The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  “It smells like Grandfather,” she said. “Pipe tobacco. Balkan Sobranie Mixture. He smoked in here non-stop for fifty years.”

  She flipped a switch and a yellow light filled the room. It was a good sixty square metres, and took up an entire corner of the house. One row of windows offered a view of the sea and through another I could see the fields of Unst. I crossed the floor, and from there I could see the veranda and the green foliage of the arboretum.

  Gwen stood with her back to the window and observed me silently as I wandered about. In front of a book cabinet stood a massive bureau with worn corners. Small woven baskets on top contained dried-out rubbers, glasses’ cases and matte fountain pens. The bookshelves were crammed with yellowed newspaper cuttings and leather-bound books.

  A glass-fronted cabinet was filled with whisky bottles. Most of their contents had evaporated. Another cabinet was stacked with flat tins. “This is what you can smell,” she said, twisting one open. “Balkan Sobranie.”

  On the inside of the lid were the words: A long cool smoke to calm a troubled world. I put my nose to the dried tobacco. Tried to evoke a hint of a memory, but it did not come. “The jacket I was wearing,” I said. “Did that belong to your grandfather?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you let me borrow it to see the gunsmith’s reaction?”

  “No. I let you borrow it because you needed a tweed jacket. Don’t be so suspicious. It doesn’t become you and I won’t have it, not in here.”

  In front of a sooty fireplace there was a worn living-room set and a low table with an enormous crystal ashtray on top. Above the mantelpiece was a painting of Gwen. It looked like she was in her early teens, in profile and dressed in an old-fashioned checked skirt and sleeveless blouse, looking across to a coastline. I recognised the place, it was a river here on Unst.

  “There aren’t any other family pictures here,” I said.

  “Oh yes, there are. Here’s his other family,” she said and pointed at the wall behind the desk.

  The photograph was one metre wide, but no taller than a sheet of A4 paper. I came closer and immediately saw why it was in that format. It was of a military detachment, probably three hundred men divided into six rows. The frame was inlaid with a small brass sign engraved with THE BLACK WATCH 1915.

  “He is sitting with the officers in the middle of the front row. The one without the moustache. Captain at the age of twenty.”

  It was a good photograph, with all the faces in sharp grey tones. The soldiers were my age, they seemed cheerful and carefree.

  “The Black Watch wore kilts into battle as late as 1940,” she said. “The Germans thought they were skirts and called them ‘the Ladies from Hell’. Look at the four men standing by the officers – bagpipers. They followed the soldiers to the front line, all the way. It’s no coincidence that a corps from the Black Watch played bagpipes at Kennedy’s funeral.”

  “Why were they called that?”

  “Are called. They’ve existed since the 1600s. Do you think a Scottish regiment would disband after only a few hundred years? But the name – no-one knows for certain. Grandfather could spend hours explaining all the theories. They wear dark tartan, but my favourite explanation is that they’re called the Black Watch because the first soldiers had such dark hearts.”

  Standing by the photograph, I was struck by that same smell. The smell of tobacco when it settles in a room or in clothes. Bestefar always came to mind when I caught the smell of cigarillos. Could my father have smoked Balkan Sobranie?

  I leaned forward and studied Duncan Winterfinch. The bandoleer cut proudly across his chest, but he was not looking into the camera. Instead he looked to the side, at the privates. A striking number of them were not looking at the camera either, but at their captain. It was impossible to see whether it was doubt or admiration in their eyes.

  From a wardrobe Gwendolyn took a khaki uniform jacket. She carefully laid it flat on the glass table in front of the fireplace, the crystal ashtray squeaking as she pushed it away. At first I thought she had not unfolded the jacket completely, until I realised that the entire left arm was missing. The material hung in shreds from the shoulder, the fibres black and resembling rough twine. Blood had soaked into the torn fabric, where it had dried and never been washed out. On the shoulder straps there were three faded captain stars.

  “Do you find it unpleasant?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Just . . . sad.”

  She took off the wristwatch and placed it on the table where the left cuff would have been.

  “Grandfather had been at the front for almost a year when it happened. He had also fought on the first, the most catastrophic day. And then the Black Watch were sent in to take the woods. What the gunsmith told us chimes with what Grandfather told me. But he left out everything about the trees and the gas. I had never heard about the Sixteen Trees of the Somme until now. I cannot understand why.”

  It must have been the same gas that killed Mamma and Pappa, I thought. But I said nothing to Gwen, because I could sense that we had each followed our own path during the story, and that we might emerge from it separately.

  “All Grandfather told me was that he had been hit by shrapnel. When he came to, he was alone. His soldiers were lying around him, dying or blown to bits. He got to his knees but felt strangely unsteady. It was because his severed arm lay on the ground behind him. His Webley revolver was just beyond his fist. Do you know what he thought was strangest of all?”

  I shook my head.

  “That his watch kept going, even though it was on a severed arm.”

  I ran my hand over the cloth. Rough, tightly woven. I had an urge to pick up the uniform, just as I had picked up the dress out on Haaf Gruney, but I stopped myself.

  “How old were you when you were given the watch?” I said.

  “Ten. Fifteen when he told me the story behind it. How he picked up his own arm, ambled towards the supply lines. In the end he was found next to the Ancre.”

  Out of a pocket she took a dented, star-shaped regimental badge.

  “But he never mentioned the sixteen walnut trees?”

  “Never.”

  “That’s really strange. What would have been the harm in telling you?”

  “I have no idea. It would have been harmless, even nice. But no, not a word. Nor that he had hired Aainarr in 1943 to secure the wood.”

  I remembered what the priest had overheard. Enough to fill a lorry. That could correspond to sixteen tree trunks.

  “What was he like?” I said. “Around you?”

  “The best. He liked it that I always wore his watch. He could be rather crass with other people. He had horrific nightmares, always woke up at three o’clock in the morning. I heard him sometimes, shouting for tea or something. He could be very disagreeable.”

  In a semicircle on the regimental badge there was something written in Latin. I mouthed it to myself.

  Nemo me impune lacessit.

  “Their motto,” she said. “‘No-one attacks me with impunity’.”

  I stood looking at the uniform. Gwen went to a corner of the room and all of a sudden I heard a loud screeching of metal on wood. I spun around to see Gwen rolling out from behind a folding screen an antiquated wheelchair with a high back. The large wheels were fitted with metal rims and could have come from a horse cart. The material on the backrest was disintegrating.

  “He was in this when he came home from the war,” she said pushing the chair back and forth with her legs. “In 1921 he was at King’s Hospital in London and had fifteen pieces of shrapnel removed. In 1947 he had an operation in the U.S.A. Cost a fortune, but by 1953, he was actually able to walk on his own. It was not until he was in his eighties that he had to use this again on occasion.”

  Gwen sat in the wheelchair for a long time, then got up, opened a door and stepped onto the veranda. On the other side of the railing there was a primitive lift, a crude wooden box fastened to rusted flywheels, block and pulley and met
al wires.

  “Of course it would have been more practical if he had simply furnished the ground floor, but this office had the view. Treetops inside, the sea outside.”

  She pulled a black handle and an electric motor began to hum. We sat on the floor of the wooden box. She pushed a control and in fits and starts we followed the trees down with the smell of foliage, the sea and machine oil in our nostrils.

  “Now and again I would take the lift up to see him, dangling my legs over the edge. I’d knock on his door and come from the veranda into the smell of Balkan Sobranie. He would know when I was coming because he saw the lift go down and up again.”

  “This is fantastic,” I said.

  Gwendolyn Winterfinch smiled.

  “Was that not the right word?” I asked.

  “Fantastic? Sure. If you want.”

  “I’ll find a better word soon,” I said. “I’m working on it.”

  “It’s not so fantastic in the daylight,” Gwen said. “I told you that the house was never finished. Two entire wings have no panelling and floors. In 1926, the money began to dry up. My grandfather was actually a romantic. He wanted to make Quercus Hall a tribute to peace, and to all the trees of the world. He loved trees and furniture, became a pacifist after the war. He had no idea how to run a business and his wounds tormented him. What he was really interested in was decorative trees for furniture making and weapons. The department supplying building materials, the one that was truly lucrative, was heading straight downhill. Sales dropped off, office after office shut down. It got even worse in 1946, when the situation was similar to that in 1919. No-one had money to spend on beautiful materials; what was needed instead was cheap wooden boards for rebuilding. My mother was born in 1927. In practice, she ran Winterfinch Ltd from the day she turned twenty. Grandfather still ran the trade in exotic trees, but it was like working at British Petroleum and being in charge of sewing-machine oil. So Mother controlled everything.”

  “Why do you say Mother like that?”

  “My birth didn’t fit in with her plans. She’d had enough of children, she wanted to concentrate on the firm. Father just played with his stamps. Vanished from the dinner table like a deer in the woods. I have two brothers who are much older than me. Clear-thinking, efficient men who believe I’m a hopeless, spoiled inconvenience.”

  “Did you grow up here?” I said. “In this house?”

  “To all intents and purposes. My grandparents’ mission in life was to bring me up the old way. Clothes, dinner manners and furniture design. I have seen all of Europe’s major cities from the back seat of a Bentley Continental. My grandmother’s hobby was auctions. When I was twelve, I could estimate the value of any Lalique vase, or date a piece of Miriam Haskell jewellery to the nearest four years. When she died, I was like a walking remnant of pre-war customs.”

  “But you said that your father taught you to sail?” I said.

  She shrugged. “I was bluffing. Grandfather taught me to manoeuvre Zetland. Since the age of ten I’ve been taking it through rough seas with an old one-armed man. He was of no use, but he was calm. After all, a furious gale is nothing compared to a German mortar attack.”

  “I like him,” I said, “Duncan Winterfinch. I’m not quite sure why.”

  “When my grandfather died, my mother had wanted to sell the place. But she couldn’t. Because he left it to me.”

  “You own all of this?”

  “And the surrounding land. Plus Haaf Gruney and a few reefs in the vicinity.”

  “But why do you live in the stone cottage?”

  “I get lost in here. I don’t have the . . . stature to fill this house. When I was little, I went to public school. I was happy there, in fact. But the rest of my path had long since been set out for me. Edinburgh School of Economics, then heading up a division of Winterfinch Ltd.”

  “You’ll never lack for anything,” I said.

  “But that’s exactly it, I am lacking something substantial.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I’m like Grandfather. I have no head for business. I have zero interest in import duties and profitability. I sit in the lecture theatre listening to other people ask questions while I hide in my seat. I failed my last round of exams, and it went even worse in the spring.”

  In the dim light I could at last see what really lay behind Gwendolyn Winterfinch’s facade. Pure, unadulterated despair.

  “I get money from parents who are disappointed in me. Enough for expensive clothes and music, but not enough to maintain this monster of a house. If I were beautiful, I would have found a husband with a fat bank account. But I have small breasts and I’m terrible in the kitchen. The only thing I know about is antiquities and sailing in heavy weather. The few affairs I’ve had have been with older married men. Dear Lord, Edward, don’t you see? I’m a trinket – and I’m not even attractive.”

  13

  I SAT IN THE TWEED JACKET UNDER A SYCAMORE, DRINKING black tea with honey and reading the Shetland Times. On the table were the remains of breakfast: black pudding, fried eggs and grilled tomatoes. I had cooked it on the gas stove in the stone cottage and carried it on a tarnished silver tray with a lid through the chilly air and into the arboretum, where we sat under the trees.

  Calm we were not. It was like when Geira went to sea. The undercurrent from 1971 had no end. Never again would I wake up to Hanne’s face. A nice, easy girl, traded in for an affair which could not end well.

  Money – I earned it and I spent it. My share of the income from the potatoes or the sheep we sent to the slaughterhouse. The black soil of Hirifjell would refill the coffers next harvest.

  But this? I thought, and looked up at Quercus Hall. Great sums of money had a power all of their own. Before, I had looked at the house and thought that it belonged to others, that it was someone other. Now I considered what I would have done if it were mine.

  From what the gunsmith told us, the materials for the stocks – if they still existed – were worth far more now than during the lean post-war years. I calculated in my head what they could be sold for, more than enough to buy any large farm in Saksum.

  But Mamma had not felt any such inclination, at least not according to what she wrote to Einar. Despite a beggarly childhood.

  There were dregs in the tea, a necessary evil according to Gwen, who despised teabags. I poured them out over the clumps of grass, which glistened. A butterfly whirled and landed close by, attracted by the sweet smell.

  Who did the walnut belong to in fact? My family in France, who for generations had looked after the woods, or Duncan Winterfinch who both fought for the trees and purchased the right to fell them? That was a question which over the course of the night had become more and more difficult to answer. Because Gwen, having shown me the west wing of Quercus Hall, had clasped her hands together and said:

  “We can’t just go in without a plan. To be fair I’m a terrible student, but four years at the Edinburgh School of Economics has certainly enabled me to find my way around a business archive. But before we start rummaging, I need you to answer one thing.”

  “What kind of deal are we going to make, right?”

  “Exactly. There’s no getting away from the fact that Einar cheated my grandfather.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said. “We still don’t know why he blamed your grandfather.”

  She went to a window. With her back to me she said: “Edward, there’s only one way to do this. We keep nothing secret from each other. If we find the walnut, we share it equally. And at the same time you might find the truth about what happened in 1971.”

  Once again we went through the corridors, and she unlocked a steel door and led me down a staircase. The smell of the cellar was heavy and raw. Soon we were in a room as large as the public library in Saksum, brimming with files and discoloured ring binders.

  “The business archives of Winterfinch Ltd up to 1947,” she said. “Plus all of Grandfather’s private archives. Unfortunately a
little disorganised at the moment.”

  A broken ladder lay on the floor. In the corner a bookcase had toppled over and scattered a pile of papers. Only half of the light bulbs were working, but still it was easy to see how the number of files was like a barometer for the rise and fall of Winterfinch Ltd. An entire bookcase was needed to cover the period from 1899 to 1906. Trade dwindled from the twenties, improved again and then dropped in 1940. For the period after the war, when Gwen’s mother took over and moved the head office back to Edinburgh, there were only a few files.

  “Help me with this, would you?” she said, pulling out a crooked stepladder. “Hold this steady while I go up.” She pointed at the highest shelves. “His old private archive.”

  *

  “Here’s something,” she exclaimed an hour later. “A medical certificate from the war.”

  The typewritten sheet was thin and delicate, the full stops had punctured the paper.

  The unit was exposed to a gas attack in position 324 Thiepval/Authuille. Possibly cyanide or arsenic, but widely divergent symptoms (confusion, insubordination). Nearly all soldiers and officers abandoned their positions or passed out. Forty-seven soldiers killed or wounded by machine-gun fire. Thirty-two drowned in the bomb craters. Captain Winterfinch was found at Speyside Avenue near the Ancre, carrying his severed arm.

  “Speyside Avenue?” I said.

  Gwen knelt on the floor and skimmed the document, then a second one, then flipped back to the first and read it more closely.

  “The passages and trenches at the front had street names,” she said distantly. “To control the traffic. Thousands of soldiers had to find their way.” She handed me another certificate.

  Left arm severed between shoulder and elbow. Carried arm himself and refused to abandon it. The remaining section amputated by a field doctor.

  We kept looking, and before long she had found a worn and tattered military map from the autumn of 1916. It unfolded in her hands, and I shuddered to remember how Det Hendte 1971 had opened for me once.