Barbed Wire and Roses

by Peter Yeldham

  ‘The house was demolished?’

  ‘Despite a hell of a row. Massive protests. All the save-the-planet people were here, and rent-a-crowd. Oh yes, we had ‘em in those days. You young people don’t know what a good protest is. Mind you, I was sorry to see it go. Bulldozers moved in, smashed the walls… only took a day or two. People living here at the time, we all felt upset about it. Great big house. Victorian, or Georgian. Blest if I know about architecture and all that. But a fine house. Huge grounds, several acres of lawn, stables and a tennis court.’

  ‘Acres? Around here?’ Mrs Meredith was surprised.

  ‘End of the street,’ Andrew Gardiner said. ‘Where those eight new homes are now. Well, they were new in those days, after they chopped the land into pieces. Some developer chappie put up those houses instead, cheek by jowl. That’s the way it is today. Cheek by jowl. End up like battery hens, I wouldn’t be surprised. Disgraceful.’

  ‘Mr Gardiner, did you know Georgina Rickson?’

  ‘Of course I did. The Rickson girls. There were two of ‘em.’

  ‘Two?’ Patrick repeated, surprised. ‘One was called Georgina?’

  ‘That’s right. And the other… hang on a second…’ They waited while the old man looked thoughtfully at Karen’s thighs, as if he might find recollection there.

  ‘Henrietta,’ he said abruptly, ‘that’s it. Henry and George, we’d call ‘em. Or George and Henry — alphabetical order, so to speak. Their mother used to get furious.’

  ‘Why?’ It was Mrs Meredith who asked.

  ‘Because of the names. “They’re girls,” she’d say, “not chaps!”’ He shook his head in wonderment. ‘George and Henry, well I’m blest. Fancy someone asking about those two after all this time.’

  ‘You know what happened to the Lodge,’ Patrick said, ‘but what happened to them?’

  ‘It was pulled down. All those new houses… I told you.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I meant what happened to the sisters?’

  ‘George and Henry? One died.’

  ‘Which one?’

  Mr Gardiner paused, his face creased in thought. ‘I can’t remember. But one did, and after that, the other couldn’t cope. Taxes, rates, cost of domestic help. All got too much for her, so she sold to that lout of a developer. Shame. Nice looking girls.’

  ‘Do you know where the one who survived might be?’

  ‘At a guess I’d say Golders Green or some other cemetery,’ Mr Gardiner answered. ‘Both were older than me, and I’m not buying any green bananas these days. If you want to see George or Henry, son, I think you’ve come along a bit too late.’

  Patrick had a leisurely pub lunch in Leatherhead, then went to the council chambers. After a long delay, a clerk found time to see him. There was no Georgina Rickson listed as a householder or ratepayer at any address in the shire. Nor a Henrietta Rickson either, the clerk assured him, and would that be all as he was rather busy? With no trace of irony, Patrick thanked him for the use of his valuable time, and went out to his car.

  The temperature had risen sharply. Patrick wondered what else he could do here. It occurred to him that if the house had been as splendid as Mr Gardiner described, and the agitation over its demise had created such protest, there should be a record of it. He asked for directions to the municipal library. There a helpful librarian apologised that they had a rather restricted local historical section, and at the moment all their computers were down. She would search for the name of the house and its owners; if he cared to phone tomorrow she would try to help. Or there was the Epsom library, she suggested, which had a more comprehensive archival unit. Patrick thanked her, drove to Epsom, but the library there had just shut. He had forgotten about British traditions like half-day closing.

  Disappointed, he headed back towards London. After crossing Putney Bridge and reaching Fulham he realised this was close to the address Claire had given him. On an impulse he turned towards the river and into Ashburton Road where she lived. Her flat was on the second floor of a large terraced house, but there was no reply when he rang the bell. Below the security system were four mailboxes. On one was the stencilled name C. Thomas.

  He scribbled ‘a brief note: Called to say thanks for the book. Sorry I missed you, Patrick. He put it in her box, and drove back to Paddington to return the car.

  Late that afternoon the temperature reached the predicted eighty degrees Fahrenheit. In Patrick’s hotel room the airconditioner was a window unit, both noisy and ineffective. He called reception to ask if something could be done about it, as it was decidedly not cooling. The same desk clerk said unfortunately the company who serviced their machines was busy because of the weather, and unable to come for several days. He could offer Patrick a far better room on a lower floor, larger and cooler with ducted air, but naturally more expensive. A matter of an additional fifty pounds a night, but for Mr Conway they could perhaps make one available at forty-five.

  Patrick decided to remain where he was. He switched off the clattering window unit, and phoned the BBC.

  ‘Tim Carruthers’ office,’ a female voice said, and when Patrick gave his name he was told Mr Carruthers was on leave at present.

  ‘I have an appointment with him,’ Patrick said, feeling some faint stirrings of alarm, ‘on Monday.’

  ‘What name?’ the voice asked again.

  ‘Patrick Conway.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I doubt if Monday is possible. Will you hold?’ He heard what seemed to be a muted conversation, before she spoke again. ‘Mr Conway? I’m sorry, but Monday is out of the question.’

  ‘Look, we exchanged emails on this. I’ve come from Australia on the assumption it was a firm date!’

  ‘I realise that. The best I can do is a week on Tuesday.’

  Eight extra days, he thought dismayed. Eight more bloody days than he’d anticipated in this dump of a hotel.

  ‘Are you there, Mr Conway?’

  ‘I’m here. Is there no possibility before then?’

  ‘Unfortunately not. Will that be satisfactory? Are you available Tuesday week?’

  ‘Yes,’ Patrick said reluctantly, ‘if Tim will be back by then.’

  ‘Right. That’s confirmed. I’ll put you down for 10.30.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He hung up feeling disconcerted. It seemed an odd phone call. He’d expected at least to talk to Tim, whom he knew from working together on a drama series at Thames. It had felt strangely impersonal, like an exchange with a computerised voice.

  Since he had extra days on his hands, his only consolation was more time to try and trace Georgina Rickson — if she was alive. There seemed no reason why not. The helpful Mr Gardiner was well and truly alive.

  He picked up the book of Sassoon’s poems and turned to the verse Claire had spoken about. A footnote said Sassoon had chosen to keep this work secret, and therefore the bitter poem was unknown until after his death. Entitled ‘On Passing the Menin Gate’, it was bitter indeed:

  Who will remember, passing through this gate,

  the unheroic dead who fed the guns?

  Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate —

  Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

  Crudely renewed, the salient holds its own,

  Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;

  Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,

  The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

  Here was the world’s worst wound — and here with pride

  ‘Their name liveth forever’ the Gateway claims,

  Was ever an immolation so belied

  as these intolerably nameless names?

  Well might the dead who struggled in the slime

  Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

  He sat pensive, long afterwards, hardly aware that most of the afternoon had gone. Traffic was heading out of London along Bayswater Road, and the girls who had been sunbaking in the park were wrapping on their skirts and preparing to depart. He kept hearing the poet’s sco
rnful words in his mind: Well might the dead who struggled in the slime, Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

  Claire had not understated the anger. This was the writing of a man who had been there, had fought in muddy trenches, a poet with the poet’s power to express what war was really like. Had his grandfather felt as angry as this?

  There were entries in Stephen Conway’s diary that suggested it. Patrick knew he must read it again, far more carefully this time, studying it for traces of fear or anger. He must search for what had motivated Stephen to desert — if that was what he had done. It now seemed difficult to believe anything else. And yet…

  He went downstairs to the nearby delicatessen and bought a sandwich. Back in the hotel room he poured a beer from the mini-bar and began to read, skipping the early pages, the naive thrill of Stephen’s first ocean voyage from Australia, the tedium of training in Egypt, even much of Gallipoli.

  Patrick flicked to the later pages. To the Somme again, but this time it was after the terrible winter of 1917. It was there the tone of the entries changed. That was where Stephen Conway had become a different person.

  ELEVEN

  I sometimes look back through what I have written here, and no longer care if it offends the military or breaks any of their arcane laws. What I put down in these pages may be seditious: the truth is often considered subversive. If anyone ever reads this it is of no consequence what they think of the opinions I express. The diary has become a release from the sheer misery of these dreadful past months, that have been like Pozieres all over again, only far worse because I’m a year older and nothing has changed. Nothing will change. No one is winning, and it seems to us as if no one can win.

  At the end of this year I will be twenty-two, and if I had been smart and not listened to inflammatory rhetoric or the fever of military bands, I would be graduating soon and have letters after my name that would enable me to be a solicitor. A bachelor of the law: a dreary life I always thought then, but how desirable it seems now. I would make wills, do conveyancing, perhaps even appear in court on behalf of people in debt, or defend petty thieves.

  Instead, I’m here. Amid this fucking madness. In the dark of this stinking trench the artillery barrage sounds thunderous, and the candle is worn down. Soon the dugout will be pitch dark. There is just time to finish these few new pages. To say what’s in my mind.

  I now believe that these bastards are all insane. I don’t mean the poor bastards on the other side of the wire, the ones we have to fight — I mean the thick-skinned bastards on our side, the ones who command us: the wheyfaced, great-coated men who sit in a safe chateau far behind the lines and plot what’s to happen next. Cold old men, playing their deadly games of chess with our lives.

  All through the freezing winter we were here on the Somme, at times fighting to hold places that looked exactly like ones we thought we’d fought in last year. All winter it was confusion; none of us sure any longer what land we’d won or lost, because the villages with different names all looked the same. Just rubble and mud. No trees, no buildings, rarely if ever any people. Just shitty little places that Haig and his generals gave orders for us to capture. And when that was done, without time to stop to bury our dead, further orders would come instructing us to advance to the next objective. Or else retreat, because a mistake had been made, wrong commands issued, wrong orders given.

  That often happens, wrong orders. What we call an ‘own goal’ — when our guns fix on a target and blast the hell out of a place but it’s us instead of the Huns trying to hide in there, us poor devils trying not to be blown to bits from our artillery because it seems like a bad way to die. Wrong orders, wrong alignment, wrong linearity — the maths and measurements all fucked up. There’s been an awful lot of that.

  We live in this kind of turmoil, in such chaos that I can no longer believe anything I’m told. I know weeks ago, on the 25th of April, it was my son’s second birthday. I believe that, because my wife wrote and told me. She said her mother made a birthday cake, and my mother brought candles, and Richard was such a clever boy because he blew out both candles at his very first go. She writes me letters like that, Jane does; prudent and guarded, as if nothing else is happening at home: no national referendum about a vote for conscription being defeated, no talk of how everyone goes surfing at weekends or else watches the footy. I think she’s trying to be kind.

  But I do clearly remember Richard’s second birthday because I spent it in the field hospital behind the line at Bullecourt, hardly a day’s stroll down the road from Pozieres — and does anyone know whether that bloody place is still ours or theirs, because I certainly don’t. I was brought in sick with trench fever, weak as a kitten and shaking like a leaf, plagued with headaches, leg pains and riddled with lice that bred in the trenches and were now breeding under my skin. The rash was all over my body, and a nurse, one of the young English volunteers they call ‘the Roses of No-Man’s-Land’ told me in confidence I’d most likely be invalided back to Blighty.

  My heart sang at the thought of this wonderful news. A few weeks in hospital, I envisaged, and with luck a slight relapse, only a very slight one, but just bad enough to keep me there until August and the end of summer. By then, perhaps the war might be over! August, that’s the anniversary of the third year of fighting, and surely neither side can go on much longer. Both of us must soon run out of bullets to fire and enemy troops to kill.

  I believed my Rose; she looked so sweet and serious, and for two days I dwelt in the luxury of this probability, imagining hospitals with nice nurses in clean starched uniforms, lawns to walk on, chairs to sit in where patients could rest or read. It’s been two years since I have been able to properly read a book. I had no particular preferred place where this hospital would be, just as long as it was across the channel. London, I felt would be suitable. Or even better, somewhere in the countryside — a view of farmlands, sheep grazing, elms and spreading oaks… the quiet, peaceful English country landscape to me would be akin to heaven.

  But when the doctor came around — a young captain who looked barely old enough to be a first-year medical student — he maintained I was a malingerer. It was not a serious case at all, he told everyone in the ward within hearing, there were far worse cases than this. Men were limping back to their units with a lot more wrong with them than a rash. They weren’t trying to pull up stumps and declare their innings closed!

  What fucking innings?

  I wanted to ask him if he’d ever played a game of cricket in front of a mob of taunting Turks, not knowing if the next shot would be a late cut through the slips or a bullet in the guts.

  ‘Invalided to Blighty?’ he snorted dismissively, ‘who put that absurd idea into your head?’ The same nurse accompanying this oaf on his rounds was about to speak, but I got in first.

  ‘Nobody put it into my head. It’s common knowledge that trench fever is caused by lice, and our trenches are full of them. Lots of cases have been sent back for treatment and convalescence.’

  ‘Convalescence, eh?’ The doctor seized on this like a greedy dog with a bone. ‘So that’s the objective. Not on my watch, Private Conway. Definitely not while I’m on roster. You’re a shirker, using this mild complaint as an excuse to dodge duty.’

  ‘Sir —’ My Rose did her best to interrupt, upset at his cavalier attitude.

  ‘Just a minute, Nurse,’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m talking to the patient?’ When the poor girl subsided, cowed by this school bully, he glared at me. ‘It’s a very simple matter, Conway. Simple! A thorough wash in disinfectant is all the treatment you require.’

  So that was my present on the day my son blew out his candles on the other side of the world. I was doused in a concentrated dose to kill the lice, and it bloody nearly killed me. The stink of the muck burnt my throat and made me spew. After this the baby-face quack discharged me as fit and I was told to return to the trenches.

  Are they the same trenches, I asked him, where lots more lice are lurk
ing ready to breed again, to swarm all over me like blowflies at a picnic? Will they take up their customary positions in my hair, on my balls and up my arse?

  Don’t use such crude language in front of the nurse, he replied. Don’t worry about the nurse, I said. She’s seen up my arse and she knows it’s not a pretty sight.

  He looked at me as if I was beneath contempt, and went off on his rounds. The Rose sneaked an approving grin at me, then had to follow him while he set forth to stuff up some other poor bugger’s dreams.

  The guns keep firing. At least tonight the shells are not landing on us. Tonight some genius has worked out the lineage or the range. We can sit in the trench and celebrate that we’re safe from our own gunners. But the candle has flickered out and in the pitch dark there are other problems that trouble me. It is no longer possible to accept this is a good war, or a fair war, or even a necessary war; it is clear that back there on National Recruitment Day we were conned and deceived by the flags and the cheering crowds. Crowds and streamers, I can still see it in my mind, us so young and keen — and worried we’d be too late to fight, Christ help us. They are all dead now, the blokes in our platoon who sailed with me down Port Phillip Bay. A whole group of good mates gone, and none to replace them. After Bluey died I deliberately did not seek to make new friends, because losing them is too painful. I have lots of close friends scattered all over hillsides or buried in the mud, and it becomes unbearable to think about.

  Some nights I manage to sleep, but I never welcome it because there are dreams. Uncomfortable images — I don’t like to call them nightmares — more like delusions. Such as turning to answer a tap on the shoulder and finding Jeff Gilmore, who was buried on Gallipoli, lighting a cigarette and grinning at me, asking where have I been lately and insisting we go and join a game of two-up. We win a fortune until the Turks come and break up the game, shouting that gambling is a sin and take all our money. They say they’ll use it to build a mosque for Allah.