadet Force was not really now a privileged entry to the much depleted Royal Navy, more an after school club run by disinterested parents hoping only to keep their kids off the streets; one or two of them would eventually join only to discover that the navy didn’t have any ships. They would be sitting in a basement under the MOD, directing drones from a computer console; but then, perhaps that was what they would want to do. They could be right. Nobody in their right mind wanted to put themselves physically in front of the enemy’s guns.

The President of the RNA local branch, Simon Hawkes, was a good president and a gent. Simon had been a Yeoman of Signals in the days when signals had still been sent using flags and flashing lights using the Morse code. Not like nowadays. Nowadays they were called Communicators and relied almost exclusively on radio; God! In Simon’s time, radios had been called wirelesses anyway.

Funny really, a new generation had reinvented the term wireless. The world went round and round and everything comes back into fashion eventually. He looked at the hanger hanging from the wardrobe door and wondered if wearing a blazer and tie would come back into fashion before he died, probably not: scruffy lot the present generation.

Of course he would be there, shoes highly polished, hat on straight – pusser fashion – he could still feel the honour that the banner bestowed on those that had served and the friends they had made; lifetime friends, some of them. Friends that still believed in the same things that he still believed in, not like the kids of today.

Today’s kids were the product of their fathers but their fathers were the product of his own generation; what did we do so wrong, he wondered, that the civilised world had so quickly fallen apart? Ah well, carry on regardless, as they always said; nobody lives for ever. The word prescient might have come into his mind at that point but, of course, it didn’t.

2

T he war memorial, cleaned, repaired and refurbished had been moved from the park to its new position in front of the museum after many years of attacks by vandals. Here, in the town centre’s Wellington Square Garden, it was hoped that it would be safe from attack by anything more aggressive than the local seagulls; and a few passing pigeons.

Bob Akers and a few other veterans had watched the council’s workmen reassemble the refurbished memorial and lay out the new surround, offering ribald but kindly meant advice. To either side of the newly cleaned cross, a WWI field gun now stood, their wheels locked so that nobody could wheel them away as a Saturday night joke and, extending from that central array, a horseshoe shaped display comprised a series of diminishing sized shells, ranging from what the navy would recognise as the kind of twelve inch shell that would have been fired from a heavy cruiser down to a forty millimetre shell that would have been fired from a Bofors anti-aircraft gun supplied by the neutral Swedish manufacturer. Both sides in WWII had made great use of these splendid weapons.

The Portland stone cross, now stood centrally within this horseshoe of war memorabilia and, cemented centrally in front of the cross, a WWII horned sea mine that had been washed up on the beach in nineteen sixty eight and, having failed to explode and nobody having claimed it, had been placed in the council’s storage yard and forgotten. Now, a smart young architect had suggested that it could form an important part of the display of weaponry with which he wanted to surround and illustrate the purpose of the newly restored war memorial; a small collecting box had been incorporated into this.

Beneath the small hole in the top of its casing, from which the detonator had long ago been withdrawn, an engraved plaque now suggested the donation of one penny in recognition of the nation’s debt to those that gave their lives that later generations might live in peace. The council being realists, had not expected that there would ever be sufficient money donated to warrant retrieval and no provision had been made for this. Today, thrust into this small hole, a posy of poppies gave graphic, blood-coloured emphasis to the occasion. A nice touch, Bob thought; he wondered who had put them there; not the council, that’s for sure.

Standing, more or less smartly, in front of this array, the local MP – Ms. Juniper Masters, the Mayor – Councillor Rodney Baker and the leaders of the two other political parties represented on the council formed the official rededication party; to the other side of the centrally placed MP, stood the mayor’s Mace Bearer and two members of the museum’s management to balanced the group. In spite of this, the balanced appearance of the group appealed to Bob’s sense of military order.

To one side of these worthies, and a little further from the memorial itself, stood the vicar of St. Michael and All Angels who would, when and if the politicians finally finished their own speeches, deliver a sermon. Opposite him stood the Royal Marine Cadet bugler who would at the appropriate moment render the Last Post; after that, they could all go home. The veterans would be glad to do so; it was important that the dead should be remembered but standing to attention for long periods was no longer as easy as it had once been. Getting old was no fun at all.

In front of these officials, facing the memorial and behind the four Standard Bearers waiting first to lower their banners in salute then, on completion of the Last Post, to raise their banners from the ‘dipped’ position, the three ex-service platoons and their attendant cadet groups had been fallen in by their non-commissioned officers using the traditional service terms of endearment.

Detective Inspector Dibs Beacon stood behind the servicemen and women, pretending not to be too proud of his adoptive grandson who stood with the sea cadets.

There was no grandma Beacon, she having died some years before from ovarian cancer but the boy’s adoptive father was there beside his own father, offering family solidarity and support amongst the many other proud parents and grand parents.

The Mayor had finally run out of steam and the vicar stepped forward to attract the attention of the local Press photographer and began his long, prepared sermon dealing with the evils of war in general and the evils of war particularly relating to or involving his flock, past and present.

Beacon saw the youngsters beginning to weaken in their resolve to stand smartly to attention and even some of the old soldiers themselves were beginning to show signs of their frailty. Did the fools that organised these things not have the sense to realise that there were men of over eighty standing there, waiting for them to finish so that the bugler could sound the Last Post and they could all go home for a cup of tea?

At last. The vicar ground to a halt and the bugler stepped forward, raising the bugle to his lips. Behind the memorial, Cadet Lance Corporal Fredrick Barnes, sixteen years old and looking forward to his enlistment, grasped the string that would unveil the new memorial as soon as the bugler had finished. One tug was all he was allowed to undrape the union flag that covered the new cross. No dragging and pulling like some demented acrobat, he had been told by his commanding officer. One smart tug and off it comes; alright?

Young Barnes stood, rock like at attention as the notes of the bugle reminded all present of the reason for their attendance, the string wound round his right hand to ensure that there was no possibility of it slipping when tugged. The last note drifted into the respectful silence that followed it and young Barnes tugged at the string.

The explosion that followed this simple gesture killed all those standing immediately in front of the memorial, one of the Standard Bearers and injured many of those formed up behind them. It also totally destroyed the memorial. Behind it, it blew out some of the carefully refurbished front wall of the museum, exposing that that was within to the inrushing hail of debris of brick, glass, steel and stone chippings; doing many thousands of pounds of damage to the exhibits so recently and carefully displayed. It also killed Cadet Lance Corporal Barnes.

For a long, dreadful moment that seemed like an eternity, the explosion created a sonic vacuum. No sound escaped from the scene of carnage surrounding it. The blast had blown all sound away from those still standing dazed like a petrified forest, whist around them lay the dead and mutilated bodies of those who had been closest to point zero, the WWII mine, long certified by the army as benign.

DI Beacon picked himself up, brushing off the fine dust that the disintegrating memorial had deposited over everyone present, even those well behind the military contingents. He was lucky not to have been injured by any of the thousands of larger fragments that had scythed through the assembled military and civilian watchers; a spot of someone else’s blood on his white shirt annoyed him. He fingered his ears, trying to unblock them only, upon success in this endeavour, to be assailed by the screams and terrified calling and sobbing of the mothers and fathers of the paraded cadets, the wives, sons, daughters and grandchildren of the veterans and of the even greater crowd of unrelated onlookers that had, only a moment before, been standing in respectful silence watching the ceremony.

Around him, amongst the blood and gore, others were doing the same, dabbing at bleeding faces with handkerchiefs, some not as clean and sterile as they might have wished had they known they were to be displayed in public. Within this chaos, he found his son and grandson and told the boy’s father to take the lad home. Conscious of the boy’s troubled background and his natural reticence resulting from his being adopted, home was the best place for the child. His probably schoolboy father was unknown, his schoolgirl mother had been unable to cope and now, apparently, some idiot was trying to kill him, he told the boys father to take the lad home and feed him hot sweet tea as the only known cure for shock. He was a good lad, grown up beyond his years but children of twelve, however worldly they thought themselves, should not be exposed to this sort of mayhem.

Everywhere were the signs of disaster and now almost frenetic activity as people tried to reunite into families, to find and hold each other as if by so doing they could recreate the peaceful scene of just a few moments before; before the explosion had altered their lives for ever.

He must restore order. As probably the only senior copper around, Beacon knew he should stay and try to make some sort of sense out of what had happened.

Here and there some of the senior veterans, the first to recover their senses were, as if transported back to their youth, endeavouring to re-establish order from the chaos. God only knew what was going through their minds; some terrible, impossible replay of their worst moments in long ago battles, moments when friends had simply ceased to exist, disappeared and been replaced by a gaping hole in the ground where the shell had landed. Slowly, discipline reasserted itself, a discipline many thought they had forgotten sixty or more years ago. Old men at first then, only moments later, women who had lived through the blitzes in London and other cities, came together, instinctively organising those about them, comforting those that could be comforted, helping others to find those they were looking for. Others, mobile phones clamped to their ears, were summoning assistance.

Bodies, even parts of bodies, lay strewn about, some bloody and wet, others seemingly unhurt, killed by the blast rather than by the thousands of pieces of flying shrapnel; all that remained of the harmless old sea mine that the young architect had proudly placed as the centre piece of his memorial.

Behind the remains of the cross, a woman sobbed, cradling the terribly damaged body of her son; Cadet Lance Corporal Barnes.

She sat, unable to comprehend the separation of the boy’s head from his body, clasping his remains to her as if, by sheer force of will, she could reassemble the parts, make him whole again. Around her, other women gathered, making no effort to separate the mother from the bloodied remains of her son but making comforting sounds rising from some deep, primeval, source within their own bodies, sounds entirely natural yet without positive form.

On what remained of the steps, the body of the MP lay, one severely lacerated leg twisted beneath her. Death had claimed her before she had had time to change the world as she had hoped to do. Her blonde hair, so carefully arranged only moments before, now matted by the blood still oozing from a gaping hole in the back of her head.

Beside her the Mayor lay, regalia intact, apparently unhurt but equally dead. Such is the effect of explosions, there is no explaining why or how people who but a