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. . . . . . •• JJJJ ■■ m Ty'Jj I: THE ARCHERS RETURN TO AMBRIDGE A I hfrs (q RETURN TO AMBRIDGE § ) Jock Gallagher BBC BOOKS Other titles in the Arch.lers series TO THE VICTOR THE SPOILS BORCHES ER ECHOES Published by BBC Books A division of BBC Enterprises Ltd Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane, London W12 OTT First published 1988 © Jock Gallagher 1988 ISBN 0 563 20606 3 Set in 10/11 Times Roman by Opus, Oxford and printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk CHAPTER ONE For Jack Archer the war was over. Not that it had ever really started as far as he was concerned. After three years of being pushed around a miserable barracks in Aldershot, the army had finally decided it didn’t need him. Now he’d been discharged - “honourably” it said on his papers - but he knew differently. There could be no honour in walking away from a war. Like most of his mates, Jack Archer had signed on as soon as he could because he wanted to be a hero. He wanted to do his bit for the country . . . to show Hitler what the British were made of . . . to kill a few Germans . . . to win the war! At the time, the army had seemed to share his enthusiasm. The recruiting sergeant in Borchester had been keen to take him. Within days of his eighteenth birthday and fresh off his father’s farm, he was on his way to the Borsetshires’ regimental headquarters. He felt he was destined for greatness. There were medals to be won . . . and some of them surely had Jack Archer’s name on them. It was a young doctor, only a couple of years older than he was, who had been the one to throw a spanner in the works. After carrying out a few peremptory tests and listening to Jack’s slightly wheezy chest for a couple of seconds with a stethoscope, the MO had scribbled the cruel words . . . “unfit for active service” on his medical record. And that, Jack reflected, was the day the war really ended for him. Whoever had said “They also serve who only stand and wait” had been wrong. Ask anyone who had done his time in the quartermaster’s stores issuing boots to other lads so that they could march off to war and glory. Jack had never felt anything but useless in the service depot they’d sent him to. He had wanted to walk tall with his Borsetshire mates in the county regiment; he just could not adjust to life as a private in 5 the Royal Army Service Corps. He had hated it. Yet he knew he should have been grateful not to have been in the thick of the fighting. Stuck in the depot handing out equipment, he saw squads of new boys, dreamers with the gleam in their eye he had once had in his, going off to war. Thinking only of victory over the enemy, they were cheerful and noisy as they acquired the paraphernalia of killing. To them, the King’s uniform was a magic cloak that would protect them from harm . . . and because they were right and the Germans were wrong, God was on their side. And he had seen blokes his own age come back shattered in body and spirit . . . broken men who told terrible stories of carnage . . . of guns and shells and tanks and the noise and stench of war. They all spoke in the same monotonous voice . . . not complaining, just explaining. He could see the nightmare in their eyes as he relieved them of their battle-stained uniforms that had given no protection at all against the experiences they had just been through. For Jack, the only saving grace of his time in the army was that he’d found himself a wife. Lancecorporal Peggy Perkins of the ATS, the clerk in charge of the stores, was a pretty, bright-eyed Londoner whose sharp Cockney wit had done much to relieve the gloom of Jack’s surroundings. A smile from her had most of the men eating out of her hand. Life, said Peggy, was for living and if she had to do it in the shadow of war, she would simply have to