The Protagonists

by James Barlow

  ‘Do you come here often?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I’ve never been before.’

  ‘Nor me. Harry talked me into it. I can’t really dance.’

  ‘You’re all right tonight.’

  ‘Do you really go to school?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, but added immediately, ‘I’m leaving before long.’

  ‘I’m only eighteen,’ Joe said, ‘but school seems a long time ago. I’ve been working since I was fourteen.’

  ‘What at?’

  ‘Oh, all sorts. In a shop and then in a factory. They were glad to have me ‘cause of the war.’

  ‘How long have you been a soldier?’

  ‘Six months. I’m not very good at it yet.’

  ‘Are soldiers really as rough as they seem? It’s awful the way they stare.’

  ‘Some of ’em,’ said Joe. ‘Harry’s a case. He’s all right, you know. He’s decent to me – I get on with him.’

  ‘He seems – jolly.’

  ‘He’s a good ’un. He never tries to get me on a line like some of ’em.’

  ‘On a line?’

  Joe was suddenly bothered; his hand sweated in hers. He explained quickly, ‘Some of ’em think you’re a pansy if you don’t go with women.’

  Olwen was amazed at his innocence; he was as untouched as she, surrounded by a lot of Bonds, clever with their words and sneers and persuasions. She looked at his face in its seriousness and liked what she saw.

  About an hour later, when the atmosphere was thick, the placed packed and the foreheads of the soldiers were filmed with sweat, Olwen said, ‘I feel a bit sick. Could we go outside?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Joe. ‘Would you like another drink?’

  Olwen refused and they wandered outside as others had been doing. The cold salt air struck and refreshed them. There was no moon, but the black-out wartime night was relieved by the stars. ‘Let’s just walk to the sea and back,’ said Olwen. ‘I’ll feel all right then.’

  It was the first time she had been in Bar Quay at night. Despite the absence of light, it was as crowded as during the day. The sound of high-heeled shoes and the heavier, accompanying boots seemed to fill the town, but little could be seen. Olwen sensed others nearby, more silent, in shop doorways, but identified nothing. As they neared the shore it became lighter. The approaching ride could be discerned, and on the sands dark shapes walked together. Other people were strolling along the promenade, hugged close together; identified as human by the flavour of their trails of cigarette smoke and as masculine and feminine by their voices. Nobody was separate, alone, and Olwen did not protest when Joe held her hand. They walked cautiously about, two innocents who were uncomfortably aware of others, far less separate, who sat close together on wooden seats or half sprawled without words in the corners of the beach shelters. In the silence following each crash of the incoming tide could be heard significant giggles and shrills from the direction of the sand. Joe and Olwen proceeded a few hundred yards beyond the end of the promenade until they felt themselves to be alone.

  ‘I like being here,’ Joe said. ‘I haven’t seen the sea before.’

  ‘I don’t like the town,’ said Olwen.

  ‘Don’t you live in the town?’

  She described it to him: the hill which he could see on the horizon each day as he paraded, marched and did physical training was where she lived.

  ‘It must be good there,’ said Joe. ‘I hope I see it before I leave here.’

  Olwen remembered the warnings about soldiers; the girls who had had to leave the district; others who had married in a hurry; small wonder that the village was hostile and anxious to retain its isolation; but Joe was as innocent as she. ‘I hope so too,’ she said in honesty.

  He kissed her suddenly, nervously, half as though it was expected of him. ‘Have you got a boy?’ he asked.

  Olwen said quickly, ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘Well,’ said Joe, still nervous and half defiant, ‘you’ve got one now if you want.’

  Just before midnight Joe took Olwen to the car park and they waited in tenderness for the other two. As they were arranging the details of where they should next meet, Peggy and Harry staggered in together. They were slightly drunk, friendly drunk, and the goodbyes were prolonged because of it.

  On the way back to the village in the lorry Peggy said, ‘What a mouldy hole that place was. Thank God I’m getting out of it.’

  ‘Are you getting married?’

  Peggy swerved in her laughter. ‘Oh, that’s a good one. Me getting married. I don’t need to – I can get it wholesale.’

  ‘Well, what are you doing, then?’ Olwen asked, disliking this coarseness.

  ‘I’m going to do a bit more for the soldiers,’ said Peggy. ‘I am about to become a nurse.’

  The idea appealed straight away to that compassion of which Olwen was capable. ‘What a good idea. Are you going to Cardiff?’

  ‘No fear,’ said Peggy. ‘Too many damn relations there. I’m going to Birlchester.’

  It was in England, a hundred miles away, a huge city, remote from any experience of Olwen’s. ‘That’s a long way from home,’ Olwen commented.

  Too apprehensive of the village to meet Joe there – for eyes peered from behind net curtains; postmen talked; nothing was secret or sacred – Olwen walked the mile to the shore and on the following Saturday waited for him at the crossroads near the new cemetery. He arrived in the small bus, and at the sight of him all the misgivings collected during the previous seven days were forgotten; she hadn’t made a mistake.

  They greeted each other nervously; without the presence of the talkative Harry and Peggy, they tended to be silent.

  Olwen said, ‘That was my father who drove the bus.’

  ‘He was talking to me.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘All about the camp and that.’

  ‘Not about me?’

  ‘No, only about where I was going.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘To meet my girl.’

  These were the words Olwen wanted to hear, and she hung her head in shyness. She took him a walk along the shore to the lighthouse. It was a long time since she had been, and she found with shame that it had grown ugly during the years since Leslie. But if he noticed the ugliness Joe said nothing about it, and he was grateful for the privacy of the tower in which to kiss. Afterwards they travelled to Bar Quay on another bus service, ate fish and chips in a café, and at seven o’clock made their way to the dance hall.

  A week later they gazed on the world from the top of the hill above the village. Above the trees and gorse Joe gasped at the view. Down below moved the tiny woollen dots which were sheep. The fields stretched away in a patchwork of innumerable greens to the small sore on the horizon which was the town. A toy train moved along the coast – it was so toy-like that Joe laughed. On another horizon was the dark purple outline of a different range of hills. Out at sea, unseen on the horizon at sea-level, a convoy of ships proceeded. The harsh roar of a military aeroplane filled the bowl of land below them, and Joe saw with astonishment that it flew at a lower level than themselves. Olwen could see that the boy was deeply affected by it all, even troubled.

  ‘The world’s a big place,’ Joe said awkwardly. ‘In a city you think there’s not enough room. I mean, this is worth dying for.’

  ‘Aren’t there things in the city worth dying for?’

  Joe said, ‘In the city you’ve got nowhere to go with a girl. All those thousands – it isn’t fair. You have to go to the pictures.’

  ‘I like the pictures,’ Olwen said.

  ‘Yes, but they’re not real, see?’

  ‘They’re not meant to be. They’re only – well, pictures.’

  Joe said, ‘I
mean, people want to be alone, to talk and that.’

  Olwen asked in curiosity, ‘What do you do in a city to be alone with a girl?’

  ‘You have to go in the parks and boozers,’ Joe said. ‘Never really alone, see? Not like this.’

  Olwen smiled. ‘Round here if a boy comes up the hill with a girl they say it’s – you know, sinful …

  Joe laughed briefly. ‘Whatever you do it’s wrong. Too many regulations,’ he said. He held her rather clumsily. His face was pink and his eyes abject; he had something important to say. ‘You know what? You’re something worth dying for.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask anyone to die for me.’

  ‘You’re a nice girl,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t just like you. You understand? You’re not just another girl.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ he pleaded. ‘Oh, Christ, don’t you see? I mean I love you.’

  She touched the roughness of his greatcoat and then his face and hair. ‘I’m glad,’ she said.

  An hour later they came down into a mist. Under the darkness of the trees they trod on the slippery, damp leaves and breathed the trapped, autumnal air into each other’s faces. ‘Are you sure your folks want to see me?’ Joe asked.

  He found tea with Olwen’s parents and brother something of an ordeal. When she exclaimed to Joe, ‘You don’t eat a lot for a growing lad,’ Mrs Hughes meant it kindly, but the boy-soldier was covered with confusion.

  At the sink, as they washed up afterwards, her mother said to Olwen, ‘He’s a nice lad, but isn’t he shy? Not like a soldier at all.’ After the washing up Olwen found herself in the other room with Joe, among the heavy furniture, plates and the dark painting, a fire lit mysteriously and nobody interrupting. Without hesitation she turned off the lamp and relaxed before the firelight with Joe until it was time for him to leave. While Joe was out of sight, putting on his coat, Tom whispered, ‘He’s all right. I like him.’ Her father’s approval came last of all, the next morning. ‘He’s a good lad. Bring him here as often as you like.’

  She did. All through that autumn and winter Olwen met Joe as often as school hours and his duties permitted. Her home was a home for him, too, because her parents accepted it as right and natural that, after a walk with Olwen, he should come in for tea and supper. He even spent a short leave there.

  One Saturday in the spring he failed to keep a rendezvous. Olwen spent a worried weekend wondering what had happened, and was only partially relieved when a letter arrived on the Monday morning postmarked Bar Quay. When she opened it and read the first few words of the rounded, childish script, she knew that everything was all right: her world was still intact. It was just that he would soon be leaving for a camp in England. Full of yearning for him, Olwen hoped that he would come to her, dramatically, in the middle of the night even, with prolonged moments to speak of his love before he went back to the camp and on to the other part of Britain. She wrote a long letter in return, begging him to do so.

  He came three days later. Olwen cycled home from school and there he was, standing awkwardly as he always did, the boots too big and the coat too heavy for him, waiting at her own doorway. They embraced without this time bothering about privacy.

  ‘I’ve only got two hours,’ Joe said.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere quiet.’

  ‘You’d better have your tea first.’

  ‘I don’t want any tea.’

  ‘You’d better tell your mama, then.’

  Olwen did this, and then they walked, as they had often done, out of the village, over several stiles and up a path into the green thickness of the woods.

  ‘It’s cold in the trees,’ Joe said. ‘Let’s get into the sun where it’s warm.’

  They sat by a bush in a shaft of sunlight. It was so warm that they took off their coats, and so quiet that the world at war seemed unreal.

  But it wasn’t.

  ‘When are you leaving?’ Olwen asked.

  ‘Tonight. They haven’t said much.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  She was shocked. ‘You can tell me.’

  He was palpably nervous and she could not understand why. Because it was their last meeting, perhaps?

  Joe said, ‘It’s somewhere in Wiltshire.’

  She understood suddenly: he was frightened and the fright belonged to something bigger than either of them. ‘It’s the invasion,’ she said.

  ‘It will be.’

  ‘You’ll be all right. I’ll pray for you.’

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ Joe said. ‘The war brought me to you. It may take me away.’ He smiled. ‘But I’ll be back.’

  ‘Let’s forget about it,’ Olwen said. ‘Why does it have to take you away now? I’m leaving school in six weeks. I could have seen you often.’

  She leaned heavily against him, and he lost his anxiety in her kisses, in the quietness and the warmth. White flowers on a may tree waved in front of his eyes; there was a drone of insects; the warm softness of Olwen drew him towards drowsiness, but he became too conscious of it to sleep. It was too feminine and real to be ignored. Joe whispered, ‘Let me touch you,’ and his left hand, hoping for acceptance and ignoring rejection, had felt into her blouse before Olwen in shock (but not fear: he was no Bond) pleaded, ‘Joe, you are afraid.’

  He said, almost in tears, ‘I’m not afraid, and, if I am, it’s only of myself.’

  ‘You don’t think you’ll come back to me and you want –’

  ‘You feel so soft. I only wanted to touch. Nothing more. It was because I was nearly asleep and I forgot –’

  In the warmth and the tenderness, her body had relaxed so that it pleaded with her to surrender, and more than surrender, to participate. A tingling shot out pleasurably from the contact of his hand through her breasts and stomach even to her legs. It sought to envelop her. He was going away to risk his life, and he loved her. It was one of war’s temptations to persuade one that a small sin would not be noticed, and was even permissible inside the chaos of the greater one. She groaned because she saw this, but did not want to hurt Joe. ‘A boy at school tried to touch me,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t let him. Why should I let you, Joe?’

  ‘I’ve never touched anyone before. I don’t know what made me –’

  With the hand that had arrested him, she pulled his hand down on to her left breast, and nearly fainted in the cold-hot ecstasy that resulted. Joe, misunderstanding her gesture, began to circulate his hand. He sweated as he kissed her passionately and attempted gently to stroke her legs; but Olwen said, ‘No, my dear,’ and hugged the one hand to her breast as if she wanted it to touch her heart. Everything else she resisted, and at length Joe calmed down, understood the gesture and accepted her control. He longed to do with her the things he had never done at all, but loved her enough to wait. People married when they were twenty these days and that, for him, was only eighteen months away.

  Later Olwen murmured, ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Time to leave,’ said Joe. ‘I’ll have to run.’

  They tidied themselves urgently and went quickly to the bus stop in the village. The bus came into sight as they reached it. ‘I’ll write,’ Joe said. He seemed to think of something else. ‘Here. Have this.’ It was his cap badge. He kissed her hard on the mouth, said, ‘And thank you, Olwen, thank you,’ the bus came and he was gone. ‘Oh, God,’ Olwen whispered, ‘take care of him.’

  A few days later she received her second letter from him and answered at once eagerly. Two weeks later the invasion of Normandy commenced, but still his letters came from that other part of Britain. Then no letters came for two weeks and Olwen knew he had left England. Letters began to arrive in strange, military envelopes from abroad. They worried and pleased her. There were times when she could
feel the fear in his words, and she longed for just one more similar day of warmth and love in which to comfort him. One day she had one of her own letters back, and had to go to school with all the agonies of a kind of widowhood. She tried to imagine Joe had found another girl; one whose hands did not arrest his eagerness – she even hoped that that had happened. She tried to believe that he had moved elsewhere and that his letters had gone astray; tried, as a last resort, to see him as a prisoner. But she had seen the agony in his eyes that day, and knew what his gratitude had been for. ‘And thank you, Olwen, thank you.’ (Thank you for granting me months of tenderness, with tender passion at its end; thank you for granting me a particle of beautiful past that I can hug secretly in the hammer blows of the future.) She knew only too well that he was dead, and weeks later a letter came from Harry telling her how he had died.

  Olwen was numbed with despair. She had left school: there was nothing to do but walk about, and her every step took her where he had been. And in these places she would have foolish moments, forgetting he had gone, when her eyes would see him; she would move forward to speak and then weep bitterly in the face of reality. Her body, too, ached with longing, and she wished that she had surrendered; for perhaps he had known he was going to die. She would lie in bed, unable to sleep, and in shame (for she knew he had been as innocent as she) she would feel sensuous and would picture his eager eyes above her. Then she would fall asleep and see him die in the most realistic, terrible, smashed postures. She would approach his apparently sleeping body only to find bluebottles crawling round his eyes. She would awake sweating, thanking God it hadn’t happened, only to realize that he was dead and perhaps it had. She lost some of that lovely child’s roundness and colour. She took to staying in her bedroom, writing letters to him and alternating this with bouts of tears. Everywhere she looked was happiness perverted into unhappiness. She knew then that hell may easily be a beautiful place. She longed to go somewhere miles away, as Tom had done by joining the Army, where there was nothing that could remind her and no one even to sympathize. The notion of moving became an obsession and eventually took a form and shape. Olwen went to her mother. ‘Mama,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m not happy here without him. I want to go away. I want to help in the war. Let me become a nurse.’