A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  Do you find that odd? Ten-year olds in a love so intense they didn’t know how to express it. Too deep for taint. The others in the playground chased and hid and threw balls. The girls would play Queenie Eye and the boys would roll their marbles or fight or set up a cricket game, drawing chalk stumps on to the trunk of a tree. I was normally excluded from these games, especially after the Mary Collins episode. I suspect now that quite a few parents had told their children to keep away from me and I can vaguely remember my mother having a visit from the head teacher after the incident. Well, it suited me. Madeleine was happy to stay by my side in the playground and I would wake each beautiful, sunny morning, eager to get back to school so I could see her again. Slowly her English improved and by the last day of the summer term, Mrs Brown pronounced Madeleine as the “gold star pupil” of the term for her progress.

  During that long summer holiday we would meet two or three times a week, always on the bridge by that ancient lock-up. I would bring a bag of sweets from the shop with a bottle of Tizer or Dandelion and Burdock and we would head for a quiet pool, a backwater in the fields just by a bend in the river. We used to call it “Mandalay” after the song. Mum had heard it on the radio one day and so she went out and bought the sheet music. Madeleine would come round for tea at the shop on Wednesdays when we closed for the half-day and we’d stand at the side of the piano looking at each other over Mum’s shoulder as she pounded away at the keys. I loved the way Mum held the note just at the start of the chorus. Can you hear it? You know the tune, don’t you? Of course neither of us knew what the song was about but we just loved the idea of the “flying-fishes” and we pretended that our pool would have them. “Let’s go to Mandalay!” was our cry and we’d set off on the footpath along the river bank, ducking under the railway bridge that always dripped water even on the hottest of days, jigging the Tizer bottle so that when we came to open it we’d laugh at the fountain of pop that erupted. We’d be gone for hours. No-one worried, no-one sent out search parties for us. We always came back for tea.

  I can remember one day, one very particular day. The summer had just seemed to go on and on with almost cloudless skies. It was about the middle of August, not long before we were due to go back to school, and Madeleine and I had created a makeshift camp, a kind of tepee, from the tangle of undergrowth, broken branches and willow-tree roots by the water’s edge. We had gathered up some grass that had recently been cut in the field adjoining the river and brought it to our tent. Spreading it around the inside, we made a soft carpet on which we laid an old blanket I had found in a cupboard at home. At the hottest time of the day we would retreat to the relative cool of the tent, eat the food that Mum had made for us and read some books. I had found a picture book simply called Madeline in our local bookshop earlier that summer and had persuaded Mum to buy it for Madeleine’s birthday. I had read it to her the first time, pointing to the picture of the little red-headed girl in the book and then pointing to her. She was to keep that book with her wherever she went, slipping it into a battered brown satchel that hung around her shoulders. I have that very book here, in front of me. It was one of the books I asked Madeleine to bring in and as I look at it now I can hear the brush, brush, brush of the sound of Madeleine turning the pages in the warmth of the tent and the hot smell of the grass under our bodies, and I bring the book to my nose and I can smell her and see it all.

  On that beautiful day, after we had eaten and read our books, we stood by the river and watched as a large log slowly floated by, a stunted branch sticking up out of the water. We took turns in throwing stones at it, laughing and whooping when the occasional direct hit bounced off the trunk. Eventually it flowed out of sight around a bend in the river and we returned to our pool. The poplar trees at the edge of the field flashed green and silver as the gentle breeze ruffled their delicate leaves. I was sitting by the entrance to our camp, watching as Madeleine paddled barefoot at the water’s edge. Her blue and white summer dress was tucked into the side of her knickers, the cloth dove-tailing behind her. She was slowly trawling a net on the end of a stick backwards and forwards through the water. The sun’s light, occasionally eclipsed by the silk-sack clouds of that day, dappled through the leaves of the overhanging trees, bouncing and sparking off the water’s surface disturbed by Madeleine’s feet. In the distance I could hear the chug, chug, chug of a barge as it headed along the canal towards Avoncliff, a tell-tale plume of smoke slowly winding skywards over the tops of the trees. A flash of blue on the river and a kingfisher caught fire, darting by and into the trees on the other side. I stood up and joined Madeleine by the water’s edge, my bare feet dabbling the surface close by hers. She looked up at me, her eyes blinking against the bright sunlight, and she smiled and I smiled, and I haltingly touched her hand and she smiled and she said, “I luff you, big Henry,” and she squeezed my fingers and my heart reared wings, and I smiled and she smiled and I said yes, oh yes… and I thought I would die.

  Two days later I found my father slumped over a tray of marshmallows in the shop, blood dribbling from his mouth, staining his white overalls a vivid scarlet. The day of his funeral was on September 1st, just two days before war was declared and from that moment on everything changed. The summer and those golden days were lost forever. Looking back now it is as if the gates to the past were closed and padlocked, hidden behind high walls that we would never be able to climb again.

  And when the evacuees arrived, I lost Madeleine.

  Do you remember those days before we all came to learn the dirty devices of this world? I can only guess at your age but perhaps you were a young lad just like me before that other war: a young boy, carefree, never dreaming of death, of drops and ropes and buckles. Yes? Yes, I think so. I can see you playing in the fields in that summer of 1914, ducking round the hay ricks and greeting a single magpie which hopped across your path with a “Good Morning Mr Magpie” and then pinching yourself for good luck. Did you know the story that when Jesus was crucified all the birds of the world wept and sang to comfort him in his agony? All except the magpie. A bird sang when I was sentenced to death in the court. Did you know that? It was on the roof of the Old Bailey and it sang so beautifully I felt transfigured.

  Did you used to think like me that the world was a magical place with secret gardens and adventures and Swallows and Amazons? And nothing could ever go wrong? But it all faded to nothing, didn’t it? The lamps went out and ruined half the world – that 11 o’clock deadline when the clocks struck, the lever was pulled and millions were hurled to their deaths.

  Last night I dreamt that I went to that pond by the river again and I found myself at the edge of the water. But the bright sunshine had gone and was replaced by heavy lowering clouds and the branches of the trees, bare of their leaves, crossed and recrossed overhead in a skeletal canopy. I looked around but I couldn’t see by which path I had got to this place and the old familiar landmarks had all disappeared. The river, swollen by winter rain, ran swiftly past the spot. Suddenly a shape appeared in the middle of the river, pushed along by the current. At first it looked like a log but as it neared it took on human form, twisting and rolling in the swift flowing water. An arm, raised out of the water, stiffly pointed to the sky and then, as it passed me, I could make out the face of my mother and the arm and accusing finger rolled over and pointed directly at me. Terrified, I watched as the body was carried from my sight and round the corner, pushed and pulled by the river. A small circular light suddenly appeared at eye level and a voice called out:

  “Eastman! Eastman! What’s up?”

  A larger light came on and I was awake and in this cell. The ceiling light had been turned on from outside and I was crawling on the opposite side of the floor from my bunk, with my back against the wall. My head was damp with sweat and my heart was pounding, my breaths coming in short, hard bursts. The cell door opened and the warder on duty came in, looking anxiously at me.

  “Come on, Eastman, what the fuck are you doing? You were shouting
out fit to bust! Let’s get you back into your bunk.” He put his hands under my arms and helped me to my feet. “I’ll get the doc to bring you something. Make you sleep a little easier, eh?”

  I shook my head. “No. No. It’s OK. I’ll be alright – it’s just a nightmare.” I lay back on the bunk, closing my eyes, wishing the warder to leave. I didn’t want sleeping pills to blur my memory or fog the pictures that fanned through my mind’s eye like those penny peep-show machines I found on the pier at Weston-super-Mare. I heard the door to the cell close and the key turn in the lock. I turned to the wall and closed my eyes, trying to calm my heavy beating heart and to conjure up, once more, the memory of Madeleine and Mandalay and the bright summer days. Very slowly, by and by, as a wayfarer reaches the warmth of the blossom-filled orchards after descending from the misty mountains, the images flickered to life once more and the terror in my heart’s lake subsided.

  Those days after my father’s funeral were strange. The whole world felt as if it had slipped sideways, almost as if what had happened to my father was an omen of what was to come. The weather had broken and heavy showers driven by a sharp wind from the east soaked the streets. The customers who came into the shop would try to flap their umbrellas dry or swat their hats at the door. The older people would talk about the previous war, shaking their heads and wondering why we hadn’t learnt our lessons the first time. It was on such a day that Mrs Martin came into the shop. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was sitting on a high stool behind the counter, reading a book. I had often seen her around in the town, her shoulders draped in a brown, fox fur stole. Her husband, my father had said, was a hopeless drunk, often seen propping up the bar in a town centre pub.

  “Be grateful your boy’s too young, Mrs Eastman,” she had said to my mother, nodding towards me. “Our Jim is twenty next birthday. I’ve told him not to enlist. Stay away from the recruiting office, I said, but will he take any notice of me? No.”

  She shook her head, and the fox’s head on her fur moved side to side as if in sympathy.

  “Fair keeps me sleepless at night, it does, wondering if he’s going to get his call-up papers and the next thing I’ll see him in a khaki uniform. The last war did for his father even though he survived the trenches. Never the same after he came back. Never the same.” She paused for a moment, wondering what she had come in for. “A quarter of mint humbugs, dear.”

  As my mother unscrewed the cap of the jar and tipped up the opening over the scoop on the scales, Mrs Martin continued. “Went out cheering and smiling in 1916, marching off to war, he did. By Christmas 1918 when he came back he was a broken man. Brooding, always staring into the fire. Looking at him now it’s a wonder we ever got a child out of him.” She laughed and paused for a moment while she dug in her purse. I can remember her next words so well, almost as if she was in this cell with me. Her smiling face changed swiftly as if a mask had dropped away to reveal the true, deep sadness underneath. “Now I wish we hadn’t. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing Jim. Not now.”

  I noticed my mother take a side-long glance at me before she said, “We can only keep our fingers crossed, can’t we? Let’s hope it’s not like the other one. They say it’ll be over by Christmas and that it can all be done from the air nowadays. Don’t need infantry.”

  My mother handed over the paper bag of mints. “Henry, could you make a note on that piece of paper by the till, dear? Put down ‘mints’. I’ll have to do a reorder later this week.” She lowered her voice to Mrs Martin but I could still hear. “Since Albert died I’ve had to learn the ropes quickly. Sometimes I wonder if I can carry on.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage, dear. Be good for you, you’ll see. Keep your mind off things.” Mrs Martin pushed the bag of sweets into her coat pocket. “Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t be better off without Saul around. I know it’s a wicked thing to say but…” her voice trailed away. She shrugged her shoulders and the little fox fur feet hanging down on each side of the stole jiggled against her chest. “We do our best, eh?” She turned and opened the shop door, pausing to open up her umbrella. “Cheerio, dear.”

  The door shut behind her, the bell echoing in the shop. I looked over to my mother. She had her hands over her face and I could hear her sobs leaking through her fingers. I realized, with a shock, that not even at my father’s funeral had I seen her cry and that this was the first time.

  The evacuees from London came quite soon after the war had started. We had heard that a special train would be arriving late one afternoon, and Madeleine and I stood on the footbridge over the tracks waiting for it to arrive. Suddenly it appeared around the corner, puffing and blowing through the short tunnels on the approach to Bradford station. Drawing into the platform, the engine passed under our feet, wreathing us in smoke and steam. When the train finally came to a halt, the doors of the carriages were flung open and the platform quickly filled up with children, each with a label tied to their lapel and with a gas mask box bouncing at their waists. The adults that came with them were trying to shepherd them into lines before bringing them over the footbridge to the buses and coaches that were lined up in the station forecourt. We remained on the bridge, watching as they filed past us. Madeleine held my hand. Some were anxiously looking about them while others were laughing and pushing each other, oblivious to their new surroundings. My mum called them the Cockney Sparrows.

  How hopeful we were in those first weeks of the war. Stupid even, thinking it would all be so different this time. At the very time that I discovered my father slumped in the sweet shop, a Polish cavalry regiment were being wiped out by a German tank division – to every single man and horse. We never imagined that this war would be even more brutal than the last. The “precision” bombing which would only take out military targets – do you remember those stories? Even from the very beginning bombers threw out their explosive cargo whenever and wherever they could in an effort to avoid the flak and get away as fast as possible from the shrapnel. What is it one flyer reported when asked why his bombs fell on open fields? “We have made a major assault on German agriculture.” The chances of precision bombing were never realistic but we fooled ourselves for a long time – even when houses were being flattened around us – that it was only military targets the bombers aimed for. How things changed! I was to see the newsreels in the cinema of VE night with those London revellers dancing in the streets and later in the year those atomic bombs going off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were happily disintegrating tens of thousands of people and not turning a hair. George Tanner, of course, knew all about the filth of war right from the beginning. He was an expert, a man of the world. Knew his way around.

  But Jim, Mrs Martin’s son, was just like so many of the other youngsters at that time. Keen and naïve. He did join at the earliest opportunity despite his mother’s protests. It didn’t seem to make any difference to Saul, his father, but Mrs Martin shrank in size. I’d see her in the town, the tell-tale fur stole draped over her shoulders, and even though she knew me she would pass by as if she were in another world. After Jim was killed “on active service” during the Italian campaign – the rumours came later about the possibility he may have been killed by the RAF in error – Mum and I never saw her out of her house again. Mum visited her once a few weeks after she had learnt of Jim’s death and came back ashen-faced.

  “Oh, Henry. Oh dear.” She sat down at the kitchen table. “That poor woman.” She brushed her hand back and forth over the whorls and lines of the wooden surface of the table, displacing flecks and crumbs of bread. “Thin as a rake. She can’t be eating much these days – and Saul’s just hopeless.”

  Perhaps it was a blessing then that brought a returning German bomber from Bristol over our town and to drop its final bomb. I don’t suppose the bomb aimer knew or cared less where it might drop – but it fell on the Martins’ house. The peculiar thing was that while Mrs Martin was killed outright, Saul was somehow spared – even though he was buried for a couple of days. They pu
lled him out with just a few scratches on him. Most people said he was probably too drunk to get up the stairs to bed that night and had fallen under the table in the kitchen and it was that which had saved his life. For what it was worth. He had no idea what had happened to him, or his wife. I remember him wandering the streets of the town asking everyone if they had seen his wife. This went on for years, even after the war had finished, and then one day he just disappeared. We never found out what had happened to him and eventually people stopped talking about him.

  I remember seeing an ex-RAF pilot around the town. He’d constantly be turning his head in quick sharp movements, looking upwards and sideways. It was hypnotic to watch him coming across the town bridge towards the pub, jerking his head round and up in constant, exhausting movements. I suppose you may well have seen the same kind of thing in your town. He was on a constant look-out for enemy planes, checking that he wasn’t going to get jumped by an ME 109 coming out of the sun or from behind. Upwards and side to side, upwards and side to side, he would scan the skies for those phantom black shadows that could appear from nowhere, terrified that they would shatter his machine, ripping open his body with their cannon fire. Occasionally he would stop, stock still, and peer straight into the sun, screwing his face up as he tried to catch the faintest of specks that might herald an advancing enemy plane diving in on him. Once I saw some kids come up behind him and make machine-gun noises. He ducked instinctively and then slowly curled up in a ball on the ground, hugging his knees. The kids ran off and I went over to help him up. I have never felt a man tremble so much before – or since. The only time he stopped doing these weird head jerks was when he was in the pub. He had a favourite seat – the only seat he would use – which was jammed in at one corner of the bar, sandwiched between the walls and just tucked a little under the stairs. Even so, I would watch, mesmerized, as his shaking hand brought the pint glass to his mouth, the beer slopping and spilling over the rim. The strange thing was the barman never pulled a glass that was short of a pint for him and then offer to top it up after a couple of swigs. Every time it was filled to the brim and every time the poor man slopped it down himself. There were permanent stains on his jacket and trousers.