Life Class

by Pat Barker

  Watching ambulance lumber round the turning circle at the hospital I used to think they were huge, but inside the cabin’s rather cramped. The stretchers are level with the back of the driver’s seat so the groans and cries go right into your ears. Sometimes they seem to be inside your own head. You can hear pleas for water but you can’t answer them, only drive hell for leather down dark, rutted, congested roads. I never get used to the screams that are jolted out of people when I get it wrong and bump into a shell-hole. Sometimes they die on the way to hospital. That’s hard. I’m surprised how difficult it is. I thought because I didn’t have time to get to know them I wouldn’t mind so much. Instead I feel personally responsible in a way I never did on the ward, where you were always part of a team. One morning driving back to base just before dawn I found myself crying, and yet nothing worse had happened on that trip than on any other. Big fat baby tears trickling down my cheeks. I didn’t even feel particularly upset. It seemed to be something my body had decided to do without consulting me.

  The other place is a place – our common room, which is where I’m writing this. It’s comfortable and warm, in spite of, or because of, the rain that pelts down outside. There’s an oil lamp on the desk and Lewis is writing one of his endless letters home. Do you know he writes to his mother every day? I can’t imagine what he finds to say. The wood stove is blazing away, and there’s a card game going on at the next table. We’re on duty but no calls have come in yet, though the guns have started up, louder than usual, I think, so perhaps there’s something brewing. Every time the gun near us goes off Lewis’s inkwell gives a little jump. This table was taken out of a schoolroom and has boys’ initials carved all over it. Some of the carving’s so deep it must have taken ages to do. Dates too. I wonder where they are now, those boys? So this is where I am, thinking of you (as always). And now somebody’s come in with a tray of cocoa. The door opens, and the wind lifts the thin carpet and sends dead leaves rattling across the floor, but inside we’re warm. Full of hot cocoa and fingers crossed for a quiet night. Goodnight, my love. I can’t say I wish you were here, and I can’t really, except at the most superficial level, wish I were there, but I do wish with all my heart that we were together in some place where the war couldn’t find us.

  Elinor to Paul

  I suppose my headline news is that I’ve sold two paintings. The mother and baby from the ferry crossing, and another one I did of some schoolgirls in a park. Based on one of the drawings I did when I came to see you. Dad took one look at the mother and child and roared with laughter. He says if my idea of motherhood ever catches on there’ll be no need for Marie Stopes. I got five pounds each! Of course I can’t think what to spend it on. Not that I don’t need masses of things, but it’s my first painting money so I feel I should buy something special with it, but nothing seems special enough.

  Speaking of places, picture me in an Islington workhouse. There, that’s a challenge, isn’t it? The day before yesterday Catherine’s mother said she was too ill to go on the fortnightly visit to Catherine’s father, so Catherine was faced with going on her own. ‘I’m dreading it,’ she said, so of course I offered to go with her. We sat on the top of the bus in a slight drizzle, our knees safely tucked away under the rain apron. Catherine said what a relief it was to be back in London where nobody knew them. I was determined to make her laugh or smile at least and I did, several times, but then we got close and she went quiet.

  It was only a short walk from the bus stop to the workhouse. Oh God, Paul, what a place. I thought of all the people over the years who’d dreaded going in through that door, how it must have seemed like the end of everything and been the end of everything, and it’s exactly the same now. We were kept waiting a long time. A long time. Perhaps unavoidably, but I don’t know – there was a whiff of little-minded people with a lot of power. Catherine had brought a cake with greaseproof paper wrapped round it and she sat cradling it like a baby. The room was packed. Children, wives, mothers, no men of course – no boys over the age of fourteen. When the big doors opened Catherine went in alone. I sat there and tried to take it in. Ugh, the smell. Gravy, sweaty socks, drains, oh and on top of it all, Condy’s Fluid. What would we do without it? I heard a woman sobbing and tried to look round the door, I was afraid it was Catherine, but it wasn’t. People were exchanging gifts. Some of the internees had made wooden toys for their children. One elderly couple simply sat and looked at each other across the table, holding hands, not speaking.

  The visit lasted an hour. I started sketching and one of the guards came up and told me to stop. Of course I asked why and he didn’t have an answer, but I still had to stop. Then at last Catherine came back holding a letter rack her father had made for her mother. She was crying and laughing at once. ‘I don’t know what use he thinks this is going to be,’ she said. ‘Nobody writes to us any more.’

  I can’t get it out of my mind. The papers are full of it, all the time now – the enemy within. The enemy within is Catherine’s father, a dentist, for God’s sake, who never hurt anybody (well, you know what I mean!), and he’s locked up ‘for the duration of hostilities’ without a trial or anything. If this is the kind of thing that can happen, what are we fighting for?

  Paul to Elinor

  If you ever again hear me complain about things being too quiet will you please hit me over the head with a large blunt instrument – a book, or a doorstop or a sculptor’s mallet would do. Last night I was leaving a CCS – a Casualty Clearing Station – when I heard a screech followed by a crash. The man ahead of me fell and lay spread-eagled on the ground. Another shell landed, sending debris cascading across the roof; then another. This particular station’s in the cellar of a ruined farmhouse. A cloud of dust billowed up into the air. I was rooted to the spot. When I tried to run I found my knees had turned to jelly. A very strange sensation because my mind was quite calm. At the entrance to the station, I ran full tilt into one of the other drivers trying to get out. One of the barns at the back of the building had been demolished, but the clearing station itself was still intact, full of wounded men stumbling about, hair and eyelids crusted with plaster dust. Poor devils, that was the last thing they needed. But the surgeons went on operating, though the lights swung from side to side and the shadows rocked.

  Elinor to Paul

  I asked Lady O if I could bring Catherine to her Thursday night party and of course she said yes. Catherine came round to my place first and we got dressed up and set off to walk to Bedford Square. Streets rather quiet. It’s the full moon and London’s expecting to be bombed. You can feel it everywhere, the tension, the watchfulness, the excitement. The few people who venture out after dark keep looking up at the full moon – and so the war makes werewolves of us all.

  We arrived at the house and were shown into the drawing room where a man was playing a pianola, and Lady Ottoline was standing over a huge box in the middle of the floor holding up a purple feather boa. ‘Who wants this?’ she boomed, and handed it to a tall etiolated man with a straggly beard who wrapped it around his neck and immediately started to dance a minuet – though the music was nothing like that. Gradually others joined in. Ottoline, looking rather splendid and baroque, kissed me and greeted Catherine very kindly. Catherine blushed and stammered and when Ottoline had moved on looked astounded. ‘I did warn you,’ I said. I got a gypsy shawl from the box and Catherine a fan, and we started to dance a tarantella. When I stopped to get my breath I was seized by a man who looked like a highly intelligent teddy bear and spoke with dry, devouring passion about how the war must stop, now, at once, this instant, keeping his gaze fixed on my bosom the while, until Ottoline swept him up and on to the dance floor where any fool could see he didn’t belong, only then, to my astonishment he began to jump up and down, his face shining with that solemn joy you see on the faces of children when the Christmas candles are lit.

  Towards the end of the evening when everybody was worn out from the dancing a woman with short black hair sang. I loo
ked up and saw Ottoline standing just inside the door listening with one big white hand held to her throat and her pearls looped round her fingers. I find her very moving. She’s like a giraffe that’s fallen among jackals and stalks about with that improbable head level with the treetops and a pale swaying underbelly within reach of so many teeth and claws. She was caught up in the music as we all were but even her being caught up was different from anybody else’s. Then the dark-haired girl sang a song that I sort of half knew.

  Cold blows the wind to my true love

  And gently falls the rain.

  I never had but one true love

  In cold grave he was lain.

  I knew as soon as she started I was going to cry and I started edging towards the door. I don’t think anybody saw me go. It was raining outside so I went upstairs and hid in a bedroom and only came down again when the singing stopped. I stood on the bottom step looking into the drawing room and saw the red walls and the chandelier lit and all the heads bobbing up and down and a great stamping of feet – on bare boards because all the carpets had been rolled back – and Ottoline with her red hair flying loose from its pins and streaming across her face. I thought either they’re sane and the rest of the world’s gone mad or … ? It was silly and splendid and I didn’t know if I was part of it or not, or even if I wanted to be. I thought about the dead people lying on the cobbles. The dead child. I think about them all the time, but crying won’t bring them back.

  I’m losing you, Paul. Or myself, I don’t know. I’m tired and this is a stupid letter. I suppose I ought to focus on the good things. Catherine enjoyed herself. She’s sure of a welcome there and that isn’t true anywhere else now. I think perhaps I should just go to bed and hope it all looks better in the morning. Write soon. Ever your own Elinor.

  Thirty

  Lewis had fallen asleep with his head on the table. A stump of candle guttered only an inch away from his slackened mouth. The French batteries behind the school had started up the dawn bombardment and the table juddered beneath his distorted cheek. Once, a louder crash than usual made him grunt. He raised his head, stared around him, sank back into sleep.

  Five minutes later the first call came. They ran towards the camouflaged shed where the ambulances were parked. Paul cranked the handle, survived its first vicious kick and climbed into the cabin. Soon he was bumping gently across the uneven ground. Peering through the muddy windscreen at the road ahead, he thought, for a second, of Elinor, before the reality of his surroundings grabbed him. Snow-stippled fields. Here and there, a blurred moon stared up from frozen puddles at the side of the road. He kept the ambulance in low gear, labouring up the hill. As he got closer to the front, it needed all his attention to steer round pits and craters in the road. The road was crowded now with motor lorries, columns of marching men, horse-drawn limbers taking the rations up. At the crossroads, which had been subjected to repeated heavy bombardment, a shattered crucifix stood in the middle of desolation, the figure of Christ reduced to one hand hanging from a nail. He hated that hand: it offended him that such a banal image should have so much power.

  But he hardly existed now as a person who could hate anything. He was a column of blood, bone and nerves encased in a sheath of cold, sweaty skin. His hands kept slipping on the wheel. When at last he dropped down from the cab and began to walk towards the clearing station his legs again threatened to give way under him.

  The CCS was in the cellar of a ruined farmhouse. You went down a flight of narrow steps – so narrow you had to plant your feet sideways – into a whitewashed room lit by oil lamps. At the far end a surgeon worked in a makeshift theatre, patching men up for the journey back. On benches ranged along the wall the walking wounded waited. They’d had iodine sloshed into their wounds and been bandaged, but all were in shock, blue some of them, jaws wobbling, hands shaking. Paul shared out his cigarettes.

  ‘What about me?’ the surgeon called plaintively from behind his mask. ‘Don’t I get one?’

  He was bent low over the table, now and then pausing to drop handfuls of flesh into a bucket by his feet. Paul went across, pulled the surgeon’s mask down and stuck a lighted cigarette between his lips. The tip glowed red as he inhaled. ‘Thanks. I’ve been dying for that.’

  As he spoke, he straightened up and groaned – he must have been hunched over that table for hours.

  Paul risked a glance at the patient, an abdominal. He thought of all the shell-holes between here and the base hospital and felt like groaning himself.

  He took one stretcher case, the rest walking wounded. Now they were on the move, going away from the front, the lightly wounded became positively cheerful, laughing, joking, clenching their teeth against the pain only to burst into laughter again a minute later. A canteen was passed from mouth to mouth and it certainly didn’t contain water. But then the stretcher case recovered consciousness and from then on every jolt of the wheels on the shelled road produced a scream. He was begging for water. Paul shouted at the others not to give him any and they grumbled assent, obviously offended at being taken for idiots. Paul crouched forward in his seat, hunched over the wheel, peering through the windscreen at what little the fitful moon revealed of the road ahead. He felt useless. Nothing he could do in the way of nursing care was more likely to save the man’s life than just getting him back to base as fast as possible. But in places the road was almost impassable. The bombardment had been heavy and accurate. At one place he came upon a tangle of broken wagon wheels and dead horses where a limber had been hit. He pulled to the side and slowed to a crawl. He’d just drawn level when one of the apparently dead horses reared its head and screamed. Frightened though he was, he’d have got down and put the poor beast out of its misery, but ambulance drivers didn’t carry revolvers. Screwing up his face, he drove on.

  Once past the horse he began to relax – he was almost at the end of the worst stretch of road – but then, no more than ten, twenty yards further on, he saw a dark shape ahead. As he slowed down, it was joined by a second, and then a third. Men, some of them badly wounded, crawling out of the ditches that lined the road. He stopped and wound down his window. He couldn’t understand the words but it was obvious what they wanted. They had no faces, only flaking mud masks with white circles round the eyes and red wet mouths struggling to speak. When words failed, they pointed to their wounds.

  He raised two fingers. ‘Deux.’

  That was more than he ought to take, but he couldn’t just drive past. Jumping down from the cab, he walked round to the back of the ambulance, feeling them behind him jostling and treading on his heels. These were the drivers of the horses he’d just passed.

  ‘Deux,’ he said again, but they all pressed forward, clutching at him, showing their wounds. He opened the door, jumped inside and said, pointing at random, ‘You and you.’ Another scrambled in before he could get the doors shut. Then he struggled through the others, the ones he couldn’t take, back to the driver’s cabin. He’d call the relay station as soon as he got to the hospital. An ambulance would go out to pick up the rest.

  But they couldn’t know that and one or two of them mightn’t last. As he drove off, the wheels churning in slush, he hardly dared look into the rearview mirror, where, framed in that small space, a group of mud men dwindled into the distance, staring after the ambulance, which took away with it, as they must believe, their best chance of life.

  Thirty-one

  Paul to Elinor

  After all the excitements of last week we seem to be in another quiet patch. I managed to get back to the town for two nights and spent them painting and lying in the bed in our little room thinking of you. I try to convince myself there’s a ghost of your scent on the pillows though I know it isn’t true. You seem ghost-like to me now. I’ve lost the sense of your voice, the way you move. I always see you sitting still somewhere, more especially in the window at the Slade. Do you remember how you used to sit there waiting for Tonks to come out and sign your exhibition entry forms? I walked
past you once but you were too deep in your thoughts to look up and notice me. I see you like that now, framed by the arch of the window, very tiny and far away.

  Because it’s so quiet we’ve been given another job: transporting the dead (which The Hague Convention does allow; it doesn’t allow the transport of military personnel who are alive and all in one piece, even if they’ve collapsed with exhaustion). We didn’t mind too much because we thought we’d be dealing with the recent dead, but it seems this particular Casualty Clearing Station had a backlog of corpses. It wasn’t clear why. Men who die at a CCS are generally buried as close to it as possible. They’re surrounded by these little dark crosses that always look like birds’ footprints to me, though I mentioned that to Lewis and he couldn’t see it at all.

  Anyway there they were piled up in a corner of a yard under a black tarpaulin cover weighted down with bricks. We put on surgical masks and gloves and just got on with it, though it was depressing, to say the least. You go into a trance, it’s the only way, then suddenly I looked down and realized that one of the men at the bottom of the heap was wearing British army uniform. The others were all French. He must have got separated from his unit or perhaps this ground was fought over by the British in the first few weeks of the war. He’d been there a long time. In fact he was so badly decomposed that when we tried to lift him he came apart in our hands.

  Somebody loved him once. And still does, that’s the devil of it.

  What a gloomy letter! I always feel I have no right to burden you like this, but these things happen and if I didn’t write about them I don’t know what else I’d find to say. On a more cheerful note (and high time, too, you may think!) we’ve finished that job now and we can start putting it behind us. This morning we treated ourselves to a bath and a shave in town and came out into the raw air afterwards pink as shrimps with tight, raw, shiny faces. Now it’s afternoon and we’re going to kick a football round the field behind the school for an hour or so and then have supper.