And that helped, because Mama stared at her and then rubbed her face with the backs of both hands and got to her feet. And took a few deep breaths, and then tried to smile.
‘Of course,’ she said as briefly as she could, and to Poppy she sounded almost ordinary, the way she usually was. Almost, but not quite. ‘Of course. Now, I’ll unbutton you and then you go and take off your things and set them tidy as I showed you and put on your nightdress and wrapper and slippers and come down and I shall wash you and give you some bread and milk for supper –’
‘No supper,’ Poppy said. ‘No supper tonight. Just bed –’ And Mama looked down at her and then suddenly hugged her close and said in a muffled sort of voice. ‘Oh, Poppy, you sound so old for your years! Have I made you grow up too fast, keeping you here in this dreadful place?’
‘It isn’t a dreadful place!’ Poppy was indignant. ‘It’s the nicest kitchen anywhere! Even nicer than Auntie Jessie’s –’
‘Jessie –’ Mama said and then knelt down to bring her face on a level with Poppy’s. ‘Poppy, my love, it will be better if you say nothing to anyone about what happened here tonight –’
‘Nothing happened,’ Poppy said. ‘I got frightened and Ted got frightened when he showed me his –’
‘I know,’ Mama said hastily. ‘I know – but all the same, don’t tell anyone. Not even Aunt Jessie – especially Aunt Jessie.’
‘Why?’ Poppy stared at her, her lower lip pouting a little. She was beginning to feel cross now, and wasn’t sure whether she wanted to go to bed or not, after all. She felt scratchy and bad inside. ‘Why? I like Auntie Jessie –’
‘Of course you do –’ Mama swallowed hard and smiled again, but it was a very thin sort of smile. ‘Of course you do. So you don’t want to upset her, do you? And this will upset her –’
Poppy considered for a moment and then nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I don’t like Auntie Jessie being upset. I don’t like being upset. I don’t like anyone being upset –’ And she gave a sudden jaw-cracking yawn. ‘I think I do want to go to bed –’ she said sleepily.
And when she was there and fast asleep – as she was almost as Mildred pulled the covers up over her shoulders – her mother sat beside her bed thinking and looking at her sleeping face with her own very stiff and tight.
‘I have to get her out of here,’ she was telling herself over and over again. ‘I have to get her out of here – it’s bad for her – must get her out –’
But where to? Where could she go where Poppy would be safe from such experiences as tonight’s, and where her mother could earn their living? And she remembered her long ago fantasy of the West End flower shop and felt the tears start again, for she could not imagine ever finding enough money to get herself such a shop, however small, and a decent home for the two of them, in a better part of town. It was difficult enough to make a living and save a little against an uncertain future where they were, here on the edge of the slums that threw the human garbage like Ted into her home to pollute it. Where else could she take her precious child and give her the care and the love and above all the surroundings she ought to have and deserved to have? Her Poppy, Mildred knew, was an unusually observant and intelligent child, with a memory as acquisitive as any squirrel’s and sharp eyes and ears that missed nothing she could add to the store of information she had already garnered in her short life. There were things she should not know about, ever, if possible. But how could she be protected in such a dreadful part of London?
Mildred sat there for a long time, her bonnet and pelisse still on her, weeping. She knew what she ought to do, but she could see no way to do it, and that was agony.
32
Lizah would have deserted if he’d known how to. It had been his plan to walk off the SS Dunottar Castle when it docked at Cape Town and disappear into the crowds and somehow, eventually, find a way to work his way home again. But it wasn’t as easy as that.
First of all he had only his uniform, and no mufti at all; all that had been left behind at the recruiting barracks to be reclaimed when he came home, he’d been told; and a man in the uniform of the Queen’s army could not wander about the docks of Cape Town without attracting the attention of the great clusters of military police who were everywhere. And there was no way he could just find a shop, walk in, and get clothes; he hadn’t the money, for a start.
So he bided his time, certain he would find a chance soon to step back out of sight, as it were, and melt away into his own private life and to the devil with their bloody war; but the right time never came. Two days after disembarkation they had been issued with additional tropical kit and were mustering for a journey North East towards the Tugela River and Ladysmith where, it seemed, a British force was held and in dire need of support.
When Lizah heard from the gossip that went through the ranks like a fire through tinderwood that they were to go to sea again, his heart sank, for how could he hope to get away when he was to be shipped God knew how far away? And there was another cause for trepidation; the fear of actual fighting began to filter through the ranks of men as they sat and stood about on the docks, waiting to be told what to do, smoking and jabbering and playing cards and passing along every snippet of information they could get. There had been a bloody and dreadful defeat at a place called Magersfontein where a thousand British soldiers, the cream of the Highland Brigade, had died and casualty lists had been posted to prove it was true and not just a rumour.
It was difficult for Lizah to get answers to all the questions he wanted to ask, for since the fiasco of his match with Amberly, none of the men had been particularly affable towards him, and he had chosen to be aloof and cold; it was the only way he could salvage what tatters of self-esteem were left to him. So all he could do was listen to the talk while pretending he was uninterested, and think and hope and scheme to escape.
But it got him nowhere. The ship that took them to Durban, on the other side of this great lump of a continent he already hated, was even more uncomfortable than the SS Dunottar Castle had been and that had been bad enough; here they slept wherever they could find a patch of deck on to which they could throw their kit to use as a pillow, while from below the stench of cavalry horses, swung in canvas slings two to a stall and whinnying and thrashing about in terror, came up to them to make them toss and moan in their own sleep and wake each other to swearing fury. The low green coast of the Cape slid relentlessly past on the port side, tantalizingly visible to Lizah yet totally unattainable, and frustration built in him as he imagined the people who inhabited these wide open expanses going about their business in tranquillity and freedom, able to make their own choices about what they did and what they ate and when and where they slept, and compared their idyllic existence with his own misery.
It was no better when they reached Durban. The heat was hellish, thick and steamy, and he was sweat-drenched in his heavy uniform and his skin was chafed where the weight of his kit had rubbed the cloth against him. As they marched off the ship and were herded directly to the railway yard, he was almost desperate enough to make a run for it; but not quite, for the military police with their guns held much in evidence were a gimlet-eyed and cruel-looking lot, he decided. The time still had not come.
He had thought the sea journeys bad enough, until he was herded with fifteen hundred other men into the cattle trucks which were to carry them north. The trucks still reeked of their previous occupants and some of them were slippery with ordure as well as stinking and desperately hot and crowded. The train, when at last it started with bone-shaking judders, crept through the night like some sort of weary snail as men snored and woke and swore at each other and would have come to blows if there had been room enough to swing their arms.
And so it went on, hour after hour with his mouth tasting, he told himself sourly, like the bottom of a birdcage, and his head aching and his eyes feeling as though they’d been gouged out of his head and put back with gritty fingers, through places which sounded more attra
ctive than they seemed to be, when he peered out through the wooden slats to see them in the erratic lamplight. Pinetown and Camperdown and Ashbirton and Howick, and some with strange-sounding names like Mooirivier and Pietermaritzburg. And then, it was dawn, and the sky looked like the oleograph his mother had on her parlour wall, all pretty blues and roses and golden glows and quite unreal.
Now he could see the country more clearly and, as he stared with one sore eye through the peephole he’d managed to fashion for himself by digging out the soft wood under one of the slats at the side, he felt a sense of awe. It was so bloody big, like a sea, with vast waves of green and dun-coloured land rolling away for ever to the west where a range of mountains reared up like a huge and unimaginably thick wall of living red rock. The Drakensberg, that was it. He’d heard someone call it that, and had rolled the word round his mouth, Drakensberg –
And God, but it was hot. He heard someone say he reckoned it was a hundred in the shade already, and the sun hadn’t been up half an hour yet, and sweat poured out of him, and out of all of them, so fast they seemed to steam and certainly smelled chokingly rank. All Lizah wanted was water to drink and lots of it, but all they were issued with was small bottles of soda water which he drank so fast that it felt as though he had none at all; and one of the men deigning to speak to him for once grunted, ‘You’ll do better if you sip it, you damn fool. That way you’ll be bloody ill –’ And so he was, throwing up painfully into the dust of the yard where they had all at last been decanted.
It got a little easier after that. They were mustered in a broad patch of scrubby land not far from a small place called Estcourt and there they pitched their bell tents and the quartermasters broke out supplies and they had their first real food since they had left Cape Town; or what was to be considered as real food for the rest of their time out here. A thick porridge made of corn which the men peered at suspiciously and then ate voraciously, for it had a mild and milky taste to it that was very comforting; and strips of leathery brownish meat, dry as a thistle, which was called biltong and which, the men grumbled, was like eating your boots, though Lizah actually liked it. It reminded him in taste a little of his mother’s salt beef. And when he thought that he almost cried with homesickness. But didn’t, and managed to sleep that night like a dead thing, freed at last of the rattle of trains and swing of ships, and above all the stink of bodies, human and animal. The open air, even in this heat, was cleaner and fresher than any he had known since they had arrived in this benighted, hateful country, he told himself, and began to think again, tentatively, about how he would make his escape. Except that he couldn’t think how he would get back to England from this place, wherever it was, which felt like the outer limits of hell.
They started to march next day, their kit strengthened with their own supplies of biltong and biscuit, the twice-baked rusks that the Boers used and which the British army had learned to respect as useful rations for long forced marches, and bottles of water. Now he knew how to use it, Lizah felt safer; having his own supplies made him feel less tied to this dreadful army, made it possible to believe that one day, somehow, he could get away –
Where he got to was Colenso on the Tugela river, on the far side of which, the men were told, General Botha and his Boers were waiting for them. They had herded the English into the tin-roofed cluster of buildings and scrub that was Ladysmith and there they rotted, starving and fearful, waiting for the army to come and rescue them; an army made up of many as unwilling as Lizah and as ill-equipped to deal with this alien landscape as he was. Even the eager soldiers, thirsting for blood and fed with springs of patriotism, were not up to the standard of the Boers, those despised enemies for whom the regular soldiers had nothing but jeers and sneers. Yet these scornful soldiers were fit only to obey orders and to march steadily forwards to be shot at as easy targets; the Boers had lived in and loved their huge hot country and its eternal veldt for too many years not to be good soldiers in it. They could melt into the landscape and disappear as easily as any snake, and their gunshot fire across the shimmering heat haze was wickedly accurate, where the British marksmen often fired wide, confused by the strange way the light and colours distorted their vision. But there they were, the British Army, ready to throw Botha back where he belonged and relieve the garrison at Ladysmith.
‘Before dark,’ the officers boasted, and Lizah, keeping as far back in his platoon as he could place himself heard them as they went by on their horses; fresh-faced boys with all the arrogance of their youth and their schoolboy games ideas and brand new uniforms. ‘We’ll get these damn farmers scuttling away before dark.’
But it was not to be. The orders were that they were to wait, and wait they did, as more and more men came pouring in from the South, until there were fully thirty thousand British soldiers and great masses of heavy artillery clustering close to Colenso. Occasional observation parties made sorties to spy out the land and reported back on available crossing places in the river, and men were disposed at different points, ready for the charge when the order should come. Lizah, by now hopelessly aware that he was not going to be able to escape yet, and even more sickeningly certain that he was going to have to be somewhere where fighting was going on, even if he were to avoid actually doing any of it himself, followed his platoon gloomily to their new tented billets near Tritchard’s Drift. It cheered him a little to see that behind them, on the higher slopes on this side of the river, heavy artillery was being brought in; great naval guns that glimmered in the light and sent reassuring flashes of reflection down to the men sitting there hunched in the heat by the riverside. But it did not cheer him a great deal. And there they sat and waited.
Lizah tried to think more about getting away and actually began to hide some of his food supplies in his uniform, instead of in his kit – a forbidden activity though that was – in the hope of slithering away from his tent one night when the other men who shared it were asleep, and making his own way back to the railhead and from there south to Durban and a ship on which he could work his way home. And then suddenly lost his nerve and most of his hope, when he heard one of the men say something about the date.
‘My old woman’s birthday,’ he said. ‘January 22nd. Bloody midwinter, trust her! Always went down the music hall, we did, and then had a blowout at the old pie and eel stall on her birthday. She’ll ’ave to do it on ’er own this time. An’ if I get back and find she did it wiv’ someone else, I’ll kill the bloody pair of ’em –’
They had been sitting outside their tent after nightfall waiting for a can to boil water on the damped down fire to make tea, and Lizah lifted his head at the man’s words, so sharply he nearly spilt the can.
‘What did you say the date was?’
‘January 22nd,’ the other man growled. And it’s bleedin’ 1900 an’ all. Flippin’ great twentieth century this is, and no mistake.’
‘Gawd – how long we been here, then? It don’t make sense – so hot and all – I just didn’t think –’ And as the men guffawed at his stupidity he stared up at the sky and tried to see familiar patterns there; but the stars were in the wrong places and made the wrong patterns and he was swept with a sudden sense of desolation as he contemplated the size of the world and where he was in it. To get home, to escape this lunatic, alien, eternal high summer and get back to the reality of a normal fog-bound London winter again would take weeks, even months. He had no money, for pay was not being issued on active service, but being allowed, the men were told, to accrue to them for payment on their return, and no real resources apart from his army rations, meagre as they were. He was tied to this hated army as closely as he had been tied to the table leg by his mother long ago in his infancy when she had wanted to keep him under control and out of her way, and he remembered now how furious that had made him and how he had pulled and shouted against her ribbon controls, and felt the same rage rising in him. And he could do nothing about it, any more than he had been able to as a baby. He could have wept.
&nb
sp; The battle started at last two hours before dawn, with men running eagerly about as though they were to go to a party and the officers having a glorious time snapping out their orders and herding the men into position. The artillery started first, sending great pounding shells over the river towards their main target, a low hill crowned with ragged trees; it was called, someone said, Spion Kop. There were said to be hordes of Boers dug into trenches there, waiting to attack. So, the English were to attack first and so they did, with deafening effect. Shell after shell whined over Lizah’s head and he stopped wincing and ducking after a while. It became as normal as the heat and the stink of cordite and the churning of fear in his guts that never left him. He had lived like this, he felt, all his life. Any other experience was like a long ago dream, and of no real relevance to him at all.
It went on all day as Lizah and his platoon, and many more like them, lay on their bellies in the scrub above the river, their eyes fixed on the target, where plumes of black smoke and pieces of flying shrapnel, looking for all the world like drunken eagles in their erratic flight, starred the enamel sky, with their rifles on the ready and their minds almost numb with fear. And then at sunset the shelling came to a ragged stop and the men were told to stand down, and Lizah almost fell into his tent as other platoons came to relieve him and his fellows. It was easier now with the rest of the men; a day spent under those circumstances had wiped out the memory of the money they had lost when he had failed to box his way to victory on the Dunottar Castle and that helped, for they talked to him now and seemed to treat him much like one of themselves. And for the first time since he had come to South Africa Lizah experienced a glimmer of pleasure in being alive.
One of the men in his squad was a chef at a London hotel in civilian life and he had managed somehow to get hold of some vegetables in his travels, for now he dug out from his pack a couple of onions as well as the eternal ears of corn which seemed to be the staple diet in these parts and with some of the biltong issue, and some of his own store of pepper and spice and a good deal of skill, produced a meal which tasted something approaching the sorts of stew they all understood and which filled their bellies very comfortingly.
Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles) Page 35
