by Tanya Moir
It’s well into 1997 before Uncle Eddie’s army service record finally turns up in the post. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge, if I was looking — houses sold and chardonnay drunk, mothers and husbands avoided.
But I can’t say that I really notice the wait — I’m not in any hurry. It’s idle curiosity, not smouldering need, that makes me wonder about the meaning of Lester Bodgewick. The significance of that one dead boy, between the mountains of Belsen Camp and Will Biggs’ dead brother-in-law. Just one exposure before Eddie.
It’s a beautiful shot — a grubby pietà, the Death of Innocence perfectly framed. But Will Biggs’ proofs contain plenty of those. So there must have been something else about Bodge. Something to merit enlargement, and a name. And I wonder what that thing was. What my grandfather saw to make him press the shutter.
Not all the time, though. There are nights when I do just eat ice cream and watch Friends. A lot of the time I forget all about him. (Am I contradicting myself? Yes and no. It was true and not true — it came and went, my obsession with Lester Bodgewick. There were moments, many of them, when I might have let it go completely. It’s only hindsight that tempts me to give him more weight than he had, back then, in those years when he was just a romantic loose end, my tender boy, arranged on no particular blanket.)
And I have to admit that I’m not at all interested in Uncle Eddie. I already know how my great-uncle got his head blown apart. I must have heard it a hundred times. And I believe in it, that story of Sarah’s brother, Ted’s son. Because I like him, I suppose. People always did, even William Biggs. So there’s nothing to wonder about dead Eddie.
Even his military record turns out to be, if I’m honest, a bit of a snore. I read over it when Greg goes out, sitting on the sofa, curled up in front of the muted TV. There was some trouble with a girl in a Bremen bar. Otherwise Eddie didn’t do much that anyone thought was worth writing down. Not until his very last day. Of which there is an account, rather terse, but no different to Nanny Biggs’ in its details.
Lester Bodgewick isn’t mentioned at all. So I’m disappointed. And a little aggrieved. Not just that I’ve wasted my time and money, but for Uncle Eddie, too. Because he saved all his heroism right to the end, when the war was hours from over and no one was looking any more, and they were all so busy celebrating they forgot about him, the medal he should have been up for.
I put the file down and raise a glass to him. The Hardings’ last-minute hero. Raise another to Bodge. Whatever their connection was. And that’s where I could stop.
But I don’t. The next week, I start all over again, with Bodge himself this time. It occurs to me that he, too, must have next of kin. So I go looking.
I’d like to say that it’s out of respect. That I owe some debt of understanding to the fallen. To Bodge, for being young and innocent and dead without a story. To Eddie, the saviour of my blood, for proving that Hardings do choose to die for things other than their own convenience. I owe it to them to find out what happened on their last day.
I could even say that it’s my business. That the meaning of Bodge is the key to my grandfather, the one missing piece in the puzzle of William Biggs. That I owe it to him — a duty of my newfound love — to unearth the last of those things he made it his life’s work to bury.
But those would be lies, I think. I’m pretty sure it’s just my genes at work. That all I’m carrying with me, as I stroll, at a leisurely pace, towards Vita Bodgewick, is a great big festering bag of Harding curiosity.
Vita, who is waiting for me in the Sunnyview Retirement Home, thinking whatever it is contented old women think when left to their own devices. Waiting for someone to ask. Tell me about Lester.
Through the dregs of the nineties, I make my way there. Swinging my bag, caught up in the scenery, looking everywhere but down. Which is a shame, because it’s not just Vita Bodgewick up ahead — there’s also a big hole. The same one that Will Biggs tumbled into fifty-four years ago. It’s waiting for me as well. It has my name on it, you see.
TWO
In the last minutes of 4 May 1945, the hole in the pine forest floor south-west of Lübeck is barely five hours old. And look! What should we find at the bottom of it but my very own blood, all wrapped up with Vita Bodgewick’s.
Above their clammy slit trench, there’s a sky, thick and low and dull grey-black, but Eddie Harding and Lester ‘Bodge’ Bodgewick can’t see it for the trees in this Grimms’ fairy tale of a forest. The night is quiet now, as still as a carol. Though it’s spring, still a bitter little snow is flitting through the pines, a ghost of the Ardennes.
Eddie’s hands are cold. Bodge wraps his own around them, brings them up to his chest, presses them there, against his heart.
Somewhere down by the river, in the village perhaps, a dog begins to howl. At least, Bodge hopes it’s a dog. There are nightmares enough in these trees already. S-mines that’ll rip your guts out. Booby traps that’ll take out your eyes. Murderous children with dead men’s guns, and SS heroes lurking like bloody werewolves.
Eddie’s breath is warm against his ear.
‘We should go apple picking this year,’ says Bodge. ‘We’re bound to be home by August.’
Eddie shifts his hips, holds Bodge a little tighter and says nothing.
‘We can stay at my mum’s.’ Bodge pictures the matching counterpanes on two narrow beds beneath low beams. Clean sheets with little blue flowers. The warm weight of the thatch above, and the curve of his old mattress. ‘She’s been on and on about meeting you.’
Up ahead in the Germans’ fox-hole, someone coughs.
‘The first thing we should do, though,’ Bodge continues, after a while, ‘soon as we get to London, is go down the Queen’s Head in Old Compton Street, get a ploughman’s and a pint.’ He turns his cheek into Eddie’s shoulder. ‘My shout.’
‘Shh,’ says Eddie. ‘There.’ He frees his hands, rubs Bodge’s arms and shoulders. ‘You warm now?’
‘Yes,’ lies Bodge.
Gently, so gently, Eddie rolls him over. Bodge feels the familiar weight, the long press of Eddie’s body against his back. His lips part. He breathes in the smell of Eddie’s blanket, dirty wool, and the fresh-dug earth beneath it. He lies still.
‘Hush,’ says Eddie. ‘There now.’
It doesn’t take long — much less time than we tend to imagine. Eddie’s thighs grip, and his elbows pin, and he finds the soft skin at the base of Bodge’s neck, and presses his thumbs into it with such tenderness, such need. Such love. Five heartbeats. Ten. It’s not the first time they’ve played this game, and Bodge is drifting with it, the cold night opening up, and he doesn’t have time to think anything much at all, until it’s too late, because Eddie hasn’t let go. Five beats more.
Oh shit.
Oh no.
Eddie.
Apple blossom.
A blond boy he loved once, silky and hazel-eyed.
Blackness, coming down.
‘Shhh,’ says Eddie, and kisses, so gently, the back of his head. ‘There. All done now.’
How long do they lie like this? Long enough for Bodge’s body to go cold. Not long enough for the Shermans to arrive. Not until dawn, which is still several minutes away when Eddie sits up, and begins to make Bodge decent.
Too long, as it turns out. Because Eddie hasn’t yet finished when Will Biggs drops into their hole.
‘Eddie?’ Will whispers cheerily. ‘Guess who!’
Eddie stares at him like he’s a grenade. Will Biggs, on the floor of his slit trench. For fuck’s sake. What are the chances?
‘Sorry, mate,’ says Will to the silent Bodge, upon whose legs he has landed.
Eddie senses the hand of fate. He stares, and his life flares bright like a fuse, in that split second of calm before everything blows apart, but there’s nothing to do. No time. And he wishes Will were a grenade, because by now it would be over.
‘All right, boys?’ says Will. ‘I brought you some cigs.’
Slowly, Eddie stands up.
‘Ed? What’s up?’
It’s not far. A hundred yards perhaps, no more, to the German gun. But it’s still dark, and it seems to take forever for them to see him, and about halfway there Eddie gets an idea, and reaches into his pouch. With the grenade in his hand, he starts to run, and he stumbles a little over a branch, and at last the Spandau gunner wakes up and begins to fire. He’s not very good, and Eddie thinks he must be new, because who the hell would have thought a man could get this far?
Eddie’s close now, he can see the line, and it’s all about the running. He’s braced for the tackle, but it doesn’t come, and he’s forgotten why he’s here because he thinks he just might win. He takes a shove to the shoulder, but it barely slows him down. From ten yards out, he makes the throw, and he knows it’s good, and the last thing to go through his mind, before the Spandau round, is the good old Wimbledon hurrah.
There are real cheers, seconds later, after the flash and the thump, and the bits of Germans come down. Men move up to secure the Spandau. It must be officially dawn, because down on the road there’s a hum and a throb as the Shermans turn over and prepare to move up through the line.
In Eddie’s slit trench, Will starts to feel for Lester Bodgewick’s pulse, and finds him cold. He lights a smoke, and thinks he understands.
A head appears above them. ‘Bodge?’
‘He’s dead,’ explains Will, as a captain drops in. Will hands him a smoke.
‘Ah,’ says the captain. ‘Thanks.’ He takes a drag, and exhales. ‘And who the fuck would you be, exactly? If you don’t mind my asking.’
‘Biggs, sir. AFPU.’
The captain sighs. ‘Of course.’
There is a moment’s silence.
‘So. Did you get all that?’
Will shakes his head. ‘Bit dark, sir.’
‘Can’t say I had Harding down as the type.’
‘The type, sir?’
The captain shrugs. ‘Suicide by German.’
‘No, sir. Neither did I.’
‘You knew him?’
‘I’m engaged to his sister, sir.’
‘I’m very sorry, Sergeant. About Harding, I mean.’ The captain puts out his cigarette. ‘He’ll go up for the Military Medal, of course.’
They both stare at Lester Bodgewick, a crumpled shape, sharpening with the dawn. Will can see his face now. It is very white and young, and pretty, like a statue. An angel above a grave.
Will can also see, in the strengthening light, that there are red finger marks around Lester Bodgewick’s neck, that his battledress is in disarray, and that, those things aside, he has no wound.
‘I don’t understand,’ Will says.
The noise of tank engines builds in the silence. The captain looks at his watch, and rubs his hands across his face. ‘My men have to move up now,’ he says, but he stays where he is, and looks, again, at Lester Bodgewick.
‘One of the enemy,’ he says firmly, at last, ‘crept in and strangled poor Bodge in the night. He never saw it coming.’
Will says nothing.
‘He had a mother, I presume. Your friend.’
Will nods, slowly.
‘Bodgewick too. Let’s do what we can for them, Sergeant.’
The captain leaves. Will stays where he is. The sounds of men and tanks move away, and more Spandaus start up, and he feels a kind of nothing. Another 88 begins to thud. He smokes another cigarette. Then he takes the Contax out of his bag and frames a shot.
Private Lester Bodgewick, on his deathbed, in the hole he has dug for himself, in enemy ground.
The shutter closes, opens. Will puts the camera down. Gently, he straightens the boy’s uniform, buttons his trousers, tucks in his vest. He wraps the body up in the blanket, but for some reason, he can’t bring himself to cover Lester Bodgewick’s face.
He climbs out of the hole, and walks across last night’s no man’s land. There, on the forest floor, he takes his final frame of the war. Eddie’s portrait. A last record.
I have it here in my hand. And if I were Babs, what might I recognise inside her great-great-nephew’s skull, all its patterns exposed to the lens of William Biggs, to judgement and the sky?
‘Did you find your friend?’ asks Bob, back down on the road to Lübeck.
‘No,’ says Will.
Before they reach the coast, the Germans have surrendered.
The pointlessness of it all isn’t lost on Vita Bodgewick. The cruelty. Her little brother being taken from her on the very last day of the war.
‘At least I know Lester didn’t suffer,’ Vita writes. ‘He was shot in the head. Straight through, clean as a whistle. He wouldn’t have felt a thing, so the captain said.’
She still has all Lester’s letters. One for every week he was over there. Which wasn’t long, because he only went out on D-Day. (‘He had to wait till he turned eighteen,’ she explains. ‘He tried lying about his age like the other boys, but no one believed him. He always looked so young.’)
They had to be careful of the censors, Lester and she. But they had a code.
‘A lot of people didn’t understand about that sort of thing back then,’ she goes on. ‘But I did. Lester loved your great-uncle just like I loved my Stan.
‘Eddie looked after him, you see. That’s how they got started.’
They’d been so looking forward to meeting Eddie, she and her mum. Not that her mum really knew about Lester and Eddie — not officially, anyway — but she was happy that Lester had a friend. Someone taking care of him, over there. Someone he wanted to bring home. And he was so handsome, my great-uncle! Lester had sent them a photograph. They looked like film stars, both of them. In their vests and braces, in front of some grand ruin somewhere, Eddie’s elbow on Lester’s shoulder.
He was coming down with Lester, as soon as they got demobbed. Lester hoped he might stay. For the apple-picking season, at least. Maybe more. When the war was over.
‘How strange and sad it is,’ Vita Bodgewick writes, ‘that they both got killed on that last day. I hope it may comfort you — as it has always comforted me — to know that they died happy, and in love.’
It would be nice — don’t you think? — if I wrote back to Vita. And I do. I send her a calendar for Christmas. One of the nice ones I have printed up for work, with arty photographs of cabbage trees and paua shells and ponga and golden sands. Which are as far away as you can get, really, from trenches, and Kings Close, Wimbledon, and Kate, and Sarah and Evelyn and Betty and May, and the floor of a German forest where Private Lester Bodgewick was not shot, and Eddie Harding did not earn the Military Medal.
There could be other explanations, couldn’t there? Perhaps someone else strangled Lester Bodgewick. Grief. Perhaps that’s what drove my uncle onto the German guns so close to the scheduled ceasefire. Perhaps Eddie — that sixth-generation Harding — really was a last-ditch hero, and his medal got lost in the post.
It’s not impossible. So why can’t I believe it?
In return for my calendar, Vita has the photograph she wrote of in her first letter copied, and sends it to me. Eddie and Bodge. Laughing in a field somewhere — France, I think — their backs to the wreck behind them. And I sit beside the fire for hours — the first of a new millennium — but still, I can’t quite bring myself to burn it.
THREE
About a year after Vita’s last letter, I take a day off. A Monday cold enough to light the fire when I get up, though it can’t be more than a month after Valentine’s Day. I’ve slept in, and what’s left of the morning doesn’t look up to much — blustery and grey and flat — so after I’ve drunk my coffee and got the mail, I decide to do the laundry.
There are two pairs of Greg’s suit trousers stuffed between the clothes basket and the wall — his handy place for putting his drycleaning. It’s not doing the fabric any good down there, so I pick them up and smooth them down, and then I think, what the hell, I’ve got a few things of my own that need to go in — I’l
l do a run into town, drop them off. Maybe pick up some steaks, a nice bottle of red for dinner. So I go through the trouser pockets.
In the first pair, I find twenty bucks, three business cards and a restaurant peppermint wrapper. In the second, I find a condom.
It’s in the back pocket, buttoned up, with a restaurant bill. Dinner for two at the Strathcairn Inn — a place no one we know would go. They started with champagne. Somebody had crayfish mornay. It had to be her — there’s no way Greg would touch shellfish. I look for the date: 14 February. No wonder they pushed the boat out.
It’s the rudeness of it that gets to me first. How lazy is this man? It infuriates me, the carelessness, the sheer stupidity, of leaving these things here for me to find.
And then it’s the trousers. Which I’m still holding in my hand. Clearly they haven’t been cleaned. Did he even take them off? Did she? This is the fabric against which his prick twitched and stirred, made its first little moves, the pin-striped wrapper around the erection my husband had for some woman who wasn’t me. Which was pressed against what? Hand, or groin, or arse? There’s no telling what could be on here.
I hold the trousers further away from me. Then I carry them, carefully, downstairs, and I put them on the fire. There must be more nylon in them than Greg would like to admit, because they make a delightful blaze.
His credit card statement is on the table with the rest of his mail. I feel free to open it now. The Strathcairn Inn is there. Several times. And on 13 February, my husband, who doesn’t believe in Valentine’s Day, spent eighty-two dollars and seventy-five cents at City Florist Interflora.
I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day myself. Nor did the buyers of 32 Gladstone Road, obviously, or I wouldn’t have been working all that evening. So I’m not sure why it bothers me so much that, in all our nearly eleven years, Greg has never bought me flowers.
I look around. The house is a mess. So I start tidying up.
Someone has to do it.
I work my way around the living room, picking up all the things that Greg hasn’t put away, everything that isn’t in its place. I start with the easy stuff. Saturday’s newspaper. Last week’s Oreti Reporter. The cricket club newsletter, GQ, The Rotarian. The files he brought home for the weekend and neglected to take back to work. Dirty tennis socks. They all burn very well.
