A Time to Love

by Beryl Kingston

  Fortunately, Quin’s cheerful cynicism was a healthy antidote to too much adulation. ‘Keep yer ’ead down, young Cheify. That’s my advice. Dead heroes are all very well, but I never knew a cause worth dying for yet. When yer going?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ David confessed. ‘When they send for me, I suppose.’

  ‘It will be a day or two before you hear,’ Mr Palfreyman surmised. ‘Bound to be. Yes indeed.’

  And David thought privately that they could take as long as they liked.

  ‘Months if they like,’ Ellen said, agreeing with him. ‘I wish you ’adn’t done it, Davey.’

  The days went by and became weeks and still he hadn’t heard. She began to feel quite hopeful again. ‘Perhaps they’ve forgotten yer,’ she said.

  But in the first week of September, just after the kids went back to school, an official envelope arrived. It contained a travel warrant from Liverpool Street Station to Chelmsford, and instructions that he was to report to the Rail Transport Officer at Chelmsford Station at 12.00 hours on Monday, 11 September 1916.

  Ellen burst into tears at the sight of it, but there was no possibility of argument or disobedience. To Chelmsford he was ordered, so to Chelmsford he went.

  The day was miserable, damp and overcast, the sky sultry with cloud, but the new recruits climbing aboard the Ipswich train in their hundreds were determinedly cheerful. ‘You all’ all! they greeted one another. ‘Attested, was yer?’ And they exchanged names and cigarettes, and showed off photographs of their families, so that by the time they arrived outside the R.T.O.’s office they already felt they belonged. But whether to the Army or to one another they weren’t quite sure.

  At Chelmsford they were loaded into trucks and driven south under rain clouds as dark as bruises through a flat, sodden countryside.

  ‘What a place!’ David said to the man beside him, as they passed yet another track full of churned-up mud. ‘Don’t much fancy marchin’ about in that lot.’

  ‘That,’ his companion said lugubriously, ‘is the whole h’object a’ the h’exercise. H’up to our h’ears in mud we shall be. You mark my words.’

  ‘Oh no! We got a right one ’ere!’ another man said. ‘Proper ol’ growser, aintcher?’ He was a cheerful young man with a very pale skin and lank brown hair, and as far as David could remember his name was Evans.

  ‘Keep yer pecker up, that’s what I say,’ another recruit said.

  So they all smiled to show him he wasn’t the only cheerful one. But David was thinking of Ellen.

  Their camp was as muddy as a pigsty. They were splashed to the knees with the stuff the minute they jumped down from the trucks.

  ‘What did I tell yer?’ Lugubrious complained.

  Evans wasn’t deterred. ‘Good fer the skin,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘You’re welcome to it,’ Lugubrious told him. ‘My old woman ‘ud die if she could see the state a’ my bum-bags.’

  But then the Army descended upon them in the person of an enormous sergeant major with beefy arms bulging under his uniform and a voice so loud it made their eardrums ring. They were stood in line and roared at, and given uniforms and roared at, and given regulation haircuts and roared at, and shown where they were to store their kit and wash and eat and sleep, and roared at, and marched up and down and roared at. Finally they were all stood in line again and each man was given a pay book, an identity disc and a number, and told to commit the number to memory and never ever forget it.

  ‘Wherever you present yourselves,’ the sergeant major said, ‘anywhere in the world, for any purpose whatsoever, you give your name and your number. And don’t let me catch any of you ever forgetting it. Because I tell you, you ‘orribie little men, without your number you do not exist in the Army, and if you do not exist in the Army, your life is not worth living.’

  When they fell into their tents at the end of the day, they were footsore and exhausted. Even the discomfort of a straw palliasse laid on bare earth was no bar to sleep. Evans said he could have slept standing up, and David, who was glad they were in the same tent, said he’d been asleep on his feet for the last two hours, and decided that when he got a bit of spare time he would draw a sketch of his new friend and send it to Ellen.

  The bit of spare time couldn’t be found until they’d been in camp for nearly a week, and by then David and Joe Evans had found another friend.

  He was a skinny eighteen-year-old, raw and uncouth, with long awkward limbs and the hang-dog look of the chronically underfed, the sort of boy who could easily become the butt of the entire squad. ‘Soldierin’! That’s nothink!’ he said, brash with anxiety, his loose lips quivering.

  ‘All in it together, nu?’ David said to reassure him. There was something about the boy’s long face and the anxious alertness of those overbold eyes that reminded him of Jack.

  ‘One fer all an’ all fer one, eh!’ Evans said.

  But that bewildered him. ‘What’s ’e on about?’ he asked David.

  ‘It’s from a book, old son,’ Evans explained. ‘Three Musketeers. Cantcher read?’

  ‘Yeh! ‘Course!’ the boy said scornfully. ‘Not big words though.’

  ‘What’s yer name?’ David asked.

  ‘Clifford.’

  ‘Caw, dearie me! What a monicker!’ Evans said. ‘Well, you stick by us, Clifford. We’ll look after yer.’

  Which they did from then on, doggedly.

  ‘It is a strange life,’ David wrote to Ellen, when he sent her the sketches of his two new friends. ‘No logic in anything. We have to clean our boots till you can see your face in them and then we go out and march about in filth all day. Then when we come back we have to clean them all over again. I can just imagine what Jack is saying about that. The food is rotten. The weather is rotten. The Sergeant Major is indescribable. I will draw him for you next time, if I can bear to. I miss you. I.L.Y. I.L.Y. David. PS Keep the sketches. I might use them when this is all over.’

  It rained every single day, monotonously, rain, rain, and more rain until the camp site was slimy with slush and mud.

  ‘We should ‘a been issued wiv boats not boots,’ Evans said, knocking the caked mud from the heel of his boot.

  ‘Don’t ‘alf make yer feet ache,’ Clifford complained. ‘Them boots are a ton weight wivout the mud.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it, son,’ their corporal told him. ‘Rub the inside a’ yer socks wiv soft soap.’ He was full of useful tips, having been regular Army since he was sixteen. ‘Soak yer feet in salt water. That’s the thing. Toughen ’em up. Don’t take boots too small fer yer. Feet swell up sommink rotten on a route march. You’ll get used to it.’

  David didn’t think he ever would. The marching and drilling seemed interminable and unnecessary, the food tasteless and unappetizing, and the daily ritual of kit inspection more ridiculous and demoralizing than anything he’d ever experienced. To see twelve grown men line up beside their beds in a crowded bell tent, stiff-necked with apprehension because the sergeant major was coming to inspect their kit and roar at them, was only bearable when he could draw sketches of it afterwards or when Evans turned it into a joke.

  The best joke of all was when the tormentor asked to be shown the ‘housewife’, a small canvas bag containing needles and cotton for running repairs. He would insist on calling it ‘arse-wife’, and the request became steadily and more irresistibly funny every time they heard it. ‘Show me your arse-wife.’

  ‘Arse-wife, I ask you!’ David whispered to Evans when one inspection was nearly over.

  ‘I could do wiv one a’ them,’ Evans whispered back ruefully. ‘Six weeks I been away from my old girl.’

  ‘Me an’ all,’ David said, suddenly missing Ellen with a constricting emptiness that made him feel totally bleak.

  ‘Carry on, Corporal!’ the sergeant major said.

  ‘Right lads, stow yer kit,’ the corporal ordered.

  That evening, when he was writing his daily letter to Ellen, David wondered whether he cou
ld tell her the joke about the arse-wife and decided it was too coarse. So many things about this new life were too coarse, the words of their marching song, for example, eleven verses of ‘Mary had a little lamb’, and only one of them respectable. It was a rough, rude, male world and he found it exhilarating despite all the hardships. But he couldn’t share it with a woman and especially not with his own tender Ellen.

  At that moment his own tender Ellen was having a furious row with a man in the Tyne Main Coal office. ‘Whatcher mean, no coal?’ she was shouting.

  ‘There’s a war on,’ the man explained patiently. ‘Ain’t my fault, missus. There’s a shortage.’

  ‘Shortage my eye,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty a’ coal down the depot. I seen it.’

  ‘Then you’d better go down the depot.’

  ‘Don’t you worry! I will,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Come on Gracie. You an’ me’ll go down termorrer wiv a pram. I don’t see no reason why we got ter freeze, war or no war. My ‘usband’s a soldier, I’ll ’ave you know.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ the man said wearily. ‘’Im an’ all the others.’

  It made her so angry that he was in the Army. She missed him so much, especially at night in that great empty bed.

  ‘Surely they ought ter give ‘im some leave soon,’ she said to Aunty Dumpling when November began. ‘I ain’t seen ‘im fer two whole months. Benny’ll ferget what ’e looks like.’

  He came home a fortnight later, on four days’ embarkation leave.

  ‘Oy!’ Rachel said when she heard what a short leave it was. ‘Only four days! Vhy so liddle? It ain’t right!’ She and Dumpling had come down to Mile End Road to welcome him, because Ellen had sent them a postcard the minute she heard he was coming home. A good voman, Ellen Cheifitz, even though she vas a shiksa.

  ‘So we don’t waste a minute of it,’ he told her. ‘What say we all go to the theatre?’

  ‘Us an’ all?’ Jack asked, delighted at the idea.

  ‘’Course!’

  ‘When?’ Gracie wanted to know.

  ‘Ternight!’ He was expansively happy. To be home in the warm and the dry with Ellen hanging onto his arm and his family all around him was nothing short of blissful. ‘Returning hero takes family on special outing!’ he said striking an heroic pose, one foot on a chair.

  They went out every evening, to the Standard and the Britannia and the Pavilion and the London Music Hall, in a large, happy, family party, Ellen and the children, his mother, Aunty Dumpling, and even on one occasion Fred Morrison, who was extremely shy but said he was honoured. And they sang ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ with tears in their eyes, and ‘Sister Susie’s sewing shirts for soldiers’, nodding their heads in time to the music, and they laughed at all the comics, whether or not they were really funny, and they were warm and happy together in the plushy stalls. Nobody mentioned the war or the Army and he and Ellen were careful not to remember their row. It was bad enough being in the Army; having to relive the reason for it would have been intolerable.

  But better than all the other pleasures added together was the fact that at night he was sleeping in his own welcoming bed with his own welcoming Ellen. They had both been starved of love for such a very long time neither of them could get enough of it. They spent most of their afternoons in bed too, usually remembering to make themselves respectable just in time before the kids came home from school. It was a rapturous leave, and of course it ended much too soon.

  ‘Keep smiling,’ he said to her on that last morning.

  ‘You keep out a’ trouble,’ she said earnestly. ‘Don’t you go getting shot or nothink.’

  ‘I’ll write every day.’

  ‘Me an’ all,’ she said, very near tears. ‘Oh Davey, I wish you wasn’t going.’

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he begged, ‘I couldn’t bear it. Give us a smile, nu?’

  So she smiled at him, mistily, but as well as she could. And they kissed for the last lingering time, while the rain spattered in upon them through the open door.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he promised. ‘Stay inside. You’ll get wet if you come to the gate.’

  But she walked to the gate and waved goodbye to him until he’d disappeared through the archway and she couldn’t see him anymore.

  Then she cried.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  It was a miserable crossing, for the sea was rough and the troop ship overcrowded. Within half an hour of leaving Folkestone, most of the new recruits were feeling seasick, David amongst them, and by the time they’d rocked into Boulogne and bumped to rest alongside their first foreign street, they were too sore and weary to pay much attention to it.

  David had a vague impression that there was a row of higgledy-piggledy houses fronting the quay, each one honeycombed by rows of tall windows but all different colours and different heights. Behind them the ground rose sharply, crowded with other sea-viewing houses and surmounted by a grey church with an inelegant squat tower. But he didn’t have the slightest urge to record any of it.

  As he stumbled down the gangplank he saw that there was a hospital ship alongside, marked with bold red crosses, and that wounded men were being embarked. There was a long queue of ambulances on the quay unloading the stretcher cases. The sight of them gave David a profound shock, for these were not the tidy wounded he’d seen on the streets of London in their neat blue uniforms and clean bandages. These were men straight from the battlefield, caked in mud and filth from head to foot, their bandages bloodstained and their flesh grey-green in the winter light. Several of the stretcher cases looked dead. Their faces were as pallid as wax and their arms flopped from the stretchers to trail limp-handed just above the cobbles. They’re broken, David thought. Hundreds and hundreds of broken men. And he looked up at the line of walking wounded, instinctively seeking a more hopeful sight.

  But the walking wounded were just as bad. They were shuffling along in such an odd halting way, each with his right hand on the shoulder of the man in front. It wasn’t until he’d watched them for some time that he realized, with a frisson of horror, that they were all blind. Patient and uncomplaining and quite unable to see. And his heart sank at the thought that this was what wars did to the men who fought them, and that unless he was very careful, or very lucky, or both, he would end up in the same state.

  ‘Are you downhearted?’ a voice boomed down to the new arrivals from the deck of the hospital ship.

  Their answer was immediate and automatic. It was a familiar question now, and they knew how to respond. ‘No … o … o!’

  ‘You bloody soon will be!’ the voice called mockingly.

  ‘Don’t much like the sound a’ that,’ Clifford said as they formed fours ready to march away.

  ‘They’re only kidding,’ David said, hoping they were.

  ‘Where we going, Corp?’ Joe Evans said.

  ‘Eat-Apples,’ the corporal told them.

  ‘I hope we got transport,’ Clifford said, shifting his pack into a more comfortable position between his shoulder blades.

  ‘Fer you,’ the corporal said, ‘the Orient Express.’

  As the column trudged off, past another fleet of ambulances, a horde of small boys appeared, ragged, dirt-smeared and buzzingly cheerful, scampering along beside them and calling, ‘’Allo Tommy!’ ‘You got ciggies?’ ‘Choc-late?’ ‘You like my seester. Good jig-a-jig. Five francs.’

  And David looked at them with pity and loathing, thinking that this was what wars did to children. And their sisters.

  Later that evening when they were settled into their uncomfortable bell tents at a place which turned out to be called Etaples, he drew his first sketches of the war, the unconscious boy on the stretcher, one arm trailing; the meek line of the blind; and three leaping urchins. He wrote a postcard to Ellen to tell her that he’d arrived safely and was in training camp and that he loved her and missed her. But that was all, for everything else was either too disturbing or wouldn’t get past the censor. And anyway they were alr
eady in two different worlds.

  The next day, after being issued with a cap badge, a rifle, an oil bottle and pull through, and a gas helmet, in short what the quartermaster sergeant called ‘all the necessities of modern warfare’, he was introduced to the rigours of the bull ring.

  It was a vast, cold, wind-scoured plain between the railway station and the sand dunes, where nature had collaborated with the Army to ensure that everybody would be as miserable and uncomfortable as it was possible to be. The earth there was always trodden hard and on this particular morning it was coated with an ice-sharp frost. But it was the size of it that struck them all most forcibly. There were literally thousands of men being drilled there, some stripped to their shirts and trousers, others running at the double in full kit, but all of them bullied and cowed by their sergeants and instructors who seemed to have been chosen for their ugliness and their loud voices and their inhumanity. They were called the Canaries because of the yellow sashes they wore, and they were universally hated.

  At the end of their first gruelling day, David released his hatred by drawing a vitriolic cartoon of the man who’d been screaming abuse at his squad. His fellow sufferers were thrilled with it and pinned it on the walls of the overcrowded tent so that they could spit at it the minute they got back every evening.

  ‘You’re a credit to the Army,’ Evans said admiringly. ‘Dunno what we’d do without yer.’

  Back in Mile End, Ellen was finding it very difficult to do anything without him. His absence filled every corner of the house, from the painfully empty studio in the front room to the vacant chair that cast a sadness over every meal. At night she found it hard to sleep in the emptiness of a bed now more than ever unnecessarily large, and she was glad when one of the kids was wakeful too and came creeping in for a cuddle. But by day, once they’d all gone to school, there were far too many hours available to worry in.

  ‘This’ll never do,’ she said to Aunty Dumpling as they were sorting out the washing one Monday morning. ‘We could be years an’ years like this. I don’t see no sign of ’em ever endin’ this war, do you?’