And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  For a while Liz took the boys to church and the walks were shunted to the afternoons. He decided not to make an issue of it and it didn’t last. He was glad. He didn’t believe in God and didn’t want his boys indoctrinated. The church he took them to was the big outdoor one, the cathedral full of trees and flowers, bees and creepie-crawlies, cows and sheep and birds. He tried to teach his sons the names of things, as many as he knew. Billy absorbed, Charlie got bored. Don didn’t like to admit it, and tried not to show it, but he had a favourite son: he enjoyed these walks most when it was just himself and Billy. At such times he felt a reason for being a father, a reason for Billy being his son.

  Sometimes he’d catch himself searching the trees ahead, as if Jack and his nephew might suddenly be there, as if they’d never been away. Sometimes he thought he glimpsed them.

  Time quickened. It wasn’t just the speed at which the boys grew, it was the way he felt himself being left behind by change in general. The 1945 General Election had seemed to be the dawn of a bright new day, but it wasn’t turning out as he’d hoped. Labour, exhausted, had been put out in October 1951 and Churchill had come back, seventy-six, imperious, ill, but a hero to millions. Liz had voted for him. They’d had a row over that, and from then on hardly discussed politics again. Don missed that as much as anything from his Saturday nights – how Jack had always had an opinion about what was going on in the world. A couple of the men at Byres Brothers were up for political talk, but it wasn’t the same. There was a lot of ignorance about, especially when it came to anything abroad, a place full of dirty wogs, ungrateful niggers and treacherous Russians. He read about the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya and the way it was being repressed and longed to discuss it with Jack. The name of a Scottish colonial police officer, Ian Croick, came up often: described as a no-nonsense chap who knew how to deal with the natives, he sounded cold, hard and brutal to Don. He listened to reports from Malaya praising the way the British were combating the Communists there, and wondered what the real stories were there too. Jack would have had a view.

  Then Churchill retired and suave, handsome Sir Anthony Eden took over. Women couldn’t see past his looks, his sophisticated manner. Don thought he was incompetent, but that didn’t stop the Tories winning another election in 1955. The Labour Party didn’t seem to know what it stood for any more. Don voted for Attlee even though he was due to retire. Liz voted for Eden’s moustache. The Tories won more than half the Scottish vote. The SNP contested just two seats and lost their deposit in one of them. So much, Don thought, for Jack’s age of small nations.

  Could a man really just vanish? Don thought of Jack stepping out in sunshine along a country road, a car slowing to offer a lift, Jack waving it on. He wouldn’t take assistance but the driver would remember him, surely, give the police something to go on? He thought of him trudging through rain. He’d need to take shelter, dry off. There were byres and barns and, with all the reduction in farm labour, plenty of disused cottages scattered about. Maybe he’d earn his breakfast or a bob or two doing a bit of gardening work at a big house somewhere, for an old dame that couldn’t get the staff any more. Make himself a nest in one of the outhouses. No names, no pack drill. It mightn’t be a bad way to live over the summer months, but then would come winter. And someone would be bound to say something to somebody. Word would filter back. He must be dead. It was the only explanation.

  Where did ye go, Jack? Every time some big thing happened, Don would wonder if Jack knew about it, what his opinion might be. When Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, he thought of Jack: everybody from Churchill to Wullie Byres, even senior figures in the Labour Party, was badmouthing the Egyptian leader, calling him the new Hitler, but what would Jack think? Then Eden resigned, grey and shattered, the shine off his shoes, and Don wanted to know what Jack thought of Macmillan, of Gaitskell, of Alec Douglas-Home. What about the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban-missile crisis? Did he think Kennedy clever or scheming, lucky or foolhardy? Was Khrushchev a shoe-banging boor or a match for the American upstart? A year later, Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Everybody was supposed to remember where they were when it happened. Don was on the bus coming home from his work, a Friday afternoon: when he got in and switched on the news on the newly rented television, there it was, but where was Jack? When the Buddhist priest set himself on fire in South Vietnam, did Jack see it? When Profumo resigned, when Harold Wilson won the election in 1964, and again in 1966, when England won the World Cup, when Celtic won the European Cup the following year and Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election, was Jack alive to care?

  Sarah and Barbara were long gone by then. Through the years Sarah had struggled to keep up the payments on the house, gradually diminishing the savings in the bank. She had some help from social security, but there was the awkward issue of Jack’s status. Unless his body or some other convincing evidence could be produced, the law presumed he was alive. But as far as his estate was concerned, and Sarah’s marital status, after seven years the law said she could act as if he were dead. He was neither one thing nor the other. When the seven years elapsed Sarah got the court ruling she needed. She had to do it, she explained: otherwise nothing else could happen.

  ‘Have ye gien up hope for him, then?’ Liz asked.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ she said. ‘But’ – and a gleam of defiance came into her eyes, lighting up her pallid face – ‘I’ve not given up hope for Barbara. I don’t care about myself but Barbara deserves a fresh start. That’s why we’re leaving.’

  She’d been offered a full-time job in another post office. It was forty miles away in Fife, in a place that was hardly on the map as yet: Glenrothes, one of the new towns going up in different parts of the country, so modern and important they were given capital letters, New Towns. The mortgage was too hard for her, she would sell the house and use the money to pay off her debts and start again. They would get a brand-new corporation house, be part of a new community. Barbara was eleven, she’d finish up at the village school and then transfer to a secondary school that was barely a year old. Folk were moving to Glenrothes from all over. There were paper mills there already, but what was really drawing them in was coal. Miners from old, tired coalfields in Lanarkshire and the Lothians were coming with their families, lured by the promise of a lifetime’s work in the best of conditions. The Rothes Colliery was going to be a Super Pit. It would need five thousand miners to work it, extracting five thousand tons of coal a day. The coal would go all over the country from great railway yards. There was enough to last a hundred years. The future of Glenrothes would be built on this vast black treasure vault, and the whole economy of Fife would be powered by it. The New Town would be a shining place of clean concrete, broad roads and precincts of neat, comfortable houses in rows and circles and crescents. There would be green parks and gardens, a covered shopping centre. There would be people walking dogs, cycling to work, going to the shops by bus and car. It would be safe. It would feel young. It would be a better place for Barbara to be.

  ‘It’s a big decision,’ Liz said, ‘but ye’re right. It’s an opportunity for ye baith. I would dae it if it was me.’

  ‘Would you?’ Sarah said.

  ‘Definitely,’ Liz said, as if the one thing she was determined on was to see Sarah and Barbara on to the bus to Glenrothes. ‘Ye’ll no regret it.’

  ‘The only thing is,’ Sarah said, ‘she’ll miss your Billy.’

  ‘No, she’ll no,’ Liz said. ‘Maybe for a few days, but once she starts at her new school, she’ll be fine. She’ll no be the only new face, they’ll aw be looking for friends. And Billy’ll be fine tae.’ She could hardly keep the enthusiasm out of her voice, and Don had to come in at the back of her and say, ‘Onywey, it’s no like ye’re emigrating. Ye can aye come back and see us.’

  ‘She’ll no hae the time,’ Liz said. ‘A fresh start, Sarah, that’s what ye said. Ye canna aye be looking ower yer shooder.’

  Every time Don threw Sarah a rope, Liz hauled it back. She wanted the Gordons out of t
heir life and maybe she was right. They’d only been connected by two unlikely friendships – the one between Barbara and Billy and the one between Don and Jack. No doubt the children would grow out of theirs, and Don’s, well, it was with a man who didn’t any longer exist. They would all move on. They would have to. The world wouldn’t wait for them if they didn’t.

  §

  There was that one September night, walking back from the Blackthorn, when Jack came into his own. Whenever Don considered it in later years, he understood why he’d tolerated him, why he’d liked him in spite of everything, why he continued to remember him: because of that night. Everybody has a still, sheer place in them where light doesn’t penetrate. It had always seemed to be Jack who struggled with bad memories, but on this particular night, it was Don who found himself looking over the edge of the cliff.

  It was the earlier talk about the hill in Korea that did it. That and the extra pint maybe. Halfway home, Don’s bladder suddenly couldn’t wait another five minutes. There were houses on one side of the road and a park on the other. ‘Just a minute, Jack,’ he said, and hurried across the tarmac and into the shadow of some trees. It was a calm, cloudless night. As he stood relieving himself he closed his eyes, breathing deep, and in a moment was in northern Italy. The same season of the year; the same cool smell coming off the hills.

  There was a river, the Germans dug in on the far side. A couple of British infantry divisions supported by tanks were waiting to cross, but they couldn’t move till the German defences had been softened up. Don was further back in a column of lorries loaded with ammunition, stuck on the main approach road from the south. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be, out in the open with two tons of explosives at your back. He was sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the sky for planes. The driver was a guy from Glasgow, Brian Kelly. The engine throbbed then died as Kelly switched off. All down the line you heard the same noise.

  ‘What’s the fucking problem this time?’ Kelly said.

  Don said, ‘Dinna ken, but as long as we’re here I’m away tae stretch my legs.’

  He opened the door and dropped to the road, into the path of a young lieutenant marching up the line of vehicles. No more than a boy really. Don had maybe three or four years on him, but he didn’t think of himself as a boy any more.

  ‘You there,’ the boy said. ‘Want to make yourself useful? Come with me.’

  Don thought about objecting. Never volunteer for anything was the golden rule, but he was bored so he followed the purposeful stride of the lieutenant. Half a dozen lorries further on, they stopped.

  ‘There’s a bicycle in the back of that,’ the boy said. ‘Fetch it down, would you?’

  Don hauled himself up over the tailboard and made his second mistake in two minutes. ‘Which one dae ye want, sir?’ he said. ‘There’s two in here.’

  ‘Jolly good. Can you ride a bicycle?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Thinking, as the words came out, that he shouldn’t have let them.

  ‘Jolly good. Throw them both out.’

  Don lifted the bikes in turn and lowered them as far as he could, then dropped them on their tyres.

  ‘What’s your name, private?’

  ‘Lennie, sir.’

  ‘Right, Private Lennie, follow me.’

  Even then he might have said something about staying with his unit, but he didn’t. He got on the second bike. Maybe that was all the reason he needed: the prospect of a bicycle ride. The lieutenant began to weave his way through the jam, and Don followed.

  ‘Let’s find out what’s causing the hold-up!’ the boy shouted over his shoulder.

  Don could have told him and saved them both the effort: Field-Marshal Kesselring and the 10th Army. The Germans were falling back to the mountains, their last line of defence before the Lombardy plain and Austria, but they kept stopping and putting up another fight. Pointless really. Everybody knew they were going to lose the war now. It was just a question of when, and how bloodily.

  Somebody had at least had the sense to stop the bulk of the column before it was in view of the German positions, but as Don and the lieutenant came over a slight rise in the road they could see that four lorries had driven down towards the river. A belt of trees and scrub screened the British positions a little. The wreckage of a bridge lay in the water. Guns were going off on both sides, and there was occasional light-arms fire. Don could see tanks and field guns manoeuvring into protected positions. There were troops on the ground too, keeping their heads down. He didn’t blame them.

  ‘Right, come on then,’ the boy lieutenant said, and he was off, freewheeling down the hill towards the group of lorries. What the hell are you going down there for, Don thought, we don’t need to go down there yet; but he pushed off after him anyway.

  It was surprisingly quiet by the river. It felt safer than being stuck on the open road. The lorries were parked in a kind of paddock, protected on three sides by trees. The lieutenant flung his bicycle on the grass and marched over to another officer. They began to talk earnestly with one another. None of my business, Don thought as he dismounted, and at that moment he heard his name being called from beside the lorries.

  He recognised several of the men, good lads, a Cockney, a couple of Geordies, a Cornishman called Paddy Harris. He knew all their faces. They had a brew of tea on, and offered him a mug. ‘We thought we’d take the chance while we could,’ Paddy said.

  ‘What are you carrying?’ Don asked, hoping it wasn’t ammunition.

  ‘Compo rations,’ Paddy said. ‘Sorry, no cucumber sandwiches.’

  ‘Compo rations? Up here?’

  ‘We got ahead of ourselves. Some stupid cunt waved us on and then we couldn’t stop or we’d have blocked the road completely. So here we are. Who’s that you’re with?’

  ‘Dinna ken,’ Don said. ‘Just a young lad wanting tae be in the thick of it.’

  ‘Well, what the fuck are you doing with him then?’

  ‘Good question,’ Don said. It felt like a dream. What was he doing there? He should have been back with Kelly and the rest of his unit.

  The lieutenant came over. ‘Any more tea?’ he asked. And while somebody found him a mug he said, ‘Soon be moving. They’ve called up air support to knock the Krauts up a bit. Going to put up some smoke so the Americans know the target. Ah, there it goes.’

  The twenty-five pounders further down the river fired off a salvo of smoke shells. Through gaps in the trees they could see a line of thick red smoke spreading along the opposite bank, marking the German positions.

  The tea went straight through Don. He handed back the mug and headed off across the paddock, forty yards or so, and stood facing the trees while he pissed. A breeze was coming off the river. He sniffed. Traces of red smoke drifted above him. He thought, that’s a bit close. As he was buttoning up he heard the planes coming over the hill.

  The next thing he knew he was flat on his face, drowning in noise, being shaken like a bottle of sauce. The world seemed to be collapsing in on itself, splitting into chunks. Branches cracked and fell around him. The ground fountained up in the air and showered down again, mud rain. His mouth was pressed into mud and he was shouting, no words, just a repeated, formless roar. He wanted to get up and run somewhere – into the woods, into the river, back up the road. He fought down the urge. Stay where you are, stay flat. There were flashes and bangs going off all around him, shrapnel whizzing through the air, he could feel some of it whipping past his head. He flattened himself further. The stuff was missing him by inches. They were hitting the wrong side of the river, the stupid bastards, how could they possibly have thought the Germans were on the south bank? Another wave of explosions rolled through the air just above him. It was anti-personnel bombs they were dropping, with spikes that hit the ground first and detonated the bombs at chest height. Stay down, stay down. He thought he heard screams amid the incessant roar but couldn’t be sure if anybody other than himself was screaming. Something crashed beside him, a yard or two awa
y, he didn’t dare look to see what it was. His eyes were screwed tight, his mouth full of earth and smoke. He was struggling to inhale, couldn’t go on much longer without a proper breath. Then suddenly, like a demented fairground ride crashing, the madness juddered to a halt.

  He opened his eyes. A bicycle, a twisted mess of metal minus one wheel, lay next to him. He tried to work out if it was his or the lieutenant’s. Didn’t matter. Nobody would be riding it again.

  He was standing in the trees at Wharryburn, finishing off his pee. He swayed with faintness. He was out in a sweat. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he said, putting himself away. He never swore like that. Over on the road, he heard Jack say, ‘You all right?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, and started coughing violently. ‘Jesus,’ he said again, and cleared his throat and spat into the bushes. He stayed in the darkness a moment longer, to wipe his eyes, then staggered back to Jack standing in the moonlight.

  ‘I just had a kind o dream,’ he said. ‘A memory. Something frae the war. Just oot o naewhere.’

  ‘Aye,’ Jack said evenly.

  ‘Shook me up a bit,’ Don said, and told Jack about it.

  How he got to his feet, tottering as he found his balance. The green paddock was gone. So – completely – were two of the lorries. The other two lay smouldering and smashed, like dead fairground horses. Much further away he could hear men cursing, shouts for help. There were tins and bits of wooden crate and food everywhere. Pudding, concentrated soup, chopped meat. He thought, where are the others? But then he saw that some of the debris was pieces of the men he’d been talking to a few minutes earlier. The lieutenant’s cap. Somebody’s foot and leg, still booted and trousered. Somebody’s hand. Blood everywhere. If you shovelled it all up you’d have approximately twenty men. The other bike. When he saw a blackened football rolled up against a lorry wheel and realised it was Paddy’s head he was sick.

  Jack stood patiently in the road while Don let it all out. He didn’t try to interfere. The best he could do was what he did: stand and wait. Don was a mess. He found his handkerchief, blew his nose and wiped his eyes again. He said, ‘There were other times, but that was the worst. And the fact that it was the Yanks …’