Jack’s father had been killed last year in a road accident in Kenya, where he had been helping to build a dam. Jack still missed him more than he could say.
“The thing is,” said his grandfather, “you’re either a natural footballer or you’re not. Your dad wasn’t natural footballer, not at all. Bambi-legs, that’s what the other boys used to call him. Mind you, your great-uncle Bertie, he was brilliant, by all accounts. He used to play for Whetstone United before he was called up.”
“Great-uncle Bertie? I’ve never heard of him.”
“He was your great-grandfather’s older brother. And the reason you’ve never heard of him is because the family never spoke his name. They disowned him. Turned his picture to the wall, so to speak.”
“Why, what happened?”
“Great-uncle Bertie was in the trenches in France, during the First World War. I don’t know whether you’ve been told anything about it at school. Perhaps you haven’t yet. But on Christmas Day, all the shooting stopped. The Germans started to sing carols and light up little lanterns. After a while, the British soldiers joined in, and then both sides climbed out of their trenches and met up in the middle, in the place they used to call No Man’s Land. They talked to each other and shared cigarettes. They even played football. It was your great-uncle Bertie who organized the football match.
“The officers were furious. This was supposed to be a war, not a game. So the order went out from the War Office that there was to be no more making friends with the enemy, ever. This made your great-uncle Bertie very upset. He’d seen for himself that the German soldiers were nothing more than young lads, just like he was – and he didn’t want to kill them any more than he wanted them to kill him. He made the mistake of writing a letter to his local paper back home, saying that the war ought to be decided peacefully – by games of football, instead of bullets.
“Of course the editor of the local paper didn’t print it. Everybody was very patriotic in those days, and to say that our soldiers shouldn’t fight – well, that was regarded as treason. Instead he sent the letter to great-uncle Bertie’s commanding officer. Uncle Bertie got into serious trouble. They took away his corporal’s stripes and they gave him all the most disgusting and dangerous jobs to do, like going out at night to cut the enemy’s barbed-wire; or dragging in bodies from No Man’s Land; or digging out the latrines. But he was a survivor, your great-uncle Bertie, and he managed to stay alive until the following Christmas, 1915.
“On Christmas morning, though, without any warning, he climbed out of his trench and began to walk toward the enemy lines. The ground was covered in snow. He was carrying a white flag on a stick and he was singing a carol, ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’. Nobody from the German trenches fired at him.
“The officer in charge of his platoon shouted at him to come back, but great-uncle Bertie didn’t even look round. That was when the officer ordered one of great-uncle Bertie’s friends to shoot him. The man refused so the officer took his rifle and shot great-uncle Bertie himself. Killed him instantly.
“All this was in a letter which great-uncle Bertie’s friend sent to his parents. The friend said something like, ‘Even though Bertram was attempting to desert, he was my chum and I could not bring myself to obey the order to shoot him.’ I think the friend himself was killed about two months later.”
“So that was why nobody ever talked about great-uncle Bertie again?” said Jack.
His grandfather nodded. “They were so ashamed that he had tried to go over to the German side that they cut every single picture of him out of the family albums, and threw away all of his football cups and all of his possessions. Everything.”
Jack finished his meringue and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Have you still got the letter?” he asked.
“It’s at home. We’ll stop off on the way back to school and I’ll give it to you.”
It had been folded and refolded so many times that it was almost falling apart. A single sheet of soft brownish paper with faded brown ink on it. It was embossed with the name of Browns Hotel, in Dover Street, London, so it must have been written while great-uncle Bertie’s friend was on leave. He probably wouldn’t have been able to get it past the Army censors if he had tried to send it from France. It was dated December 31, 1915.
Jack lay on his bed in the dormitory reading the letter again and again. He could almost picture great-uncle Bertie climbing the ladder out of his trench and walking across the snow-blanketed landscape, his white flag lifted and his breath steaming as he sang.
There was something so strange about what he had done. Why did he go across to the German side? Surely it wasn’t to join them, because life in the German trenches must have been just as dangerous and horrible as it was in the British trenches. And even with his white flag, he had run a very high risk of being shot by a sniper.
And there was something else, too – something that his grandfather hadn’t mentioned. The letter said that he had sung one line of the carol, and then omitted the next line, all the way through. Now, why had he done that?
Jack was still reading when Thomson and Patel and two or three more of the First XI noisily pushed their way into the dormitory. Thomson was the captain and Jack always tried to stay out of his way, because he was always shoving, punching and bullying.
He sat down heavily on the end of Jack’s bed. “We’ve decided to put you on trial for losing us the game against Johnson House and for being a pathetic little creep.”
“A girl could have stopped that last ball,” added Patel.
“I just couldn’t reach it,” said Jack.
“Well, we could see that, and that’s why the court has decided to have mercy on you. Because you’re such a pathetic little creep, we’re going to build you up. We’re going to give you breakfast in bed every single day, starting from now.”
With that, another member of the team produced a large box of cornflakes from behind his back. Thomson pushed Jack on to the floor and dragged down the duvet. He emptied the whole box of cornflakes all over Jack’s sheet, and then Patel took a carton of milk out of his pocket and poured it everywhere. Another boy shook sugar over the top, and yet another produced a jar of marmalade and smeared it across Jack’s pillow.
“There you are, wimp,” said Thomson. “A nice nourishing breakfast for a weedy little wimp.”
Jack got up off the floor. He was trying not to cry but it wasn’t easy.
Thomson said, “And here’s a warning, too. Mr Brabham has gone stark staring mad and picked you for next Wednesday’s game against Villiers. If we lose that game, you won’t need breakfast in bed anymore because you’ll be dead and buried.”
Mr Brabham was sitting at his desk marking exam papers. He was a young man who always wore a tweedy jacket and whose hair always stuck up at the back.
Jack knocked at the door and waited. Eventually Mr Brabham looked up and said, “Ah, Matthews. What can I do for you?”
“Actually sir it’s next Wednesday’s game against Villiers, sir.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t want to play in goal sir.”
“Oh. So what position do you want to play? You’re not much of a runner so I don’t want to put you out on the wing.”
“I don’t want to play at all sir.”
Mr Brabham put down his pen and sat back. “Is that because of what happened yesterday?”
“Sort of.”
“I thought it might be. But the fact is that I don’t really have anybody else except you. And there’s something else besides. I think that everybody should be given a chance to show that they can put things right. Next Wednesday’s game is your chance. If you don’t play, everybody will think that you’re a coward. If you do, and we win, then Thomson and all his cronies will forget about yesterday, and they’ll be calling you a hero.”
“Yes sir.”
“Here it is,” said the club secretary, as they reached the second-to-last photograph on the wall. “Whetston
e FC, 1912-1913 Season.” He peered at it more closely, and then took out his pen and pointed at a tall, good-looking man with a small moustache and hair parted in the middle. “That’s your man. Bertram Matthews. One of the best goalkeepers we ever had, according to the records. What’s your interest in him?”
Jack found himself staring at the man who had walked across No Man’s Land in 1915 singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Well, half of it, anyway.
“He was my great-grandfather’s brother. I’m trying to find out how he got killed in the war.”
“Killed, was he? Poor chaps, look at them. Most of them were. The best thing you can do is go to the Imperial War Museum, or maybe the Public Records Office. I was reading the other day that they’ve started to release a lot of secret Army papers from the First World War. Might be worth a look, mightn’t it?”
“Yes. Thank you, I’ll try it.”
Together they walked back along the dark panelled corridor. “So you’re a Matthews, too?” the club secretary asked him. “I’ll bet you’re a great goalie, too. Runs in families, skill with a ball. Inherited. You’ll have to come and see us when you’re older.”
“Yes,” said Jack, although he didn’t mean it.
He forged a letter from his grandfather, saying that he wanted to take him to a race meeting at Kempton Park. Mr Toffy, his housemaster, was mad keen on horse-racing, so he waved his hand and gave Jack permission to go without even reading it. Jack took a train to London and then the tube to the Public Records Office at Kew, where he spent most of the gloomy Saturday morning searching through books, papers and photographs. He had made himself some peanut-butter sandwiches, and he snatched quick bites out of them when nobody was looking.
He came across great-uncle Bertie’s name quite unexpectedly, in a file on desertion, acts of cowardice and summary execution. During the war, over three hundred British soldiers had been shot at dawn for refusing to fight, or dropping their weapons and running away from the front line.
And here it was: “Report by Captain T.C. Watson, of the London Regiment, on the summary execution of Pte B.R. Matthews, December 25, 1915, by Second-Lieutenant W.W. Pearson.”
Second-Lieutenant Pearson had been warned by his superior officers that he needed to keep an eye on great-uncle Bertie because he was “a threat to general morale … a coward and a waverer.” He had seen great-uncle Bertie “defecting to the Hun in the full sight of the entire platoon,” He had shouted a warning, and when the warning was ignored “I felled him with a single shot.”
But Captain Watson had also talked to other eye-witnesses. Because it was beginning to snow, most of them hadn’t noticed great-uncle Bertie until he was twenty or thirty metres into No Man’s Land. But Pte H. Rudd had been standing next to him before he climbed out of the trench.
“It was very silent. The snow was falling and there was no gunfire. Pte Matthews suddenly said to me, ‘Listen. I can hear somebody calling.’ I listened and sure enough I could hear somebody shouting out for help, in English. Pte Matthews said, ‘I’m going to go over the top and find him. He’s probably wounded, or trapped in a shell-hole. He can’t spend Christmas Day freezing to death.’
“He made himself a white flag. I said he was mad, and that he would only end up getting himself shot by a German sniper. He said that instead of calling out he would sing a carol as a way of finding his man, and then the Germans would think that he was just trying to show them some Christmas goodwill.
“I couldn’t make him see that what he was doing was folly. He said, That’s somebody’s son out there, Rudd,’ and up the ladder he climbed and off he went.
“I heard him sing the first line of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ and then listen – and, sure enough, the second line came back from far away. He sang the second line, and waited, and the third line came back. It was then however that I heard Second-Lt Pearson challenge him to stop; and then the shot was fired.
“I tried to protest and to tell Second-Lt Pearson that there was a wounded man out there, but Second-Lt Pearson would have none of it and in the mood he was in I thought it wiser not to argue with him. Besides, his shot had started off a heavy exchange of rifle-fire with the enemy and there was no chance of saving the poor beggar after that.
“There was a heavy artillery bombardment the next morning at dawn and the body of Pte Matthews was never recovered, neither was that of the fellow he tried to save.”
At the end of his report, Captain Watson had written: “I recommend that this evidence be kept secret. It would do no good to have a man of Pte Matthews’ opinions made into a national hero; nor to suggest that the British Army is in the habit of shooting its own heroes in the back.”
So that was what had happened. Great-uncle Bertie hadn’t been a deserter at all. He had risked his life to rescue a man he didn’t even know.
Jack made a photocopy of the evidence. The librarian said, “Serious subject for a young chap like you, isn’t it?”
Jack said, “Very serious.”
That weekend, he wrote a report all about great-uncle Bertie. He made copies of it and sent them to all the television news companies and all the national papers – as well as the local paper to which great-uncle Bertie had written, all those years ago.
At break on Tuesday morning, Mr Toffy came across the yard and said, “Matthews, you’d better come inside. Some reporters want to talk to you.”
For a day, Jack was famous. On Wednesday his picture was in almost every newspaper, alongside great-uncle Bertie’s, underneath the headlines “Great War Coward Was Hero After All” and “Great-Nephew Clears Local Footballer’s Name.”
But just before lunch Thomson came up and pushed Jack in the back. “Think you’re some kind of celebrity, do you, you creep? You will be this afternoon, when I kill you for losing the game against Villiers.”
* * *
Out on the football field, it was starting to snow. Jack’s grandfather was standing on the touchline in a hat and a scarf and a thick brown tweed coat.
“That was a very fine thing you did for great-uncle Bertie,” he told Jack. “I only wish his parents could have known what a hero he was.”
“Hurry up, Matthews, you worm!” called out Patel. “The sooner we lose this game the sooner we can all go home!”
Villiers were a fit, quick, well-trained team. Their sports master was an ex-Army gym instructor who jogged and bounced up and down the touchline screaming at his forwards until he was red in the face – not like Mr Brabham, who stood under his snow-laden umbrella calling out, “Come on, Barrons!” from time to time, sucking throat-sweets, and coughing.
No matter how much he disliked them, Jack could see that Thomson and Patel were playing their best. As the snow whirled thicker and thicker, they kept the ball in the Villiers half for most of the first half-hour, and in the twenty-third minute Patel scored a cracking goal from a cross by Woods.
A minute before half-time, however, the Villiers forwards came weaving through the Barrons defence and left them all wrong-footed. Jack crouched ready in the goal-mouth with the snow blowing against his face. A small black boy came running up to him with the ball dancing around his feet. He feinted left. Jack jumped – he jumped with all his heart, his arms outstretched – but the ball swung to the right. He touched it with his fingertips, just a glancing blow, but he wasn’t tall enough and he couldn’t jump high enough, and the ball whacked into the back of the net.
“You muppet,” sneered Thomson, at half-time. “We’re going to lose this, because of you.”
In the second half, with the snow falling so thickly that they could barely see, Villiers really stormed into them. Their sports master shouted from the touchline like a maniac. This was obviously their plan – to play a calm, defensive game in the first half, and then attack Barrons in the second half with everything they had.
Jack was good. He kept his eyes stuck to the ball and he threw himself wildly into save after save. Villiers attacked his goal eleven times, and every t
ime he managed to keep them out.
“Come on, Villiers!” roared their games master. “We can’t have a draw! We’ve got to annihilate them! Sack and pillage!”
There were only three minutes left. Villiers launched a fast, well-organized attack, passing the ball so quickly that the Barrons team couldn’t touch them. Thomson was tackled and fell to the ground with a twisted ankle.
Jack, in goal, saw the Villiers forwards coming nearer and nearer, jinking and dodging their way through Barrons’ last line of defence. He was so cold and frightened that his teeth were chattering. The small black boy was running toward him with the ball skipping around his toes. Villiers’ star player, thought Jack. I don’t stand a chance.
With less than a minute to go before the final whistle, the black boy ducked and spun around, avoided a tackle from Patel, cut around the back of him and came flying toward the goal.
“Keep your eye on the ball. Matthews, not the player,” Mr Brabham had always told him, so he did.
The small black boy left Barrons’ full-backs standing still like a pair of postboxes. He came running up toward the goal and Jack knew, just knew, that this was it. This was where he lost the game. This was the moment for which Thomson and Patel would punish him, for the rest of his school career. After this, he would be lucky to find nothing more revolting in his bed than cornflakes and milk and marmalade.
The small black boy was smiling as he kicked the ball. The winning shot, that was what he obviously thought. And the funny thing was that Jack was affected by that smile, and liked him, and almost wanted him to score. But he jumped all the same, his arms outstretched, trying to reach the ball and deflect it from the goal. He heard himself say “Unh!” with effort.
And he knew, even as he jumped, that the ball was just too high, and just too far away. He wasn’t tall enough or strong enough to reach it. He tried to stretch his arms out in mid-jump, but it was impossible. The ball was nearly into the net, and he was already falling.
Feelings of Fear Page 9
