Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  Harriet’s thoughts roamed and rambled from the honeymoon to the wedding itself. Time had scrubbed much detail of the day from her mind, but the feelings, which rose concomitantly with these reminiscences, were those of peace, contentment and happiness. They’d loved each other, certainly, but the war had wrought such deep unalterable strains on their marriage that, by the time of John’s death, she had no longer known what they had meant to one another. She compared the man, beside whom she had stood at the altar of West Malling church, to the man whom she had laid to rest in Sedlescombe churchyard, and concluded that they had been the same person in name only. Her mind rehearsed the singular event of John’s funeral, of the—

  ‘Ma? Ready?’

  Harriet opened her eyes. Fraser was standing over her with Mrs Luckhurst beside him.

  ‘We’re here, Ma. Are you alright?’ He laughed, stooping down to pick up the trunks. ‘Not got your sea legs, yet, then?’

  He was mocking her, gently. She smiled, stood up and glanced to the side. They had docked. Dry land! Whistles were being blown, men were shouting instructions to and from the ship and a general restlessness pervaded the passengers, as they began to shuffle towards the gangplank.

  Fraser turned and joined the slow-moving queue off the boat. Mrs Luckhurst followed immediately behind him, and Harriet noticed her placing a hand on his elbow, as a child might do, who didn’t want to be separated from its mother.

  A surge from behind suddenly buffeted Harriet in a different direction from Fraser and Mrs Luckhurst. ‘Fraser!’ she called, but he didn’t hear her. The queue heaved and jostled forwards, off the ship and into a cramped room, where her small folded passport was checked by an officious gentleman behind a counter, before she was released out onto a busy stone causeway. The jetty jutted out over the water, providing an embarkation point for both the ships and the railway, and directly in front of her, passengers were pouring from a recently arrived train, creating utter chaos.

  ‘Good golly! Fraser!’ Harriet called, searching the sea of bobbing bowler hats for which might be his. ‘Fraser!’ she called, but her voice was lost to the elevated cacophony created by an impossible muddle of languages. It really was no good, Fraser had vanished, and standing there was just causing her to be bumped and pushed in all manner of unwelcome directions.

  Harriet braced herself and defiantly pushed through the crowds towards the train, where she climbed the steps of the nearest carriage, and used her raised position to survey the madness and try to find her son. A swarming throng of whirling movement and oh, what a ludicrous number of hats!

  There! He’d managed—willingly or otherwise—to find himself close to the front of the ship. He was searching for her, looking desperate.

  ‘Fraser! Fraser!’ she shouted, but it was quite useless. She tried waving, but he wasn’t looking in her direction. ‘Fraser! For goodness’ sake!’ She waved again, and this time he did see her. He nodded in acknowledgment, yet appeared to continue looking among the crowds. ‘Fraser! I’m here!’ He huffed—she was certain that he had huffed! But at least now he was coming towards her like a salmon swimming upstream against the current to reach her.

  ‘What a place!’ Harriet called out, as he drew close enough to hear.

  ‘Did you see where Emily went?’ he asked, unable to stop himself from looking this way and that.

  ‘Emily? Who the dickens is Emily?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Emily Luckhurst,’ he clarified.

  ‘Swept up in a tide of Frenchmen, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Fraser sighed, seemingly unwilling to be deterred and not stopping his search of the crowds. He propped himself up on tip-toes to get a better look over the hordes of people, eventually giving up. ‘Right. Shall we push through and find ourselves a chambre d’hôtes; there must be plenty nearby for travellers and tourists.’

  ‘Just hang on a jiffy,’ Harriet said. ‘I overheard in all this commotion that this—’ she indicated the train in which she was standing, ‘—is the last train to Lille. It wouldn’t be such a terribly late time to arrive there and look for a guesthouse, would it?’

  Fraser looked at his pocket watch and shrugged. ‘Won’t you be tired from all that travelling?’

  ‘Goodness me, Fraser. We’ve only travelled from Sussex to Calais; I hardly think I need to have a lie down just yet. Now hurry and fetch the tickets,’ she said, passing him some French francs.

  She watched, as he disappeared once again into the madness of the port. He glanced constantly around him while he walked, as though checking for an unseen assailant. She lost sight of him, as he entered the terminal building, and she turned to enter the carriage, empty but for one solitary man, sitting upright beside the door with his gloved hands pressed around the tip of a walking cane.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ Harriet said to him.

  He nodded but said nothing, his little black moustache twitching, as if he were disgruntled to have to share the carriage.

  Summoning what little French she could recall from her time at Sedlescombe School, Harriet made certain that this was the ‘…train pour Lille’.

  ‘Oui,’ he replied, without evening looking her in the eyes.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she exclaimed, taking a seat opposite him.

  An out-of-breath Fraser arrived moments later: ‘Done,’ he said, holding up the tickets, before taking a seat beside Harriet. ‘If this train makes good time, we could even take a taxi-cab straight to Essex Farm tonight. It’ll be light for a good few hours yet. If you want to, that is…’

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ Harriet responded. Even though she had waited a long time to visit Malcolm’s grave, the difference between seeing it today or seeing it tomorrow morning seemed an interminable chasm.

  As time pushed on lethargically and the train remained stationary, Harriet became increasingly restless. She blew out her cheeks and fiddled with the window clasp.

  Next to her, Fraser was once again asleep. She didn’t know how he did it. All he seemed to need was somewhere to perch his bottom and he was off. It didn’t seem to matter a jot how uncomfortable, or how noisy his surroundings might be. Now he was listing comically, like a ship about to capsize. She nudged her elbow into his side and he sprang awake, just like that.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘You were asleep,’ she scorned under her breath.

  ‘And what of it?’

  ‘It’s embarrassing—you’re on a train, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Do you actually care what a funny little Frenchman thinks?’ he said, not even bothering to lower his voice.

  Harriet shot a glance to the man opposite her. From his lack of reaction, she guessed that he couldn’t speak English. Thank goodness.

  From outside, a whistle pierced the air, and the train began to creep out of the station.

  ‘Oh, at last,’ Harriet said, turning to ask Fraser how long the journey would take. She opened her mouth to speak, but he was asleep.

  At this, the Frenchman smiled, to which Harriet felt obliged to reciprocate. ‘He’s very tired,’ he said, in accented but perfect English.

  Harriet felt the blood rush to her cheeks. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, mortally embarrassed by Fraser’s earlier comments.

  ‘Are you travelling on from Lille?’ he asked.

  It took her a moment to regain her composure, but then was grateful to steer the conversation on from what he clearly must have heard Fraser saying about him. Choosing her words with care, and speaking more slowly than usual, Harriet explained to where they were headed and the reasons for the trip. For the most part, he listened impassively, saying little and, by the time they reached Lille, she was grateful to have had someone with whom to talk to pass the time.

  ‘Au revoir. I hope your trip is a successful one, Madame,’ he said, tapping the front of his hat with his cane, then stepping from the train.

  ‘Cheerio,’ Harriet said. She stood up and looked beside her. As their journey had progressed, Fraser had leant further
and further over until finally his head had met with the seat, loosening his bowler hat, which had at some point tumbled to the floor. ‘I’ve a good mind to leave you here,’ she said, hands on hips, before raising her voice: ‘Fraser, get up!’

  Just like a sprung wooden toy, he pinged back up in his seat, wide awake. Without a second’s hesitation, he bent down, returned his hat to his head, and picked up the two suitcases. ‘Ready?’

  The train station was mercifully much quieter than Calais. Outside of the main building, were three waiting taxi-cabs and several horses and carriages.

  ‘Modern or antiquated?’ Fraser asked.

  ‘Modern,’ she replied, and they climbed into the first car.

  The journey seemed to take forever, and Harriet questioned whether they had made the right decision in going straight to the cemetery, given that they had yet to find anywhere to stay for the night.

  Within minutes, Fraser was asleep, and for a while Harriet gazed out of the window, but the obvious scars of war—derelict buildings, trees shucked of their branches and Imperial War Graves cemeteries, littering the endless barren fields—left an unpleasant feeling in her stomach. From her bag she removed her copy of E.R. Tingle’s Guide to Flanders, flicking to the Helpful Words & Phrases section at the back of the book.

  ‘Goeiemorgen,’ she rehearsed to herself. ‘Hoe gaat het met jou?’

  As they continued through the destroyed Belgian countryside, Harriet read and practised several stock phrases.

  ‘Zalig kerstmis,’ she muttered, evidently more loudly than she had intended.

  ‘What?’ Fraser demanded.

  ‘I said ‘Merry Christmas’ in Flemish,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh, well that will really come in handy in the middle of September, won’t it?’ he scorned.

  ‘Sorry, mijn nederlands is niet zo goed,’ she said with a smile.

  The taxi-cab suddenly slowed down.

  Harriet looked out of the window and gasped. They were here. Unquestionably, they were here. Rows and rows of wooden crosses—hundreds of them in neat lines—in a field beside the main road.

  A painted sign at the entrance read: ESSEX FARM CEMETERY.

  A sudden sensation, that her heart was being squeezed, overwhelmed Harriet and she struggled for breath.

  ‘Are you alright, Ma?’

  Chapter Nine

  11th September 1919, Essex Farm Cemetery, Belgium

  Harriet gripped Fraser’s forearm. It was taking all of her strength to stay upright. The muscles in her legs were quivering, threatening to give out at any moment. She was taking short, insufficient breaths, and she suddenly felt stiflingly hot.

  ‘Do you need to sit down, Ma?’ Fraser asked, concern contorting his face, as he placed his hands under her elbows to steady her.

  Harriet shook her head. ‘No, I’ll be fine. Just give me a minute.’

  ‘What is it?’

  It was a consuming fusion of emotions, which were hard enough to disentangle, never mind try to define or explain. Tiredness was certainly playing an insidious part; despite her earlier protestations, it had been a very long day. Foremost in her mind, however, was the overwhelming sensation of being just yards from her son’s grave. She knew, and had accepted long ago, that Malcolm was dead and was never coming home, yet actually being in the cemetery brought with it the categorical finality that he would remain here under Belgian soil for all of eternity.

  Harriet pulled in a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and said, ‘I’m alright. Let’s go and find him.’

  Threading her arm through Fraser’s, they walked slowly along the side of the road until they reached the entrance, pausing there to glance up at a tall white cross, raised imperiously on four stone plinths. Behind it, cowering low in the sky was an orange sun, setting on the distant horizon.

  Harriet withdrew her arm from Fraser’s, and silently surveyed the cemetery, surprised by several things at once. First of all, it wasn’t at all how she had pictured it. It was long, almost rectangular in shape, and, as they had entered at the very top corner, they had a view down the cemetery of almost every grave, denoted by a neat wooden cross. She found it just too neat, imagining that a cemetery, created during the chaos of war, would be much more disordered and higgledy-piggledy. The second surprise to strike Harriet was that it was much less peaceful than she had thought it would be. Its situation beside the main road bestowed upon the grounds a constant low-level rumble of motor and equine traffic. The last surprise was what she saw at the base of every grave: the most beautiful displays of flowers and shrubs. A few rows away, a shirtless young man—possibly a gardener—was on his knees tending to some magnificent giant daisies. To find such deliberate beauty here, shocked her.

  ‘What’s the grave number?’ Fraser called back to her, having wandered a short distance away.

  Harriet saw that he was standing in front of a map of the cemetery. ‘Plot one, row N, grave five,’ she replied. She was certain that the reference number would be etched in her mind for as long as she lived.

  Fraser pushed his face closer to the map, then turned and pointed vaguely into the cemetery. ‘Just down there.’

  As she followed him down a path running towards the left of the cemetery, Harriet felt the contradictory muddle of never wanting actually to reach the grave and the acute desperation to get it over with, to settle once and for all that part of her mind, which refused to believe that Malcolm was actually gone.

  Her legs suddenly weakened once again at the impossibility of what she was now seeing in front of her.

  Fraser had stopped and was indicating to a particular grave. ‘Here.’

  But she knew which one it was before he had spoken. At the base of the grave to which he was pointing rose a striking display of flowers: blue poppies, to be precise. Harriet looked urgently around the cemetery, spinning on her heels and checking other graves nearby. Then she looked further into the grounds, her eyes not finding what her brain was telling her must exist…

  But, no! Impossibly, the only place in the entire cemetery, where blue poppies were growing, was at the base of Malcolm’s grave. This flower, which he had sent to her and had mentioned to the Duchess of Westminster, was here, growing from his grave and his grave alone. What did it mean? Mrs Leonard had said that, if she found the poppy, it would help her. Did she mean that in finding his grave it might provide her with the resolution, which she needed?

  She walked slowly towards Fraser, noticing that he had turned his head away from her, subtly trying to dab his eyes with his handkerchief. She reached his side, placing her hand gently in the small of his back, finally allowing her eyes to drop down to the grave itself. Like the rest, it was a simple wooden cross with an oval tin plate pinned to where the two perpendicular parts intersected. The words written there suddenly became illegible and watery. Then the cross itself blurred, as Harriet sank to her knees with her hands clasped together in front of her.

  Malcolm. Dear, dear Malcolm. Her beloved boy, who would never willingly have hurt another human being, was lying here…alone…gone. Twenty-eight years of life…gone…snuffed out. All that he had been and all that he might have been…gone.

  ‘I miss you,’ she wept, ‘so very, very much.’

  Her eyes were stinging, and she tried to stem the flood of tears, but she just couldn’t stop her mind from bringing to the fore oddments of happiness from Malcolm’s childhood. One flickering snippet of memory leapt unaccountably to the next, and the next; all of them different mini-narratives but with the same ending, repeatedly wrenching her heart from pleasure to pain in an instant.

  Time passed. How much, she couldn’t be certain, but the snippets replaying cruelly in her mind had abated somewhat, the pauses between them increasing, as though themselves aware that the torments, which they brought with them, were simply unsustainable.

  The nightmarish visions ceased as suddenly as they had begun. Harriet opened her eyes again, blinking the tiny beads of residual tears from her eyelashes. She w
iped the thin dry, salty lines on her cheeks with the back of her hand and stared at Malcolm’s name. She looked at it for a prolonged period, barely blinking, her mind too exhausted to reach the anguish-filled depths of her heart.

  Then she noticed the poppies once more, pale blue with dusty yellow filaments in the centre. She reached out and held one, still unable to comprehend how it could be that the flowers were growing above Malcolm’s body—no, from Malcolm’s body—and nowhere else in the entire cemetery. She carefully ran her fingers down the length of the flower closest to her, snapping the stem at the base. From her raffia bag, she withdrew her diary, carefully sandwiching the flower among the centre pages, then shutting the book on it.

  Harriet rose, feeling entirely drained. She realised, then, that Fraser was no longer by her side. She glanced around the cemetery and saw him talking to the man, who had been tending to the plants when they had arrived. She bent down and gently kissed the top of the cross, closed her eyes and found herself praying, something which she had not done for many months.

  ‘Ma! Over here!’ Fraser called, waving her over. From his body language, whatever it was that he had learned from the other man, didn’t sound overly urgent, so she took her time walking to them, taking in all the names, ages and regiments of the graves, which she passed. Such a waste of life, and to think that this cemetery was but one of hundreds around the world. She’d read somewhere that at one cemetery alone, Tyne Cot, there were the graves of almost twelve thousand soldiers. Twelve thousand! She tried to imagine what twelve thousand people together looked like, but she simply could not: it was an unfathomable number.

  ‘Ma, this gentleman is a gardener and knows something of what went on around here during the war,’ Fraser explained.