by Annie Murray
They had taken the first morning boat to Boulogne, where the lady from the St Barnabas Fund met them to take them south: past Montreuil, through the old city of Abbeville and along the line of the Somme Valley towards Amiens. Now the war was coming very close to them. The names of towns were taking on a terrible familiarity, and as they motored away from the comparative tranquillity of the coast towards the battlefields of North Eastern France, they began to see clusters of graves marked with wooden crosses.
Jess, who was seated next to the rear left window, shifted her position a little, her cotton frock damp with sweat under her. Polly was asleep, leaning heavily against her shoulder, and Jess could feel the moist warmth between their bodies. She felt protective towards Polly, travelling here to face her grief head on. John was also asleep with his head back next to the other window. In front, Peter Stevenson made desultory conversation with Miss Baxter, the St Barnabas lady who was driving the car. She had rich brown hair taken up into a pleat and held tenuously by tortoiseshell combs. They looked so insecure that Jess, sitting behind her, had been waiting all day for them to fall out and her hair collapse, but so far they had held on, letting more and more strands of hair escape from them and blow round her head in the breeze from the window. Jess felt almost a sense of worship for Miss Baxter. She had thought of everything: the route and accommodation and the need to strap John’s wheelchair to the roof of the chesty old car. She anticipated their needs, even their feelings. To Jess she seemed one of the most wonderful people she had ever met.
‘Not too far now,’ she called over her shoulder. Jess loved the sound of her Scottish accent. ‘It’s a pity we have to make these visits so brief,’ Jess heard her say. ‘But of course it’s a question of the expense, and the sheer numbers of folk wanting so desperately to come. We hope to charge less as things get established.’
Peter nodded. Jess watched him out of the corner of her eye. She had an oblique view of his profile, the slant of his cheek, and she could just see the tip of his nose. She looked out of the window, but kept feeling her gaze drawn back to look at him, at the line of his dark hair at the nape of his neck.
‘Were you on the Somme yourself?’ Miss Baxter asked.
‘No.’ Jess heard a stiffness in his tone, his shame at not having done his bit. Peter raised one hand to ease some irritation on his cheek and she saw his long fingers rub the skin back and forth for a moment. ‘I was reserved to oversee a munitions factory.’
‘Aha. Well – the body is composed of many organs,’ Miss Baxter said enigmatically.
Jess sensed, rather than saw, Peter smile faintly. She felt a huge surge of gratitude to him as well. It was because of him they were here. He who had sought out all the possibilities of getting them to France, who had made the arrangements. What had clinched things was that John Bullivant, hearing them discussing the possibility of going to the battlefields, had begged to be allowed to go.
‘What on earth d’yer want to do that for, John?’ Marion Bullivant had seemed quite alarmed.
‘I can’t explain it, Mom. I just do. I left me legs over there and I weren’t with it when they brought me back. I don’t remember ’ardly a thing about it.’
‘But John,’ Polly said gently. ‘Ernie died on the Somme. We won’t be going to Belgium.’
‘I know that, Poll. But it’s still over there, ain’t it? The state the place’ll be in I should think Ypres and the Somme’d look pretty much alike. I just feel I’d like to come and see it. It took years of my life as well as my legs.’
Polly had glanced across his head at Jess. We can’t refuse him, her expression said. But how on earth are we going to manage?
It was Peter who had found out about the recently founded St Barnabas fund. Peter who had then said that he would come at his own expense to help John. Ernie’s family had been all for Polly going and they chipped in to help. All of them had savings from the war and in the end they put together enough for the four of them.
Those weeks, as the spring had passed and turned into early summer, were a time of churned up feelings for all of them. Mixed in with the preparations for the journey to France was all the emotion over Alice, the rewriting of her past in their minds. Slowly they grew more used to the idea. It was hardest of all for Olive: to have to accept that her mother had been alive and had not come back to them, and grow to understand and forgive her. Jess saw her quite often just sitting in silence, staring, and knew she was thinking of it. When she did talk about it it was with enormous sadness and regret, not with bitterness. She put the photograph from Whitall parish in an old frame and it stood on the mantelpiece. Having that seemed to reclaim Alice as part of the family.
And there was other turmoil. Bert, after coming home and gleefully returning to civilian life, was now restless and discontented. His face wore a frown almost all the time.
‘I’m back ’ere,’ he complained. ‘Back where I started in a bloody ’ard, filthy job. Four year of my life I fought and for what? What did I get out of it?’ Though he had left the army cursing it high and low, he was now talking about joining up as a regular.
‘You get used to the life, sort of thing. Moving about. Seeing a bit more of the world. And there’re some good lads . . .’
By May he had re-enlisted and said his farewells to them.
‘I don’t blame ’im in a way,’ Perce said when he heard.
Sis looked indignantly at him. ‘Well I ’ope you ain’t getting any ideas of going off!’
‘Not on your life!’ He gave her a saucy, affectionate pinch so she squealed. ‘I know when I’m well off!’
Jess turned to the car window again, seeing now that the scenery was changing. They had reached the edge of the town.
‘Now you can see,’ Miss Baxter said. ‘We’re getting close.’
Jess nudged Polly who stretched, yawning loudly, and woke John. They sat in absolute silence as Miss Baxter steered the motor car slowly, almost reverently along the ruined main street of Amiens, still following the river.
‘They make beautiful wool and velvet here – or did,’ Miss Baxter said. ‘Before it was shelled to blazes. And Albert’s even worse. Almost completely flattened.’
It was hard to imagine that anything would ever be made in Amiens again. So many wrecked and ragged buildings, the rubble of stone, the smashed remains of life as it had been before.
‘They didn’t get the cathedral though – look, quickly, to your right. We’re turning off here in a minute.’
Before them, the lead covered spire of the cathedral soared up out of the rubble against the blue sky with a kind of majestic defiance and in it they caught a glimpse of the city’s real face, its splendour before the war.
Jess felt a moment of empathy with the huge building as if it were a big strong lady, squatting there, flanked by its flying buttresses like petticoats. She survived! Wouldn’t let them crush her. It gave her strength, this thought, as they drove along the sleepy country road towards the ruined town from where Ned had sent her postcards of the basilica, when she had believed love was a sure, unchanging thing. They stopped outside Albert in a tiny roadside café, ate bread and drank black coffee brought to them by a wordless girl who then stood with her back against the wall, watching them. Jess winced at the bitterness of the coffee but it refreshed her. They were seated at a rickety table in a little stone floored room where flies moved above their heads. Peter was beside her. Miss Baxter opposite.
‘How did you come to be doing this work?’ Peter asked her.
‘Well . . .’ She spoke slowly, as if reluctant. ‘My fiancé was killed not far from here – at Grandcourt.’ It came as a revelation to Jess that Miss Baxter was a great deal younger than her old-fashioned manner and style of dress made her appear. ‘My family are not without money – I was able to come almost as soon as the war finished. It meant everything to me to know where Duncan met his end. There was no grave for me either—’ She looked at Polly. Neither the Red Cross nor the Graves Registration Committ
ee had been able to locate exactly where Ernie was buried. ‘But to see the place – be close to him somehow . . .’ She spoke with great sadness, but with a kind of resignation, and looked calmly round at them. ‘I had to find a worthwhile way to fill my life. You see, Duncan and I were going to go abroad. He’d planned to train for the ministry and I was to teach – in India. I didn’t want to go alone: it was our project, our dream to carry out together. So when I heard about St Barnabas I volunteered straight away, to help other people find some sort of peace of mind.’
Polly’s eyes filled with tears. John put his hand on her shoulder. Before they left she had gone to a seance at the Blacks’ house for what she said would be the last time. John didn’t like her going. She had asked Ernie what he thought of her going to France and he had given her his blessing. Miss Baxter’s round face looked with great kindness at her.
‘It’s a sight you’ll never forget – out where they were fighting. Beyond belief. But it does help, in a strange way.’
‘I just need to know – to see,’ Polly said. ‘To lay him to rest in my mind.’
Miss Baxter leaned across and laid her hand over hers. ‘I know, dear. I know.’
They left behind the ruins of Albert, straddling the River Ancre, and drove the few miles to La Boiselle through a landscape which looked ghostly even on this sunlit afternoon. The fields lay uncultivated along the Front, for the land had to be combed further for the dead. For miles on end stretched the churned up earth, pocked with shellholes. Shoots of grass, wheat and weeds had sprouted across them in uneven patches and here and there, tiny, fragile poppies blew in the breeze. They passed thin clumps of tree stumps, pathetic sticks poking up, barely a leaf in sight, and along the road still, lay the rubble and the human debris of the front line: sandbags, twisted chunks of rusting metal, wrecked wagons, sprawls of barbed wire and discarded belongings – a bleached scrap of khaki cloth here, an old water bottle or rusting mess tin there.
‘My God,’ Polly breathed. ‘What a mess.’ She had taken Jess’s hand. They were almost afraid to see, much as they wanted to.
‘We thought we had it bad,’ Jess said soberly. ‘But my God, the poor French!’
‘There is a little money to be made out of the debris,’ Miss Baxter told them. ‘I gather copper wire fetches a good price. And uniform buttons, guns – you’d be surprised.’
‘Can’t say I blame ’em though,’ Polly said.
The road climbed gradually upwards and on each side of the road were gentle hills. Miss Baxter pulled the car into the side of the road and swivelled round to face them. She looked at Polly.
‘We’re very close. Up here the road will cross the line of trenches the Germans were holding in July 1916 when the Big Push began. You can see one of the craters where our boys mined underneath it prior to the attack. It’s a massive hole – still full of what they left behind, helmets and so on. And just over the way are our trenches – they were very close together here. Just in the village there’s a spot they call the Glory Hole where they were only yards apart.’
Polly gripped Jess’s hand. Jess could see Peter watching her cousin, a gentle expression on his face. He sensed her looking at him and his eyes moved to meet hers for a second.
‘Can we get out ’ere a minute?’ John asked.
Miss Baxter hesitated.
‘I’ll help him,’ Peter said. ‘You stiff, John?’
‘Ar – bloody stiff.’ His voice sounded harsh after Miss Baxter’s soft tones. ‘And I want a look round.’
Polly and Peter levered John out of the car again and eased him down to sit on the ground. Polly got back into the car, leaving the two men to talk.
‘I was going to say to you, Mrs Carter—’
‘Please – my name’s Polly – this is Jess. You don’t need to call me Mrs Carter all the time. ’Specially the way things are and you being so kind to us. You feel almost like family.’
Miss Baxter smiled. ‘All right. Thank you. And I’m Isobel. I’d be just as happy if you called me that too. I was saying – as there is no grave as such for your husband, and you can’t be certain of the exact spot where he died . . .’ She brought the words out painfully. ‘There will be memorials of course, eventually. None of them will be forgotten. But for now, I’d suggest you choose a place, when you find somewhere appropriate, to make your peace with him. People find that helps.’
This time Jess squeezed Polly’s hand to give comfort.
‘Awright, I’ll do that,’ Polly said huskily. She turned to look out at the fields. ‘Oh my God – what’re they doing?’
Already yards away, on the rough terrain beyond the road, were Peter and John, beginning to climb slowly up the side of the nearest low incline. Peter was bent forward, taking short, determined strides, as John clung to his shoulders. He looked a pathetic sight, flung across Peter’s back, the remains of his legs dangling helplessly, Peter’s elbows sticking out as he held on to him.
Isobel Baxter was out of the car in a second and Jess and Polly followed.
‘Stop – for heaven’s sake don’t go any further! STOP!’ The young woman jumped up and down waving her arms frantically above her head. They saw Peter stop and swivel round. For a moment he loosed John with one hand and waved at them.
‘Shan’t be long!’ they heard him shout. ‘It’s not far!’
‘But there’re BOMBS!’ Isobel shrieked. She seemed almost beside herself. ‘Please stop, you could be killed!’ But Peter had turned away and continued to clamber up the slope, a rough rubble of stones, exposed roots, tree-stumps and debris, so that he had to watch every step and it took all his attention.
Isobel wrung her hands. ‘It’s quite, quite wrong to leave the roads and the designated paths. There are unexploded bombs everywhere . . . bodies . . . Oh dear. Perhaps I ought to go after him.’
‘I’ll go,’ Polly said.
‘No.’ Jess laid a hand on her arm to stop her. ‘Don’t. Leave them.’
‘You’re right,’ Isobel said, her eyes never leaving the two men. ‘If we all start going it increases the risk. But oh heavens . . .’ She pressed her clenched fist to her lips.
There was a kind of indistinct path which Peter was following through the rubble. Slowly, ploddingly he climbed. Jess watched, her body so tense she felt she might snap, every fibre of her willing him to reach the top safely, to turn, to come back. She found herself overwhelmed with feeling that she had only dimly known was in her.
Be safe, be safe, Peter, oh Peter, her mind hammered, beyond her willing it. Come back to me . . . She laid a hand over her fast-beating heart. She didn’t really know how big the risk was that Peter was taking with his own life and John’s, but she found herself chill with fright. It was as if all the same kind of longing, the hopes and prayers she had sent out to Ned during the war distilled together in her mind, the intensity of it startling her. Come back to me, Peter my love – please . . . This time the words, the longing, was for someone else, and she was shocked by the extent of feeling towards him that had been growing, deep in her.
The three of them watched every move of the two men as they reached the highest point. Peter turned this way and that, so that they could look back towards Albert, then over to La Boiselle. Jess saw him pointing across the landscape with its scarred fields and clumps of razed woodland, its pimples of hills. For a few moments he put John down and they rested, apparently without talking. Jess watched them, saw the curious camaraderie that had formed between the two men. Soon, Peter hoisted John back on to his shoulders and they began the descent. For a moment, halfway down he slipped and almost fell and they all gasped, but he managed to right himself.
‘Oh Lord!’ Isobel murmured. But soon they were down the hill, safe, and Peter was walking across to the car. Both men were smiling.
‘I ought to give you a thorough ticking off!’ Isobel ran to them, laughing with relief. ‘Please don’t ever, ever do anything like that again, will you promise me?’
‘I’m sorry, Mis
s Baxter,’ Peter backed in through the car door, depositing John on the seat. Jess heard the jubilation in his voice. ‘Didn’t mean to get you so worried. Got a bit of a better picture up there.’
‘You can see our lads’ trenches,’ John said through the open car door.
Jess looked into Peter’s face and he smiled at her.
‘Don’t suppose you were worried?’
Jess felt her cheeks burn. She had known, in those moments, how much she felt for Peter Stevenson, and now she was vulnerable in front of him.
‘I was. Course I was,’ she said testily.
‘I just wanted John to be able to see . . .’
She could see in his face that it was not just John. Carrying him up there had been a test for him: the duty of a man who had not endured the trenches to perform a service for one who had. A different pilgrimage from the one the rest of them were making, but a pilgrimage none the less. There was a relief, a satisfaction about Peter as they got back into the car.
‘Now,’ Isobel said. ‘Time is marching fast onwards. We have to return to Abbeville this evening, so no more delays – please.’
Polly chose a spot just outside the village of La Boiselle to consecrate a little piece of ground, in her own way, for Ernie. La Boiselle had been fought over so heavily that most of it was a ruin. Looking along what must have been the main street was a poignant sight. So little remained of the buildings of the flattened village and what did was mostly rubble.
‘These poor people,’ Polly said, even more moved by the sight than she had been in the towns. ‘All their homes gone. I think I’ll do it somewhere ’ere.’
They walked until she found a little spot at the edge of the field nearest the southern end of the village.
