But the horrors that followed chilled Jamie’s blood. The bombs fell so frequently in the following days that Matthew stopped recording them. Meanwhile, the tone of the diary became ever more disjointed and frenetic. Jamie imagined the brief sentences being scribbled in the dark as the writer lay cowering in some water-filled ditch with his ears tuned for the slightest sound of an approaching enemy. Snatches of personal shorthand recorded what may have been momentous happenings, but were forever unintelligible. These pages were torn and mud-spattered and some were missing altogether. On one, Jamie noticed a fine spray of what could only have been blood. Within six days, the BEF was surrounded and fighting for its very survival. The Berkshires were ordered to fall back towards the Channel ports, and Lieutenant Sinclair tersely recorded the disintegration of his battalion as it was chewed to pieces by the panzers, entire platoons and companies wiped out in savage minor engagements that would never appear in the history books.
18 May 1940 (near Mons). Cut off from battalion. Sergeant Anderson killed today. Shot through head while counter-attacking German tanks armed with hand grenades. Not sure I can get through this without him. I wept. Hope nobody saw me. We are now just twelve men.
Jamie read on. Hunger, thirst, strain and exhaustion took its toll on the retreating British soldiers, and his grandfather’s morale collapsed as he played a deadly game of cat-and-mouse amidst the chaos of defeat. At one point it was clear he had to be persuaded not to surrender. That entry was followed by a gap of several days. Then:
2 June 1940 Reached Dunkirk perimeter with one sergeant and three men, none from 1st RBR. Waited seven hours on Mole for evacuation. Eventually picked up from beach by chap with motor boat 0100 hours and transferred to destroyer HMS Whitshed. Bombed continuously. Must sleep. God, how good that word sounds. Sleep.
The words began to blur and Jamie noticed with surprise that the train was drawing in to Euston station. He felt utterly drained, as if he’d been fighting side by side with the men whose dramatic lives and deaths the diary chronicled in the final days of Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the Dunkirk perimeter, when Matthew had been among the very last of the three hundred thousand French and British soldiers to leave the beaches.
One thing was certain. He had to know more about Matthew Sinclair’s war.
He phoned ahead next morning to confirm his arrival and found Carol waiting for him at the hospital entrance before she started her shift.
‘You’re a little early. He’s out walking. He likes to take the path through the fields to Dunchurch Road then back again. He should be on his way back now.’
Jamie remembered the pale figure hooked up to the dialysis machine. ‘Does he go alone?’
‘Please don’t underestimate Stan.’ She smiled. ‘The treatment is hard on him, but he’s as tough as a pair of old army boots.’
‘Maybe I could go and meet him?’ he suggested.
‘I think he’d like that. It’s just around the corner and across the main road. You can’t miss it. The path that runs beside the stream.’
He followed her instructions and found a track between two fields. Ahead he could see where a line of trees flanked the stream – actually more a sluggish canal – and beyond them an estate of substantial houses. He would have expected to meet the old man by now, but it was a warm morning and Stan must be close to ninety; maybe he had stopped for a rest? The further he went from the hospital the more his concern grew, but he wasn’t truly worried until he reached the road at the far side of the field. There was no reason the Pole couldn’t have taken a different route back, or been given a lift, but . . . As he retraced his steps Jamie found himself searching among the tall grass on the verges of the path, and in the glittering shadows beneath the trees.
Stan had worn a black overcoat despite the heat of the day and that was why Jamie had missed him on his first pass. He had to look twice before he climbed down to the river’s edge on legs that seemed to belong to someone else. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the gloom and realized what he was seeing. Christ. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.
The old man lay face down in the shallows beneath an ancient willow, his body weighed down by the waterlogged cloth of the coat. The black overcoat looked like just another shadow on waters the colour of stewed tea, its folds billowing gently in the almost non-existent current. Jamie struggled through the water until he could take a handful of cloth and heave the body over. As he turned, Stanislaus Kozlowski’s bespoke artificial hairpiece detached itself and floated sedately downstream. Reproachful eyes stared back from features set in the same fierce scowl they had worn in the wartime photograph.