Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  The woman stopped in front of one of the houses, just as Fraser appeared from behind it. They both pointed simultaneously to the same pre-fab.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Harriet said to the woman, before rushing to knock on the door. This was it; she was certain.

  The door was opened a few seconds later by an elderly man, with dirty skin and dirty clothing, stooped over a cane.

  ‘Ik zoek iemand, die Lina Peeters heet,’ Harriet said, trying her best not to sound trite, having said the same thing for the umpteenth time.

  Through narrowed eyes, which looked painful, he muttered something, which she doubted that she ever would have understood, even if she had been fluent in Flemish.

  ‘Lina Peeters?’ Harriet said, more loudly and clearly. ‘I’m from England and I would like to meet her.’

  From somewhere in the house, a female voice called out, ‘Lina is working. British Tavern. Grand Place.’

  Harriet craned her neck around the bent figure before her, searching the dull room from where the voice had emanated. Every inch of floorspace was taken with grubby mattresses and bedding. The windows were inexplicably covered with dark baize material, but despite this, she could make out the shapes of several people. ‘Thank you,’ Harriet called openly into the dimness.

  With some difficulty, the old man turned and closed the door.

  ‘Well?’ Fraser asked.

  ‘Apparently she’s at work: the British Tavern in Grand Place, wherever that may be.’

  ‘Isn’t it the square in front of what was the Cloth Hall?’ Fraser turned and pointed towards the historic ruins. ‘Just over there. We can walk that in five minutes, no trouble.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  As they walked, Harriet told Fraser of the awful conditions, which she had just witnessed inside the pre-fab. ‘Poor Lina,’ she said. ‘Whether she’s our Lina or not, poor girl, living like that. What these people have been through.’ ‘I mean, just look at that,’ she said, drawing to a stop a short distance before the ghostly skeleton of the Cloth Hall. ‘Seven hundred years that’s managed to stand there. Now look at it.’

  ‘Personally, I don’t think I would have come back, if I were her,’ Fraser commented. ‘Too depressing.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed absent-mindedly, as she read a white sign, written in English, beside what was once an entrance to the Cloth Hall: Notice. This is Holy Ground. No stone of this fabric may be taken away. It is a Heritage for all Civilised Peoples. The declaration was signed in the bottom right corner by the Town Mayor of Ypres.

  ‘Come on. Let’s find this jolly tavern,’ Fraser said, turning to face the run of newly built wooden premises on the opposite side of the square. ‘I’m in need of a coffee, if nothing else.’

  ‘There it is!’ she pointed. ‘Can’t really miss that, can you?’

  The building, standing among several other new structures lining the Grand Place, was painted bright blue and the words CAFÉ RESTAURANT were written in large letters above the door. Arching around a central window on the first floor were the words BRITISH TAVERN. To think that yesterday they had been dropped off by the taxi-cab just yards away on the other side of the Cloth Hall, where the rebuilding of the city centre had yet to begin.

  Harriet grabbed Fraser’s arm, and hurried across the square towards it, a sudden niggle of nervousness rising in her stomach. Uncertainty snuck into her mind and began posing unhelpful questions. What if she wasn’t the correct Lina Peeters? What if she didn’t want to answer her questions? What if she had something terrible to say about Malcolm?

  ‘Ma? What’s up?’ Fraser asked.

  ‘Nothing. Let’s get inside.’ She pulled open the front door and entered the tavern. It was a large space, filled with a motley mixture of tables and chairs, at which were sat an eclectic mixture of people: soldiers, builders, well-dressed men and working women.

  Fraser headed to a small, vacant, square table with two chairs nearby, and sat down. Harriet sat opposite, and immediately began scanning the room for waitresses, who might have been Lina. There were three women, each dressed in a plain white blouse and a black skirt, scurrying between the tables and an unseen kitchen through a door behind the counter. She judged all three to be within an acceptable age-range of Malcolm. She reasoned that there was only one expedient way to find out. ‘Lina?’ she called across the restaurant.

  ‘Ma!’ Fraser whispered harshly, as half the restaurant turned to look in their direction.

  All three waitresses glanced over, but then two of them took a sideways glimpse at the third, presumably wondering if she was acquainted with the woman, who had called out her name.

  Harriet smiled at the waitress and beckoned her over.

  ‘Well, that was mightily embarrassing, Ma,’ Fraser scorned under his breath. ‘Would it have been too much to expect you to have just gone over, and asked politely which one she was?’

  ‘Poppycock,’ Harriet dismissed.

  The waitress approached their table, a polite but reticent look on her face. She was a slight, young thing with long brown hair tied back in a bun behind her head. She had dark eyes and beautiful long eyelashes and a soft, warm smile.

  Harriet stood up, thrust her hand forward, and said, ‘Hello! I’m very much hoping that you are one Lina Peeters, who lived in Woolwich, England during the war?’

  Lina’s face contorted into astonished confusion, as she hesitantly shook Harriet’s outstretched hand. ‘Yes, that is correct. Do I know you? From England?’

  ‘No, you knew my son, Malcolm McDougall.’

  Lina inhaled sharply, and her eyes circled, settling briefly on Fraser, then returning to Harriet. ‘I see,’ she muttered.

  ‘I understand you were a good companion of his? Could we talk?’

  Lina nodded. ‘Yes, of course. I will get you something to drink, and then we will talk, yes?’

  ‘Marvellous,’ Harriet said. ‘Two coffees, thank you so much.’

  Harriet returned to her seat, watching as Lina walked over to one of the other waitresses. From the surreptitious backward glances, their hushed conversation undoubtedly involved Harriet’s and Fraser’s visit.

  ‘Now we’ve actually found her, what exactly do you want to find out?’ Fraser asked, drawing Harriet’s attention away from the waitresses.

  ‘Just to know who she is, that’s all, and to let her talk about Malcolm a bit,’ Harriet said. ‘He did use his one annual pass to visit a woman about whom he’d never uttered a word to us: she must have meant something to him.’

  ‘Well, don’t blame her that he didn’t mention it; it’s not her fault.’

  ‘Thank you for that piece of advice, Fraser McDougall,’ she said, folding her arms. She looked across to see that Lina was on her way back over, carrying a tray of three drinks, which she placed down on the table.

  ‘Here are our drinks. I can have a fifteen-minute break, so I will talk with you,’ she said, reaching for a chair from the neighbouring table and sitting between the two of them. ‘So you are Malcolm’s mother, yes? You are exactly like he described.’

  Harriet’s eyes widened, not sure of the implications of her words. ‘Right...’

  Lina laughed, and placed her hand on Harriet’s forearm. ‘No, it is always good things he said about you.’

  ‘Really?’ Harriet said, disbelievingly.

  ‘Really,’ she insisted. ‘He spoke a great deal about his family in Sedlescombe—is that the name?’ Harriet nodded, ignoring the clumsy mispronunciation, and then she continued. ‘And you are Malcolm’s brother, yes?’

  Fraser nodded and offered her his hand. ‘Fraser.’

  ‘Ah, the older one,’ she said.

  ‘That’s me,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Are you here in Ypres to find me?’ she asked, sounding both intrigued and surprised.

  ‘That’s right, yes,’ Harriet answered. ‘It’s all a rather long and complicated tale, but the gist of it is that I wanted to know what happened to Malcolm before he died, and when you
r name came up, I knew that I just had to find you.’

  ‘I see,’ Lina said with a smile. ‘And did you know that I would be here, in this place?’

  ‘Your old landlady, Miss Yavuz said that you’d—’

  ‘Miss Yavuz?’ Lina interrupted with a laugh. ‘My goodness!’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said, realising that she perhaps sounded a little unbalanced in the evident doggedness of her pursuit and that her explanation required simplifying somewhat. ‘Miss Yavuz led us to Ypres, and a chap at the hotel suggested going to the Plaine d’Amour.’

  ‘And the Van de Veldes sent you here?’ Lina guessed.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Lina sat back with a sigh, which appeared to represent a shift towards guardedness. ‘But what is it that you think I can help you with? You’ve come all this way and what for?’

  ‘You don’t need to be nervous of us,’ Fraser said, corroborating what Harriet herself felt that she was witnessing in the young girl.

  ‘It was really just to talk to you,’ Harriet said. ‘You were clearly important to him; he returned to England to see you, and you alone…’

  Lina clutched her cup, her eyes shifting from Fraser to Harriet. ‘He said that you would not be happy if you found out that he was in England without telling you that.’

  ‘Well,’ Harriet began, sensing a sharp glance from Fraser in her peripheral vision, ‘it certainly was a little odd to discover that he had visited England in June 1917.’

  ‘Yes, I am sure. We had a week together doing our best to forget the war, just for one moment. We went to the theatre and music hall, and we took walks in the park. One day we went into London, and we saw Buckingham Palace and Big Ben…’ Her face lit up at the recollections. ‘We made plans to come—together, I mean—to visit with you at the end of that week. A surprise. Malcolm bought the train tickets and knew the train we should take, everything. But the night before we would have come, I fell over in the…in the blackness, you know, no street lights, and cracked my head.’ She tilted her head and pointed to an inch-long scar just above her right temple. ‘I went to hospital, and there was no way I could go to Sedlescombe now. I said to Malcolm he must go, but he stayed with me, and then he went back to his army…his regiment.’ She shrugged forlornly and Harriet placed her hand on hers, as she was gripped by the deepest sadness over what could have been.

  The gravity of the fact that Malcolm had wanted to bring home a girl for the first time struck her heart; that he had stayed by her bedside instead of coming home provided even greater evidence of the seriousness of their relationship. She knew it could have meant only one thing. ‘You were to marry, weren’t you?’ Harriet asked.

  Lina nodded, but did not look up.

  ‘Oh, goodness…’

  ‘He asked me to marry him when we were in London. We had dinner in the Waldorf Hotel with an orchestra playing; it was just wonderful. Then we walked along the Thames, and he got down on his knee and asked me to marry him, and I said yes. It was that night, getting back late in the dark to Woolwich, when I fell over.’

  Harriet breathed heavily, tears welling in her eyes, as flickers of scenes from their unlived, long, happily married life, which they should have led together, momentarily reeled over her mind’s eye. But it was a life destined not to be.

  Fraser cleared his throat and punctured the thick silence: ‘I presume you met Malcolm when he came over in 1916 to the gas labs at Woolwich?’

  ‘No, actually,’ Lina corrected. ‘That was a happy chance. We met here, in Ypres in May 1915.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Fraser said.

  ‘Yes. From the end of 1914, the German artillery began to attack the city. On November the twenty-second, the beautiful Cloth Hall and cathedral were destroyed, and the people here left in lots of great groups. I lived just behind here with my family and our house was hit by a shell. My mother was killed, but my sister and I were lucky to be pulled from the wreckage by a group of British soldiers. One of them was Malcolm, and he looked after me when it was a very dangerous place, here. He and his friend carried me out on a stretcher and got me medical help.’

  ‘Goodness me,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Malcolm saved my life, but I did not get to thank him. The city was completely destroyed: not one house or tree was left standed up at the end of 1917. Not one. Our neighbours, the Van de Veldes looked after me and took me with them to England.’

  ‘What about your sister and the rest of your family?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘By then, I had no other family; just my sister. She fell in with some bad girls and she stayed in Belgium with them.’

  ‘What about your dad… No other brothers or sisters?’

  ‘Many Belgian people were punished for any delay in the German advance. Houses were raided and put on fire, and thousands of normal peoples were killed. My father was one of these. My brother, as the only male child, was called up to fight. He was taken prisoner and put in Soltau Camp in Germany, where he died from tuberculous two weeks before the end of the war.’

  ‘My dear girl,’ Harriet said, shuffling her chair closer to Lina, and placing her arm over her shoulder. ‘And now you live in that place…’

  ‘Yes, we are lucky,’ Lina said. ‘Many have nothing.’

  Harriet hadn’t considered Lina lucky to this point, but, given the high numbers of those destitute, whom she had had cause and the misfortune to notice recently, maybe she was indeed one of the more privileged ones. But she couldn’t help thinking that she would have had a better life remaining in Woolwich. ‘Did you actually want to leave England?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘No, but the Van de Veldes… They do so much for me, and they wanted to come back, and so I went with them and live in their house. I have no choice.’

  A short but meaningful quietness wrapped around them, as they drank their coffees. Harriet’s thoughts were clogged with the new information, which she had just learned. By all accounts, in the closing weeks of his life, Malcolm had been happy, and the reason had been Lina, a woman whom she would likely never see again after they left this restaurant.

  ‘Did you visit his grave already?’ Lina asked.

  Harriet nodded.

  ‘I put on the ground the seeds of a flower, which he liked a lot: the blue poppy. Were there flowers when you visited?’

  ‘Ah, that explains it,’ Harriet said. ‘Yes and beautiful they were, too.’

  Lina smiled, as she placed her empty cup onto the table. ‘Unfortunately, I must go back to work. It was very nice to meet you both, and, who knows, maybe one day I will come to England and see you.’ She rose from her chair, offering them her hand to shake.

  Harriet stood up and sandwiched Lina’s hand between both of hers, unable to deal with the thought of never again seeing somebody, who had meant so much to her son. Marriage and children would undoubtedly have conferred upon Harriet and Lina a life-long bond, which the war and Malcolm’s death had now decisively denied them. All she could think to say, in order to surmount this crushing sense of loss, was, ‘May I write to you?’

  ‘I would like that very much,’ Lina answered.

  ‘Splendid,’ Harriet said, rummaging in her bag. She placed a piece of paper on the table, and then wrote out in block capitals her name and address. ‘Here you go.’

  Lina tucked the piece of paper into a pouch in the front of her apron, then shook her hand once more. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Wait,’ Harriet said, opening her purse. She poured out the few francs, which she had on her person, and handed them to Lina.

  ‘But this is much more than two coffees,’ Lina protested.

  ‘Call it…a tip,’ Harriet said.

  Lina hesitantly slipped the money into her apron. ‘That is very kind, thank you.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do in return for the happiness you brought my son in his last weeks.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Lina said affectionately, before turning back towards the counter.

  ‘Bye,’ Fraser said.


  ‘Cheerio,’ Harriet said. Then, facing Fraser, ‘Come on, I need some fresh air.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting a fiancée,’ Fraser commented, when they were back out in the square. ‘Were you?’

  ‘Not for a second, no,’ Harriet answered. ‘I began to suspect it, when she said they had both planned to come down to Sedlescombe. She seems very nice, I can see why Malcolm liked her.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Fraser agreed.

  Harriet threaded her arm through Fraser’s and they walked at a leisurely pace with the Cloth Hall behind them. She watched the life of the city going on obliviously around them: horses and carts came and went in the square; the odd motorcar lumbered across the cobbles; tradesmen trod past grieving women, dressed in black; cheerful youngsters cycled through on bicycles. Each of them endeavouring to forge a new life out of the ruins of material and personal devastation.

  ‘The Menin Gate,’ Fraser said, nodding his head forwards.

  ‘What is?’ she asked, not seeing anything resembling a gate.

  ‘There, where the ramparts of the city walls taper down to admit the road.’

  She had heard of the Menin Gate from the newspapers back home. It was one of the entry- and exit-points most-used by the troops fighting on the Ypres Salient. Malcolm would unquestionably have passed along this very spot.

  They stood side by side at the gate. Piles of debris littered the place, and, rising from the top of the ramparts, were tall tree trunks, eerily devoid of branches or leaves, jutting up from the ground, as though poking up from an underworld, reminding all of the city’s previous diabolical incarnation.

  Harriet shuddered: ‘Let’s get out of here. I think our work is done in Belgium, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fraser agreed.

  Turning around, they walked arm in arm away from the Menin Gate.

  Chapter Thirteen

  14th September 1919, Ypres, Belgium

  Harriet woke with a breathless gasp, panicked. She sat bolt upright, struggling for air, and swung her feet down to meet the rug beside the bed. Beneath the net, her damp hair was sticking in patches to her scalp. She stood up too quickly and felt the rush of blood from her head, and she tumbled backwards onto her bed. ‘Oh!’ she squealed, immediately grimacing more at her own fuss than at her malaise.