Bell Harry Read online

  BELL HARRY

  Nicholas Best

  © Nicholas Best 2019

  Nicholas Best has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One - The Luftwaffe’s Canterbury Raid

  Chapter Two - The Yank’s Tale

  Chapter Three - Thomas Becket and the French King’s Ruby

  Chapter Four - The Scrivener of Magna Carta

  Chapter Five - Bell Harry and the Black Prince

  Chapter Six - Wat Tyler and the Beheaded Archbishop

  Chapter Seven - Geoffrey Chaucer and the Harlot of Mercery Lane

  Chapter Eight - Henry V Gives Thanks for Agincourt

  Chapter Nine - Edward IV and the Wars of the Roses

  Chapter Ten - Henry VIII and the Boleyn Girl

  Chapter Eleven - The Looting of Thomas Becket’s Shrine

  Chapter Twelve - Christopher Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth’s Birthday Party

  Chapter Thirteen - A Pilgrim Father Charters the Mayflower

  Chapter Fourteen - King Charles I Consummates his Marriage

  Chapter Fifteen - Roundheads Storm the Cathedral

  Chapter Sixteen - The Restoration of Charles II

  Chapter Seventeen - Wolfgang Mozart and the Infant Prodigy

  Chapter Eighteen - John Adams, Future U.S. President

  Chapter Nineteen - Napoleon’s Troops in the Precincts

  Chapter Twenty - Jane Austen and Lady Hamilton’s Enormous Behind

  Chapter Twenty-One - Sir Thomas Picton Returns from Waterloo

  Chapter Twenty-Two - George Stephenson’s New Steam Engine on Wheels

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Charles Dickens and David Copperfield

  Chapter Twenty-Four - The Skeleton in the Crypt

  Chapter Twenty-Five - The Unknown Warrior

  Chapter Twenty-Six - The Yank’s Tale Continued

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - The Search for the King’s Ruby

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Bomb Disposal Squad

  To have seen the place where a great event happened is the next best thing to being present at the event in person. In this respect, few spots in England are more highly favoured than Canterbury.

  Dean Stanley

  Chapter One

  The Luftwaffe’s Canterbury Raid

  Just before one a.m. on the first of June 1942, a German chandelier flare exploded over the old town of Canterbury. It hung motionless for a moment, filling the sky with a bright yellow light. Then it began to drift downwards, dropping silently towards the cathedral far below.

  The flare lit up the tower of Bell Harry as it fell, and the sandbagged buildings around the cathedral, and the frightened faces of the people in the streets. It lit up twenty thousand people, all running for cover, desperate to find shelter before the bombs began to fall.

  The flare was followed by another flare, and then another — sixteen in all. They fell in rapid succession all over the sky, lighting up the whole town, making it bright as day.

  The flares were followed by the ominous drone of German aero engines, the familiar thump thump of Junkers 88 bombers on their approach run. The bombers’ target was Canterbury cathedral. The tower of Bell Harry lay right in front of them, brilliantly outlined against the flares exploding all around.

  There were seventy bombers on the raid. They had flown at wave height over the English Channel, crossing the coast north of Dungeness, picking up the railway line from Ashford to Canterbury and chasing it along in the moonlight until they came to the cathedral at the end.

  Canterbury was not a military target. There were no factories in the town. It was the cathedral the bombers were after, the Mother Church of all England. They had orders to destroy it from Reichsmarschall Goering himself.

  The bombers attacked in several waves, coming in so low over the rooftops that the black crosses on their wings were clearly visible as they unloaded their bombs.

  Most of the bombs were incendiaries, thousands of them, designed to start fires in hundreds of different places. But some were high explosive, capable of bringing Bell Harry crashing to the ground if they scored a direct hit.

  Others were land mines, delayed action monsters that lay ticking for days where they fell, fraying the nerves of the sappers trying to defuse them, who never knew when they would blow.

  The first bombs fell at eight minutes to one. They landed just south of the cathedral, in the medieval heart of the city. The tightly packed wooden houses along Burgate Street had been there since Shakespeare’s time.

  By one o’clock they were blazing from end to end, the roof timbers collapsing, the walls crashing outwards, filling the streets with smouldering heaps of rubble.

  The Longmarket was burning too, and Butchery Lane, all the shops to Watling Street. The flames rose a hundred feet into the air — so high that the cathedral itself was obscured by a giant pall of smoke.

  The explosions sucked debris up and flung it so far into the sky that papers and documents from Canterbury were found next day in villages seven or eight miles away, hurled there by the blast.

  In the streets there was panic as the fires took hold. People ran everywhere with no idea of where they were going — easy targets for the Germans machine-gunning them from above. The Archbishop of Canterbury was doing his best to restore calm, striding among the wounded in a steel helmet and a coat over his pajamas. His wife was with him, both of them white with shock at what was happening.

  Above them the bombs kept coming, but Bell Harry still stood. The cathedral had been showered with incendiaries, but the fire watchers on the roof were dealing with them, working frantically to seize the bombs by the tailfins and manhandle them over the parapet to burn out harmlessly on the grass below.

  There was little else they could do, because there was no water for the fire hoses. The mains had been cut at the beginning of the raid. There were no fire engines either, because the streets to the cathedral were blocked with rubble. Nothing could get past.

  Yet Bell Harry still stood — the tallest tower of the greatest cathedral in England. Thomas Becket had been murdered in Canterbury cathedral. King John had worshipped there. Henry V had given thanks on his knees for the victory at Agincourt.

  Bell Harry still stood — but for how much longer no one knew, as the next wave of bombers arrived over the town and winged downwards to begin their assault on the ancient tower.

  Bert Marden was a fire watcher at the cathedral. He wore overalls and a steel helmet and carried a gas mask slung over his shoulder. His job was to identify the incendiaries on the north side of the building and make sure they were extinguished before they could do any damage.

  It was dangerous work, with all the explosive coming down. Marden was scared out of his mind.

  ‘Bastards!’ What kind of people were they, who machine-gunned civilians in the street? Marden had fought the Germans in the First World War. He had served with the Royal West Kents in France and Belgium. He had thought that was the end of it, when the Armistice came, but now here they all were again.

  Marden was a greengrocer by trade. He had a wife and grown-up daughter and he was too old for any of this. He just wanted to be out of it, safe from the bombing. He didn’t want to get killed at his time of life.

  His post was at the Sellingegate, near the cathedral library. He could cover most of his side of the cathedral from there. There was supposed to be another fire watcher to help him, but the man hadn’t shown up for duty.

  Few of them had, when the bombing began. They had stayed home, or run for the shelters, or joined the rush for the open fields outside Canterbury. Anything to avoid the attack o
n the centre.

  ‘Bastards!’ Marden threw himself to the ground as more bombs fell, a rapid succession of deafening blasts that ripped into the earth and tore it violently apart.

  Shrinking down, he counted the blasts one by one. High explosive usually fell in sticks of eight. If you heard eight bangs, you knew you were all right. There wouldn’t be any more after that.

  ‘Six, seven, eight...’ Marden lay still after the last one, hugging the ground for another few seconds before cautiously picking himself up again. But there were no more bombs, after the eighth. He was going to live, this time.

  Shaking the dust out of his eyes, he looked around to assess the damage. The cathedral library had gone, for a start. The whole building had vanished, as if it had never been there at all.

  One wall was still intact, with pictures still hanging on it. The rest had fallen into a huge crater which had suddenly appeared. The walls had gone first, taking thousands of books with them.

  The roof had followed, in a great shower of dust and rubble that swept everything before it. The whole cathedral library had been blown to pieces, by a single German bomb.

  Next to the library, another crater had appeared, about twelve feet across. Marden walked unsteadily to the edge and shone his flashlamp into it.

  He saw water at the bottom, flowing into an underground tunnel that led towards the cathedral. The tunnel was ten feet down, built of Kentish stone. It was the conduit for a subterranean spring, channelling the water under the foundations of the cathedral and out again the other side.

  Another bomber began its dive. Instinctively, Marden leapt into the crater and ran for the tunnel. It was the safest place, with ten feet of earth over his head.

  He ducked into the opening and took cover again as the bombs hit. They were further off this time, too far away to be a danger.

  Marden slumped thankfully against the wall. His hands were shaking beyond control. He badly needed a cigarette to steady his nerves.

  He shone his lamp down the tunnel. It led straight under the cathedral. In days gone by, the stream at his feet had supplied the monks of the monastery with fresh drinking water.

  The monks had been gone for centuries, but the water still flowed, forgotten in its own private tunnel until the Luftwaffe blew a hole in the roof for everyone to see.

  The water came up to Marden’s knees. Playing his light along the tunnel, he saw a set of stone steps further along, leading out of the stream to a recess in the wall.

  Wading towards it, he saw that the recess was a narrow alcove ten feet long by five wide, built into the foundations of the cathedral. The entrance had been bricked in at some point, because a few of the bricks were still in place. The rest had just collapsed, hit by shock waves from the bombing.

  Marden shone his light into the alcove. He saw the dead men at once. There were three of them, slumped unnaturally across the stone floor.

  For a moment, he assumed they had been killed by the bombing. But then he looked closer and saw that the men had been dead much longer than that.

  Boots, spurs, broadswords. Lobster tail helmets. Buff riding coats made out of cowhide. They were soldiers of Cromwell’s Parliamentary army. They had been dead for three hundred years.

  The men were skeletons now, with a few wisps of hair still attached to their skulls. Two lay on their backs, the third on his side, with one arm flung outwards. A broken sword lay by his hand; beyond it an upturned copper casket with the contents scattered all around.

  Marden caught a glimpse of gold and silver as he lifted his light to the wall at the far end of the alcove. There was a shrine on the wall, with a man praying on his knees in front of it. A man in the sovereign robes of a Tudor king. He was as large as life, human in every detail, but made entirely of silver gilt.

  Above the king, there was a golden angel on the wall, and an enormous ruby as big as a plum. There were other jewels as well, and a human skull mounted between two candlesticks in a casing of solid silver.

  The skull had a large piece missing from the top of the crown — gouged out, Marden guessed, by a blow from a Plantagenet sword almost 800 years ago. The skull of St Thomas Becket.

  Marden turned to run. In two strides he was out of the passage and heading for the exit, splashing along the tunnel as fast as he could go. Another stick of bombs was coming down, but Marden didn’t care. He just wanted out as quick as he could.

  ‘One... two... three...’ The bombs were right in front of him, coming his way. ‘Four... five...’ Marden felt the impact as they thudded into the ground ahead.

  He heard the sixth as it landed almost on top of him, in a shower of flying debris, but he didn’t ever see it. The blast twisted him round and sucked the eyeballs out of his head before he had a chance to turn away, leaving him blind for ever.

  His last memory was of being hurled high into the air, then thrown down again under a vast pile of rubble. He remembered the shock of his fall, the weight of the masonry pressing down, the sudden darkness all around. He remembered the dust clogging his nostrils as he struggled to breathe — and that was all Bert Marden ever remembered of the Luftwaffe’s little visit to Canterbury, on the first day of June, in the year of grace nineteen hundred and forty-two.

  Chapter Two

  The Yank’s Tale

  Hi. I’m dying. I only have a few weeks to live, so it’s now or never if I’m going to say what I want to say. If I don’t get it off my chest now, I never will, and that’s a fact.

  My name is Ezra Tyler. I’m from Colorado, Larimer County. I was born in 1923 and raised in the Depression. A farm boy. There were six of us altogether, two older brothers, two sisters, and one who died.

  We were poor, like everyone else we knew. So poor we didn’t eat, sometimes. That‘s how it was, back then. Nobody’s fault. Just the way it was.

  What I have to say is about World War II, and what I did in it. I don’t know if anybody will be interested, but if I don’t film myself now and get the story down on tape, no one will ever know what happened.

  So I’m going to do it now, while I still have the chance, and hope somebody else can make some sense out of it some time. There must be someone out there who knows more about it than I do. Maybe what I say now will help them track it down and find the answer after I’m gone.

  Here goes, anyhow.

  I was eighteen when the war came, working on the farm. I remember it like it was only yesterday. Pearl Harbor on the radio, President Roosevelt, the whole bit. I couldn’t believe it, what the Japs had done. Bombing the US Navy! What the hell did they think they were playing at?

  We went into town soon as we heard the news, took the truck to Fort Collins and went to see what was happening. Everyone else was there too, all the folks we knew. They’d all come in, from all over. They were all fighting mad, just itching to drop everything and get back at the Japs. I never saw so many angry people in my life.

  Of course we all enlisted, first chance we got. Soon as the doors opened we were in there, signing up for Uncle Sam. I guess we’d known a war was coming, with the fighting in Europe and all of that. It was time to do our bit.

  It was exciting too — I won’t pretend it wasn’t. Better than working the farm. I was eighteen, as I say, only a kid. I’d never been anywhere or done anything, never in my whole life. The chance wouldn’t come again. I grabbed it with both hands, joined the military as soon as I could. Nothing would have stopped me, if you want the honest truth.

  I guess I owe the Army, one way and another. They gave us three meals a day, for a start. You didn’t ever have to worry about your next bite to eat. It was always right there, as much as you wanted.

  Medical care too, and dentists, all right there. They looked after us real good, I’ll say that for them. Didn’t cost us a nickel.

  Boot camp was in North Carolina, Fort Bragg. It was the first time I’d ever been out of state. I thought I’d be going with my buddies from back home, seeing as how we’d all enlisted together, but it di
dn’t work out like that. We all went every which way, got separated from the first.

  Some joined the Rangers, some went in the Navy. And some we never saw again, after the war was over.

  I joined the infantry like most everyone I knew. There were guys from all over at boot camp — Oklahoma, Kansas, New York, Seattle, you name it. Nebraska. There were Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, all kinds of people thrown together who’d never seen each other before.

  The only thing we had in common is we were all Americans, just waiting for a crack at the Japs. Sooner we got at the Japs, the happier we would be. That’s how we felt, after what they’d done at Pearl Harbor.

  But I can’t say I enjoyed boot camp, and I doubt any of the others did either. It wasn’t meant to be fun. It was meant to turn us into soldiers, and it did that, right enough. I didn’t enjoy it though — not even with all the food, and money in my pocket. I just didn’t like it, never met anybody who did.

  Anyhow, I got through it okay and came out the other end — Private Ezra B. Tyler, United States Army. We all saluted the general at the big parade and threw our hats in the air and then went to join our outfits.

  I was sent to the 1051st in Maryland. They were front line infantry, or so I was told, but actually none of us had ever been in a real fight before, not even the ones who were regular army — and there weren’t many of those.

  We were all just rookies who didn’t know one end of a bazooka from the other before we joined the military. Not like the Japanese, who’d been fighting in China for years.

  That was the summer of 1942, but it wasn’t until the fall of 1943 that we shipped out to join the war. So much fighting going on — Guam, Bataan, Guadalcanal — and we weren’t even in it, for a whole year. And when we did finally ship out, it wasn’t to the Pacific, like we were expecting. It was to England, to fight the Germans. We never got to fight the Japs at all.