Barbed Wire and Roses

by Peter Yeldham

  There was also one of Stephen. Identified by his name on the back, written in the same distinct hand as Georgina’s letter, it instantly dispelled any possibility he had been killed in the war. Patrick studied it, captivated. His grandfather wore civilian clothes and stood in front of a Ford car that belonged to an era at least fifteen years after hostilities had ended. He seemed to be in his late thirties when it was taken, and he did look a little like Patrick, Mrs Greenfield commented. Claire agreed. A very slight resemblance, but probably enough to startle Georgina into memory.

  There was something else, the administrator said, that she felt sure had belonged to Patrick’s grandfather, and therefore was no business of Mrs West, who was arriving shortly. She’d like to dispose of it before the niece could interfere, and she handed Patrick a thick notebook. He opened pages, staring at the handwriting that had become so familiar to him.

  ‘What little I read,’ she said, ‘made me feel it must be his.’

  ‘It is,’ Patrick replied softly. ‘I know his writing. I have a diary he kept for most of the war. It stopped in mid-1918 when the family thought he’d been killed.’ He hesitated, realising she must be speculating. ‘It was a mistake. They were wrong. He simply never came home for his own good reasons. And perhaps one of the reasons was Georgina.’

  ‘Or perhaps the reason’s in there,’ Mrs Greenfield answered quietly. When they looked at her in surprise she appeared unsure whether to continue. ‘It seems to be about what happened to him. I think probably after the time he stopped writing in his diary.’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘Look, I only read a page or two, so I’d rather not comment. But I read enough to know it is very personal, and should be given to you and to no one else. To be honest, Mr Conway, if you weren’t here to take possession, I would almost certainly have burnt it.’

  They drove back to London, leaving the nursing home with a promise from Mrs Greenfield to let them know the date of the funeral. The day that had begun with such expectation had turned to sad disappointment, although to be sad for Georgina, Patrick felt, was to ignore the reality that her proper life had ended a long time ago.

  ‘It’s still sad,’ Claire said. ‘It would’ve been wonderful if she’d known you were there. Stephen’s grandson, after all these years, helping to take care of her.’

  ‘It would’ve been special,’ he agreed. ‘But as Kitty the nurse said, a bit optimistic to expect miracles.’

  Yet it had been a sort of miracle in its own way, he thought, just finding her. If only it had happened sooner. There were so many things Georgina might have been able to tell him, that now he’d never know.

  Claire asked to be dropped at her flat, after which Patrick went to return the car and check out of the Clayborough. The desk clerk declared it unusually short notice but, swayed by a twenty-pound gratuity, professed himself happy to pass on the phone number if there should be callers. He trusted the hotel would have the pleasure of his company again, and with sly complicity hoped Mr Conway’s friend had enjoyed her stay.

  In a taxi on the way back to Fulham, Patrick checked his mobile. One message, the display informed him, and there were no real surprises when he saw the caller’s ID. Joanna sounded a trifle terse.

  ‘Well, what do you think of the place? Didn’t my email with the attachment arrive? Darling, I wish you wouldn’t switch off your phone. It’s a bit of a one-way street trying to keep in touch. All I get these days is your bloody message bank.’

  He was about to return her call when he remembered the time difference; it would be after midnight in Australia. Instead, while the cab was gridlocked in traffic, he opened the laptop to view his mail.

  The attachment was full of photographs. There was a shot across the harbour to the Opera House, looking so close that he thought it must be taken on a telephoto lens. There were views of the city, which seemed right on the doorstep, and one taken at night where the blaze of lights looked like New York. The slide show was arranged like a tourist brochure of the harbour: ferries crossing from Circular Quay, racing skiffs like a fleet of white sails, plus a close view of a freighter passing alongside, then a great passenger liner, and all of them — unless the camera lied — just outside the windows of what seemed to be a penthouse apartment.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Patrick muttered, and minimised the pictures while he scanned her email.

  It’s real, Joanna had written, and it can be ours. Right on the very waterfront at Kirribilli! A pair of duplex apartments converted into one lovely spacious penthouse, with a view to die for, and a roof garden with trellised vines and fruit trees…

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ Patrick said, and wrote her a quick reply to be sent later, saying it looked fabulous — like something in one of those glossy magazines worth millions — but there was no way in the wide world they could even begin to afford it.

  While he unpacked, Claire found a plastic cover to protect Stephen’s notebook. It was in a precarious state, with many pages loose and the binding unravelling, while the writing in pencil was sometimes badly smudged and difficult to read. It was large for a notebook, more like a bulky accounting journal, and Stephen had filled it entirely, writing on both sides of each page. Sometimes this was neat and careful like in the diary, but Patrick also found sections where his grandfather’s writing became an unruly scrawl.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Patrick said, ‘while you’re at work, I’ll start to read through this.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Claire answered, ‘I’ll help you’. She told him she’d spoken to her firm, had asked for and been given leave.

  ‘Just until you go home. I don’t want to waste what precious days we have left.’

  ‘Have they agreed?’

  ‘Yes, provided I’m on stand-by, in case they need me for any emergencies.’

  ‘Very understanding firm,’ Patrick replied.

  ‘They have to be.’ She laughed. ‘It was me who set up the computer system. I made it so complicated, that I’m the only one who can fix it. So they have to treat me nicely!’

  In the late afternoon they went for a stroll to Kings Road, then drinks in the pub at the World’s End. When they returned to her flat laden with shopping Patrick presented options: a Chinese meal at Choy’s, Italian at Luigi’s, or French at Antoine’s, all of which she refused. Dinner tonight, she told him, was at Chateau Claire’s; scallops flambeau followed by poached perch, asparagus and sauteed potatoes.

  The meal was delicious, the evening an intimate tete-d-tete. Claire looked dazzling in a strapless dress, her auburn hair let loose and falling to her shoulders, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing softly on the sound system, and twin candles lighting an old dining table she’d bought at a street market and restored.

  Afterwards they went out to her balcony with the remainder of their wine, to an almost full moon that seemed to be hanging above the chimneypots of the building opposite. Patrick felt happy; he tried to think when he’d last experienced such a feeling of contentment. Much later he realised he’d forgotten all about Joanna’s email, and turned on his laptop to send the prepared reply. He hoped it would be the last he’d hear of the magical harbourside apartment that was way beyond their means.

  The next day, as they began to decipher the dilapidated pages, they realised how different it was to the diary. If there was anger in Sassoon’s poem, there seemed a deeper anger in Stephen Conway’s notebook. He was only nineteen years old when he abandoned a law degree to volunteer for the army, and he did not have Sassoon’s phenomenal way with words. But he had endured experiences that changed him beyond all expectation, ordeals that Patrick found it difficult to imagine, and reading it he frequently found himself in tears, although whether they were tears of grief or rage he could not be sure. They were certainly tears for a man who had endured experiences beyond today’s capacity to envisage.

  Patrick made notes and sometimes read aloud to Claire while she did her best to repair detached sections of the book. She also scanned
faded pages in the computer to improve their image.

  As they progressed, the notebook began to make certain things clear. It was written more than two years since he had reluctantly left the arms of Marie-Louise after the recapture of Pozieres. In those years, apart from when the battalion was spelled behind the lines and twice given leave in England — only a brief respite each time — he had not really been away from the sound of battle.

  He had certainly not died in 1918 as they had been led to believe. He had simply been mentally and physically exhausted; his ears were shattered from bombardments, his mind numbed by the frequency of killing with bayonet thrusts into other men’s bodies. He could see the shock of death on the frightened faces that appeared so like his own; he witnessed the killing of these enemies long into the dark of the night, and often dared not sleep in case they were there waiting for him in his dreams.

  Some of this information Patrick had gathered from the last pages of the original diary. There he had recognised the increasing signs of despair and exhaustion in his grandfather. But he soon found the notebook was quite different. It was apparent his entire world had altered, and like Stephen himself, it had begun to disintegrate.

  *

  In the summer of the fourth year the war entered a new and alarming phase. That was when Germany advanced with massive ferocity, retaking all the ground they had lost in the past. They had daunting new weapons like flamethrowers, heavier guns like the ‘Big Berthas’ and far superior tanks. The vaunted British tanks had not been a success: they lumbered forward on caterpillar tracks like Jurassic monsters, their ultimate speed just a mile an hour. Troops, able to march faster than this, stared at these apparitions in despair; their officers had promised the invention would free them from trench combat and its horrors. In London the machines were lampooned in vaudeville, with chorus girls performing a satiric and bawdy dance called ‘The Tanko’.

  By the summer the Germans were poised to cross the Somme and drive on Paris. Giant guns were shelling Parisian suburbs. Australian divisions were assigned the task of attacking them. In the notebook Patrick discovered the reason for the enduring affection he had encountered in the town of Villers-Bretonneux, the frequent memorials and the schoolchildren’s song.

  For when the morning mist rose from the river, the AIF divisions cut their way through the Somme valley to this village. They surged into the German lines like they had at Pozieres; this time driven by a desperate desire to end the carnage and go home, and this savage longing for their own shores was an incentive that made them unstoppable.

  Stephen Conway was among them, but after that day nothing for him was ever the same.

  FIFTEEN

  I don’t know how I got here. I’m trying to remember. They say I was shoved on board an ambulance ship and brought across the channel and unloaded at a pier in Southampton. Then all of us were put into carriages drawn by four horses that galloped along a cobbled road and down the hill at such a speed that a few patients died on the way; they simply croaked from the fright of the journey or the vibration. That’s how you come to this place, either half alive or stone dead.

  It’s called Netley. A place of screams. No, not dreams — there are no dreams here, only nightmares as black as the pits of hell. It’s like a prison. It lies on a spit of land called Spike Island in Southampton Water, with iron gates guarded by sentries. Behind these gates is where I am now, in what is known as the ‘nuthouse’, or the place where the dregs are sent, or the fucking ‘coward’s castle’ — that’s another name for it — but its official title is the Royal Victoria Military Hospital.

  It is named for the old Queen who ordered it to be built, against the express wishes, it is said, of Nurse Nightingale. But the Queen prevailed, as royalty always does. I mean, why bother being royal if you can’t get your own way? Especially against poor old Flo Nightingale who, when all’s said and done, was just a lady with a lamp.

  This gargantuan building, this asylum filled with us, the war’s new victims, is actually part of a town. The strangest kind of town. It contains its own railway station, post office, stables, kitchens, shops, bakery and even a library. It has as many people as an ordinary town: cooks, gardeners, bakers, blacksmiths, artisans of all kinds, as well as nurses and doctors. The hospital is vast, like a grand hotel. They tell us every day how fine and grand it is, and how lucky we are to be here. Lucky, as the devil might say, as he beckons you in the direction of his fiery hearth. Here they constantly boast it is the world’s biggest hospital: us poor buggers who endure it know it is by far the world’s worst.

  It is a bizarre place. Grotesque. It even produces its own photo postcards, and does a steady business in happy smiling pictures of soldiers in uniform. And other smiling pictures of soldiers without legs or arms, but with little captions that say: ‘Are we downhearted? No… never at Netley!’

  Visitors can be photographed on the hospital’s pier, or the spacious lawns; a patient can even have a personal picture taken with the surgeon who amputated his limb, the doctor cheerful and full of gruesome medical jokes as he poses by his butcher shop; or, as he prefers to call it, his operating table.

  I have no visitors, and thus no need for smiling photos to present to them. No surgeon, either, for they say I had no injury: no bullet wounds, no shrapnel, no signs of damage that anyone can see. Therefore I am branded a coward, a malingerer — that word again, the one the schoolboy doctor called me — too scared to remain in France and fight the foe. They do not seem to hear me when I speak, when I say I have been in France and Gallipoli before that, fighting the foe for more than three years. The foe becomes so awfully familiar to me, at the end of a bloodstained bayonet, or lying in the mud with sightless dead eyes, that I no longer know if he is a foe or just a poor wretch of a comrade who happens to be on the other side. I begin to feel he could even be a friend, and by saying this I am committed here — for to declare the enemy a friend is either serious insanity or a heresy close to treason.

  We are not altogether insane, just slightly so. Like the big dour Scottish quack who diagnoses me, and writes on his chart: ‘A wee bit dangerous’. This is the place where they bring the ‘dangerous’, where they take away our uniforms and dress us in hospital blue and strip us of our identity, for in here we are all dangerous, unsafe cases with numbers now instead of names.

  Netley is considered an ornament, like a majestic palace. It is a shrine to caring for the wounded; ever since Crimea, the Sudan and the Boer War it has commanded royal patronage. It is today a place where the ambulance ships bring the broken bodies back. I hesitate to even mention the broken minds. But they come too, to D Block, where the lights remain on all night, and nurses patrol in case some poor victim of gas or shell or the inability to cope with endless fear flings back his blanket and goes raving bloody mad.

  We are suffering from what they call ‘shell shock’. It is a new term and many doctors do not believe in it; but as we are in a state of temporary insanity we can be given experimental remedies and subjected to new and frightening therapies. Electric treatment that sends us into awful paroxysms, drugs that numb the mind, hypnotism that is meant to persuade the deranged that going back to filthy muddy trenches and bursting shells will give us renewed stature and improve our chances in future life.

  Like a prison, I said. A strange sort of prison, for behind the palatial facade are rows of wooden huts where we live crowded together, and rail lines where a real train brings carriages with more victims, more wounded bodies and injured minds. D Block is the domain of the nursing sister who my neighbour in Bed 10 calls Attila the Hun.

  ‘What do you mean, Attila the Hun?’ I ask him, when he first calls her this. ‘Attila was a bloke.’

  ‘So?’ Bed 10 says. ‘Ever had a close look and seen her neat little moustache? I reckon she must shave twice a week.’

  Her real name, I find out, is Penelope Parker-Browne, and her father is an earl with an estate that takes up half of Monmouthshire. Bed 10 says that she was brou
ght up like a boy because the earl has no male heir, and is upset his estate will go to his brother’s son. So he took it out on his child for being female, and thus losing the heritage. Whatever the reason, it’s made her a repulsive creature, a cruel bully. Even if it explains her anger and the way she ill-treats us, the Honourable Sister Penelope is feared and hated by all the patients in D Block.

  Whereas most of us are in love with Sister Henrietta, who is plump and caring, with flaxen hair and the warmest smile that makes us all want to hug her. Not in any sexual way — because Henry, as everyone calls her, is not at all sexual. Perhaps to some, but not to me. Perhaps Bed 10 fancies her because often after she has been on her rounds, I hear his bed springs start to squeak as he beats his meat beneath the blankets. He might think of Henry while he does it. Whereas to me she’s like a sister or a favourite cousin. She helps me write letters to Jane when my hand shakes too much to hold a pen, after I have had the electric treatment. Or when they put the terminals on my spine to discover if I am truly shell shocked, because after this treatment I tremble for hours and cannot walk unaided.

  Henry thinks it is cruel, the things they do to us. Not that she ever says so, but I can see it upsets her. There are times when I’d like to tell her about Marie-Louise, and the few days we had together after Pozieres. But I can’t; she helps me write to Jane, and anyway, ‘M.L.’ is a lifetime ago. Another life, when I was twenty-one. A lifetime before that was Jane and our few days of honeymoon, where we stood admiring the Three Sisters, and heard our voices echo along the valley. But when I work it out carefully it’s only been four years, and back home there’s a son I’ve never seen whose name is Richard. At least I think it’s Richard. Sometimes memory lets me down. At times it’s hard to remember people’s names, and there are days when I even forget where I lived with my parents when I was growing up. It’s like a different existence that seems indistinct and far away.