The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  Those irresponsible people, the O’Neals, have grown a bed of hollyhocks, but for the rest the garden is untidy and unkempt. One could almost swear they were connected in some obscure way with the theatrical profession.

  Mrs Abbot’s garden is a sort of playground. It has asphalt paths, always swarming with small and not too clean children, and there are five lines of washing suspended above the mud. Every day seems to be Mrs Abbot’s washing day. Perhaps she ‘does’ for others. Sam Abbot is certainly a lazy, insolent old rascal, and such always seem destined to be richly fertile. Mrs Abbot is a pleasant ‘body’, though.

  The Greens are the swells of the road. George Green is in the grocery line, and both his sons are earning good money, and one daughter has piano lessons. The narrow strip of yard is actually divided into two sections, a flower-garden and a kitchen-garden. And they are the only people who have flowerboxes in the front.

  Number eight is a curious place. Old Mr Bilge lives there. He spends most of his time in the garden, but nothing ever seems to come up. He stands about in his shirt-sleeves, and with a circular paper hat on his head, like a printer. They say he was formerly a corn merchant, but has lost all his money. He keeps the garden very neat and tidy, but nothing seems to grow. He stands there staring at the beds, as though he found their barrenness quite unaccountable.

  Number eleven is unoccupied, and number twelve is Mrs Ward’s.

  We come now to an important vision, and I want you to come down with me from the embankment and to view Mrs Ward’s garden from inside, and also Mrs Ward as I saw her on that evening when I had occasion to pay my first visit.

  It had been raining, but the sun had come out. We wandered round the paths together, and I can see her old face now, lined and seamed with years of anxious toil and struggle; her long bony arms, slightly withered, but moving restlessly in the direction of snails and slugs.

  ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ she was saying. ‘What with the dogs, and the cats, and the snails, and the trains, it’s wonderful anything comes up at all!’

  Mrs Ward’s garden has a character of its own, and I cannot account for it. There is nothing very special growing – a few pansies and a narrow border of London Pride, several clumps of unrecognizable things that haven’t flowered, the grass patch in only fair order, and at the bottom of the garden an unfinished rabbit-hutch. But there is about Mrs Ward’s garden an atmosphere. There is something about it that reflects in her placid eye the calm, somewhat contemplative way she has of looking right through things, as though they didn’t concern her too closely. As though, in fact, she were too occupied with her own inner visions.

  ‘No,’ she says in answer to my query. ‘We don’t mind the trains at all. In fact, me and my Tom we often come out here and sit after supper. And Tom smokes his pipe. We like to hear the trains go by.’

  She gazes abstractedly at the embankment.

  ‘I like to hear things… going on and that. It’s Dalston Junction a little further on. The trains go from there to all parts, right out into the country they do… ever so far… My Ernie went from Dalston.’

  She adds the last in a changed tone of voice. And now perhaps we come to the most important vision of all – Mrs Ward’s vision of ‘my Ernie’.

  I ought perhaps to mention that I had never met ‘my Ernie’. I can only see him through Mrs Ward’s eyes. At the time when I met her, he had been away at the War for nearly a year. I need hardly say that ‘my Ernie’ was a paragon of sons. He was brilliant, handsome, and incredibly clever. Everything that ‘my Ernie’ said was treasured. Every opinion that he expressed stood. If ‘my Ernie’ liked anyone, that person was always a welcome guest. If ‘my Ernie’ disliked anyone they were not to be tolerated, however plausible they might appear.

  I had seen Ernie’s photograph, and I must confess that he appeared a rather weak, extremely ordinary-looking young man, but then I would rather trust to Mrs Ward’s visions than the art of any photographer.

  Tom Ward was a mild, ineffectual-looking old man, with something of Mrs Ward’s placidity but with nothing of her strong individual poise. He had some job in a gasworks. There was also a daughter named Lily, a brilliant person who served in a tea-shop, and sometimes went to theatres with young men. To both husband and daughter Mrs Ward adopted an affectionate, mothering, almost pitying attitude. But with ‘my Ernie’, it was quite a different thing. I can see her stooping figure, and her silver-white hair gleaming in the sun as we come to the unfinished rabbit-hutch, and the curious wistful tones of her voice as she touches it and says:

  ‘When my Ernie comes home…’

  The War to her was some unimaginable but disconcerting affair centred round Ernie. People seemed to have got into some desperate trouble, and Ernie was the only one capable of getting them out of it. I could not at that time gauge how much Mrs Ward realized the dangers the boy was experiencing. She always spoke with conviction that he would return safely. Nearly every other sentence contained some reference to things that were to happen ‘when my Ernie comes home’. What doubts and fears she had were only recognizable by the subtlest shades in her voice.

  When we looked over the wall into the deserted garden next door, she said:

  ‘Oh dear! I’m afraid they’ll never let that place. It’s been empty since the Stellings went away. Oh, years ago, before this old war.’

  It was on the occasion of my second visit that Mrs Ward told me more about the Stellings. It appeared that they were a German family, of all things! There was a Mr Stelling, and a Mrs Frow Stelling, and two boys.

  Mr Stelling was a watchmaker, and he came from a place called Bremen. It was a very sad story, Mrs Ward told me. They had only been over here for ten months when Mr Stelling died, and Mrs Frow Stelling and the boys went back to Germany.

  During the time of the Stellings’ sojourn in the Sheldrake Road it appeared that the Wards had seen quite a good deal of them, and though it would be an exaggeration to say that they ever became great friends, they certainly got through that period without any unpleasantness, and even developed a certain degree of intimacy.

  ‘Allowing for their being foreigners,’ Mrs Ward explained, ‘they were quite pleasant people.’

  On one or two occasions they invited each other to supper, and I wish my visions were sufficiently clear to envisage those two families indulging this social habit.

  According to Mrs Ward, Mr Stelling was a kind little man with a round fat face. He spoke English fluently, but Mrs Ward objected to his table manners.

  ‘When my Tom eats,’ she said, ‘you don’t hear a sound – I look after that! But that Mr Stelling… Oh dear!’

  The trouble with Mrs Stelling was that she could only speak a few words of English, but Mrs Ward said ‘she was a pleasant enough little body’, and she established herself quite definitely in Mrs Ward’s affections for the reason that she was so obviously and so passionately devoted to her two sons.

  ‘Oh, my word, though, they do have funny ways – these foreigners,’ she continued. ‘The things they used to eat! Most peculiar! I’ve known them eat stewed prunes with hot meat!’

  Mrs Ward repeated, ‘Stewed prunes with hot meat!’ several times, and shook her head, as though this exotic mixture was a thing to be sternly discouraged. But she acknowledged that Mrs Frow Stelling was in some ways a very good cook; in fact, her cakes were really wonderful, ‘the sort of thing you can’t ever buy in a shop’.

  About the boys there seemed to be a little divergence of opinion. They were both also fat-faced, and their heads were ‘almost shaved like convicts’. The elder one wore spectacles and was rather noisy, but ‘My Ernie liked the younger one. Oh yes, my Ernie said that young Hans was quite a nice boy. It was funny the way they spoke, funny and difficult to understand.’

  It was very patent that between the elder boy and Ernie, who were of about the same age, there was an element of rivalry which was perhaps more accentuated in the attitude of the mothers than in the boys themselves. Mrs Ward could find
little virtue in this elder boy. Most of her criticism of the family was levelled against him. The rest she found only a little peculiar. She said she had never heard such a funny Christian name as Frow. Florrie she had heard of, and even Flora, but not Frow. I suggested that perhaps Frow might be some sort of title, but she shook her head and said that that was what she was always known as in the Sheldrake Road, ‘Mrs Frow Stelling’.

  In spite of Mrs Ward’s lack of opportunity for greater intimacy on account of the language problem, her own fine imaginative qualities helped her a great deal. And in one particular she seemed curiously vivid. She gathered an account from one of them – I’m not sure whether it was Mr or Mrs Frow Stelling or one of the boys – of a place they described near their home in Bremen. There was a narrow street of high buildings by a canal, and a little bridge that led over into a gentleman’s park. At a point where the canal turned sharply eastwards there was a clump of linden-trees, where one could go in the summer-time, and under their shade one might sit and drink light beer, and listen to a band that played in the early part of the evening.

  Mrs Ward was curiously clear about that. She said she often thought about Mr Stelling sitting there after his day’s work. It must have been very pleasant for him, and he seemed to miss this luxury in Dalston more than anything. Once Ernie, in a friendly mood, had taken him into the four-ale bar of the Unicorn at the corner of the Sheldrake Road, but Mr Stelling did not seem happy. Ernie acknowledged afterwards that it had been an unfortunate evening. The bar had been rather crowded, and there was a man and two women who had all been drinking too much. In any case, Mr Stelling had been obviously restless there, and he had said afterwards:

  ‘It is not that one wishes to drink only…’

  And he had shaken his fat little head, and had never been known to visit the Unicorn again.

  Mr Stelling died quite suddenly of some heart trouble, and Mrs Ward could not get it out of her head that his last illness was brought about by his disappointment and grief in not being able to go and sit quietly under the linden-trees after his day’s work and listen to a band.

  ‘You know, my dear,’ she said, ‘when you get accustomed to a thing it’s bad for you to leave it off.’

  When poor Mr Stelling died, Mrs Frow Stelling was heartbroken, and I have reason to believe that Mrs Ward went in and wept with her, and in their dumb way they forged the chains of some desperate understanding. When Mrs Frow Stelling went back to Germany they promised to write to each other. But they never did, and for a very good reason. As Mrs Ward said, she was ‘no scholard’, and as for Mrs Frow Stelling, her English was such a doubtful quantity, she probably never got beyond addressing the envelope.

  ‘That was three years ago,’ said Mrs Ward. ‘Them boys must be eighteen and nineteen now.’

  If I had intruded too greatly into the intimacy of Mrs Ward’s life, one of my excuses must be, not that I am ‘a scholard’, but that I am in any case able to read a simple English letter. I was, in fact, on several occasions ‘requisitioned’. When Lily was not at home, someone had to read Ernie’s letters out loud. The arrival of Ernie’s letters was always an inspiring experience. I should perhaps be in the garden with Mrs Ward when Tom would come hurrying out to the back, and call out:

  ‘Mother! a letter from Ernie!’

  And then there would be such excitement and commotion. The first thing was always to hunt for Mrs Ward’s spectacles. They were never where she had put them. Tom would keep on turning the letter over in his hands, and examining the postmark, and he would reiterate:

  ‘Well, what did you do with them, Mother?’

  At length they would be found in some unlikely place, and she would take the letter tremblingly to the light. I never knew quite how much Mrs Ward could read. She could certainly read a certain amount. I saw her old eyes sparkling and her tongue moving jerkily between her parted lips, as though she were formulating the words she read, and she would keep on repeating:

  ‘T’ch! T’ch! Oh dear, oh dear, the things he says!’

  And Tom impatiently by the door would say:

  ‘Well, what does he say?’

  She never attempted to read the letter out loud, but at last she would wipe her spectacles and say:

  ‘Oh, you read it, sir. The things he says!’

  They were indeed very good letters of Ernie’s, written apparently in the highest spirits. There was never a grumble, not a word. One might gather that he was away with a lot of young bloods on some sporting expedition, in which football, rags, sing-songs, and strange feeds played a conspicuous part. I read a good many of Ernie’s letters, and I do not remember that he ever made a single reference to the horrors of war, or said anything about his own personal discomforts. The boy must have had something of his mother in him in spite of the photograph.

  And between the kitchen and the yard Mrs Ward would spend her day placidly content, for Ernie never failed to write. There was sometimes a lapse of a few days, but the letter seldom failed to come every fortnight.

  It would be difficult to know what Mrs Ward’s actual conception of the War was. She never read the newspapers, for the reason, as she explained, that ‘There was nothing in them these days except about this old war.’ She occasionally dived into Reynolds’ Newspaper on Sundays to see if there were any interesting law cases or any news of a romantic character. There was nothing romantic in the war news. It was all preposterous. She did indeed read the papers for the first few weeks, but this was for the reason that she had some vague idea that they might contain some account of Ernie’s doings. But as they did not, she dismissed them with contempt.

  But I found her one night in a peculiarly preoccupied mood. She was out in the garden, and she kept staring abstractedly over the fence into the unoccupied ground next door. It appeared that it had dawned upon her that the War was to do with ‘these Germans’, that in fact we were fighting the Germans, and then she thought of the Stellings. Those boys would now be about eighteen and nineteen. They would be fighting too. They would be fighting against Ernie. This seemed very peculiar.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I never took to that elder boy – a greedy, rough sort of a boy he was. But I’m sure my Ernie wouldn’t hurt young Hans.’

  She meditated for a moment as though she were contemplating what particular action Ernie would take in the matter. She knew he didn’t like the elder boy, but she doubted whether he would want to do anything very violent to him.

  ‘They went out to a music-hall one night together,’ she explained, as though a friendship cemented in this luxurious fashion could hardly be broken by an unreasonable display of passion.

  It was a few weeks later that the terror suddenly crept into Mrs Ward’s life. Ernie’s letters ceased abruptly. The fortnight passed, then three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, and not a word. I don’t think that Mrs Ward’s character at any time stood out so vividly as during those weeks of stress. It is true she appeared a little feebler, and she trembled in her movements, whilst her eyes seemed abstracted as though all the power in them were concentrated in her ears, alert for the bell or the knock. She started visibly at odd moments, and her imagination was always carrying her tempestuously to the front door, only to answer – a milkman or a casual hawker. But she never expressed her fear in words. When Tom came home – he seemed to have aged rapidly – he would come bustling into the garden, and cry out tremblingly:

  ‘There ain’t been no letter to-day, Mother?’

  And she would say quite placidly:

  ‘No, not to-day, Tom. It’ll come to-morrow, I expect.’

  And she would rally him and talk of little things, and get busy with his supper. And in the garden I would try and talk to her about her clumps of pansies, and the latest yarn about the neighbours, and I tried to get between her and the rabbit-hutch with its dumb appeal of incompletion. And I would notice her staring curiously over into the empty garden next door, as though she were being assailed by some disturbing apprehensions. Ernie wou
ld not hurt that eldest boy… but suppose… if things were reversed… There was something inexplicable and terrible lurking in this passive silence.

  During this period the old man was suddenly taken very ill. He came home one night with a high temperature and developed pneumonia. He was laid up for many weeks, and she kept back the telegram that came while he was almost unconscious, and she tended him night and day, nursing her own anguish with a calm face.

  For the telegram told her that her Ernie was ‘missing and believed wounded’.

  I do not know at what period she told the father this news, but it was certainly not till he was convalescent. And the old man seemed to sink into a kind of apathy. He sat feebly in front of the kitchen fire, coughing and making no effort to control his grief.

  Outside the great trains went rushing by, night and day. Things were ‘going on’, but they were all meaningless, cruel.

  We made inquiries at the War Office, but they could not amplify the laconic telegram.

  And then the winter came on, and the gardens were bleak in the Sheldrake Road. And Lily ran away and married a young tobacconist, who was earning twenty-five shillings a week. And old Tom was dismissed from the gasworks. His work was not proving satisfactory. And he sat about at home and moped. And in the meantime the price of foodstuffs was going up, and coals were a luxury. And so in the early morning Mrs Ward would go off and work for Mrs Abbot at the wash-tub, and she would earn eight or twelve shillings a week.

  It is difficult to know how they managed during those days, but one could see that Mrs Ward was buoyed up by some poignant hope. She would not give way. Eventually old Tom did get some work to do at a stationer’s. The work was comparatively light, and the pay equally so, so Mrs Ward still continued to work for Mrs Abbot.

  My next vision of Mrs Ward concerns a certain winter evening. I could not see inside the kitchen, but the old man could be heard complaining. His querulous voice was rambling on, and Mrs Ward was standing by the door leading into the garden. She had returned from her day’s work and was scraping a pan out into a bin near the door. A train shrieked by, and the wind was blowing a fine rain against the house. Suddenly she stood up and looked at the sky; then she pushed back her hair from her brow and frowned at the dark house next door. Then she turned and said: