Rose’s initial relief on reading his postcard was followed immediately by fear. Was he behind lines because he was injured? If he was, why was he reluctant to tell her? Had he lost an arm? A leg? Had he written a more informative letter to Nina?
‘Everyone thinks there’ll be a difference now the Yanks have finally pitched in,’ Micky wrote to her gloomily from somewhere in Picardy. ‘I don’t. They’re all talk and no blooming action.’
Neither she, nor anyone else, knew of any other two young men who had survived uninjured at the front for as long as Micky and Harry.
“You’d think, wi’both of them being Yorkshire lads, they’d’ave fought side by side by now, wouldn’t you?” Albert said to Lizzie and Sarah, smoothing Micky’s latest pencil-written missive out on his knee so that he could read it aloud to them. “If they ’ave, Micky’s never mentioned it. Not that he mentions a lot.” He peered down at Micky’s faintly scrawled message. “He must’ave written this against a tent-pole. A bow-legged spider could ’ave made a better job of it.”
Rose divided her time between helping the nursing staff at Crag-Side and supervising the running of the mill. In many respects the war had simplified things where the mill was concerned. There was no more competitive tendering, instead the Army allocated orders and a newly formed Wool Control Board dictated the amount of wool to be made available for civilian manufacturing purposes.
“And as women are now doing men’s work in the mill, we’re paying them men’s wages,” she said to Noel as he sat on the terrace in a wheelchair, a sketch-book on his lap. “You’d think all the other mills would be doing the same, but they’re not. The General Union of Textile Workers is having a rare old ding-dong with some local mills. Rimmington’s, you’ll be pleased to know, is a shining light when it comes to conditions and terms of employment.”
He didn’t answer her. He wasn’t even listening to her. Across the vast sward of sun-kissed lawn, dotted with patients’day-beds and wheelchairs, a slender figure was walking briskly towards the foot of the terrace steps. She had a suitcase in one hand, a summer coat over her arm. Her once waist-length hair had been bobbed and there was elegant self-assurance in every line of her body.
“Lottie,” he said, his sketch-book slithering to the ground as he grasped the arms of his wheelchair so tightly Rose was sure he was going to miraculously rise from it and run. “Lottie!”
One look at Lottie’s face was enough to tell Rose that her visit was no casual visit; that she wasn’t home on leave; that she was home for good. Home, because Noel was home. Home, because she intended nursing him back to health. Home, because she now knew that there was more than one kind of courage and because she would never, as long as she lived, accuse Noel of cowardice again.
“Can you hear the larks?” Harry asked his adjutant. “You’d think the guns would send them fleeing miles away, wouldn’t you? Yet every time there’s as much as a ten-minute break in the firing you can hear them singing as if their hearts will burst.”
“They don’t sing so chirpy a few miles back, sir,” his adjutant said with a cheeky grin. “The French farmers shoot’em for pies. I reckon the little bleeders think they’re safe here. Every sod in sight has a rifle but we don’t make much of a mark with’em, do we? The Germans are exactly where they were three bleeding year ago and I doubt a battalion of the West Yorkshire’s joining us for our next little scramble is going to make much difference.”
Harry gave a weary grin. He never minded his adjutant speaking to him with familiarity. They’d been through too much together. Insubordination was quite another thing, of course. The French had been plagued by it to such an extent in some cases it had developed into outright mutiny. He slid his gun into his holster. If the new men assigned to him were Bradford Pals there’d be no question of insubordination from any of them. They would be battle-hardened soldiers. They would be the very best soldiers any man could possibly command.
Walking over creaking duckboards, he set off to inspect them. Bradford. It seemed a million miles away. Another world away. He wondered if there were still rowing boats on Lister Park lake. He wondered if Rose still went into the park with Jenny or if, now Jenny was a married woman, they no longer enjoyed such jaunts together.
“It wasn’t the girl I saw you with at Brighton,” one of his men was singing, “So who – who – who’s your lady friend?”
He knew who he wanted his lady friend to be. He’d known for a long time now. The damn thing was, though, he didn’t know how to go about telling her. She’d always believed him to be in love with Nina. For far too long, he’d always believed himself to be in love with Nina. When the scales had finally fallen from his eyes he’d felt like a man bereaved, certain he would never again feel an emotion so deep.
And then, high up on the moors, he’d looked down into Rose’s upturned, sunnily smiling face, and he’d known that everything that had gone before had been nothing but heady, fevered, youthful infatuation. It was Rose that was his real love; his true love. It was his fiercely loyal friend, with her irrepressible sense of fun and sure and certain values, that was his rock and his still centre, his searing flame and his peace.
“Is it true the Big Push is on for tomorrow night, sir?” a ‘Mons-man’, a gold wound-stripe on his sleeve, asked him.
“I haven’t had confirmation yet, Sergeant,” Harry said easily. “There’ll be a briefing the minute I hear.”
He wondered what Rose’s reaction would be when he told her he loved her. He wondered if, by some miracle, she would say she could learn to love him. Would they live at Crag-Side together for the rest of their lives? Would they run the mill together? Would they …?
“Sergeant Porritt’s platoon is over at number 3 machine-gun post, sir,” his adjutant said, interrupting his thoughts.
“Porritt?” Harry nearly lost his footing on the narrow duckboard. “Did you say Porritt?”
“I did, sir. He’s a bolshie bugger but he’s been out here ever since day one and he’s won himself so many medals the bits of ribbon would decorate a maypole.”
Despite his weariness Harry chuckled. Sergeant Porritt had to be Micky Porritt. Micky had always been bolshie. Especially with him.
Quickening his pace he strode swiftly past a group of men sorting out a large ammo box and swung himself down into the machine-gun station. The men lounging there, taking what uncomfortable rest they could, sprang hastily to attention.
He looked immediately towards their sergeant, his grin widening. It was Micky. There was a hardness and a maturity about him that hadn’t been there previously, and he was even broader in the shoulders and more muscular in the arms than when he’d seen him last, but it was Micky all right.
“It’s grand to see you, Micky,” he said, meaning every word of it.
“Sir,” Micky saluted.
“Stand easy,” Harry said to Micky’s platoon, saying to Micky, “I thought we were never going to meet up. You were at Loos, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Micky remained tight-lipped and taciturn. Three bleeding years he’d been in bleeding Flanders and he had to end up taking orders from a Rimmington – and Harry bleeding Rimmington at that!
The edge vanished off Harry’s pleasure. There was going to be no friendly reminiscences of Bradford with Micky. Just as, when Micky had been been living in Beck-Side Street he had clearly shown he had no time for ‘toffs’, so he was showing now that he had no intention of being matey with an officer.
“You know that tomorrow is most likely going to be a Big One, don’t you?” Harry said, surprised at how fiercely disappointed he was. He would have liked to have talked about Beck-Side Street, to have exchanged amusing anecdotes about Gertie and Albert, to have asked if Albert’s old horse was still alive and if Bonzo was still plaguing the life out of any stranger who might walk down the street.
“Yes, sir.” There was a note of weariness in Micky’s voice. Another ‘Big One’. Another God Almighty ‘Big Push’. Christ, but he’d seen h
is fair share of them since Mons. And he’d seen his fair share of officers, and those higher in command, leading from the rear. Much as it would have given him great satisfaction to believe Harry bleeding Rimmington fell into such a category, he doubted it. Word was Rimmington was that bloody rarity, an officer who was respected by his men.
“’E leads from the front,” he’d overheard one of Rimmington’s men say to one of his own privates, “an’when we march, ’e marches with us. ’ E don’t ride on a bloody horse like some of’em.”
“I’ll be giving a briefing at 1900 hours, Sergeant,” Harry said, knowing that the battle to be friends with Micky was one battle he seemed destined to lose. “Tell your men to get as much rest as they can. They’re very likely going to need it.”
When Harry received his orders for the next day he passed a hand over his eyes. What was the point? What was the bloody point? He’d give the order to go over the top into no man’s land and he’d come back, if he came back at all, with only a third, maybe only a quarter, of his men. How many letters to parents and wives had he written over the last three years? ‘I am sorry to have to tell you … it will console you to know he was a highly efficient young man, and popular among his comrades … your grief is shared by every man in his battalion …’ And in forty-eight hours he would, if he were still alive, be writing more.
“Officially,” he said to the officers grouped around him, “tomorrow’s objective is to straighten out the salient around Ypres and attract the enemy’s reserves. Unofficially, it stands every chance of being a massacre. We’ll be going in without any element of surprise, thanks to the prolonged preparatory bombardment.” He ran a hand through his thick shock of hair. “When, in the name of Christ, are the powers-that-be going to realize that preparatory bombardment pounds the ground into a swamp, making it impassable and our task impossible?”
“When hell freezes over, sir,” one of his lieutenants said bitterly.
At the back of the dugout Micky remained silently impressed. There was a frankness in Harry Rimmington’s manner with his men that aroused respect. He didn’t give them any of the, “Come on, gallant lads, into battle victorious,” rubbish. He’d be a good man to serve under in a tight spot, and tomorrow was going to be a very tight spot. He thought of his New Zealand book and the photographs of the mountains and the sheep farms and rushing rivers. He wouldn’t be cheated out of it by any Hun, by hell he wouldn’t! He’d survived so long out of sheer bloody cussedness and he’d survive till the last shout, by hell he would!
At 0500 hours the barrage started up and the German batteries began replying. In a front-line trench with his men, waiting for Rimmington’s signal to ‘go over’, Micky felt his stomach muscles tighten. Low air-bursts were already falling all round them and every now and then a shower of hit sandbags whirled high into the air. But no bodies with them. Not yet.
Micky ran his eyes over his platoon. They were white-faced but resolute. He’d never had to shoot a deserter yet, thank God. At twenty-two he was the eldest. ‘Lucky Porritt’they called him, because they knew how long he’d been out there. “Lucky Porritt’s platoon’s the platoon to be in,” they said. He knew. He’d heard it over and over again. His hand tightened on the stock of his rifle. Pray God they were proved right today.
At last the order came down the line: “Fix bayonets!”
“All right lads,” he said, “only a few minutes more, so hold steady now!”
They were all Bradford Pals, survivors from the Somme. Eddie Firth came from Eccleshill. Young Barraclough from Wyke. Two more were from the west side of the city. Micky had been a class above them at Whetley bane Infants.
The guns were lifting. He could see Harry Rimmington looking intently at a pocket watch. He thought briefly of Albert and the horse and Bonzo. And Rose, of course. He always thought of Rose at moments like this. He didn’t see Rimmington give the signal, but he heard it.
“Come on, lads,” he yelled at the top of his lungs as the whistles blew and machine-guns rattled from the enemy lines. “Let’s be having you!”
He was the first over the top, dropping down onto muddied ground, one man with his platoon behind him and two hundred others at their heels.
Ahead of him was a sea of poppy-speckled corn. The sound of the guns was deafening, but he was still on his feet, still running, and so were his men.
“Come on lads!” he yelled again, the corn flying flat around him as the enemy trenches came into view; as the mouths of the guns came into view. “Let’s show’em! Let’s make Bradford proud of us!”
Harry was sprinting, breasting the corn. He heard a big one sail over his head, saw the world flash and felt the ground dance. There were screams. Shouts for stretcher bearers. “Come on men!” he bellowed. “Come on!”
The enemy wire was in sight now. As men all around him fell dying and wounded he saw Micky’s platoon reach it.
Enemy machine-gun fire laced into them. He saw khaki-clad figures toppling onto the barbs.
“Give covering fire!” he shouted at the top of his lungs and, as a shell barrage from behind them fell short, spinning the bodies on the wire into a spuming bloody fountain of broken limbs. “Hold off the bombers, for Christ’s sake! Hold off!”
They made the German front trenches. With bayonets bloodied to the hilt they took them. Hours – days – years later it seemed, the world again fell silent. Or nearly silent. From out in no man’s land a wounded boy was calling for his mother.
Harry slumped back against a wall of mud. He was bleeding from the chest but he’d packed the wound as best he could. “How long has that boy been crying for help?” he asked hoarsely, struggling to button his tunic jacket over the bulky improvised dressing.
“Dunno, sir. He’ll be quiet soon, sir.”
Harry shook his head, blinking a blood-red mist from his eyes. He had lost over half his men. Micky had survived, though. Micky would very likely get yet another ribbon for his personal maypole – or would do so if he had any say in the matter. It had been Micky’s platoon which had first gained the German front-line trench and had silenced the machine-gun company causing them most losses.
The wounded boy cried out again.
Harry groaned. He couldn’t detail anyone to bring the boy in. Now that it was dusk, the least sign of movement would draw the attention of the long-distance gun batteries of both sides, making it a near suicidal mission.
He struggled to his feet. “Give me covering fire,” he said tersely, knowing that if anyone was going to have to do it, he would have to do it.
“I don’t think your idea is a very good one, sir,” his Regimental Sergeant-Major said bluntly. “You’re bleeding, sir …”
Harry knew he was bleeding and now so did everyone else, for the blood had begun to ooze through the thickness of his jacket.
“… and if his Company’s stretcher bearers couldn’t reach him …”
“I’ll cover you.” It was Micky. His face was all sharp angles. Nose. Cheekbones. Jaw. He and his Bradford Pals had knocked an entire machine-gun company out, racing up to it at point-blank range, overcoming it in the bloodiest of hand-to-hand fighting.
“Thank you, Sergeant Porritt,” he said quietly and then turned, hauling himself up and over the lip of the earthwork, weaving and ducking and diving as the long-distance guns opened up as he had known they would open up, holding the blood-sodden rags to his chest as he ran in the direction of the cries: “Hilf mir, Mutter! Hilf mir, Mutter!”
From that day on there was no question of Micky treating Harry with disdain. Throughout the remainder of the fighting at Ypres, after Harry had recovered from his wound, they fought side-by-side, or as near to side-by-side as it was possible for them to do. They were together at Passchendaele and they were together when, in the spring of 1918, a flood of German troops inundated forty miles of the British front.
“If this isn’t going to be the end of it, I don’t know what is,” Micky had said sourly, as Harry handed him a roll-up. “
Don’t suppose I’ll get to New Zealand then, will I?”
“You’ll get to New Zealand,” Harry had said, wondering just when the orders for a massive counter-attack would come. “Did I tell you William’s written to me with the news that Nina’s to marry again? He’s a lord and he’s in the War Cabinet.”
Micky grunted. He’d never had any time for Nina Sugden. She and Rose were as different as chalk and cheese. He remembered that Harry had once been in love with Nina and that, according to Rose, he still was.
“You don’t mind?” he asked, blowing a ring of blue smoke into air that was, for once, blessedly free of the smoke of guns.
Harry lifted an eyebrow. It was a question he had never thought to be asked by Micky. “No,” he said truthfully. “I still love her as a cousin, but I’m not in love with her and don’t think now that I ever was. I was infatuated though. As infatuated as it’s possible to be.”
“What happened?” Micky knew, of course, that Nina had very speedily married a duke; a duke who had won a posthumous VC at Gallipoli, but he didn’t know what had gone wrong between Harry and Nina before that. Rose had never told him. He didn’t think she’d even told Jenny.
Harry was silent for a moment, thinking of the ugly row in the stable yard at Crag-Side. “We didn’t think the same way about things,” he said at last. “Things that were important to her, weren’t important to me, and vice versa.”
It was Micky’s turn to be silent. Only one thing was important to him. New Zealand. He’d be on a boat out there the minute the war was over, he inhaled deeply, regarded the tip of his roll-up with studied interest, and said, “What will you do when it’s over?”
Harry grinned. “What I’ll do when it’s over is to ask the girl I do love if she’ll marry me, and then we’ll live happily ever after at Crag-Side, in sight of wonderful, wonderful Ilkley Moor!”
Yorkshire Rose Page 23
