Ella's War

by Lynne Francis

  Both of them fell silent again, thinking.

  ‘What about a drawing?’ Ella said eventually. ‘He can keep it folded in his pocket and carry it with him at all times. Or a lock of hair?’

  ‘I like the idea of a drawing!’ Beth was enthusiastic. ‘But of what?’

  ‘You don’t need to come up with anything right now,’ Ella said, only too aware of how soon their day would start. ‘Try to get an hour or two’s sleep. You’ll have time to think of something tomorrow, before he has to go back.’

  That evening, when John came down to the kitchen to bid them all farewell before his early start the following morning, Beth handed him a folded piece of paper.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ she admonished him, as he made to do so in front of the assembled company. ‘I’ve made you a drawing as a good luck charm. Take it with you and keep it close.’

  The smile that John gave her as he tucked the paper, still folded, into his top pocket was closer to his old self than anything they had seen over the last couple of days.

  ‘What a good idea!’ Elsie exclaimed after John had left to spend the rest of the evening with the family. ‘I remember how you two used to give each other drawings when you were small. It will be nice for him to have something from home to remember us by. Something that will last longer than the bit of food I’ve been able to send back with him,’ she added ruefully.

  Ella thought she noticed Stevens give Beth a sharp look, but her expression was demure. She had been clever to hand over her drawing in full view of everyone; she must have guessed that there would be no further opportunity to talk privately with John before he left.

  And so it proved. By the time they all rose to start their day the following morning, John had already gone. They weren’t to see him again for many long months.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Beth set down her sewing then picked it up again. She looked at the clock. Was it possible that barely five minutes had passed since she had last looked? If it hadn’t been for the second hand ticking inexorably around the face she would have sworn the thing was broken. She exhaled slowly, trying to still the nervous fluttering of her heart.

  The door opened and Beth half started to her feet, her hand rising to her mouth, her sewing falling to the floor.

  ‘Did I startle you?’ Ella stepped forward and picked up the sewing. ‘Oh, Beth, you look all at sixes and sevens. Why don’t I fetch you a cup of tea or something?’ She looked critically at the sewing she had picked up. ‘I think you’d be better finding something else to occupy you. It looks as though you’ll have to unpick all of this.’

  She smiled at Beth and took her hands. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be here in no time, I’m sure. Mr and Mrs Ward will want to spend time with him but I know he will ask for you as soon as he can.’

  Beth could only manage a tremulous smile. It was October 1918, nearly a year since she had last seen John. Nearly a year in which she had fretted endlessly, trying to keep track of his whereabouts and wellbeing with whatever news the servants could glean from the family. She had poured her heart out in her letters to John. At first, it had been odd writing to someone who wouldn’t be able to reply. John wrote regularly to his family and they replied just as frequently, but Beth and John had never been able to work out how he might get letters to her. He couldn’t write to anyone else in the household – one of the servants for example – without it coming to the attention of Mrs Ward. And members of the household were the only people in York that Beth knew and trusted. So, after getting over her initial feeling that it was pointless – embarrassing even – to write to someone who couldn’t reply, Beth had come to find it liberating.

  She wrote to him as if she were writing in her diary or, as she often felt, as if he were standing in the room next to her, where she could see him but he was trapped behind a glass wall, unable to speak or respond but simply to listen, mute. She didn’t need to worry about anything in his replies, his tone, his possible reaction to something she had said, or his state of mind.

  She took care to remain positive in everything she wrote. She didn’t want him to worry about any of the privations that his family might be facing when he himself had far greater things to endure. She filled her letters for the most part with trivia, the day-to-day doings of the household, who had visited, what she had done. She took care not to mention the visitors who came and wept because they had lost sons somewhere on an unknown French field, fallen in the line of duty in a hail of gunfire, or picked off as they attempted night manoeuvres. Nor did she mention the son of their nearest neighbour who had returned injured, and whose cries could sometimes be heard through open bedroom windows at dead of night, or even in the daytime as he was wheeled around the garden next door.

  She mentioned her sewing, the weather and, with increasing boldness, how much she missed him. At first, she had written to him more as a friend, unsure of her position with regard to anything beyond that. But, of an evening as she curled up on the bed in the room that she and Ella shared at the top of the house, her mind would turn to the thoughts that had occupied her as she sewed during the day: her longing for John and his physical presence; his easy smile as he had stuck his head around the door of her sewing room in the past, proffering a shirt with missing buttons or riding breeches with a ripped seam requiring her skilled needle.

  Now here she was, waiting to see what a mess the war had made of him. She knew that his left hand had suffered injury and his neck was scarred. This much had filtered through to the servants when news first reached Grange House that John had been injured. Very few details were available at this point and Mr and Mrs Ward were greatly worried. Mrs Ward was frequently seen around the house with red eyes that attested to weeping, and Mr Stevens reported that Mr Ward spent most evenings pacing the library floor until long gone midnight.

  More news finally came in the form of a letter from John, occasioning much relief. He was in the military hospital in Rouen and would be returning home as soon as he was able. By some strange quirk of fortune, he had been adjusting his collar – easing its chafing against his neck – at the very moment that he was hit by a sniper, his left hand taking the impact of a bullet that would otherwise have entered his neck and probably killed him. Beth felt the colour drain from her face whenever she thought of it.

  It had been two long weeks before word came that he was on his way home. Details of the time and method of his arrival were somewhat vague, but by late afternoon a military ambulance turned into the drive and an orderly helped John down from the back. Mr Stevens reported that his hand was heavily bandaged, his arm in a sling, his neck in a collar and he appeared thin and pale.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Years later, if anyone asked John about his army experiences, his face would close up and he would turn away. On the rare occasions that he answered, he would say that his memories of that time were very different to what was portrayed in the history books. If he had been present at any of the battles neatly parcelled up as Passchendaele, Ypres, Cambrai or Canal du Midi he could only give you a very narrow focus. His memories were muddled, consisting of periods spent trudging through mud, snow and freezing rain worrying about where and how his men would be billeted; of the terrible noise of shell explosions, of bullets, of tanks; of plans changed; of friends lost and companies almost wiped out; of life having to go on in what seemed like an unending hell while he tried to keep his men motivated; of the ghastly stench of the trenches; of exhaustion, hunger and anger; of land gained and just as quickly lost.

  Ella’s memories of the same period didn’t really match the history books either. She remembered that they all seemed to be constantly hungry as more and more foods became scarce, then rationed, while cups of tea often seemed to be their main form of sustenance. Her abiding memory was of a sense of drabness everywhere, of a life lived in monochrome. Colour seemed to have leached out of life, out of people’s worn and patched clothes, out of the dusty streets, out of the food on the plate, out of people’s c
areworn faces. Occasionally there would be a period of almost hysterical joy, an antidote to the prevailing mood, when a soldier returned home safely on leave. It soon subsided and everyone lapsed back into their strange new world. The streets held only women, young children and older men; all the men of an age to fight having been swallowed up by the army. She was sure that the sun must have carried on shining, the flowers blooming and the birds singing, but somehow these things featured only rarely in her memories of that time.

  PART V

  1918–23

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The months that had elapsed since John’s return home had seen momentous events. The war had been declared over in November, and while that caused rejoicing for so many people for so many reasons all over the country, Ella felt sure that she was not the only one to be thankful for one reason alone – that it meant an injured loved one had no need to return to the front line. For while the injury to John’s hand had healed relatively quickly, it had proved more difficult to find an easy cure for his state of mind. He did his best to appear to be the same man who had gone to the Front with high expectations of victory, but whatever he had witnessed there had ‘consumed his wits’, according to Mr Ward. The night terrors of his childhood had returned to haunt him, but this time the shadowy unknown figures of dreams from the past were made real and terrifying by what he had experienced. The same horrors stalked him by day and it seemed he could find no peace. He took to walking out from the house at all hours, although mainly at night so that he could avoid any entanglement with the demons that awaited him once he closed his eyes in sleep.

  The family had looked forward to celebrating a peacetime Christmas that, although it would still be austere, should have reflected a sense of optimism about better times ahead. Instead, it was marred by anxiety over John’s increasingly fragile state of mind. The household had been kept awake by his pacing the house and muttering throughout the night of Christmas Eve, and his lack of sleep made him erratic and confused company on Christmas Day. As soon as possible after Christmas, Mr Ward called out the doctor to examine John, and spent a good hour in consultation with him behind the locked door of the library once the examination was over.

  The convalescent home that the doctor recommended proved to be less than successful. It was full of young men with worse physical injuries than John, as well as a good many with similar mental disturbances, but this only seemed to serve as a reminder of what he was so desperately trying to escape. He returned after a month with better sleep patterns established, thanks to nightly sedation, but still with the deeply haunted look that appeared likely to become a permanent fixture on his features. Less erratic in his behaviour, he had become withdrawn instead.

  Beth was quite beside herself with worry and distress. She had very little opportunity to spend any time with John, and in any few snatched moments together she found him too unsettled to take any pleasure in her company.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said despairingly to Ella one evening. ‘Whatever we had is lost. I feel sure that if it were only possible to spend a stretch of time together, I could take away some of the pain and help him to be calmer. But I have no idea how that can ever be possible. I think all connection between us has gone for ever.’ She spoke so sadly that Ella, deeply upset herself by John’s situation, resolved to find a way to help.

  In the end, it was Mr and Mrs Ward’s growing impatience with John’s lack of improvement in health that played into her hands. Their delight in John’s safe return had given way to irritation at his inability to recover quickly, something they saw as a sign of weakness. Mr Ward had suggested more than once that John just needed to ‘pull himself together and show a bit of backbone.’

  After the failure of the convalescent home to provide a lasting solution, the doctor had suggested that they might like to follow a new line of thinking on recovering from mental exhaustion, which involved a good deal of fresh air and exercise. He was suggesting a period spent in the Alps, with ten-mile walks every day that would, when combined with the fresh air, guarantee a healthy night’s sleep and a subsequent return to normality of the brain. Although Mr Ward had been initially enthusiastic, Stevens had reported that, on reflection, he now felt it wouldn’t be safe to send John to the Alps alone, and he was at a loss as to who might be employed to accompany him.

  Ella had pondered the situation for a day, without consulting Beth for fear of raising her hopes, then asked to speak to Mr Ward. She had thought her plan through carefully, trying to ensure that she was prepared for every possible objection that Mr Ward might raise. Then she had proposed to him that John could just as easily benefit from a stay in the peace of the Yorkshire countryside, with a great many miles of moorland to roam at will, yet close enough to York for his parents to be able to visit him regularly to check on his progress. Ella and Beth, who knew the area well, could be his walking companions whilst staying close by in Northwaite with Ella’s mother, and would be on hand should any problems arise.

  To Ella’s astonishment, after a short period of deliberation, Mr Ward had agreed. Indeed, he had commended her for her thoughtfulness and set about arranging the trip within the week. It dawned on Ella that he was perhaps glad for the problem to be removed from his sight; whatever the reason, the plan also worked some sort of magic on John. His general demeanour was much improved before they even left York, while Beth was beside herself with excitement and had a hard job hiding it from the others.

  ‘You are so clever, Ella,’ she exclaimed, on an almost daily basis. ‘However did you get Mr Ward to agree? I just know that we can make John better. Why, already he seems calmer and he has told me how much he is looking forward to discovering the countryside where we were brought up, and to meeting Sarah. Stevens said to me that it’s the first time he has seen John show any enthusiasm for anything in weeks!’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  The Wards came to visit John during his first week away, as he had known they would.

  ‘They’ll check up on me,’ he said, ‘to make sure everything is proper. And then they will leave me alone.’

  John was staying, as arranged, at The Royde Inn in Nortonstall, which he had described to his parents as tolerably comfortable. He made a wry face when telling Ella and Beth about it and, when pressed, he confessed that he found it hard to sleep, his rooms being above the bar, which was noisy until late in the evening. The food, still subject to rationing, was less than good, despite the possibilities that the countryside offered in the way of wild and foraged food.

  ‘Then you must come and stay with us,’ Beth declared. ‘There’s no sense in you being billeted all the way down the hill, staying somewhere that you don’t like, when we are supposed to be looking after you and we have plenty of room here.’

  At the time, they were sitting in the parlour of Sarah’s cottage, beside a fire specially lit for the occasion to drive away the chilly March breeze. When they had first arrived there, Ella and Beth had been taken aback by the state of Lane End Cottage.

  ‘What need do I have for this house now, with you all gone?’ Sarah had demanded. Beth and Ella looked at each other. This querulous tone wasn’t something that they had heard from Sarah before.

  ‘My bedroom and the kitchen suit my purposes,’ Sarah went on. ‘I’ve shut up the other rooms.’

  This meant that the rest of the house felt damp, dusty and very much unloved. During the first week of their visit, when they weren’t keeping John company, Beth and Ella spent as much time as possible restoring order at home. Sarah had grumbled at the unnecessary use of fuel to light a fire and this turned out to be but a symptom of the wider economies that she had been making in their absence. They found very little in the way of food in the house, not even any of the preserves that she had been in the habit of making every autumn for as long as Ella could remember. The furnishings were grubby and Sarah’s clothes were becoming threadbare.

  ‘It would serve no purpose,’ she said, when they asked her why she ha
dn’t replaced the worn-out towels, or bought a new coat instead of wearing the one that had seen service since well before the war.

  ‘What need do I have of new things? There’s no one to see them, and no one comes to visit. I’ll soon be gone, anyway.’

  It was said in a matter-of-fact way, with no rancour or accusation directed at them. Nonetheless, Ella and Beth felt cut to the core by what they perceived as their neglect of Sarah and set about putting things to rights as best they could.

  It was relatively easy to banish dust and dirt, replacing it with the scent of beeswax polish and freshly laundered linen. Windows that were cleaned until they sparkled and let in the spring light exposed cobwebs lurking in the dimmest corners, which were quickly whisked away. Primroses picked from the hedge bottoms brought a touch of freshness to every room. Yet Sarah’s spirits remained low. It seemed as though she had decided that sixty-two years was to be her allotted lifespan.

  ‘Do you think she is actually ill?’ Beth asked Ella anxiously, as she perched on the end of her bed.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Ella replied. ‘She’s been poorly in the past but there’s no physical illness that I can see now. She’s a bit slower getting around than she used to be, I grant you, but I don’t think it’s that.’ She turned back the covers and prepared to climb into bed.

  ‘I think she’s lonely and has probably been so for a while. She’s given up on enjoying life, and that attitude has become a habit. She has isolated herself on purpose: she even seems to have given up supplying remedies, too. We’ll have to see what we can do to change this while we’re here.’

  Privately, Ella had resolved that Sarah couldn’t be left like this and that it was her duty to return and care for her. With Beattie and Annie both married and living in Leeds with their young families to bring up, Thomas gone and Beth with her whole life ahead of her, she could see no other option. She would return to Grange House at the end of their time here and hand in her notice.