Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  Billy had said pretty much the same thing in the yard the day before. It’ll be stubborn as hell, Billy had said. You c’n afford to wait.

  When there were only horses, Billy had said, they would never have dreamt they could be this far on before the end of November. Tractors made a man impatient.

  He said it again when Charlie drove back to the yard, calling him the boss but making him feel like a boy. And then he went on, and he could not tell if it was irony he saw in the old man’s so honest-seeming face. But you can’t be that sure, can you, sir? Never know, sir, could be it’ll rain every day now till Christmas.

  Billy and Joseph were going to start the winter work on the hedges. That was good work for a day like this. The three of them walked the farm speaking of where to begin. He left them coppicing the hazel by Long Field and walked alone back to the yard, his boots heavy with mud so that the field seemed ever the longer, the sky unrelievedly grey above the black roofs of the barns. The leaves sagged from the trees, dulling from gold now to sodden brown. He would go back later and work alongside them the rest of the day, he thought, and those that followed, until he could get back onto the land.

  Come, Jess, let’s go find Charlie. The retriever jumped up from the basket by the stove, crowded about her as she put on her coat, too big a dog for the narrow passage to the back door, almost tripping her up. Why such excitement to go into the bare cold fields? She took the lead from the hook by the door and put it in her pocket in case they went near the cows. She didn’t know where he would be.

  She walked out to where she had seen him ploughing those few days earlier, before the rain, saw where he had started on the next field and given up. The dog ran off on a scent.

  She saw the smoke of the fires and walked towards it, found the men. They were cutting the hedge and were burning the brush, cutting and feeding the fires in turn, two fires set a distance apart along the field edge. Charlie had his coat off. He was handsome and flushed from the work, and the heart of the fire was hot.

  What are you doing?

  The hedges are overgrown. No one paid much attention to them in the war.

  Oh. There was so much she had never thought of: how this countryside was shaped, the hedgerows and the woods as well as the fields, all of it, had had to be shaped and managed and made.

  He pulled over a cut branch, added it to the flames. Billy builds a good fire, he said. Even after the rain and with all this elder. Elder’s a beast to burn.

  Can I work with you? He looked so happy with the work, so much himself. She had a sudden urge to be part of it too, of the work and the heat. She envied the men their work and their wordless companionship, their companionship with each other and with all the men who had worked this hedge and this land before them.

  You’ll need some better gloves than that. Here, take mine.

  What about you?

  My hands are tough.

  Thick leather gloves big on her hands, already warm inside from his. Clumsy. She went to where Billy was cutting and began with the smaller branches, dragging them over and piling them on, moving about the fire away from the smoke.

  Billy had pulled out a great knot of dry dead bramble. You better be taking that, madam, as you’ve got the gloves. See how bright that goes.

  A whoosh of yellow and blue flames went up from the bramble soon as it touched the fire. She jumped backwards from the heat.

  How lovely! she said. Then she felt frivolous for saying that in front of the men, as if she was at a party or something.

  A simple supper as she had been out so much of the day.

  Let’s go somewhere tomorrow, Charlie said. Take a trip somewhere, if I still can’t get onto the land.

  Where?

  Where would you like to go?

  She thought of the gulls that had not come in these last days of wet. Let’s go to the sea, she said.

  The gulls had come like the wild over the land whose bareness she found so oppressive. Grey and white like pieces of sea themselves.

  Yes, he said. Let’s do that.

  He had got up to put his plate by the sink, but he came back suddenly behind her and put his two hands on her hair and kissed the top of her head between them.

  Your hair smells of bonfire, he said, and put his nose to it.

  The scent was there that night in the bed with them.

  Let’s go out tomorrow, whatever the weather. Leave Billy and the rest to do whatever there is to do on the farm. Let’s go early, have the whole day.

  Glad you made it out

  If we’re going to the coast, darling, and if it’s not too far, we should go and see your friend Walter’s family. If you don’t mind me coming with you. You do keep saying that you mean to visit them. Or if you want to see them alone then I suppose I could sit in the car. I wouldn’t mind, just so you got to see them.

  So they were going to Holkham.

  I know it, he had said, when Walter had first named the estate where he worked. It’s a beautiful place. I went there once or twice.

  He remembered the woods, and the beach, which was longer and sandier than any other on this stretch of coast. There was marsh along much of the coast, but not there, there the beach ran directly up to the trees.

  He had visited Holkham when he was boy, in the holidays when he was sent to stay with Ralph. That was one of the things that made him close to Walter, when they discovered it soon after they met. I know your uncle Ralph, Walter said. A fine shot, your uncle Ralph.

  Every keeper in the county must have known Ralph. It was Ralph who had pushed him to join up with the Norfolks. He had served with the Norfolks himself, in the First War. He had come home badly wounded – no good to women, as he said, after what Jerry did – and put the rest of his life into the farm, a limping, amiable, bachelor farmer who must have been invited to every shoot in the county. If Charlie had seen Walter among the keepers at Holkham, he had no memory of it. It had been different then. Then they were boy and keeper. Once they were in the jungle they were only men even if there was a rank between them.

  He should have gone sooner. He could have made the trip soon as he got back to England. He might have taken the train from London for the day. At least he might have gone in the spring when they came to the farm. It was only twenty miles, an easy drive now he made it, a slow weave cross-country through villages and down minor roads.

  A few drops of rain showed on the windscreen and for an instant he set the wiper going.

  I do hope it’s not going to rain, she said.

  The cloud’s still quite high. I don’t think it’ll rain hard.

  Such a mild day today, not like November at all.

  Dull land it was on such a day, this land of big estates and big shoots: wide verges to the roads, hedges and stands and woods and strips of cover planted between rectangular fields, flat functional land in which whatever appeared to be wild was only kept wild for sport. They came to an American airbase and the road diverted around it. Such great areas of farmland had been given over to the war. He wondered how long they would remain, the Americans and the runways and the hangars and the huts.

  We’ll go to the house first and then walk. If she’s not in then we can leave a note and walk first and go back later.

  Are you sure she’ll be there?

  Shouldn’t think she’s gone anywhere.

  He had written a letter from Mokokchung, from Hussey’s bungalow. He had written the usual kind of letter, the usual words about gallantry but not those final ones that were wanted, about wherever he was buried. The absence of such words glared out from the page. He had written the letter a dozen times and there had been nothing he could say to fill that space. He wrote how Walter was a fine, brave, imperturbable soldier. How the younger soldiers looked up to him. How everyone looked up to him. He had led them in the jungle. His sons could grow up proud of their father. If only he could have followed that with the final offer of a grave for them to visit, or at least that they might know was there; some not
ion of a cross bearing his name, some piece of him on that hillside where they were making the cemetery, at Kohima, on that same ground where the battle had been fought.

  Won’t it be a tied cottage, if he was a gamekeeper? If there’s a new gamekeeper then she might have had to leave.

  I don’t know about that. She said I’d always be welcome. She didn’t say anything about going anywhere.

  A woman’s careful curly script on a small sheet of lined paper. Thank you for your kind letter. We know our Walter was a brave good man. We looked up where you were on the map. It is hard to picture as it is so far off. Please come and see us so that we can know something about it. You will be welcome here at any time.

  The house was the last in a row of estate cottages, dark brick with slate roofs, a length of garden in front that was ragged with autumn, Michaelmas daisies fallen along the path. He thought he might tell her how when they were in the jungle Walter had looked up at the trees and spoken of bringing her an orchid home.

  It was a boy who answered the door.

  She’ll be back dinnertime.

  We’ll come later then.

  The boy puzzled, looking at them, at the car. He was small and freckled and dark-haired, nothing like Walter.

  He said who he was before the boy had to ask. That would give her time to prepare.

  They drove down a track to the beach, parked where the track came to an end facing the sea. The beach was pale sand, wide and long, trees dark to one side of it, slow pewter sea to the other, the grey of the sea paling to the horizon so that there was only a white line of dissolve at last between water and sky. They walked along close to where the waves were breaking. When they had gone some way from the car a fine drizzle began, so fine that it scarcely wet them, only the moisture like dew in her hair as she took out a woollen headscarf from her pocket and tied it over. They came to the broken black posts of some old breakwater and stopped there. The dog ran on but they turned back together, naturally, as if they had reached some unspoken destination. The dog would soon enough turn and follow, catch up with them again.

  She saw the sheen of rain on his eyelashes and face. She pulled on her gloves, and saw his hands hide in his pockets where she might not touch them, not touch him, his eyes away on the sand before them and the sea.

  The wet in the air seemed quite some other substance from that in the sea, and yet when it fell into the sea the distinction was gone.

  His hands in his pockets, his eyes on the edge of the waves, he began again to speak.

  After the battle, there was a Naga boy who came out of the forest. The fighting was over. The Japs were gone. The whole town was destroyed, up to the forest’s edge, even parts of the forest around it destroyed, broken trees beyond the broken huts. This boy came out like an apparition from where the devastation ended, a thick green jungly wall from which you might have thought only some scavenging animal might emerge, out from between the leaves and creepers.

  I saw him from a distance, just happening to glance over that way, a small moving figure where everything had seemed either wild or dead. He walked straight out from that jungle into the battlefield as if he was going somewhere, self-possessed and deliberate like a child walking to school or walking back home after school, and he didn’t stop until he came close to where we were working. I had the sense that he knew precisely where he was. Perhaps that was what he was doing, he was going home, perhaps this was where his house had been, or his school.

  He must have been the age of that boy we just met, seven or eight, I should think. Or perhaps a little older, if he was a Naga, as the Nagas tend to be small. They’d been living in the jungle all through the battle. They’d fled there right at the beginning and they’d been there for months, and slowly now they were coming out to find what was left of their homes and their land. I don’t know why this boy was alone. I kept looking back where he had come expecting some others, expecting his family to follow. He was a skinny little chap as I don’t think they’d had much to eat through all of that time, with very black hair in a pudding-basin cut – they have very shiny black hair, the Nagas – wearing nothing but a pair of too-big khaki shorts and a necklace of red and yellow beads.

  She was attentive as if he had a whole story planned to tell her.

  He paused, fell back a step, turned to look for the dog. It was a bit of war one didn’t mention. One mentioned battlefields but one didn’t explain what was there. What was there already when they arrived, what had massed there all through the siege, what the burial details were doing as the Army began to grind on ahead.

  The battle was won, the story would go, and the Army moved on, without a word for the rest of it. Even at the time the men had done the work almost without speaking. Here. This one. Take up that boot. Looks could say those things as well as words. Handkerchiefs over noses and mouths. They smoked bidis. Those pungent Indian cigarettes worked better than anything else at covering the smell. You did not know if they should be thankful for the rain. Better perhaps rain than sun for work such as this. Rain washed down them, and washed each body as it was buried. Each body was washed as it was buried. Under the rain, identity dissolved. There was only one colour. Every skin, every uniform, the colour of the earth itself. Japs recognisable by their puttees, the Punjab regiments by their turbans. Japs to a mass grave. British to go to individual graves. Colonials to be sorted by religion; Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, each to his own grave. A tag handed to a man at a desk in a tent, collected and recorded, name, rank and regiment, with the rain hammering on the roof of the tent louder than it hammered on the mud. You stood at the entrance of the tent and smoked another stinking bidi before going out again into the wet, and you did not know if it mattered who was who and who went where, only that it was decent that each man was put under the ground and not left upon it, and when the bidi was dead between your fingers you threw the tiny stub of it down into the mud. You saw a padre go by and say a prayer. So many graves there were, and many of them nameless, and one of them might have been made for Walter, a long grave for a long stooped Norfolk man. But Walter was still alive then, his thin face solemn, rainwater running down the hollows in his cheeks. He was jumping ahead in time.

  If Walter’s wife were to ask, could he lie to her?

  Perhaps he could, if he had Walter’s grave in his mind. He knew precisely how it would look. It would look like those other graves they had dug later in the jungle – that they had dug so fast, looking over their shoulders, listening even as their spades thudded into the mud, shallow graves hastily made to be more hastily covered over, but deep enough for respect, for honour. A long narrow grave in wet jungle soil, tendrils like hairs along its sides and thicker white roots cut through by his spade. Trees for mourners. Mist moving across and turning the bare trunks and the one man standing into shadows, pouring down into the hole to blanket the body at its base.

  Would it make it easier, if he were to lie? Or he might more truthfully speak of the cemetery they had left behind them before they went into the jungle, the memorial that was to be built and dedicated to those without bodies or names, from the battle itself or the days that followed. He might tell her how neat it was becoming when he made his return months later, when the rains were over and things were growing again. He could tell her how the new-made crosses ran across the curve of terraced hillside where the DC’s bungalow had been and where the worst of the battle had been fought, across the DC’s garden and his tennis court; and how it was green already, becoming a garden again. Yes, he should speak of that, the garden.

  But Claire had waited for him. She wanted him to go on with whatever he had been saying.

  The boy had bare feet. The Naga boy was treading so neatly, barefoot, between the bodies.

  He remembered looking down at the boy’s feet in the mud.

  As the dog came to them he picked up a piece of driftwood, automatically, and threw it away ahead. It landed where a wave came in and licked it, and Jess caught it as the wave receded, h
er tail wagging in the foam.

  Small feet. Living feet. Mud squeezed between the toes, spatters of mud on his legs. The softness of his steps in the mud. The quiet of him.

  Knowing that all this wasn’t right. That they were here, that they had done this to his world.

  He spoke again, now that her eyes were on him. It was some thought about Walter that got him started telling her this.

  At some point, close to us as I say, this boy stopped, and he began to look around, as if he’d lost his bearings, or as if he had got to wherever he was going and found it gone, and wondered where to go to next. Walter called then and waved him over. I knew Walter had a family but I hadn’t much thought about it till then, that he was somebody’s father, father of three boys in fact. So the boy came up to us, and he had this odd solemn poise, and Walter stooped and smiled, Walter had a kind smile, and put his hand to the boy’s shoulder and found a sweet to give him, a toffee in its wrapper, and the boy took the sweet without a word but didn’t eat it and only put it in the pocket of his shorts, and walked on down the hill, through the death and the debris and the blasted trees, and he was looking about him as if it was all very curious, the whole thing, Walter and the rest of us and the toffee and the bodies. He was the first, but he wasn’t the only one. We saw more of them in the days that followed, Nagas coming out of the jungle to look, singly or in groups, walking, only walking. Old men, women, children, women carrying babies in their arms. I didn’t think they should be there. Well they’re headhunters, somebody said. But they were just sightseeing. They weren’t hunting any heads.

  I couldn’t tell you what they were doing, Claire, they were just looking about them. They had known this place before, however it was before. I don’t know, I suppose, perhaps, they were looking for their homes.